Fighting to be remembered

Fighting to be remembered

Loretta Ann Rosales, a history teacher and human rights activist, remembers being tortured by police and the military during the martial law period.

She was arrested twice in the nineteen seventies for taking part in street protests after some of her students informed the authorities she had criticized the regime of Marcos Senior.

Her captors poured burning candle wax over her arms partially suffocated her with a belt and subjected her to waterboarding for hours on end.

In her worst experience, her torturers clipped wires to her arms and feet and gave her electric shocks that made her body convulse.

Now, at eighty-three-years-old, she counts herself as lucky for having survived, and has dedicated her life to human rights activism and making sure such atrocities never happen again.

The Philippines has officially recognized that eleven thousand one hundred three people were tortured and abused during the martial law period. There were also two thousand three hundred twenty-six killings and disappearances between nineteen seventy-two and nineteen eighty-six, before Marcos Senior was ousted in a popular uprising. They are commemorated by the government-funded Human Rights Violations Victims' Memorial Commission.

But the true number of victims could be far higher. According to Amnesty International, at least fifty thousand people were arrested and detained under martial law from nineteen seventy-two to nineteen seventy-five alone, among them church workers, human rights activists, legal aid lawyers, labor leaders and journalists.

What Rosales and other survivors fear is that the lessons of that era are in danger of being forgotten.

Marcos Junior, who was democratically elected in May with a massive majority, has defended his father and refused to apologize for his actions. He has said it is wrong to call his father a dictator and, during his campaign for the presidency, he praised Marcos Senior as a "political genius."

"The fight for human rights in the Philippines started fifty years ago, and that continues on today," Rosales said.

"What we're fighting against is historical distortion, to not be silenced, to not be forgotten," she added.