The question was: How has the loss of your loved ones affected your lives? “I lost my grandfather,” replied an eight-year old boy who put on a stoic face. “He was the one left behind in the house with us to take care of us, so nanay could work, but now he’s gone.” “They killed my uncle, who was supporting my college education,” a tall lanky teenager chimed in. “I therefore had to stop schooling.” “I lost my parents, and it’s been really hard for us… ” began a 14-year-old girl who eventually broke down before she could finish her thought.
This was the emotional start of the trauma counseling which families of EJK victims undertook last Saturday at the UGAT Foundation at the Ateneo de Manila University. This was in fact their second session. Since 2023, the Jesuits have reached out to these 50 families. At the height of Duterte’s so-called War on Drugs that felled 30 thousand Filipinos, they were given refuge and shelter by the Redemptorist priests and brothers in Baclaran. Then a group of artists who called themselves Resbak decided to help out by providing them livelihood, like training them as coffee baristas or candle-makers. We asked them what they needed to be able to rebuild their lives. They simply asked for scholarships for the children. In December last year, however, almost like an afterthought, they asked for trauma-counseling. How tragic that since 2016, or since Duterte’s bloodbath began, there was very little intervention of that kind. Although it was understandable that their priority was survival in terms of relocating themselves and earning a living, they were for a long time an emotional mess. For sure, anger, despair and rage were bottling up and festering inside them.
Imagine being awakened at the dead of the night in your shanty by masked men who unceremoniously gun down a member or members of your household. After slowly recovering from the shock, you struggle to make funeral arrangements for your loved one, conscious of how the neighbors are whispering stories behind you. Then paranoia kicks in as you notice that the same masked men are stalking your place. You need to hide for your sake and the safety of the remaining members of the family. But where do you go when you just migrated to the metropolis from your destitute life in the province. There is nowhere to go to or to run to when the government has condemned you. You realize not only that you are poor but also that you are alone. You also understand now that your life is insignificant and negligible to this world that has already judged you to be a criminal without the benefit of any civil court. You start losing your mind, until you hear the silent whisper going around for people like you: “punta kayo sa Baclaran.” Go to Baclaran.
Trauma, as psychologists explain it, is any experience of intense pain that impacts on your psyche consciously or unconsciously for the rest of your life. Until it’s faced or processed. But the trauma can be experienced again and again. The EJK families went through it again when Congress investigated on Duterte’s war on drugs and they saw how the perpetrators of the bloodbath just lied through their teeth. They went through it again when the former President was hauled to the Hague and media could only talk about this being the bitter result of the political in-fighting between Duterte and Marcos. This was especially painful. Not only did this ignore the fact that it was civil society with these EJK families that courageously and quietly filed the case at the International Criminal Court in 2017, but it also removed the spotlight or rightful focus on the real victims of the war on drugs – the victims of Duterte’s fraudulent war and the families they left behind.
And yet a few discussions in the media now talk about “Transitional Justice.” This was achieved in post-Apartheid South Africa, for instance, where a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed and investigated the repressive racist regime that killed numerous black South Africans. Significantly, the victims of governmental human rights violations were heard, their sufferings bared to the whole world. Only then could some sort of healing be experienced. The truth told was a soothing balm to the wounds of the victims.
The same seems to be what is called for now, in behalf of the victims of Duterte’s atrocities. We did try a Truth Commission in the aftermath of Marcos’ Martial Law and succeeded in even awarding compensation for the human rights victims then. But aside from the TriCom or QuadCom hearings in Congress, no sector seems to be picking up this suggestion. Everyone just wants to move on from the nightmare that we lived through during Duterte’s time. For truth be told, the victims of his so-called war were not just those who were summarily killed and the families they left behind. The mad man held hostage the whole nation. We were silent accomplices to his crime. Guilt, shame, fear, rage—these are bottling up within the national soul. Indeed, we are a nation in denial of having gone through a collective Trauma!