Days of living dangerously (2)

Rhona Canoy

Last of two parts

HERE’S the second part of the piece written by my friend, Ricardo Jorge S. Caluen. Read on:

A Sister Act

In the early weeks of the new regime, I attended a symposium at the San Miguel Corporation auditorium in Makati to listen to an ailing Father Horacio de la Costa, noted Jesuit historian. He eloquently captured the prevailing political milieu as he deadpanned  “Before martial law….our politicians would talk and talk without thinking; now they can only think and think….”

Father de la Costa was not alone in the Jesuit community to bravely question Martial Law. No less than the Father Provincial in the 1970s, Fr. Benigno Mayo, labored for greater Church involvement in fighting  political oppression.

One day (this could have been in late 1975) we Senior Scholastics gathered in the provincial house of the Religious of the Good Shepherd to listen to Sr. Christine Tan (a giant in the opposition to martial rule) share her experience of working among the slum dwellers of Tondo. I did not know that at this gathering we would meet the courageous leader of “Zoto” or Zone One Tondo Organization, “Inday” Trining Herrera. Zoto was the first major urban poor movement organized in the country. Zoto had opposed the rezoning of Manila’s shoreline to accommodate big business.  “Inday”, like many of her counterparts, would later be incarcerated and tortured by the military. Father Ben, who headed the Association of Major Religious Superiors for Men (AMRSM) at the time, was supposed to be our keynote speaker that day. But he never showed up. We soon found out that the military had arrested him while en route to our forum.

I found many nuns of the different congregations particularly brave.  One day, in the wee hours of the morning, we heard rapping on the steel gate of the De la Salle  Scholasticate which had recently relocated to a sprawling property on Congressman Francisco Street which intersects with Leon Guinto. It was only two blocks away from St. Scholastica’s College where the Benedictine nuns also had their priory. I was among the first to run to the gate to check on the noise. Two nuns were outside, introducing themselves as from “St. Scho”. They brought with them a typewritten sheet with lines for signatures at the bottom. One Scholastic asked what the sheet was all about (we could barely read with only one fluorescent lamp lit high above the gate). One of the nuns said “Basta pumirma na lang kayo, Brother….”

The other nun quickly explained that union members of La Tondena would be going on strike and the sheet contains the statement of support emanating from the Association of Major Religious Superiors for Women.  I signed the statement in awe of the courage and industry of these nuns who were unafraid of dark alleys like Congressman Francisco Street, definitely not afraid of the long arm of martial law.

Later a story made the rounds within the religious community in Manila… that a nun had jumped onto a moving bus when strikers were loaded to be brought to Camp Crame, precariously holding on to the handle bar while a soldier begged for her to get off the bus saying “hindi ho namin kayo hinuhuli, Sister….” But the nun clung on with tenacity telling the military man she was going with the strike leaders wherever they would be taken. The La Tondena strike was historic.  It was the first major act of defiance  to take place in the martial law setting.

The Religious of the Virgin Mary (RVM) were just as involved. In the last rally I participated in (December 1975 on the march to Malacanang during the state dinner President Marcos hosted in honor of visiting President Gerald Ford) some of the RVMs I met on Mendiola Street were the first to grab my hands for the “kapit-bisig”. In this formation, we hoped that the presence of men and women in their religious habit would be a deterrence to the Metro Discom police arbitrarily arresting fishermen, farmers, and factory workers who were inside the formation.

Spare No Underwear

On our third year of formation we the Scholastics became Novices. One time, we joined a shortened Ignatian retreat at the Jesuit Novitiate in Novaliches, Quezon City. A group of Jesuits—known as Tertians (those in the final stage of their formation prior to taking perpetual vows) were also doing the 30-day silent Ignatian retreat. In this group were Fr. Joaquin Bernas (later president of Ateneo de Manila U and also a member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission) and Fr William “Bill” Kreutz, later president of Ateneo de Zamboanga University. During a break in the retreat (we joined the Jesuits at meal times and religious services) we learned that we had just barely missed a recent military raid of the novitiate, which also doubles as home for aged Jesuits.

The Jesuits had lent a wing of the property to be used by visiting nuns from various parts of Southeast Asia attending a pastoral training program at the time.  One evening, helicopters descended upon the property and military jeeps came screeching at the gates. At first the Jesuits thought the mother of the president, Mrs. Josefa Edralin Marcos, came visiting her brother, Father Isaias Edralin, who once headed the Jesuit community in Cagayan de Oro City during the Japanese Occupation but was now long retired. It turned out to be a raid, the military suspecting that the pastoral training was a smokescreen for a gathering of activists. Despite the pleadings of nuns, the soldiers went about ransacking even drawers in the bedrooms looking for subversive materials in between underwear and pajamas of the poor nuns.

Brave

Back in De la Salle, opposition to martial law gained new recruits like the esteemed Math professor Salvador Roxas Gonzales who quite closely resembled his mentor, Bertrand Russell, the noted 20th century British philosopher and mathematician. We (History/Political Science majors) had organized a forum inviting the likes of Sen. Soc Rodrigo to speak on the state of the nation. Professor Gonzales would break his serious tirade against Marcos by interjecting humour saying he always carried with him in his trousers (3) items in case he gets picked up the military: a face towel, a toothbrush, and of course his ubiquitous pipe. Later, Prof. Gonzales would indeed be arrested by the Metro Discom  together with Senator Rodrigo and the editorial staff of a brave new publication–WE Forum. I cannot fail to mention my own mentor, Dr. Wilfrido Villacorta, as among the De la Salle faculty vocal against the Marcos government.

I returned to Iligan City after graduation in 1977 to teach History and Politics in the next 15 years. Early in my career, an uncle (who was city prosecutor at the time) had asked me to scale down my rhetoric against the regime, saying that his military friends informed him that I was No. 20 in the order of battle in Iligan.  I thought this was hilarious. All I had done so far was criticize Imelda Marcos and her frivolous lifestyle and I was a suspected communist already.  Thus was the state of military intelligence gathering at the time.

Student activism was very much alive in MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology where some of my students were spoken of in whispers as agents provocateurs. To the credit of brave student leaders and an enlightened school management, the Institute had one of the very first student councils—Kasama—to be organized in the country since the imposition of martial law. At least two of the student leaders from this period were reported to have been abducted by the military—“salvaged,” to use the popular term—never to be seen again.

A handful of faculty members were also vocal against martial rule but most notable was Ester Resabal Kintanar (whom we fondly called Teray) who would later serve as editor of Mindanaw, an underground protest publication. She was among the 200 passengers who perished in the Dona Cassandra drowning incident of 1983. Together with Venerando “Benny” Villacillo, the two of them who are from my hometown of Iligan are honored in the Bantayog ng mga Bayani (Wall of Remembrance), a shrine in Diliman, Quezon City, dedicated to those who suffered in their crusade for political and human rights during martial law and onwards.

I write this piece to honor the memory of the many thousands–most of whom will remain unknown and their involvement unpublicized–who chose to break the silence even at the expense of life and limb when this was most needed during a dark chapter in our nation’s history.

(Ricardo Jorge S. Caluen obtained bachelor’s degree in History-Political Science at De la Salle University, Manila. He took graduate courses in History and International Relations as scholar of Rotary Foundation. He is a  former chair of the Department of Political Science of the Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology. He now lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is a freelance writer.)