Filipinos hold up yellow signs and flowers during a demonstration to mark the eve of the 27th anniversary of the 1986 People Power Revolution, in Quezon City, east of Manila yesterday.

 

DPA/Manila

Bonifacio Ilagan’s darkest memories of the Philippines’ military regime are not the beatings he endured during two years in prison, including the night in 1974 that his guards threatened to destroy his genitals.

More traumatic, he says, was the disappearance of his younger sister Rizalina, who was abducted by intelligence officers with nine other activists in 1977 and has not been seen since.

“I felt guilty because I influenced her to join the activist movement,” he said. Three of the group were later found dead.

“There was no trace of the seven others, including Rizalina. My father and mother died waiting for her to return.”

The 61-year-old playwright and former student leader said he has accepted that his sister is dead. But like many others of his generation, he is still looking for closure from the atrocities suffered under dictator Ferdinand Marcos and martial law during 1972-81.

Congress last month ratified a bill granting recognition and compensation to thousands of abuse victims, but Ilagan said only prosecutions would bring satisfaction.

“We have to move towards identifying and pressing charges against those who violated us,” he said. “That’s the only way we can have a full implementation of justice.”

But the likelihood of such prosecutions seems to be fading, as a commission created 27 years ago to hunt for billions allegedly embezzled by the dictator and his family recently suggested its own disbanding.

The government is studying the proposal, at a time when members of the Marcos family have returned to the political stage.

“The creation of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) sent the message, ‘here is your new government getting into action’,” Ilagan said. “To abolish it now is to send a wrong signal.”

Marie Hilao-Enriquez, head of the Organisation of Ex-Detainees Against Detention and Arrest, in its Philippine acronym, agreed.

“The Marcoses are really trying to clean their name,” she said. “If the PCGG winds down, the signal you send is that it’s okay to plunder wealth because after 27 years, people will forget about it.”

During 1965-86, the dictator and his wife allegedly diverted 800,000 troy ounces (24.9 tonnes) of gold from central bank reserves and $27mn from the Philippine National Bank for their personal use, and tapped economic aid from the US and Japanese war reparations.

The couple and their cronies are said to have enjoyed lavish parties and worldwide shopping and dining sprees while millions of Filipinos sank deeper into poverty.

The allegations are laid out in a lawsuit filed by the Philippine government with a US district court to recover $50bn from the Marcoses, who fled to Hawaii after the 1986 uprising that ousted them. The dictator died in exile three years later.

His wife Imelda, who later returned to the Philippines with her children, was acquitted of racketeering and fraud in New York. She has always maintained her husband never committed any human rights abuses or stole any money.

The Philippine government has so far recovered 164bn pesos ($4bn) in money, jewellery, art, real estate and stocks. But the task is becoming harder, PCGG chairman Andres Bautista said, with recent efforts yielding only “bits and pieces.”

“I want to level expectations,” he said. “After 26-plus years, what can we do?

“Evidence is missing, or witnesses have died, or else people are not cooperative anymore because many of the people we are running after are back in power.”

Imelda Marcos is a member of Congress, her son Ferdinand Jr is a senator and daughter Imee is a provincial governor. Many of their political allies are also congressmen or local officials.

In mid-2011, the PCGG proposed its own dismissal, in order to give Filipinos what Bautista called “a much-needed sense of closure.”

Persistent allegations of corruption also made the job difficult, he said.

“For any anti-corruption agency to be successful, it must be beyond reproach,” he said. “It has been very difficult to re-establish that credibility.

 “But we are not saying that we should stop the fight against the Marcoses or the hunt for the ill-gotten wealth,” Bautista said.

Investigation and prosecution should be transferred to the Department of Justice, he said, while the duty of overseeing recovered assets should be referred to the Department of Finance.

But for Ilagan, Enriquez and other human rights victims, closure will only come from prosecutions and justice.

“There will be no closure as long as no one is punished,” Ilagan said.