Filipino survivors of martial law still haunted by abuses fifty years after declaration
Filipino survivors of martial law still haunted by abuses fifty years after declaration
On the morning of September twenty-third, nineteen seventy-two, Chris Sorio remembers being awoken by his mother at their home in Quezon City in the Philippines. She told him that the country had just been placed under martial law.
"There's nothing on TV and nothing on the radio," said Sorio, who was a teenager at the time. He is now sixty-four and living in Vancouver. "So there's chaos and confusion among people because they don't know what's happening."
Later that evening, President Ferdinand Marcos appeared on television to formally announce that he had declared martial law.
What followed was fourteen years of corruption, violence and human rights abuses. It's estimated that more than three thousand were killed, thirty-five thousand tortured and seventy thousand incarcerated, based on reports from Amnesty International. In nineteen eighty-six, Marcos was ousted from office following mass protests known as the People Power Revolution. He fled to Hawaii, where he died in exile in nineteen eighty-nine.