“He was supposed to go to a farmers meeting and then no more word,” his wife related.

It was the last months of the Marcos years and our family resorted to seek the help of our late father’s long-time, writer friends in Malacañang. The late short story writer Juan Tuvera, then executive secretary of deposed President Ferdinand Marcos, helped us secure from then Defense secretary Juan Ponce Enrile a letter of authorization to comb the camps in Mindanao.

My elder sister went to Davao, visiting camps and later, even morgues, to look for Marcel. To this day, she cannot recount the experience without her voice breaking, her face near tears. Marcel was not in any of the camps. Nor was he in the morgue.

Months after the EDSA 1 People Power Revolution, I opted to work full-time at the Families of the Involuntarily Disappeared (FIND), an NGO for desaparecidos. We went to protest rally after protest rally for the missing. But we never discussed the steps we would take to locate any of the missing. It does not surprise me now that they never found any of the disappeared.

During the 1987 peace talks, I took the opportunity to talk to Left leaders to ask about Marcel. They all promised to help and asked me to submit a narrative of the events leading to his disappearance. This, I promptly did, right there and then. But afterwards, I could no longer find any of them, even those who were not from the underground movement.

For five years, the Left made us believe that the Marcos military took Marcel. Until 1990, when a college friend, who had just left Utrecht, told me the true story.

It was June 12, 1990, Independence Day, and we were sitting at a canteen inside Isetan Cubao.

“Your brother was killed at Kampanyang Ahos, the communist purge in Mindanao,” my friend said.

I could not believe my ears.

“Why weren’t we told?”

“They said, it was your brother’s last request.”

“What?”

“They said Marcel admitted he was a deep penetration agent. But he recanted it when they were about to… That was when… according to those who knew about it… that was when your brother requested that his family not be told of what the movement did to him.”

“Was he tortured?”

My friend nodded.

I don’t know if I cried. All I remember is that the florescent lights in the canteen suddenly seemed so bright. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear what other things my friend was saying. I had difficulty breathing.

It took another three years to piece together what happened to my brother Marcel. Unfortunately, the facts we now have are still not enough to locate him.

The time I was asking people about my brother, the prevailing view in the Left was that he was a deep penetration agent because the movement upheld the rightness of Kampanyang Ahos. It was only after the ideological split in the movement that they “rectified” their error and cleared Marcel. At least, that was what I was told.

The movement, to this day, NEVER told us the details of Marcel’s disappearance. They admitted, through channels, that they took him but they never told us where we can find his body.

No human rights group identified with the movement has ever approached us to offer help in finding Marcel.

To this day, I want to find my brother. I have been looking for him for 25 years. I know some of you who are in the movement or sympathize with the movement, may take this narrative negatively. I only wish you will find it in your heart to understand my need to find him.

I ask forgiveness from my loved ones, my family and kin, most especially, Marcel’s sons and his wife, for ventilating my grief.

I am old and I do not want to die without letting you, his sons, know just how special, how selfless, how good a man your father Marcel was, and how much he loved you and your mother.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARCEL![/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Last Updated on October 12, 2016 by Tudla_Admin