I’ll never forget

There is a corner of the Philippine government’s official internet real estate (https://www.gov.ph/) that lists the names of known victims of the Martial Law 1972-1986 era – https://hrvvmemcom.gov.ph/list-of-victims-recognized-motu-proprio/.

The list supposedly has 11,103 known names organized by the number of points committed to a victim – 10 points being the worst. Unfortunately, the published names are only for 10 points to 6 points. The pages that should have contained the names for 5 points and below only show a default work in progress page. With how things stand back home, I worry that the list won’t be completely updated and/or the website will be scrapped altogether.

So I got it saved on the Internet Archive’s excellent Wayback Machine – https://web.archive.org/web/20220807024031/https://hrvvmemcom.gov.ph/list-of-victims-recognized-motu-proprio/

There’s a name on this list that makes this very personal. It’s important for me that people never forget that a lot of bad things happened during Martial Law, that a lot of families were affected (and are still affected) and that it’s not historical fiction.

This opinion piece by Ian Casocot – https://www.rappler.com/voices/thought-leaders/opinion-raping-sugarland/ – hit home so hard I remembered the stories my grandmother rarely spoke about when we were kids.

I’ll never forget those, nanay.