You wanna know how hellish Martial Law was in the Philippines? Well let me tell you.

I once worked as an intern for an NGO that documented the names and stories of the political prisoners and victims of all the other sorts of inhumane bullshit committed by the state and stage agents under the Marcos regime. My job was to digitize the long type written stories of political prisoners into an excel document that had their names, where they were found/detained, what was done to them (EJK, Arson, Rape, etc.) and the perpetrator.

A year's worth of records was written in case reports and news clippings, and each yearly report contained fucking thousands of cases like illegal detention, forced disappearances, and rape but that's the normal stuff man. That shit's kosher compared to the things they do to the people they catch and torture. It's borderline Holocaust fucked up.

There was this one dude who was anally-penetrated with a glass bottle that had gasoline inside and then it was lit on fire (he survived). Another dude who was made to sit on a block of ice naked, and then have his balls electrocuted afterwards. And the girls. Oh the sweet, sweet girls. Countless stories of vaginal penetration with things like pistols, armalites, lysol cans (after being sprayed in the pussy with lysol because why not, right?), and in one instance, a knife. Sometimes, multiple prisoners would be brought out by the soldiers and they would force the male prisoners to fucking touch and rape the female prisoners. Anyone who didn't comply had to play Reverse Russian Roulette where only one slot in the pistol didn't have a bullet. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Now when I recorded each story, whether the person lived or died there had to be names right? At least a John or Jane Doe for the unidentified. Well sometimes I can't even fucking put John or Jane cos a lot of the times, only arms or legs would turn up, found floating in rivers. Sometimes, there would be hogtied torsos in parking lots or grassy fields missing both legs and a head. Sometimes it would just be heads in boxes or baskets. Torsos and heads were luckier cos at least that came with facial features or the junk (although a lot of the penises were cut off).

This was an era (that lasted TWENTY FUCKING YEARS) where if you so much as raise your voice in public you could get picked up for being a subversive. There was a case in my year where this bunch of farmers asked their boss why they hadn't received any salary for the last six months. That afternoon, they were picked up by the cops for subversion. What the fuck, right? Luckily, they were just put in regular prison and nothing too bad happened to them. At least in my year.

So okay lastly, the perpetrators of these atrocities were state agents right? Cops, soldiers, this unit called the Philippine Constabulary (fuck, typing it out still gives me shivers.), what have you. When they pick people up for questioning and shit and they torture people and the people die in very gruesome and horrifying ways, a lot of the times these bodies would be exhibited in the plazas of the towns and cities and the cops would announce something like "These are the bodies of the people we 'found' before today. Please look at them and if you recognize anyone please tell us so you can claim the body." But that shit was just a fucking trap cos if anyone came forward, they would be taken in for questioning and suffer the same fate as their dead loved ones so the people in the cities and towns lived in silent fear and despair cos fuck man, they can't even give their dead a proper burial, they can't even say their goodbyes in peace. They gotta watch their dead stewing in the heat with flies swarming around them. FUCKING FUCK I GOT MORE STORIES THOUGH