MASINLOC, Zambales—On May 30, 1981, a native son of this town left home to become one of the first Filipinos to be granted political asylum by the government of Canada. It was a tough decision to make for Bernard-Adan Ebuen, then 34 years old. He had to leave his wife and two children, abandon his calling in organizing poor miners and fishermen, and fly away with little money to an unfamiliar place where he knew not a soul. But it was a choice he had to make. The Philippines was then under the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law regime, and he felt the noose closing in.
“For almost eight years in the underground movement, I prepared myself for this eventuality. I found it harrowing,” related Ebuen in an essay he posted on social media on the eve of the anniversary of the declaration of martial law on September 21.
Bernard-Adan Ebuen visits his old
detention cell at Camp Conrado Yap, where he was first held after his arrest in 1980.
Ebuen wanted to be a priest, graduated with a degree in philosophy from the Major Seminary in Vigan, Ilocos Sur, and taught philosophy and theology at the Ateneo de Zamboanga from 1970 to 1971. But after a stint at Delta Motor Sales Corporation—then a progressive automotive manufacturer and dealer until its owners fell out of favor with the powers-that-be and operations stopped in 1983, Ebuen went home to Masinloc for a different work.
“With some friends, I helped organize the workers of Benguet Consolidated Mining Company at Coto,” he now recalled. “We established initial contacts and formed a core group to formally establish a legal union which later on became affiliated with a national labor group in Manila.”
Sitio Coto was famous for its lucrative export of refractory chromite, which is used in making projectiles, guns, ball-bearings, safes, as well as armor-plate for warships. The mine is located at the rugged foothills of Taltal, the village where Ebuen was born. And while it was then operated by one of the oldest and biggest mining and mineral extraction firms in the country, miners grumbled about low wages and poor work conditions.
the Human Rights Victims’ Claims Board; HRVCB resolution awarding four points for Arbitrary Detention.
Dangerous times
THE formation of a miners’ union at Coto was soon followed by more organizing work. By 1978, Ebuen became involved with local fishermen and formed the Samatob, or Samahan ng mga Mangingisda ng Atob, also in Masinloc.
Atob is a sitio of Baloganon, a coastal village with a port where chromite ores from Coto were loaded onto ships. It is also where some of the poorest fishermen in town lived and eked meager living from the sea. Ebuen organized the fisherfolk and helped to give them a voice in the community. “It was the first fishermen’s union in Zambales, I believe,” Ebuen said.
It was a good opportunity for Ebuen and his fellow community organizers to change the lives of the poorer sectors of the society, a fruitful period that was also fraught with danger. At this time, elections were held for the Batasang Pambansa, and the opposition, led by jailed former Senator Benigno Aquino Jr., gave a credible fight that, while they lost, gave the strong impression that the poll was rigged.
In 1980, Marcos allowed Aquino’s exile in the United States, and the next year, ostensibly announced the suspension of martial law. But as his winning another new six-year term in a virtually uncontested election soon showed, Marcos was, in fact, trying to consolidate his grip on power. It was at this time that Ebuen heard that dreaded knock in the night.
Horrors
“ONE early morning in July 1980, I woke up to find soldiers had encircled our house. My knees almost buckled and my stomach churned. I tried to be calm,” Ebuen remembered. Three nights before, five heavily armed men furiously knocked on the door at 2 in the morning. “As per my previous instructions to my family, nobody opened the door. I knew they were coming to get me that night, and I was soundly asleep six houses away.” But upon their return that morning, the soldiers did get Ebuen.
He was brought to a military camp in the capital town of Iba 36 kilometers away. “Through the day and night, Army trucks full of people kept rolling in. The next day, there were about 400 people in the camp: men, women, teenagers, students, farmers and fishermen,” Ebuen said.
He also recalled that at one point, soldiers brought two mine workers out of the camp into an isolated barrio, and tortured them. “Presumed dead, the two were thrown over a bridge into a murky river. One drowned; the other regained consciousness under water, clung to a post and stayed still, and survived to tell the brutal tale.” That survivor would later receive compensation from the Victims of Human Rights Compensation Board, Ebuen added.
At the camp, more tension and anxiety beleaguered the detainees, more so when informers were planted into their ranks, Ebuen said. Soon, the spies rooted out from the detainees the source of a written complaint against military abuses and atrocities signed by concerned citizens. “I stood up in front of the crowd and defended the just position we had taken,” Ebuen recalled. “I knew the risk. Sure enough, at dawn, I was whisked to a waiting car and brought to Camp Olivas in Pampanga.”
Nightmare in solitary
AT Camp Olivas, Ebuen was locked in maximum solitary, a cell he said was reserved for the most wanted and dangerous. And the following weeks incommunicado almost drove him crazy. “Even the guards who brought me measly meals never showed their faces. I came to realize this was a part of the mental torture to break down a prisoner,” he narrated. “To fight the tedium, I talked to the spiders on the wall, and swatted the mosquitoes that dared to enter my cell. I took showers no less than six times a day.”
Then one night, more nightmare as a guard brought him into another room. Two officers were waiting and interrogated Ebuen on who’s who in the underground movement. “I professed to know nobody,” he recalled. “Frustrated and angry, one of them shoved to my face a gruesome photograph: a man with eyes half-closed, naked to the waist, with three blackened holes on his chest, a dark spot on the forehead between his eyes…and a whitish glob of brains behind his head.”
Ebuen said he knew it was “Ka Nelson,” an acquaintance of his in the movement. “My knees shook. I retched nauseously, and I was about to pass out. Tears were filling my eyes from anger and fear. But I brought myself back,” he said. He reminded himself that the people’s struggle depended on his endurance. He told the interrogators: “No, I have never seen him; not even once in my life.”
The next day, Ebuen was visited in his cell by a high-ranking officer who told him: “Look, you’re highly intelligent with lots of potential. Why don’t you channel your energy with us? We’ll send you to any university of your choice, with a handsome monthly stipend and a .45 pistol for your protection. No one among your comrades will know. We can arrange that.”
Ebuen said this made him angrier and he couldn’t contain himself. “Sir,” he snapped back, “you’re insulting my intelligence and sense of values. I’d rather plow the rice fields under the heat of the noonday sun than work for you.” The officer left flabbergasted.
Freedom someplace
IN October of 1980, Ebuen was temporarily released but needed to report once a week at a military safehouse in the Edsa-Kamias area. At this time, some friends from his previous Delta Motors job secretly worked on his travel documents. Soon, the Canadian Embassy issued him a three-day visa. On May 30, 1981, Ebuen landed in Toronto, a place he knew nothing about.
The next two and a half years were spent on hearings before the Refugee Status Advisory Committee (RSAC) in Ottawa, which heard his appeal to be granted refugee status in Canada. While his case was pending, Ebuen was given a temporary work permit and he took on odd jobs to support himself—dishwasher, factory worker, garage attendant, or bellhop in a downtown Toronto hotel.
Finally, in March 1984, he found his redemption when the RSAC declared his claim to refugee status legitimate. Bernard-Adan Edejer Ebuen, then 37, officially became a refugee in Canada in what The Mail and Globe, Canada’s most widely read newspaper, described as “one of the first such cases viewed as an indictment of the Government of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos.”
Ebuen’s case, The Mail and Globe also said, was “among only six favorably acted upon by the federal committee since 1982, when one application was rejected.”
“Mr. Ebuen is the first to come out in the open as a refugee from the Philippines in more than 50 years of Filipino immigration to Canada,” the newspaper added. “His case has had an unsettling effect on Filipino Government representatives in Canada because it is viewed as a reflection of conditions in the Philippines.”
Home again
IN 2010, Ebuen finally returned to Zambales for good with a dual Canadian-Philippine citizenship. But before that, he used to visit his mother Nanay Diday every five years at their ancestral house.
In the interim, he had sponsored the resettlement of his two children with his estranged wife to Canada, where the two boys have since married and had their own children. Two other boys were born to Ebuen and his partner in Canada, from whom he eventually separated.
He also tried taking up some English courses in Toronto at George Brown College, where he submitted an essay on his martial law experience in 1985, and later at the Ryerson University, but going back to school was “nothing remarkable,” he found out, as he had to devote his time to a full-time job for the sake of his new family.
On May 22, 2014, Ebuen filed a claim before the Philippines’ Human Rights Victims’ Claims Board, which finally resolved on October 14, 2016, that he is a human rights violations victim under RA 10368, or the Act Providing for Reparation and Recognition of Victims of Human Rights Violations During the Marcos Regime.
Today, Ebuen lives in single-blessedness and apparent contentment at Barangay Taltal, not too far from where he used to organize mine workers and later, fisherfolk.
“This is what preoccupies me nowadays,” he told the BusinessMirror, showing a mini-library filled with non-fiction, biographies, Filipinianas, tomes on spirituality, and books “of different interests, mainly Left issues.”
The former activist said he leads a simple life. “Often, I go to the market to have some fresh fish—no meat, as I had a radical nephrectomy last year in Canada, so I should watch my diet,” he said.
Isms and the subversive
STILL, Ebuen rued about immense poverty and the prevalence of corruption in the government today. “I will never exchange the Philippines for another country as this is my ‘bayang sinilangan,’ but the feeling here is like living in hell.”
He added: “After living and carefully observing the governance system of both the Philippines and Canada, I eventually came to the conclusion that the root cause of our social problems is not the ‘Imperyalismo, Pyudalismo, Kapitalismo, Ibagsak!’ that I used to shout in the streets of Manila in the ’70s. It is the government itself.”
Ebuen said too that he “gradually became disillusioned with the Reds” and came to realize that not one single person, nor party, nor ism can provide a simple answer to the problems of humanity. “We have to adapt to the constant flux and make meaningful adaptations and not be captives of a single ism.”
And what about today’s historical revisionism among the masa that appears to drive the Marcoses to seek power again? To this, Ebuen cringed and said: “For the life of me, I cannot understand the world of Marcos loyalists and the DDS.”
With the horrors of Martial Law still vivid in memory, and with the remnants of those dark days reemerging from the shadows, Ebuen reminded everyone not to forget.
“Ferdinand Marcos is the true subversive,” he stressed, “not the activists who committed themselves to the liberation of the people from poverty and injustice—even when such commitment inevitably meant either imprisonment or death.”
Image courtesy of Nonie Reyes
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