Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s quest for the Philippine presidency has Loretta Rosales recoiling in horror as she remembers the nightmare she went through standing up to his late father’s brutal rule.
Tortured and gang-raped by troops when then-Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the 1970s, the former history professor, now 82, said that she fears history will repeat itself.
“I don’t want this to happen again to my people,” said Rosales, a human rights advocate who became a politician and has asked the government to disqualify Ferdinand Marcos Jr, nicknamed “Bongbong,” from the May 9 election.
Photo: AFP
She fears that the son will take after the father, who shut down the Philippine Congress and other democratic institutions, as well as media outlets, while ruling by decree.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr, 64, is a clear leader in the polls, running on a campaign that steers public discourse away from the crimes of his father’s dictatorship.
Rosales took part in street protests with the Humanist League, a group aligned with the Philippines’ Communist Party, which was the only serious opposition after Ferdinand Marcos crushed most opponents.
In 1976, she was secretly arrested and taken to an unmarked detention house, Rosales said, adding that boiling-hot candle wax was poured on her arms and she was subjected to waterboarding, as well as strangled with a belt.
Her abusers delivered electric shocks to her fingertips and toes, leaving her trembling uncontrollably, and stripped off her clothes, she said.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr has downplayed or disputed accounts of abuses committed under his father’s rule.
The Philippine government acknowledged abuses in a 2013 settlement that awarded 9.8 billion pesos (US$191.91 million at the current exchange rate) in reparations to more than 11,000 victims out of about 75,000 claimants.
After her torture Rosales was moved to a military prison and freed a month later.
She was elected to the Philippine House of Representatives in 1998, when one of her torturers, a former paramilitary officer, also won a seat.
The man, since deceased, always denied that he took part in the abuse, she said.
In 2010, she became head of the government’s independent Commission on Human Rights, a year after the Philippines outlawed torture and “other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.”
The Philippine Commission on Elections says that 56 percent of Filipinos registered to vote were born after the end of martial law.
Polls project that the predominantly young electorate will sweep Ferdinand Marcos Jr into the Malacanang Palace — the Philippine president’s residence — 36 years after a bloodless uprising ended his father’s 20-year rule and chased the first family into exile in the US.
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