Memoirs of Struggles Against Martial Law in The Philippines (2018)

Claiming History: Memoirs of the Struggle against Ferdinand Marcos’s Martial Law
Regime in the Philippines

Author(s): Portia L. Reyes
Source: Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia , Vol. 33, No. 2 (July 2018),
pp. 457-498
Published by: ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26538540
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SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia Vol. 33, No. 2 (2018), pp. 457–98 DOI: 10.1355/sj33-2q
© 2018 ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute ISSN 0217-9520 print / ISSN 1793-2858 electronic
Claiming History:
Memoirs of the Struggle against
Ferdinand Marcos’s Martial Law Regime
in the Philippines
Portia L. Reyes
The year 2012 saw publication of three volumes of memoirs dealing

with the Martial Law period of 1972–81 in Philippine history.
Although multiple individuals wrote these memoirs, their narratives
illustrate a shared sense of allegiance to a community. Collectively,
their recollections also embody a counter-hegemonic account of the
period, introducing alternative subjectivities and individual voices
that contribute to the democratization of history and its writing in
the Philippines.
Keywords: The Philippines, memoirs, Martial Law, state violence, the Philippine left,
Philippine history and historiography.
In 2012, in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of President

Ferdinand Marcos’s declaration of Martial Law, the Philippine
government embarked on a landmark mission to remember the
Filipinos who died under the late dictator’s brutal regime and to
bequeath such remembrance to coming generations. Then President
Benigno Aquino III created a Martial Law Historical Advisory
Committee tasked to gather, preserve and publish the testimonies,
oral histories, documentaries, film and audio records of the Martial
Law era and to compile materials that could make possible a
“true account of the events that transpired during the said period
in our history” (Administrative Order No. 30, s. 2012). In the

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458 Portia L. Reyes
meantime, the Commission on Human Rights and the National

Youth Commission supported Congressional Resolution No. 2608,
prescribing mandatory teaching on Martial Law atrocities in the
basic, secondary and tertiary levels of education (Akbayan Party
List 2012).
Independent of these state actions, the same year saw publication
of three volumes of memoirs written by political activists: Subversive
Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years (Quimpo and Quimpo
2012), Not on Our Watch: Martial Law Really Happened. We Were
There (Maglipon 2012), and Tibak Rising: Activism in the Days
of Martial Law (Llanes 2012). In an effort to buck the trend of
growing nostalgia for the dictatorship among younger Filipinos, the
three volumes provided first-hand accounts of participants in the
movement against Marcos’s repression. Former activists, participants
and relatives of victims of Martial Law have celebrated the appearance
of these memoirs, welcoming efforts to publicize alternatives to
official narratives that have been either silent about the period or
trite in their coverage of it.
This essay analyses these three volumes of memoirs; it scrutinizes
their contexts, authors and depictions of the Marcos dictatorship.
While exploring issues related to remembrance of and responses
to trauma resulting from state violence, I consider the connection
between memory and history and the uneven and often contested
plane on which historians write history. I argue that the contributions
that comprise the memoirs, although written by a range of individual
authors, collectively illustrate a shared sense of allegiance and
belonging to a particular community. Reminiscent of Ernest Renan’s
definition of a nation, common experiences of both past joys and
pains, or the remembrance of those experiences, distinguish and bind
this community (Renan 1990). Together, the authors’ recollection
embodies a counter-hegemonic version of the Martial Law period,
introducing alternative subjectivities and individual voices that
contribute to the democratization of history and its writing in the
Philippines. This essay proceeds in four parts. The first provides an
overview of the Martial Law period in Philippine history, while the

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Memoirs of the Struggle against Ferdinand Marcos’s Martial Law Regime 459
second introduces the memoirs under scrutiny. The third section of

the essay maps the Martial Law experiences of the contributors to
these volumes of memoirs, and the fourth locates the books’ place
in Philippine historiography.
The Martial Law Regime in Philippine History

On 21 September 1972 President Ferdinand Marcos put the Philippines
under Martial Law, claiming that the measure was necessary to
save the republic and reform society.1 His government suspended
constitutional rights, allegedly to enable it to eliminate the communists
who — according to Marcos — had infiltrated all sectors of the
society (“Proclamation 1081” 1972). He closed Congress, coralled
the judiciary and assumed all governmental powers. He imposed a
curfew and censorship and prohibited rallies and demonstrations.
Loyal to the president-turned-dictator, the Armed Forces of the
Philippines (AFP) embarked on a ruthless campaign of censorship
and repression. They detained members of the political opposition,
journalists, intellectuals, delegates to the Constitutional Convention
convened in 1971 who opposed the prolongation of Marcos’s power
beyond the end of his second term in 1973,2 labour organizers and
student leaders. By 1975, the military had detained some thirty
thousand individuals.
Most of the communists to whom Marcos referred were members
of a movement predating Martial Law. Initially comprised of
competing labour and peasant groups, much of the country’s left
had coalesced under the leadership of the Marxist Partido Komunista
ng Pilipinas (PKP, Communist Party of the Philippines) by 1930
(Richardson 2011, pp. 138–40). The PKP served as the unions’
vanguard, enforcing Stalinist “iron discipline” among its members
(Nemenzo 1984, p. 72). In the 1940s, it led the anti-Japanese guerilla
army network known as the Hukbong Mapagpalaya Laban sa mga
Hapon (People’s Anti-Japanese Liberation Army) (Fuller 2007,
pp. 159–96). After the war, in response to state persecution of its
members, the party went underground and remobilized its wartime

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460 Portia L. Reyes
peasant army in Central Luzon as the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng

Bayan (People’s Liberation Army) or Huks, which attempted to
seize power through armed rebellion.3
Several successful Huk attacks, called “dress rehearsals”, prompted
Americans in 1950 to assist President Elpidio Quirino’s administration
in overhauling and upgrading the AFP with modern arms, intelligence
units and a psychological warfare component. Estranged from
community support and, hence, easy prey for encirclement and
suppression, the Huk rebellion had collapsed by 1954 (Saulo 1990,
pp. 44–53). As desperation turned into disintegration, the PKP, in
a bid to avoid the newly passed, draconian Anti-Subversion Law
of 1957 (Republic Act No. 1700), encouraged members who were
not facing criminal charges to return to civilian life. It imposed the
“single file policy” that required members to operate individually,
while maintaining contact with only one or two other comrades.
It also brought the recruitment of new members to a halt (Sison
1989, pp. 13–14).
Following a ten-year hiatus, in the mid-1960s the PKP sought
to rebuild. Uneasily, it took into the party’s fold self-radicalized
students from the University of the Philippines, who were gaining
a reputation for reviving nationalist sentiment on campus and for
fighting reactionary elements in the national legislature. The PKP
tasked the young radicals to form a student mass organization
— the Kabataang Makabayan (KM, Nationalist Youth) — for the
party and to conduct propaganda work (Abinales 2001a, p. 120).
Two generations, perhaps destined to lock horns, now comprised
the party. Its ageing veterans, scarred by the defeat of the Huk
rebellion and raised on Stalinist principles, tended to be cautious
and fearful of suppression, but also bureacratic and autocratic. The
second group included the young cadres, who were learning about
Marxism at a time when Maoist adaptations were transforming its
doctrines. And because the drama of such international events as the
Cuban revolution, American involvement in Vietnam, the rise of the
Indonesian Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution in China
politicized the youthful members of this group, it was, according to

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Francisco Nemenzo, “raring for a fight” by the second half of the

1960s (Nemenzo 1984, pp. 74–76).
The generational rift came to a head over the writing of the party’s
history. The head of the party’s youth section, Jose Maria Sison,
sought to hold the established party leaders, the brothers Vicente
and Jose Lava, to account for their failed wartime strategy, futile
attempts at capturing power and the single file policy (Guerrero
2013). Conflict also arose when zealous KM members, upon their
return from exposure or indoctrination trips with communists in the
People’s Republic of China, proselytized armed revolution among
the peasants of Central Luzon. Nervous about government reprisals,
peasant mass leaders, who had initially been supportive of Sison’s
critique, backed the replacement of KM leadership and the Lavas’
assumption of control of the organization. The party expelled the
young cadres involved in this episode for resisting orders.4 In
response, in December 1968 those cadres founded a new communist
party — the Communist Party of the Philippines-Marxist Leninist
(CPP-ML), electing Jose Maria Sison, then an English instructor
at the University of the Philippines, as its chairman. The CPP-ML
denounced the PKP for its revisionism and prescribed a national
democratic revolution (Abinales 2001a, pp. 120–21).5 The new party
was decidedly Maoist in its precepts and strategies. In 1969, Sison
joined with former Huk commander Bernabe Buscayno to form the
New People’s Army (NPA), as the armed wing of the CPP-ML. They
subsequently built base areas in the mountains,6 from which they
aimed to wage a protracted people’s war (Chapman 1987, pp. 68–84).
Meanwhile, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, student unrest
in Manila intensified. Inspired by flower power and youth rebellion
in America and Europe, reformist and radical student organizations
held mass, anti-government protests, called the “parliament of
the streets” (Nemenzo 1985, p. 46). Anger peaked when students
denounced Marcos’s fraud-tainted 1969 re-election. Led by moderate
and reform-minded students, a series of high-pitch protests of some
twenty thousand to fifty thousand participants were held from
January to March 1970; collectively they became known as the First

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462 Portia L. Reyes
Quarter Storm. Following violent clashes with the police and the
Philippine Constabulary7 reformist activists turned from participating
in “teach-ins” on campuses to leading such activities in the city’s
slums and working-class neighbourhoods (Sison 1989, pp. 36–39).
Mildly surprised by their pluck, the CPP-ML invited these activists
to be party cadres and guerillas. It regarded them as “surrogate
proletarians” whom it could integrate into the larger peasant struggle
(Abinales 2001a, p. 124).
The activism that had generated the First Quarter Storm lost
momentum. Not least, it had failed to spark the interest of the
majority of (moderate) students in Manila and elsewhere in the
country. Anxious to increase the number of armed combatants, Sison
devised his own “spark” to sway them to the CPP-ML’s and the
NPA’s side. With the help of selected cadres he conspired to bomb a
Liberal Party campaign rally for the senatorial and mayoral elections
at the Plaza Miranda in central Manila on 21 August 1971.8 The
explosion killed nine and wounded many more, including opposition
politicians. Two days later, as CPP9 leaders anticipated, Marcos
introduced tyrannical measures. Citing a national emergency provoked
by “communist subversives”, he suspended the writ of habeas
corpus,10 arrested radical labour and student activists and claimed to
expose a communist “master plan” to burn Manila and assassinate
government officials and citizens. The CPP denied involvement in
the Plaza Miranda bombing, but most Filipinos, including Liberal
Party stalwarts, were convinced that Marcos was its mastermind
(Jones 1989, pp. 59–66).
A year after Plaza Miranda, Marcos declared Martial Law and
sought to impose new order on the country. He targeted both leftists
and rightists who supposedly connived to overthrow his government
and corrupt Philippine society. He disbanded politicians’ private
armies and demanded the surrender of their unlicensed firearms. He
cloaked the dictatorship of the Martial Law regime with legality
and initiated putative political normalization. The members of the
Constitutional Convention remaining at liberty drafted a charter,
which allowed for a modified parliamentary form of government

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in the Philippines. Representatives from barangay or village-level

citizen assemblies purportedly endorsed the draft. In March 1973
the Supreme Court of the Philippines, which Marcos allowed to
function under the proviso that it would not question the validity
and constitutionality of Martial Law, ratified the new constitution.
This decision empowered the incumbent president to exercise full
authority pending his convention of the unicameral Interim Batasang
Pambansa or National Assembly. Henceforth Marcos governed by
issuing letters of instruction and presidential decrees (Noble 1986,
pp. 89–90). Dramatically, for instance, he declared the enforcement
of an agrarian reform programme that would allow tenant farmers
of lands devoted to rice and corn to own their land. To foster a
business-oriented and foreign-capital-friendly economic climate
he worked with technocrats and imposed policies of liberalization
and export-oriented industrialization (Encarnacion Tadem 2014,
pp. 352–57; Tadem 2015, pp. 399–400). He also maintained the
Philippines’ close relations with the United States, which operated
large military bases in the country (Bonner 1987, pp. 203–23).
Meanwhile, the declaration of Martial Law led to the dissolution of
the political party system — members of the main opposition party,
the Liberal Party, either allied with Marcos or became politically
inactive (Thompson 1995, p. 61). In 1978, in anticipation of
national elections, the Marcos regime created the Kilusang Bagong
Lipunan (New Society Movement), which the dictator envisioned
as an umbrella party incorporating the political parties of the past.
While still under Martial Law, hence, the country saw the return of
regular elections for members of the national assembly and officials
of local governments.
The AFP, in turn, waged bloody campaigns against and harassed
those whom Marcos had declared his enemies — the CPP-NPA and
the “oligarchs”, private companies owned by anti-Marcos families.
The military also ramped up its campaign against the Moro National
Liberation Front (MNLF), which had been fighting a secessionist
war on the southern island of Mindanao and in adjoining areas (Che
Man 1990, pp. 74–97; Vitug 2000, pp. 27–37).

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464 Portia L. Reyes
Marcos never achieved his end game, however. Although his

regime centralized power, in numerous small towns it failed to win
politico-administrative influence, which remained in the hands of the
traditional political elite (Turner 1989, pp. 294–300). In the meantime,
developments in the global economy took a toll on Marcos’s Martial
Law regime. As a non-oil producing country, the Philippines depended
on imports for most of its energy requirements. Declines in global
petroleum production in 1973 and 1979, exacerbated by conflicts
in the Middle East, increased oil prices and plunged the world into
an energy crisis. Prices of goods and services skyrocketed in the
Philippines, and numerous Filipinos lost their jobs even as their
purchasing power shrank (Noble 1986, pp. 103–4). In the midst of
this economic crisis, Marcos continued to borrow extensively from
international financial institutions to build infrastructure — not in
the countryside where it was much needed, but in the form of lavish
urban projects helmed by his wife Imelda Marcos. Among the ranks
of technocrats, discontent over the regime’s priorities increased.
Even the government’s much touted agrarian reform programme
only allowed tenants to lease rather than immediately own outright
the land that they cultivated, even while enabling richer peasants
to consolidate their land holdings (Tadem 2015, pp. 401–3). Rural
income distribution hardly changed. In 1971 the lowest 20 per cent of
landless rural income earners had only 4.4 per cent of total income,
and in 1985 that group’s share of income had only risen to 7.4 per
cent of total income (Tadem 2015, p. 414). In the provinces, human
rights abuses by soldiers, combined with deteriorating economic
conditions, convinced thousands to join or support the NPA (Jones
1989, pp. 12–25). By the mid-1980s the CPP had an estimated thirty
thousand members, and the NPA operated on fifty-nine guerilla
fronts. It reportedly engaged the military in some ten “encounters”
each day (Weekley 2001, p. 104).
In urban centres, politicized students and intellectuals went
underground in the face of censorship and prohibition on assembly.
They established a network producing protest literature that recorded
the regime’s numerous excesses and the grotesque infringements of

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human rights inflicted on those whom it perceived as subversives and

dissidents. In opposition to the regime, the CPP appeared committed
to the revolution; it disdained conventions and advocated the welfare
of the poor. Romantic notions of the life of revolutionaries, including
service to and camaraderie with the suffering downtrodden, further
enticed a following among members of the middle class to join
the cause of the CPP and its later front organizations (Del Rosario
2009, pp. 3–5). In the same period, empowered by the worldwide
liberation movement and the Second Vatican Council’s having opened
the door to socially oriented theology, an eloquent minority in the
Philippine Catholic Church declared solidarity with the Filipino
poor and victims of injustice. Reluctantly, the Church heeded this
minority’s plaidoyer and declared a policy of “critical collaboration”
with the regime. Some religious wrote to convince the regime to
reform, others supported farmers and labourers and established task
forces on detainees and education centres focused on the country’s
situation, and a few even allied with the CPP (Mananzan 2002,
pp. 197–200). Also, from the late 1970s, as the consequences of the
world economic crisis hit, periodicals published by University of
the Philippines students became bolder in criticizing the university
administration for tuition fee hikes and the regime for its meddling
in academic affairs. Students staged lightning demonstrations, lifting
the pall of fear of the regime on campus and demonstrating, after
they gained some concessions from the administration, the effectivity
of urban mobilization. Gradually, more students, along with some
uneasy members of the Church, collaborated with the CPP in working
with the urban poor and with workers. At times they even assisted
in mounting work stoppages and strikes in factories (Abinales 2012,
pp. 265–68).
Alarmed by his rising international unpopularity following the
publication of an Amnesty International report that accused the
regime of eight thousand summary executions and fifty thousand
arrests of suspected subversives, Marcos “lifted” Martial Law in
January 1981 (Amnesty International 1980, pp. 225–27). Cunningly,
his announcement neutralized the critical minority in the Catholic

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466 Portia L. Reyes
Church hierarchy before the scheduled visit of Pope John Paul II

to the country the following month. Marcos would no longer be an
embarassment among his friends and patrons — and particularly
to U.S. President Ronald Reagan, soon to take office. However,
Filipinos hardly noted the change. For some, travel became easier
and publishers no longer needed permission to operate. But Marcos
retained legislative power. The writ of habeas corpus continued
to be suspended for persons who were detained for insurrection,
rebellion, subversion, conspiracy or plans to commit such crimes.
Legal and underground resistance against his regime continued
unabated (Boudreau 2008, pp. 35–75).
In the meantime, Marcos’s own form of crony capitalism, which
had allowed him and his civilian and military allies to plunder private
and state-related companies, brought massive losses to the sugar
and coconut industries. Rising oil prices sparked inflation, while the
value of the country’s agricultural exports declined. Recession set
in and the government resorted to further deficit spending (De Dios
and Hutchcroft 2003, p. 50). In 1983, opposition leader Benigno
Aquino, Jr., who had been banished to the United States under the
pretext of requiring medical treatment, returned to the Philippines
but was assassinated on arrival at Manila’s international airport. His
killing, its immediate aftermath caught on film, put on display to the
world the regime’s inhumanity and relentless impunity. It initiated
a crisis of confidence among international bankers, who refused to
renew the short-term loans on which the state had relied to meet
its foreign debt obligation (Thompson 1995, p. 119). Divergent but
critical sectors inside and outside the country began to unify in their
opposition to Marcos’s dictatorship.
In a bid to regain public support, the ailing Marcos called for
snap presidential elections for February 1986. The opposition, a
motley collection of anti-Marcos forces, prodded Aquino’s widow,
Corazon “Cory” Cojuangco Aquino, to contest the election as its
candidate. Although lacking campaign funds and terrorized by Marcos
supporters and Kilusang Bagong Lipunan members, Aquino won the
elections and was formally sworn in as president. Marcos refused

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to concede and ordered the parliament to declare his re-election.

However, computer analysts at the Commission on Elections derailed
his proclamation by claiming that its basis — the vote — was
anomalous and staging a walk-out on live television (Thompson
1995, pp. 141–51).
Divisions among the ranks of the AFP also began to surface.
Angry at the corruption and favouritism among the officer corps
and the regime’s inability to contain the communist and Mindanao
insurgencies, at growing demoralization among soldiers and at
violations of human rights, middle-ranking officers established the
Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM). In their eyes the regime
was fast losing the political and propaganda war. Denying that soldiers
violated human rights, the group claimed a role in nation-building.
Ambition and greed for power among RAM officers grew apace;
secretly they plotted a coup against the government (McCoy 1999,
pp. 230–34). However, Marcos loyalists in the military discovered
their plot, forcing the plotters to hole up inside a pair of military
compounds on opposite sides of one of Manila’s main traffic arteries,
the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA). At the urging of Manila
Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin, opposition politicians, members of
the anti-Marcos business elite and of left-leaning non-government
and people’s organizations, and some two million ordinary Filipinos,
who steadily arrived in waves, blocked EDSA. Their gathering lasted
for five days, 22–26 February 1986, during which they both showed
support for the plotters in the compounds and obstructed forces
loyal to President Marcos (Thompson 2000, pp. 1–20). This “People
Power” revolution, as it became known, resulted in the toppling of
the dictatorship. Marcos, his family and close associates fled the
country on board an American aircraft. Struggling with lung, heart
and kidney ailments, the president died in exile in Hawaii three
years later (Gross 1989).
Triumphantly, the Aquino government set out to restore the rule
of law in the Philippines and the country’s democratic institutions. It
sought to rehabilitate the economy and to renew the Filipinos’ trust
in the discredited state. The middle class was exasperated by the

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468 Portia L. Reyes
CPP’s failure to appreciate the strength of public support for removing

Marcos from office and the decision to watch the uprising against
him from the side-lines. It was relieved by the restoration of order
following EDSA. That class now bolstered Aquino. Her government
freed political detainees, launched investigations of human rights
abuses on the part of the military and commenced talks with the
CPP-backed National Democratic Front (Abueva 1997, pp. 1–81).
However, the tenuousness of the ideologically conflicted coalition
behind the government was soon tested by the politicized military
and the pressing issue of the international debt, pegged at US$27
billion, that the Marcos regime had incurred (Cortez, Boncan, and
Jose 2000, p. 437).
Resentful of civilian rule, the RAM attempted several coups d’état.
In one instance it nearly succeeded in grabbing power. Aquino’s
cash-strapped government, wary about pressure from international
financial institutions, relented to demands from the military that
included reforms to the AFP and a halt to the investigations on
its human rights abuses. The government’s fundamentally centrist
orientation notwithstanding, it drifted to the right. It mended
relations with the United States and granted amnesty to coup-
plotters (McCoy 2012, pp. 138–48). In 1987 the Aquino government
promulgated a constitution that limited a president to one term and
provided for a return to a bicameral legislature and an independent
judiciary. Dialogue with the National Democratic Front ceased,
and the government declared “total war” against the CPP-NPA.
This declaration, in turn, let loose anti-communist vigilantism and
violence among and against the poor in the countryside (Rutten
2008, pp. 304–10; Sidel 2000, pp. 36–64).
Like a fungus, the pre-Martial Law oligarchic order grew back.11
Decentralized local governments, for example, became venues for
unusual alliances between representatives from reformist NGOs
and people’s organizations and scions of traditional political
families and of the land-owning elite (Tornquist 1998, pp. 93–97).
In Mindanao, a break-away insurgent faction, the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front, declared its intent to continue the armed separatist

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movement abandoned by the MNLF (Vitug 2000, pp. 106–89).

Disillusioned, Filipinos found solace in non-traditional Catholic
religious organizations, in which politicians saw vehicles for voter
mobilization (Kessler and Rüland 2006, pp. 73–96). Great numbers
of the poor lent their support to then vice-president Joseph Estrada, a
former actor. His frequently televised movies, in which he typically
featured as the defender of the downtrodden against corrupt officials
and landlords, had earned him wide populist appeal (Hedman 2001,
pp. 5–44). In 1998 he won the presidency handily.
The restoration of the country’s democracy proved challenging
for the CPP. By committing the tactical blunder of boycotting the
1986 snap elections, it had estranged itself from the iconic People
Power (Caouette 2004, pp. 420–33). Many Filipinos thereafter looked
askance at leftists, suspicious of their attempts to derail the hard-won
freedoms and democratic rights that EDSA had delivered. Cadres
cast doubt on the party’s leadership too, highlighting cleavages that
would haunt it for years (Kerkvliet 1996, pp. 9–27). More insidious
than these differences, however, were disclosures that the party, for
fear of spies, had arrested, tortured and killed hundreds of its own
in the 1980s (Abinales 2001b, pp. 153–92; Garcia 2001, pp. 12–26,
37–39, 44–50, 55–56, 76–80; Sarmiento 2003). Demoralized cadres
rued the sacrifices they had endured for years. They left the party
in droves.
Reeling from the repercussions of self-inflicted anti-infiltration
campaigns, the CPP tried to recapture middle-class support, even
as it confronted the government’s policy of total war. As its
numbers dwindled, however, in-fighting among its core leaders
deepened. The question of what strategy befitted the times —
mobilization in urban centres or guerrilla warfare in rural areas,
for example, and the adoption of greater internal democracy —
divided opinions (Rocamora 1994, pp. 139–69). In the 1990s, in
response to “detractors” who opposed protracted people’s war,
Chairman Sison published from his exile in the Netherlands a
directive that in effect split the party into those who followed the
party line, called “reaffirmists”, and those who opposed it, known

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470 Portia L. Reyes
as “rejectionists” (Reid 2000, pp. 41–49; Liwanag 1992). Sison’s

ideological, polarizing stance not only convinced many cadres to
leave the organization but, importantly, also ruptured deep friendships
and partnerships forged in the party.
Still, the CPP’s and Sison’s hold over others remained firm, and
through the party’s affiliated organizations it has captured seats in the
national legislature (Quimpo 2008, pp. 128–59). In 2001, determined
to not repeat its 1986 blunder, it participated in the predominantly
middle-class protests, called EDSA 2, that helped to remove Estrada,
accused of corruption and complicity in drug smuggling and illegal
gambling, from the presidency. Three months later, Estrada supporters
drawn largely from Manila’s lower classes, mounted EDSA 3, only
to see it snuffed out by the police and military and denounced as a
“mob” by the establishment (Thompson 2016, pp. 321–22). Although
easily quelled, EDSA 3 signalled growing disaffection and grievances
among the poor, and, equally important, cast doubt on People Power
as an exercise of direct democracy and political action.
Memoirs under Scrutiny

Democratization, although fraught, moved forward after 1986 and
even allowed political parties closely associated with the dictator
Marcos to thrive. His wife, children and allies have in recent years
campaigned vigourously to disguise and revise the image of the late
strongman and his rule.12 Imelda Marcos associates her husband’s
rule with “one of the best things that happened in Philippine
history”, “benevolent leadership” and the “most peaceful, democratic
time” (Chua 2012, p. 1). Supporters proclaim that “Marcos was
the greatest president”, for imposing discipline in and striking
fear among unruly Filipinos (Alhambra 2015). Younger Filipinos,
who only know the corruption of today’s administrations, have
questioned the logic behind the EDSA Revolution and toppling of
the dictatorship (Whaley 2016).
The volumes of memoirs under scrutiny here seek to reverse
the trend of wistfulness over and to influence remembrance of the

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dictatorship. Unlike the government, however, they do not privilege

the triumphalist narrative of EDSA, its protagonists and the role of
the state in democratization and nationhood. Instead, they provide
first-hand accounts of intellectuals, political activists and former
CPP-NPA cadres who risked their lives to oppose the Marcos regime.
Collectively, the authors and editors of the three books dedicate their
work to those who fought and fell during Martial Law.
Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years
(Quimpo and Quimpo 2012) dates in fact to 1989, when its editors,
siblings Susan and Nathan Quimpo, each began to write about
their own experiences independently of one another. At historian
Vicente Rafael’s urging, Nathan and Susan Quimpo merged their
unfinished works and included their other siblings’ contributions
in the manuscript. The result, a volume of 468 pages, recounts the
family’s trials and tribulations under Martial Law.
The Quimpos have origins in Aklan and Capiz on Panay in the
Visayas and Pangasinan on Luzon. Their father’s family owned
tracts of land on the border of the former two provinces, while
their mother’s clan owned farms and mango orchards in the latter
province. Their father worked as chief engineer for Coca-Cola in
the Philippines, while the mother had taken care of their children
(Quimpo and Quimpo 2012, pp. 19–20). The Quimpo siblings spent
part of their childhood in Iloilo, also on Panay — where their father
first worked. They later moved to Manila, where they finished
school and became famous as activists. Subversive Lives aims to
“commemorate a generation of kasama [comrades], who, out of
unfettered love for the country and its people, gave all that they had”
(Quimpo and Quimpo 2012, p. xviii). It narrates the politicization
of the Quimpo siblings and their eventual involvement with and
departure from the CPP. Six out of the eight siblings were arrested
and imprisoned, four tortured, and two killed — one is presumed
to have been summarily executed by the military, the other by an
irate CPP comrade.
Not on Our Watch: Martial Law Really Happened. We Were
There. (Maglipon 2012) was born out of the efforts by members

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472 Portia L. Reyes
of the League of Editors for a Democratic Society and the College

Editors Guild of the Philippines from the 1969–72 era. For Vic
Wenceslao and Elso Cabangon, who organized the volume, the
impetus for its creation was a 2010 reunion of these members and
their desire to introduce themselves, as former editors of college
newspapers during the dictatorship, to their children. Thirteen
testimonies comprise the book. Authors re-examine their lives and
fears while evading arrest or further detention during Martial Law.
They recall their participation in the First Quarter Storm and their
helplessness in the face of the Marcos regime’s stubborn survival
and adamant refusal to acknowledge mass discontent and its socio-
economic causes.
Ferdinand Llanes explains that Tibak Rising: Activism in the
Days of Martial Law (Llane 2012), our third volume of memoirs,
arose from a “general call” in 2005 for first-hand accounts of a
moment or event in the lives of “tibaks”, a Filipino colloquialism
for activists. The resulting volume highlights episodes of the lives
of lesser-known political activists. Llanes anticipates that the book
will inscribe the anti-Marcos activists in the “national narrative and
collective consciousness”, and inspire the telling of more stories in
a “continuing narrative and as celebration” (Llanes 2012, p. xi).
Memoirs of a Movement
The three volumes of memoirs include accounts of a total of sixty-one
writers — nine in Subversive Lives, thirteen in Not on Our Watch,
and forty-one in Tibak Rising. English is the preferred language of
contributors, accounting for more than 85 per cent of the testimonies.
This linguistic preference indicates the authors’ privileged socio-
economic status relative to that of the average Filipino, who is
primarily literate in the national language, Filipino (Thompson 2003,
pp. 257–65). The three groups of authors encompass academics,
scientists, writers, politicians, artists, doctors, enterpreneurs, bankers,
engineers, health workers, therapists, women and human rights
advocates. Although of varied occupations, they share both the

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experience of a tumultuous period in the history of the Philippines

and participation in the pursuit to remember and narrate their part
in overcoming that period.
We can plot the multiple perspectives and accounts of the three
volumes of memoirs as one. Following a linear narrative structure,
the authors relate their radicalization. Discussions and caucuses
exposed them to and educated them about drastic solutions to the
continued apathy of the regime towards the plight of many poor
and downtrodden. Contributors narrate their participation in protest
actions, confrontation with the regime, and work as “full-timers”13
and NPA fighters. Collectively, they attest to the difficulties of
standing by their leftist convictions and affiliations.
Subversive Lives begins with the Quimpo family on the eve of
Martial Law. It traces the affiliation of six of the siblings with activist
youth organizations and the CPP; it then paints their ordeal in captivity
and on the run. Lastly, the book describes their split from the party
and their efforts to put their past behind them. Individually the writers
of Not on Our Watch also narrate their introduction to, participation
in and departure from “the movement”.14 They communicate their
sense of closure with the difficulties that they experienced during this
trying period. For instance, Jaime FlorCruz considers his hardships
as a part of his journey of becoming a world-class journalist; Jay
Valencia Glorioso, an established theatre artist; Manuel Dayritt, a
specialist in public health; and so on. Tibak Rising, while also linear
in its narrative structure, highlights episodes or vignettes in the lives
of its thirty-five contributors. Writing from Australia, teacher Emere
Distor notes how her political activities caused a rift between herself
and her father. Renowned theatre and film director Behn Cervantes
remembers his mother’s courageous attempts to shield him from the
military, as well as his time in detention and friendship with his
fellow celebrated director, Lino Brocka.
The contributors to the three volumes share numerous traits
that distinguish them as members of a particular collective. Of
middle-class background, they joined the movement between the
ages of fifteen and thirty years old; they were, that is, born between

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474 Portia L. Reyes
the late 1940s and the 1960s. Their parents came of age when
the country’s elite safeguarded its political and economic stature
through close collaboration with the U.S.-backed government in
Manila. Their parents saw the United States as society’s liberators
from the Japanese, who during their occupation of the country in
the Second World War had cruelly treated Filipinos (Quimpo and
Quimpo 2012, pp. 7–12; Llanes 2012, p. 158). Most subscribed to the
American distrust of communists, who, they believed, brainwashed
students into embracing their extreme ideology (Maglipon 2012,
pp. 39–40; also Abinales 2012, p. 262). To the dismay of such
conservative parents, their children chose to turn their backs on the
establishment and to learn from and serve the lumpen proletariat
and peasantry instead.
The contributors to the three volumes of memoirs also shared a
love of street theatre, poetry, books and music. They were among
the better students at Manila’s leading schools and universities —
including the Philippine Science High School, University of the
Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University,
Philippine College of Commerce,15 Lyceum University, St. Theresa’s
College and University of the East. They forged deep friendships
with like-minded individuals in student activists organizations like
KM, its break-away organization the Samahang Demokratiko ng
Kabataan (SDK, Association of Democratic Youth), the Students’
Alliance for National Democracy, and others. They were passionate
about the need for revolution to oust the “rotten” political system
in order to inaugurate a people’s democratic state. For the CPP they
wrote propaganda and worked with labour and peasant unions and
impoverished urban and rural communities. Some also fought in
NPA units against the AFP.
In Subversive Lives, Nathan Quimpo and his brother David Ryan
Quimpo — a former officer of the CPP’s National Democratic Front
and now a computer scientist living and working in France —
painstakingly narrate the history of their propaganda work with the
party in the Philippines and outside the country. Because of strict
censorship under Martial Law, contributors to Not on Our Watch

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struggled to write, reproduce and disseminate newspaper articles on

behalf of the movement. They used the technique of “peryodikit”,
manually written posters posted on strategically chosen walls during
curfew hours in the middle of the night. Tibak Rising brings to light
details of the activists’ language, culture and efforts around and at
demonstrations; their collaboration with labour and peasant groups;
and their participation in armed rebellion.
The three books also give us a sense of the activists’ “buryong”
or boredom, signifying downtime, when they, in their “UGs”
or underground houses or headquarters in the cities, waited for
deployment to the provinces or the “mountains”. The latter included
“white areas”, in which comrades conducted propaganda work, and
“red zones”, in which they waged armed rebellion.
The three volumes of memoirs also address the activists’ brushes
with and experiences of violence and violation during Martial Law.
On the morning after Marcos declared Martial Law, the members
of the Quimpo family found their apartment on Concepción Aguila
Street in Manila subjected to a military zoning exercise that forced
members of the family to report to military posts in order to travel
in and out of their compound. David Ryan Quimpo was nearly killed
at a rally, while his sister Susan Quimpo — now an art therapist —
witnessed a police officer gunning down a worker during a strike.
Contributors to Not on Our Watch and Tibak Rising recount the use
of tear gas, truncheons, water canons and beatings of protesters on
the part of the military and police. For years, activists lived in fear
of arrest, detention and torture by government agents.16 Norman
Quimpo and David Ryan Quimpo repeatedly moved their families
in the dead of the night from one safe house to another in order
to evade arrest. In Not on Our Watch, Sol F. Juvida, now a writer,
describes being prepared in the months after the declaration of
Martial Law to jump through the window on the second storey of
her house with her infant to avoid capture. She slept in jeans with
transportation money in her pocket and always kept a small bag,
containing her family’s belongings, packed nearby. As we learn in
Tibak Rising, heavily pregnant Erlinda Timbreza-Valerio, now an

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476 Portia L. Reyes
advocacy consultant, moved from one part of the country to another,

not only to evade capture but also to be able to give birth to her
child safely.
Thousands of comrades were less fortunate. In a bid to gather
information about the movement, military raids in Manila and in
the provinces resulted in the arrest and detention of known and
suspected activists. Among the Quimpo siblings, Ronald, Nathan,
Norman, Jun and Lilian were arrested and detained. Seven of the
thirteen contributors to Not on Our Watch and fourteen out of the
thirty-five authors of the recollections in Tibak Rising were also
captured and imprisoned. These arrests attested to the military’s
brusque confidence and wanton use of violence on suspected
enemies. Nathan Quimpo was taken by three “burly men in civilian
clothes” (Quimpo and Quimpo 2012, p. 226). They trained a gun at
his head, handcuffed him and took him out in broad daylight to a
busy street, where they casually hailed a cab to the police station.
Firmly, the captors ensnared their captives, keeping them in awe
with their speed, efficiency and potential violence. Journalist Al S.
Mendoza writes in Not on Our Watch of being pulled out of his
bed by “burly policemen” who burst into his room unannounced.
His captors gripped his arms as if he were “the nation’s Enemy
No. 1”, making him feel “defenseless. Outmuscled. Outhustled.
Outmaneuvered.” At that moment Mendoza felt that he could not
rely on anybody else and had to fend for himself; he “had never
felt so alone” (Maglipon 2012, p. 194).
In his study of state violence against the Irish Republican
Army in Northern Ireland, Allen Feldman argues that, whereas
routine raids and zoning exercises give a state the opportunity
to reoccupy its perceived lost territory, arrest and interrogation
facilitate its endocolonization of society or, in particular, its capture
of insurgent and delinquent communities (Feldman 1991, pp. 85–
97). In an arrest, the state expands its sphere of domination and
reactivates the political potency that the insurgents — or, in the
case of the Martial Law regime in the Philippines, “subversive”
acts — have suspended. Arrest disrupts the social structure of a

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targeted insurgent community, violating its sense of domestic space,

heretofore characterized by ethics of privacy, personal territory
and closed interiority. Performatively, the state cordons off the
arrested, treating them as delinquents who could be contagious to
the rest of society. The recollection of their arrests of most of the
contributors to these volumes of memoirs highlight their defiance
against the dictatorship, on the one hand, and the repressive measures
that the regime undertook to reclaim its power over the defiant
young people, on the other. Symbolically, their arrests represents
a liminal space in which the regime attempted to impose its will
on its alleged Other.
The regime’s efforts to equate our memoirists’ actions with
criminal activities by arresting and detaining them only signalled
the beginning of their hardship. “Interrogation” represented its peak.
In the course of interrogation sessions, Ronald, Nathan and Lilian
Quimpo, as well as the wife of their brother Ishmael Quimpo Jr.,
were tortured. Roberto Verzola discusses being tortured in Not on
Our Watch, as do teacher Maria Cristina Pargas-Bawagan, former
secretary of the Department of Social Work Judy Taguiwalo, former
chairman of the Partido Lakas Masa (Power of the Masses Party)
Sonny Melencio, former national officer of the SDK Ted O. Lopez,
and former congresswoman Etta P. Rosales in Tibak Rising. Their
accounts make clear the state’s use of terror in waging a war against
and reclaiming its power over suspected dissidents. Ronald “Jan”
Quimpo describes his ordeal in the clutches of the Constabulary
Anti-Narcotics Unit as follows.
They tortured us for hours. I was stripped naked and tied to a
chair. Before starting to interrogate me, they put a very bright
lamp, like the one used for theater productions, very close to
my face. To prevent me from identifying them, I thought. They
asked me about my involvement, in the Party, from beginning to
end, who recruited me, who my closest friends were. The lamp,
it was so agonizingly hot. I felt as if my face was burning. I kept
screaming in pain, begging them to switch it off. They didn’t.
I admitted my membership to KM, I mentioned names — false
names. They injected water into my testicles. It didn’t hurt so

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478 Portia L. Reyes
much. Then they wrapped an electric wire around my penis and

switched on the current. I shook all over. (Quimpo and Quimpo
2012, pp. 159–60)
In this testimony, the determination of state agents to bend the
captured to their will is patent. Agents already had information that
they only needed the captured to confirm or deny. The session, in
this regard, was not necessarily about intelligence gathering. Rather,
it was an affirmation of state potency. Also, we sense what Alfred
McCoy describes as the theatricality of the torture session — a
stage appeared to be set so that the “actors”, the interrogators, could
heighten the pain and fear of the captured “audience” (McCoy 1999,
pp. 183–221, and 2012, pp. 114–50). The facelessness of the torturers
— referred to as “they” in the quotation — only underlines the power
that they exercised over Quimpo. Treated as an enemy of the state,
he becomes a recipient of the wrathful terror of its representatives.
Roberto Verzola, captured by the Intelligence Service of the
Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Metrocom Intelligence and
Security Group, attests to similar treatment.
Three, perhaps four, men were coming at me with their fists and
occassional kicks. Fists hit me on the chest, back, sides and of
course the solar plexus area of the abdomen … I don’t remember
how long it took … I felt numb and totally exhausted … they
made me do a “squat jump” multiple times.... Then they brought
in the Machine. Two lengths of wire extended from it, both
ending with bare wire, the insulation stripped. One end was tied
around the handle of a spoon. The Machine is a field generator …
probably generates forty to sixty volts, and if turned really fast,
may give as high as ninety volts or even more. My interrogators
tied the end of one wire around my index finger and inserted
the spoon into my pants, on my right wrist, until it rested where
my leg meets the lower abdomen, near the crotch. My body
will complete the circuit.... Eventually they moved the spoon’s
position so that it now cupped my genitals.... (Maglipon 2012,
pp. 155–56)
Increasingly, his captors impressed upon Verzola their proprietorship
over his very body, treating it as a punching bag, then as an
inanimate object that could be turned on and off. They connected

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their prisoner to an electrocution machine to complete this physically

and psychologically debilitating demonstration. After multiple rounds
of such sessions, the literally captive audience was briefly transferred
to a “normal” detention centre. He was then transferred to another
military detention center, where his “tactical interrogation” continued.
Verzola testifies that, under the auspices of the Fifth Constabulary
Service Unit (5th CSU),17 and while naked, he “was made to squat
inside a room with the air conditioner fully turned on” for hours, even
as his limbs were sharply tapped with a “softdrink bottle” multiple
times — resulting in “numbness that became an ache that grew”.
After a few days, Verzola writes, he was “subject” to a “similar
treatment one more time”; his torturers “knew it was pointless, but
they did it anyway” (Maglipon 2012, pp. 158–59).
Stripped of his clothes, and hence of markers of societal
belonging and convention, Verzola was marked as a deviant subject
to experimentation and pain. That the 5th CSU’s attempts to break
him failed hardly mattered; what mattered to the torturers were the
sessions themselves. Several accounts in the memoirs confirmed
the penchant and notoriety of the 5th CSU for torture. According
to Sonny Melencio, members of the unit,
… punched me hard. Someone cocked his revolver and started

playing Russian roulette with it, pressing the gun against my
temple.... [While blindfolded,] I was brought to a military
safehouse.... The beating began as soon as I landed on the floor.
One kept on punching me while another was kicking me, and
I felt someone was repeatedly beating my shin with a stick....
The first night of my capture was a first night of torture without
rest … [I was] stripped naked, made to lie down on a spring-
wired bed (without mattress) and tied hands and feet to bed
posts, before “water cure” began. They put a towel on my face
and poured water onto it. I heard the water drip into the banyera
[washbasin] under the bed. Much of it seeped through my nose
and pain shot up my head. It was suffocating and painful....
While this was happening, another was puncturing my body and
genitals with a lighted cigarette. But I could not feel it and only
knew it was happening when someone said he was making an
ashtray out of my body. (Llanes 2012, pp. 57–59)

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480 Portia L. Reyes
In their “safehouse”, under the cover of the night, the faceless officers
of the 5th CSU manufactured an elaborate platform to amplify terror
and feelings of isolation in Melencio. Using the torture technique
known as the water cure, they tried to extract information from their
so-called enemy in a manner similar to that in which the occupying
American forces treated Filipino resistance fighters during the
Filipino-American War in the early twentieth century.18 Like their
precursors, members of the 5th CSU saw their captive Melencio as
a wild beast to be broken. After being “cured”, he was branded and
used as an object — an “ashtray” (Lllanes 2012, p. 59), and so a
holder of ember and ash — by his captors. His ordeal continued
throughout his eleven days of captivity; respite only came, during
daylight, on his twelfth day, while his torturers were not in the
safehouse. Melencio jumped from a second floor verandah, and, with
a broken ankle, he ran away, shoeless and barely clothed.
The torment of Nathan and Lilian Quimpo, Maria Cristina
Pargas-Bawagan and Judy Taguiwalo was similarly horrifying. In
their accounts the spectacle of violence and violation is inescapable.
Similar to those of Ronald “Jan” Quimpo, Verzola and Melencio,
their testimonies illustrate the repeated physical, mental and sexual
abuse that they suffered. Equally patent is their sense of powerlessness
in the hands of their captors, who, in the name of the state they
represented, not only wanted confirmation of information from their
captives but also demanded those captives’ complete submission.
While writing about their ordeal, the narrators of these memories
cease to be subjects, becoming objects of repression instead.
In his account of torture in South America, Lawrence Weschler
claims that repression is an attempt on the part of states to recapture
individuals who are behaving as subjects in order to turn them
into objects once again. Torture, in this regard, becomes a process
of instruction, in which the torturer impresses upon the tortured
the futility of acting like a subject and of aspiring beyond abject
objecthood. The ordeal reduces the tortured to her or his body
and then forces her or him to face two harrowing realities: the
ineffectuality of screams and the extreme solitude before death. The

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tortured is thus effectively repressed — silenced into submission

(Weschler 1998, pp. 237–38). Perhaps the attempt to rage against
this silencing motivates torture victims like Jan, Nathan and Lilian
Quimpo, Verzola, Melencio, Maria Cristina Pargas-Bawagan and
Judy Taguiwalo to write about their ordeal. They detail their torture
to emphasize that it happened, defying in that way their torturers’
claims that the tortured were merely their physical selves and that
their screams of pain would neither be heard nor noted. Although
difficult, because, according to Verzola, it brought back “bad dreams”,
the authors “dug up those long-buried memories” to write about
them. Memories of their terror were “put on paper” or established,
and therefore not forgotten (Maglipon 2012, p. 143). Similar
motivations might also be behind the enumeration of numerous
activists who perished during the regime in many of the accounts
in these volumes of memoirs.
Equally remarkable is the activists’ imperative to demonstrate
that they have moved on or, even better, risen above their Martial
Law tribulations. In Tibak Rising, instead of writing about their
physical ordeals, Ted O. Lopez and Etta P. Rosales focus on their
preoccupations while jailed and their political activities following
release. Nonchalantly, Lopez treats his “month of tactical interrogation
and severe torture” as an episode in a larger narrative of his
own and his peers’ attempts to overcome boredom during their
long incarceration. Rosales sees her “release” from her “second
incarceration”, where she “was tortured”, as a finished chapter that
precedes her exposé on the difficulties she encountered in going
back to teaching (Llanes 2012, pp. 65, 105). Here, as Jean-Paul
Dumont suggests, the experience of violence appears to be a habitus,
both structured and structuring. On the one hand, this habitus has
resulted from an historical event stored as a memory of past deeds,
encounters or frustrations. On the other, it informs human actions
and conditions the acceptability and even banality of violence, if
not the ability to erase the scandal of its occurrence (Dumont 1992,
pp. 148–49). The experience of violence remains potent and affects
the present, informing attitudes, decisions and actions. Outwardly,

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482 Portia L. Reyes
Lopez and Rosales prefer to be the subjects and not the objects
of their memoirs. Instead of victims, they remember themselves
as survivors, as do most of the contributors to these volumes of
memoirs. They also consider themselves the best of their generation,
people who have risen above a “failed revolution” (Quimpo and
Quimpo 2012, p. 463). Both Subversive Lives and Not on Our Watch
depict the successful lives of their activist contributors following
the end of the Marcos dictatorship. After relatives and comrades fell
or disappeared, authors of the recollections in Tibak Rising report
having experienced hardship but also having learned eventually
to treat their personal losses as significant aspects of the people’s
movement, in general, and of their lives, in particular. Poignantly,
they remember and stress the humanity of their dead. Obstetrician-
gynaecologist Sylvia de la Paz relates her husband’s spirited defiance
of his killers. Advocacy consultant Erlinda Timbreza-Valerio describes
her fallen husband’s last goodbyes to her children. Author Lualhati
Abreu recalls how Abraham Cadungog, who detonated a bomb
killing himself to save others, made her early months with the NPA
easier. Oxfam Great Britain advisor Lan Mercado remembers her
collaboration and conversations with party leader Lean Alejandro,
who was murdered in 1987.
Memorializing a Struggle
Reliant on official and state-related documentation, writing on
the history of the Philippines has heretofore primarily treated the
country’s Martial Law period as an unfortunate, if not necessary,
episode in the march towards nationhood. Imposed because of a
“surging tide of anarchy, nihilism and communist rebellion” (Zaide
1979, p. 557) or “internal subversion” (Agoncillo 2012, p. 595) on
the part of the CPP-NPA, this historiography considers Martial Law
an “extraordinary measure taken by the state to protect itself from
extreme danger, such as lawless violence, rebellion or invasion”
(Zaide 1979, p. 558). It was “Martial Law, Philippines style” (Zaide
1979, p. 558), a chapter in the country’s ongoing rendezvous with

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“destiny” (Zaide 1979, p. 559). And represents an “interlude in the

sweeping saga of the Filipino nation” (Zaide 1979, p. 594). The
health and development of the state is hegemonic in this narrative.
They take precedence over, if they are not in fact irrelevant to, the
health and development of the very people who comprise the nation.
In this history Filipinos appear to have accepted Marcos’s Martial
Law rule, unquestioningly obeying the dictator’s lead towards a
purportedly “New Society” and a more “democratic” Philippines
(Marcos 1974). Pages and pages of work advancing this narrative are
dedicated to a preoccupation with state efforts towards land reform,
to social and economic policies, to international relations and to
other offical initiatives. Aside from the imposition of curfew hours
and the temporary closure of congress, everything was business as
usual. In fact, the state efficacy so elusive in previous eras seems
to have been achieved during this period in the country’s history.
The contributors to our three volumes of memoirs rage against this
historiography by collectively presenting a counterhegemonic narrative
of the Marcos dictatorship. They recall their attempts to foment a
revolution, illustrating their individual role and consequent centrality
in a tenebrous episode in the country’s history. A commitment to
remember a shared past evidently unifies them. They establish
their difference as members of a particular community, embodying
youthfulness, idealism and advocacy for change. Curiously, in a
number of instances their remembrance reads as nostalgia about
their past selves, alluding to their youthful selves’ having been more
interesting, more colorful and more adventurous than their older
counterparts of the present.19 Author and publisher Jack Teotico,
for instance, claims that his “generation had fun, lots of unbridled,
unparalleled fun” (Maglipon 2012, p. 170). Theatre and film actor
Joel Saracho highlights how, after getting wind of their predecessors’
existential angst and Western intellectual ruminations, their generation
“dreamt of a bohemian and radical lifestyle” (Llanes 2012, p. 150).
Critically, however, we can plot the individual recollections of the
authors who contributed to these volumes of memoirs as a singular
narrative. They have told of their protests, attempts at organizing

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484 Portia L. Reyes
peasant and labour groups, and armed rebellion. They have narrated
their fears and apprehension and feelings of helplessness for their
families and themselves in the face of a repressive regime. They
have remembered their pain and hardship, their physical ordeals and
their dead comrades. In narratives characterized by an us-versus-
them motif they have distinguished their protagonist selves as a
community, or as a “nation”, vis-à-vis the dictatorship.
In a sense, the memoirists’ remembrance of the Martial Law
period amounts to a collective memory of the sort that, according
to Maurice Halbwachs, an individual could acquire and recollect
in a society or community. Halbwachs sees memories as both
individual and social. They necessarily follow, and are reinforced in,
frameworks recognizable to members of a community (Halbwachs
1992, pp. 46–51). In our three volumes of memoirs, the authors use
words, objects and ideas comprising a valuation that give meaning to
the preconceptions and judgement of their collective. Each writer’s
remembrance conjures a view of the Martial Law period, framed
by allegiance to and identification with her or his collective in
its fight to replace the government in this period. At this juncture
I use the term collective in reference to a coherent group of people
who have similar interests, use a similar body of literature, follow
a similar slant in their reflections and share a totality of thoughts
brought about by common experiences and personal relationships
at and outside work in the past or the present.
The collective, embodied by the contributors to the three volumes
of memoirs, committed its anti-Marcos struggles to paper so that
young Filipinos would know of their plight during this murky period
in the country’s history and avoid making the same mistakes. Here the
writers’ admission of fallibility and their aspiration to contend with
obscurantism concerning — and to influence popular remembrance
of — a period in history stand out. Their shortcomings, which in the
memoirs range from disobeying their parents to not paying enough
attention to a comrade’s signals that they were being watched, serve
as mechanisms to remind Filipino readers of their humanity and their
communion with them as a people. More significantly, the three

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volumes of memoirs permit the authors to depict the Martial Law

period from their own perspective, affording them opportunities to
be the I/eye and, hence, to serve as agents of change in the country’s
historical narrative(s). Their individual rememberings deploy different
kinds of subjectivities and magnify, or “telescope”, the otherwise
ambiguous struggle of the activists who fought the establishment.
State-sanctioned violence and violation suffered by the authors and
those around them feature prominently in the memoirs, demonstrating
ruptures in an otherwise familiar narrative of citizens and their state.
Although some contributors appear in their accounts as victims, many
are also quick to emphasize their choice to stand by their convictions
and their survival following the regime’s fall. The elucidation of
violence and violation further distinguishes the authors as members of
a community, people who collectively appear to have a similar desire
to remember and to be recognized as a community. Memorializing
violence and violation becomes necessarily linked with collective
identity. It signifies a collective subjectivity and judgement, shedding
light on a particular morality and a version of historical truth. In
the torture of Ronald “Jan” Quimpo, Roberto Verzola and Sonny
Melencio, readers become privy to an apparent right and wrong
and, accordingly, to a plaidoyer for justice. The spectacle of their
violation lends credence to the authors’ protagonist selves.
Jointly, the authors bear witness to a particular past, establishing
the usability of this past in the present. Their narratives of the
Martial Law period afford readers a view of regular actors in history,
while showing how this view of the past continues to inform the
present. The violence and the violation that they endured during the
period exemplify their having been subject to repression, but their
remembrance of these experiences with terror showcases their attempt
to live with, if not to overcome, them. Their testimonies demonstrate
how the Marcos regime waged a civil war against those whom it
deemed subversives; they identify who was culpable in the wrongs
done to the members of the memoirists’ collective. Their testimonies
legitimize their narrative authority over the period, wrenching it
from agents whose actions are supposed to have caused change or

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486 Portia L. Reyes
continuity in traditional narratives of the Philippine state. Evocative

of what the Popular Memory Group suggests, the narratives of the
authors of the contributions to the three volumes of memoirs embody
a theoretical and a political activity, which is also a practice in and
for the present (Popular Memory Group 1982, p. 241).
As a collective, our authors argue for a communal view of and for
communal authority over the country’s narrative. They are emblematic
of a generation of former activists and Filipino communists who
have recently started writing about their personal experiences with
and views of the leftist movement. In two volumes, for instance, a
former naval officer had chronicled his storied career and eventual
defection to the CPP-NPA in the 1970s (Vizmanos 2000 and 2003).
To prod the Philippine left towards self-reflection, former CPP
members have also painfully exposed the party purge campaign
against suspected military agents in the 1980s (Garcia 2001) and the
ideological split in the 1990s between CPP members who affirmed
their loyalty to the organization’s tenets and those who opposed
some of them (Abreu 2009). Because a number of cadres saw their
own political and cultural work with the leftist movement as an
extension of social movements in the Philippines (Segovia 2008),
they felt demoralized when their organization became ideologically
factionalized (Melencio 2010). On the whole these works depict
their authors’ engagement in the struggle against the dictatorship
and emphasize their continuing loyalty to the people’s cause. But
they also serve to cast doubt on some of the authoritarian tendencies
of the left. Performatively, they present “Martial Law, Philippines
style” from the angle of those who opposed it and demonstrate their
collective’s pursuit of change in politics and society. What they have
done is to reveal the importance of individual voices in history and
to contribute to the democratization of history and history writing
that the country is still struggling to realize.
This collectiveness, as communities are wont to do, also excludes.
The memoirs in Tibak Rising, according to Ferdinand Llanes, offer
“silhouettes” of activists’ lives of which “the general public has
no knowledge or memory” (Llanes 2012, p. 1). The memoirists of

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the three volumes frequently use the exclusive “we” in reference

to their collective. Etta Rosales claims that “we have suffered a
devastating defeat in the hands of school management” (Llanes
2012, p. 104), for example, while Susan Quimpo narrates, “with
our fists, we banged on gates, doors and store windows — no one
would give us refuge” (Quimpo and Quimpo 2012, p. 360). Most
of the writers also allude to the elevated socio-economic stature of
members of their collective. Jose Dalisay writes of having waited as
a colleague “buzzed three times before a newly-woken-up-looking
maid scurried out of the back door to let her señorita in” (Maglipon
2012, pp. 211–12). Ballet Philippines artistic director Paul Alexander
Morales relates that “we went to the big public schools and really
immersed with the masa that had so become the apple of my father’s
eye” (Llanes 2012, p. 37). Members of the comfortable classes
politicized through the international rise of socialist movements and
within organizations associated with institutions of higher learning,
the writers of our volumes of memoirs represented a segment of
society that was not only supposed to learn from but, importantly,
also to mobilize the “masses”.
Yet, the relationship of their class with those masses had not been
matter-of-fact. In rural areas it had to first be established. Urban,
and suburban, activists and CPP cadres related to but hardly shared
villagers’ motivations in joining the NPA, which could range from
personal grievances against self-serving landlords and the military
to ills brought about by corrupt local governments (Rutten 1996,
pp. 114–33, and 2008, pp. 280–347). In some sectors of the grass-
roots movement, pressing financial difficulties drove impoverished
members to compromise their organization’s advocacy and work
(Boudreau 2001, pp. 143–64). After Marcos’s fall, opinions among
leftist leaders on how to address the changed order differed. Tensions
brought about by the internal purges and the ideological differences
that would eventually fragment the party only heightened these
differences. Rifts among and between members of the vanguard class
and the mass base that that class is supposed to lead to revolution
underscored problems born of the party’s complex, uneven, fissured

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488 Portia L. Reyes
and misunderstood membership. Certainly, leftist commitments were

not monolithic. The contributors to the three volumes of memoirs
magnify the plurality of the Philippine left. As a corollary, they also
bear witness to the significance of individuals whose roles — and
to alternative views of history whose salience — the CPP would be
well served to confront in the future.
In establishing themselves as a community or a nation, our
memoirists also underscore their estrangement from most Filipinos.
The underprivileged would not understand the memoirists’ language;
they would be likely to sympathize with but not necessarily
share the ideals and advocacy that that language captured. In the
1990s this disjuncture was parodied in a television sitcom called
Home along da Riles (Home along the Traintracks), featuring the
impoverished who lived along Manila’s traintracks.20 Frequently
it showed the puzzled expressions of the protagonists whenever
a group of placard-brandishing activists marched through (in
support of) their neighbourhood. For viewers, activists looked to
be comically alien, spouting a foreign philosophy and a perspective
that seemed to be irrelevant to the everyday toil of the poor. In
Filipino historiography, Zeus Salazar refers to this disjuncture as the
dambuhalang pagkakahating pangkalinangan (great cultural divide),
signifying the separate historical vectors and trajectories of an elite,
socio-economically superior community and its poverty-stricken,
underprivileged mass counterpart (Salazar 1997, p. 103). Salazar
maintains that, although these two communities might occupy similar
spaces, they differ in attitude, behaviour, perspective and worldview.
They have difficulty relating to, if not communing with, each other
in the larger project of building a Bansang Pilipino (Filipino nation)
(Salazar 1993, pp. 46–49).
Further, the three volumes of memoirs only shed light on the
perspectives of their contributors, which may conflict with those of
others in the movement who have yet to write of their experiences.
The views of moderates or centrists would also likely differ, and
those of members of the military, conservative politicians and
reactionary activists, and people from the varied sectors of the large

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underprivileged class would include still other perspectives. Finally,

save for the Quimpos, the contributors to these volumes tackle only
tangentially their intellectual development and tutelage in leftist
ideology; they provide few clues to their intellectual loyalties and
aspirations. Like personal snapshots of the past, contributions to the
three volumes of memoirs represent partial images that have yet to
be cerebrally sorted or to take definitive shape in larger, multifaceted
narratives of a period as a whole.
Subversive Lives, Not on Our Watch and Tibak Rising nonetheless
serve as invaluable sources for Philippine studies and Southeast
Asian studies. They might not necessarily be read by the general
Filipino public, but for Philippinists and others who write on the
Philippines they are must-reads. To be sure memoirs might be
coloured with personal judgements and inaccuracies. They could be
biased, episodic or fragmentary — self-reflective, but not necessarily
critical. However, they introduce personal memories to the sphere
of academic history and provide glimpses of how certain members
of a society experience larger structural changes. Their assertions
concerning historical events, people and places could be subjected
to critique, be “triangulated” and checked against other sources of
history. They exemplify the fact that historical episodes are continually
negotiated over time and productively contribute to the makings
of understanding in Philippine history. In this regard, certainly, the
struggles of the contributors of the three volumes live on.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this essay was read at the workshop, “Lest we
forget what? Memory, Heritage and History”, National University
of Singapore, on 24 October 2015. Maraming salamat po! to Charo
Reyes, Ferdie Victoria, Sharon Maminta, Eduardo Tadem, Jamie
Davidson and Michael Montesano of SOJOURN for their ready ears
and invaluable help.
Portia L. Reyes teaches in the Department of History of the National University of

Singapore, Level 5, AS1, 11 Arts Link, Singapore 117570; email: hisrp@nus.edu.sg.

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490 Portia L. Reyes
NOTES
1. Socio-economic problems persisted in the early years of the Marcos
presidency. The media noted a rise in criminality, aggravated by police
brutality against citizens. Two massacres gripped the country — the
killings of five farmers in June 1966 and of thirty-two members of the
peasant group Lapiang Malaya (Freedom Party) in May 1967 (Agoncillo
2012, pp. 503–6). On the complex context leading to the declaration of
Martial Law, see Brillantes (1987).
2. In June 1971, in response to decades-long clamour for change among the
public, elected delegates started convening to replace the 1935 colonial
constitution (Agoncillo 2012, pp. 598–99).
3. On the Huk rebellion, see Kerkvliet (1977) and Pomeroy (2010).
4. For a PKP version of this split, see Lava (2002). The PKP persevered to
resume its organizational work, but increasingly became engaged in an
intense contest with the CPP. In 1974, the PKP entered into an agreement
with Marcos, committing to disband and disarm the Huks. The agreement
proved to be costly for the PKP, which soon lost much of its base to the
CPP (Quimpo 2008, p. 57).
5. The CPP’s prognosis for a national democratic revolution is based on its
conviction that “semicolonial and semifeudal conditions” are the “root
causes” of poverty and inequality in the Philippines. The semicolonial
and semifeudal character of society fosters “bureaucrat capitalism” in the
government, which serves only the interest of the ruling class and accounts
for massive corruption. Bureaucrat capitalists and landlords collude among
themselves and with American imperialists to advance their respective
interests. For the CPP, nationalism could not be divorced from pro-peasant
and pro-poor causes. The solution was national democracy. National
democracy would not happen on its own; it could not be legislated. For
the CPP it has to be won by a revolution (Sison 1989, pp. 33–34).
6. NPA activities became pronounced in the mountainous regions of northern
and southern Luzon — the Cordilleras and the Sierra Madre — and also
in those of Panay and Negros in the Western Visayas, and Samar in the
Eastern Visayas, and the western and eastern parts of Mindanao.
7. Established in 1901 to aid Americans against Filipino freedom fighters,
the Philippine Constabulary was a paramilitary police force that served the
colonial government and later the Philippine state in a twofold function:
(a) patrol the provinces and (b) serve as intelligence operatives against
subversives and radical nationalists in the cities. After the Pacific War it
was incorporated into the AFP; under Marcos it integrated municipal and
city police and specialized in quelling protests in Manila (McCoy 2009,
pp. 60–61, 83, 387).

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8. This was the “miting de avance” or the last political rally of the opposition
Liberal Party candidates who were running against their counterparts
in President Ferdinand Marcos’s Nacionalista Party before the national
senatorial and municipal elections.
9. “CPP” would eventually become popular shorthand for “CPP-ML”.
10. The writ of habeas corpus is a legal action that detainees may seek in
order to avoid unlawful imprisonment. The Philippine constitution assured
it, and the president might only suspend it during an invasion, a rebellion
or a threat of such, or when the safety of the public was at stake.
11. On oligarchic politics, see Anderson (1971), Hutchcroft (1998), Landé
(1965) and Sidel (1999).
12. In 1991, after her acquittal on racketeering charges in New York, Imelda
Marcos returned to the Philippines. Two years later, the Philippine
government allowed the return of her husband’s corpse for burial. However,
the Marcoses only wanted a hero’s funeral for the late dictator and alleged
former anti-Japanese guerrilla leader; they preserved his body and laid
it in a glass coffin in his hometown in Ilokos, open to the public. In
2016 the Rodrigo Duterte government granted their wish, prompting the
Marcoses, who did not inform the media, immediately to bury the remains
of the late dictator at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery)
in Manila (Dizon 2016; Drogin 1993; Mydans 2011; Torres-Tupas 2016;
Wolff 1990).
13. “Full-timers” are political activists who devoted their working hours to
revolution, mostly “underground” or beyond the legal parameters that the
Martial Law regime had set for its citizens.
14. “The movement” or, in the Filipino language, “kilusan” was the progressive
movement. The term refers to the actions and decisions of the broad alliance
of left-leaning individuals and organizations that worked towards social,
economic and political justice for the Filipino masses. Euphemistically, it
connotes the striving of members of the CPP and its affiliate organizations
to pursue a national democratic revolution in the Philippines.
15. Today called the Polytechnic University of the Philippines.
16. Estimates suggest that throughout Marcos’s Martial Law rule, the military
killed between 3,000 and 3,257, tortured between 8,000 and 35,000,
and detained some 70,000 individuals (Chua 2012, p. 2; McCoy 1999,
p. 193).
17. The 5th Constabulary Service Unit (5th CSU) earned notoriety for its
cruel and even fatal interrogations of suspects and subversives during
Martial Law. Its officers, including the infamous Rodolfo Aguinaldo, were
relentless, physically violent and psychologically cruel (McCoy 1999,
pp. 206, 211–12).

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492 Portia L. Reyes
18. On American administration of water cure against Filipino freedom fighters,

see Kramer (2006, pp. 140–42, 149, 150, 195) and McCoy (2009, pp. 5,
89, 104, 133).
19. On remembering youthful pasts, see Halbwachs (1992, p. 48), and, on
the achronological nature of memory and the splitting of selves, see King
(2000, p. 20).
20. The Lopez-owned network ABS-CBN aired this situation comedy series
from 1992 to 2003.
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Memoirs of Struggles Against Martial Law in The Philippines (2018)

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Claiming History: Memoirs of the Struggle against Ferdinand Marcos’s Martial Law

Regime in the Philippines

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26538540

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The year 2012 saw publication of three volumes of memoirs dealing

In 2012, in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of President

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meantime, the Commission on Human Rights and the National

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second introduces the memoirs under scrutiny. The third section of

The Martial Law Regime in Philippine History

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peasant army in Central Luzon as the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng

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Francisco Nemenzo, “raring for a fight” by the second half of the

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in the Philippines. Representatives from barangay or village-level

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Marcos never achieved his end game, however. Although his

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human rights inflicted on those whom it perceived as subversives and

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Church hierarchy before the scheduled visit of Pope John Paul II

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to concede and ordered the parliament to declare his re-election.

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CPP’s failure to appreciate the strength of public support for removing

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movement abandoned by the MNLF (Vitug 2000, pp. 106–89).

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as “rejectionists” (Reid 2000, pp. 41–49; Liwanag 1992). Sison’s

Memoirs under Scrutiny

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dictatorship. Unlike the government, however, they do not privilege

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of the League of Editors for a Democratic Society and the College

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experience of a tumultuous period in the history of the Philippines

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struggled to write, reproduce and disseminate newspaper articles on

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advocacy consultant, moved from one part of the country to another,

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targeted insurgent community, violating its sense of domestic space,

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much. Then they wrapped an electric wire around my penis and

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their prisoner to an electrocution machine to complete this physically

… punched me hard. Someone cocked his revolver and started

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tortured is thus effectively repressed — silenced into submission

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“destiny” (Zaide 1979, p. 559). And represents an “interlude in the

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volumes of memoirs permit the authors to depict the Martial Law

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continuity in traditional narratives of the Philippine state. Evocative

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