In CHR Hearing, Melissa Roxas Reiterates Abduction, Torture Charges Vs Military

But one of the interrogators told her: “You have no rights here. Nobody knows you are here.”

One of the interrogators referred to as “sir” by the others threatened her, Roxas said. “He told me that if I didn’t cooperate, I would be transferred. He didn’t say where,” she said. “He told me they were not that nice. He was precise with his questions.”

She refused to sign papers stating that she is a member of the communist party, which has been waging a four-decade old Maoist revolution in the Philippines.

Roxas recalled seeing a man wearing fatigue uniforms when she peeked through her blindfold. “I heard men talking about how they interrogate people. They were laughing so loud,” Roxas said.

Barrios, when asked for comment by reporters during a break in the hearing, said that “anybody can wear a fatigue.” He also said that in the military, subordinates cannot laugh in front of their superiors.

Roxas asked Rose about the ongoing construction. Rose said they were trying to make the walls higher in the camp. Later on, Roxas said, Rose said it was actually a poultry house.

Torture

Roxas said she was strangled, hit on the chest during the interrogation and her ears slapped repeatedly. “Are you ready to die?” one of the torturers asked her.

Her head was banged against the wall. Two plastic bags were put over her head until she was choking. “I’m gonna die. I couldn’t breathe anymore,” Melissa recalled.

Asked by de Lima if she was sexually molested, Roxas did not answer categorically. She paused for a while and said that the male interrogators told Rose that “we want to give her a bath.” “I told Rose not to let them,” Roxas said.

Roxas said she was then given a drink, like a soda, but it tasted different. Then she dozed off. She did not know what happened to her next.

On the night before she was released, Roxas said RC, one of the interrogators, warned her against telling anyone about the incident.

In the early morning of May 25, they left the place. She was brought to Quezon City where her relatives reside.

Her abductors left with her the handcuffs that they had used on her, two books — the Bible and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera” — and a mobile phone. These items were later shown by Roxas’s legal counsel, Rex Fernandez, to the CHR officials.

“Do you know why you were released?” Roxas was asked by one of the commissioners. Roxas said she did not know. She was told by her abductors that they would be watching her.

Roxas came back to the Philippines on July 20 to testify at the CHR hearing and before the Court of Appeals later this month for her petition for writ of amparo, in which she asked the protection of the court against possible threats to her life.

She had gone back to the United States, where she had immigrated when she was only nine years old, after her release. Her lawyers there said they would file a case against the Philippine government before a US federal court. If this case prospers, it could open the lid on what many human-rights groups in the Philippines say is a deadly counter-insurgency policy that targets civilian activists who are not part of the armed struggled being waged by the communists.

According to human-rights groups, more than a thousand Filipinos, mostly leftist activists, have been victims of extrajudicial killings that are part of this policy called Oplan Bantay Laya (Operation Plan Freedom Watch) that does not distinguish an open and legal activist from an armed revolutionary.

Aside from the killings, hundreds more have disappeared without a trace while others – like Roxas — were kidnapped and tortured. A key component of this policy is the filing of what human-rights groups say are trumped-up charges against activists.

International human-rights groups, as well as the United Nations Human Rights Council, have blamed these killings and atrocities on the Philippine military, which continues to deny the charge. In the case of Roxas, the military insists that her charges are fabricated and that her abduction and torture had been “staged-managed” in order to discredit the Arroyo regime. (Bulatlat.com)