The decision convicting me to imprisonment for 12 to 20 years in outrageous.
- It dismisses my torture narrative as “hearsay and self-serving.”
- It ignores my wife’s testimony on how my family searched for me while I was held incommunicado for 24 days by the Eighth Military Intelligence Group (MIG 8).
- It brushes aside as inconclusive the medical certificate of Dr. Catalan and Dr. Hobayan of the Samar Provincial Hospital indicating that scars on my chest and back resulted from wounds inflicted at around the time of my apprehension.
- It totally evades the issues of my illegal apprehension without warrant and the illegal confiscation of my belongings.
- It is silent on observations by the Defense of glaring inconsistencies and brazen lies by the principal Prosecution witnesses.
The Prosecution did not even attempt to prove alien governmental support to any of the associations the charge sheet claimed to be subversive and of which I was supposedly a member. But the decision supplements this deficiency by citing the program of the so-called Christians for National Liberation. What appears to be one organization’s intention to solicit assistance from friends abroad is used to “prove” other organizations’ receipt of aid from foreign powers.
My conviction seems to be one more indication that the agencies of the present dispensation are all too ready to sacrifice a citizen’s sacred rights at the altar of national security. But I am positive that the Regional Trial Court’s decision will eventually be overturned by a higher court, if the elementary principles of fairness are observed.
In the meantime, my family and I will have to suffer. We will do so with fortitude and serenity, I hope, conscious that so many Filipinos have suffered far worse injustices.
It strikes me as ironic, though, that a nearsighted, lifelong asthmatic like me could be so feared by the authorities that they would deploy a full platoon of well-armed troops and plainclothesmen to secure me – or to secure others against me – on the day the decision was promulgated.
It is ironic, too, that such a non-violent and inoffensive person as I have always striven to be should be mistakenly branded as a leader of the CNL, CPP, NPA, NDF and RUFG by a judge who had to absent himself from the reading of his decision for reasons known only to himself.
Indeed, the signs of the times, too, are ironic.
Never before has poverty been so widespread and deeply felt, nor has peace and order broken down on so massive a scale, yet the people as a whole do not appear to be desperate but seem to discover hope in new-found unity with one another and persevering struggle for a better life and a nation characterized by authentic democracy.
Never before has the country been encumbered by such an enormous foreign debt nor has it had to endure such blatant intervention in domestic affairs by alien entities like the World Bank and the U.S. Government, yet the call of nationalism seems to ring out louder and clearer now than at any time in the past and the achievement of genuine sovereignty appears to be closer at hand than ever.
Today, Easter Sunday, four days after the decision was promulgated, I am confident that, like Our Lord, our people shall one day resurrect themselves from the country’s politico-economic deathbed.
I pray that my incarceration may somehow contribute to hastening the day of national resurrection and that my family and I – as well as other political detainees and their families—may yet enjoy living and working in a nation re-born.
