Activist’s son puts materials on martial law era online

MANILA, Philippines — When then former Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. won the presidency by a landslide in the May 9 elections, Karl Patrick Suyat, a University of the Philippines (UP) student, said he felt “immobilized by disappointment and fear.”

After all, Suyat’s father was an activist during the term of President Marcos’ father and namesake, who ruled the country with an iron fist from 1965 to 1986. He was also the first to expose young Karl to the horrors and atrocities many Filipinos went through during martial law.

Suyat was not only apprehensive about a repeat of such injustices but also the whitewashing of this dark period in history. His fear was not misplaced. Barely a week after Marcos won, state agents red-tagged a series of children’s books about martial law and accused the publishing house, Adarna House, of radicalizing young minds.

The 19-year-old UP student immediately thought of setting up an archive to preserve the memory of a foregone era.

“The thought of martial law books and other archival material [being] razed by another Marcos regime scared me,” Suyat said. He messaged a friend, who immediately started looking for funds for a scanner and the procurement of more materials.

Over the weekend, they finally launched their initiative. Called “Gunita: Mga Pahina Mula sa Panahon ng Diktadurya,” the archive is a repository of dozens of digitized martial law-era reading materials.

It features scanned copies of newspapers and magazines from that period, including We Forum, Ang Pahayagang Malaya, The People’s Voice, The Weekly Guardian, Mr. & Ms., and Philippines Free Press.

There are also PDF copies of martial law-related books such as “The Conjugal Dictatorship” by Primitivo Mijares, “Policing America’s Empire” by Alfred McCoy, and “Waltzing with a Dictator” by Raymond Bonner.

Many of these, Suyat said, were sourced from Filipiniana booksellers and antique shops, or from the personal collection of donors. Other UP students volunteered to digitize much of the materials.

This process, on top of procurement, did not come cheap. Suyat said that so far, they have spent 98 percent of the over P100,000 raised through donations.

War on historical distortion

“[But] the sweetest thing about the project is that we have taken a very huge step in fighting historical distortion by the Marcos family and their army of trolls and spin masters with the magnanimity and support [of] Filipinos who stand for truth, freedom and justice,” he said.

The Gunita archive complements similar efforts in the academe and the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, which also keeps a repository of martial law-related materials.

Suyat added that they would be uploading more materials in the coming days, including a copy of the Agrava Fact-finding Board report on the 1983 assassination of former Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr., which was also published by Mr. and Ms. in 1984.

There are varying figures on the number of human rights abuse victims under the Marcos regime.

The Human Rights Violations Victims Memorial Commission, an independent quasi-judicial body formed to investigate rights violations from 1972 to 1986, during the term of Marcos Sr., recognized a total of 11,103 such cases. These ranged from involuntary exile; arbitrary detention; torture; cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment; and killing and enforced disappearance.

However, according to Amnesty International, there were around 107,200 primary victims of rights violations during the same period. A few weeks following the proclamation of martial law in 1972, the government estimated that only around 50,000 people had been arrested and detained.

But Amnesty said that in total, 70,000 people were arrested, mostly arbitrarily without warrants of arrest; 34,000 people were tortured; and 3,240 others were killed by the military and police.

—WITH A REPORT FROM INQUIRER RESEARCH

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