Marcos victims: Salvaged (tortured, mutilated & dumped by road for public display)

The son of former Philippines president Ferdinand  Marcos, Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr, will be running for vice president in the upcoming Philippines elections in 2016

(Photo above of the younger Marcos with the elder Marcos and his mother Imelda viewing a statue of General MacArthur during a Marcos family visit to The Pentagon in he US in 1982. Source: Wikipedia).

HORRIFYING HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

The candidacy of the younger Marcos has led to renewed discussion of the horrifying violations of human rights during the 20 years of Marcos rule (1966-86).

It is of course impossible to deny that these human rights violations ever happened but there are ongoing attempts to: 1. minimize them, and 2. draw attention away from them during the election campaign.

One recent article refers to "allegations of human rights abuse" as if the extent of what happened during his presidency is not a known and proven fact.

The lack of historical research and history books in the Philipppines to describe what actually happened must be reckoned one major impediment to knowledge that allows public understanding of history to be manipulated.

There is also the real possibility that once in a position of power, the younger Marcos may decide to rewrite the history books on the elder Marcos, a possible scenario that South Korea currently faces with its current president President Park Geun-hye being the daughter of President Park Chung-hee who ruled South Korea with a steel fist and many human rights violations during the 1960s and 70s (see here , here and here).

HISTORY IRRELEVANT TO PRESENT DAY ISSUES? 

Even if they do know the history of what actually happened, Filipinos are being told that history is actually irrelevant to what is happening now. Senator Marcos declares:

"Many cases have been brought to court here [Philippines] and in the US. But if you talk to people, they are not concerned about that. Filipinos are concerned about their lives today. They want answers: 'Why are there drugs in our streets? Why is the crime rate going up at an alarming rate? Why is the educational sector miserable? Why is distribution of wealth not happening? Why is the government not doing anything?'" (Source: "Marcos: Filipinos want solutions, not history talk" from Rappler here)

Can any of these issues, whether it be crime, education and economics, really be understood without at the same time understanding history?

For example, the famine on Negros during the Marcos presidency has apparently not yet been adequately explained from historical evidence. (see here). The question of whether the poor are still vulnerable to a famine or widespread malnutrition even today has to be reckoned an important question.

With a free press in the Philippines, the Marcos candidacy has brought forward people who still clearly remember the Marcos years and have written to remind younger people of what actually happened (see here).

Historical awareness, defined as:  1. knowing what happened in the past, 2. how it could relate to what is happening now and 3. how past failures and disasters might be avoided in the future, is certainly an essential part of advanced "education sectors" found in Europe, the US, Australia and Japan, at universities such as the University of Wisconsin where historian of the Philippines Alfred W. McCoy has taught for decades,

Professor McCoy has in fact documented in detail the horrific human rights violations of Marcos the elder in lectures he has given (see below).

DARK LEGACY: HUMAN RIGHTS UNDER THE MARCOS REGIME Alfred W. McCoy, University of Wisconsin-Madison Conference: Legacies of the Marcos Dictatorship Ateneo de Manila University 20 September 1999

"Marcos Regime: Looking back on the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, the Marcos government appears, by any standard, exceptional for both the quantity and quality of its violence. The Marcos regime's tally of 3,257 extra-judicial killings is far lower than Argentina's 8,000 missing. But it still exceeds the 2,115 extra-judicial deaths under General Pinochet in Chile, and the 266 dead during the Brazilian junta. Under Marcos, moreover, military murder was the apex of a pyramid of terror—3,257 killed, 35,000 tortured, and 70,000 incarcerated."

"Some 2,520, or 77 percent of all victims, were salvaged—that is, tortured, mutilated, and dumped on a roadside for public display. Seeing these mutilated remains, passers-by could read in a glance a complete transcript of what had transpired in Marcos's safe houses, spreading a sense of fear. Instead of an invisible machine like the Argentine military that crushed all resistance, Marcos's regime intimidated by random displays of its torture victims —becoming thereby a theater state of terror. This terror had a profound impact upon the Philippine military and its wider society."

"Martial Law: Under martial law from 1972 to 1986, the Philippine military was the fist of Ferdinand Marcos's authoritarian rule. Its elite torture units became his instruments of terror. Backed by his generals, Marcos wiped out warlord armies, closed Congress, and confiscated the corporations of political enemies."

"Even at its peak, however, the Marcos state, reflecting the underlying poverty of Philippine society, lacked the skilled manpower and information systems to effect a blanket repression. As a lawyer, moreover, Marcos, at first maintained a facade of legality and spoke with pride of his constitutional authoritarianism. But as the gap between legal fiction and coercive reality widened, the regime mediated this contradiction by releasing its political prisoners and shifting to extra-judicial execution or salvaging." (my italics; source here)

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/54a/062.html