Abducted, Blindfolded, Tortured, Molested

Bernadette was in another room, also blindfolded. �They dragged me into a spot that felt like a cliff,� Bernadette said. “I thought it was the end for me,” she said. The soldiers threatened to tie her hands and neck with a rope. They also hit her head with a rolled piece of paper every time she denied their accusation that she was an NPA member.

“At one point, they were forcing me to admit that I had brought a hand grenade. They also wanted me to confirm that my father was a bomb-maker,” she recounted. “They would not stop. I even tried to fake falling sleep but they wouldn�t stop asking me questions. They would tap me rudely so I would wake up.�

Even when Bernadette told them she wanted to relieve herself, the men did not leave her. She groped her way in the pitch black darkness but “the men’s voices would not go away. I knew they were just around, watching me while I hunkered down by the cliff, blindfolded,� Bernadette said. �I never felt so debased in my life.�

The men also told her that Lourilie was already dead.

Still Alive

To their surprise the next day, they were still alive. Someone tried to make them eat but Lourilie threw up. They were led again to a room where they heard voices of women.

“They were pretending that they knew us because we were comrades. Then they stripped us of our clothes. They removed our undergarments while they looked on,” Lourilie said.

After 24 hours of questioning, six men, one of the men identifying himself as George Reyes of the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP), turned them over to the police.

The two women were in a state of shock when finally found by relatives and colleagues.

But two weeks after their ordeal at the military camp in Makilala, Lourilie and Bernadette went back to the same police station and had to go through the ordeal of recounting the Nov. 4 incident just to secure a police blotter, a document that they needed to file a case against the perpetrators they identified as members of the 27th and 39th IB stationed in Makilala.