Issue 17 — Fallen in the Night
Rizalina Ilagan was disappeared in the first months of the wet season, five years deep into martial law, on the same day that the Philippines’s First Lady and governor of Metro Manila praised the police for “the good work done.” In 1977, in the center of Makati, where the rain steeps the city in sheets and floods, she and nine others vanished, abducted one after the next under the military dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos. The Southern Tagalog 10, as they are collectively known, were students, artists, professors, and dissidents—each one organizing through education and art against authoritarianism. Rizalina had been involved with the theater troupe Panday Sining. On picket lines and basketball courts, outside churches and by flooded rice paddies, the group would perform plays drawn from the lives of those working in the factories and the fields, conceiving of themselves as activists and their art as protest.
When martial law was declared in 1972, Rizalina was driven underground, where she joined the revolutionary newsletter Kalatas. As the years stretched on, one atrocity into the next, a trickle of her companions began to disappear, and Rizalina suspected the remaining group was being watched. A new safe house was needed. In 1977, she wrote to her brother, Bonifacio Ilagan, an activist and cofounder of Panday Sining, and asked to meet. While Rizalina had been underground, Bonifacio had been a political prisoner, and once released, he remained under state surveillance. For her sake, he worried about their meeting, yet he missed his younger sister, his Rizalina, his sibling whose life was mirroring his own. Bonifacio promised to prepare a house.
“We set another date,” he says to me in Manila some 47 years after Rizalina’s disappearance.
“She did not come.”
I meet Bonifacio in early November 2023 under the shade of a lofty bodhi tree, the same sacred fig under which the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment. It is the morning of All Souls Day, and Filipinos across the country are visiting family and paying their respects to the dead. Bonifacio, now a celebrated playwright, has joined dozens at Quezon City’s Bantayog ng mga Bayani, or monument to the heroes, for a gathering in memory of the desaparecidos. For the families of the disappeared, there is no grave to clean, no place for candles or flowers, no physical monument to a life extinguished.
All that is left is to remember.
One by one, beneath a canopy of heart-shaped leaves, friends, daughters, mothers, and brothers speak, pray, and plead. Some, like Bonifacio, who reads an open letter to the Philippines, have been doing so for most of their lives. Others, with fresh wounds, pause to wipe away tears as they describe loved ones abducted just months or weeks earlier under the new Marcos government.
In 2022, to the disbelief of martial law survivors, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., son of the first Marcos, was elected president. While his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, preferred to stain the streets in blood through his so-called war on drugs, Bongbong performs diplomacy, harnessing misinformation to rewrite his family’s history and disappearing dissenters under a Duterte-era anti-terrorism law that empowers him to militarize the country without the need for martial law. Over the past four years, in a practice called red-tagging, activists, Indigenous peoples, union leaders, peasants, artists, and teachers have been publicly branded as terrorists, allowing the state to justify violence against its critics. History, as it does, has encircled itself. One tyrant becomes the next. A son becomes his father.
Read the complete story at Alta Journal
The excerpt above and accompanying photos are from a recent story I wrote about enforced disappearance, art, history, and remembering. In early November 2023, I attended the memorial event mentioned in the story on my last day of reporting in the Philippines. I was there to investigate state-violence against environmental defenders and several of those recently disappeared and resurfaced would be present. When the memorial came to a close, I hung around waiting for the TV news organizations to get their b-roll and leave so I could have some unencumbered time with those I was seeking to interview.
(As an aside, hanging around is my ususal tactic as I got to spend the remainder of the afternoon there until I needed to grab my bags and sit in Manila's traffic for two hours. A lot of reporting is hanging around but some of the best is hanging around long after everyone else leaves).
While I was waiting for the cameras to move on, a woman called Evangeline approached me and asked for my thoughts on Palestine. I had left for the Philippines in the wake of October 7th and while I was reporting in mostly rural areas, speaking with people who had been targeted by the military and police, whose families had been disappeared, whose neighbors homes had been bombed by the state, the ongoing genocide was heavy on my mind. I had no doubt Evangeline felt the same way. In fact, it had become almost an ethical litmus test among the people I was speaking with who knew all too well what it is to live under state violence carried out in the name of anti-terrorism.
It was Evangeline who introduced me to a few people including Bonifacio Ilagan, the main person in this story. While I wasn't sure where the interview would fit into my current investigation, I felt it was important to speak with him as things do not happen in a vacuum. The repression — killings, disappearances, and bombings — we are seeing in the Philippines today is not unprecedented. Since martial law was declared in 1972, each Philippine President has leveraged the violence of the police and military to crush dissent, silence activists — peasants, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, artists, unionists — and deem anyone who disagrees a terrorist.
Survivors, like Bonifacio, bear the scars — physical and psychological — of history. It was my great privilege to be able to listen to his experiences and document just a small part of his struggle for justice. As he said to me, “the best way to remember those who have fallen in the night is to continue the causes that emboldened them to forgo personal welfare and personal interest. No amount of state terrorism will be able to stop the movement.”
Thank you for reading this issue of Defender.
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Rage On. ❤️🔥