City councilor gets compensation as human rights victim

FORMER student activist and currently human rights advocate and lawyer Bacolod City Councilor Archie Baribar said he already received his partial compensation as one of the human rights victims of former President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Last March 14, 2011, he said he received a check from Robert Swift, lawyer of the claimants against Marcos, amounting to P43,000, which is the equivalent of the US$1,000 settlement for each victim.

According to Baribar, they were told that this settlement came from one of the former President’s cronies who admitted he was fronting for the former dictator.

There were 7,000 human rights victims all over the country who received these financial claims, he said. There were 500 human rights victims in Negros Occidental, he added.

He recalled that he was a third year psychology student at Ateneo de Manila University in 1977 when he was illegally arrested and detained at Camp Aguinaldo in Bicutan and at Camp Crame.

He was a student activist and was caught in possession of subversive materials against the Marcos administration.

During that time, the former President was very powerful that “our lives were planned on short-live basis. We never thought of going beyond our thirty’s because of the massive human rights violations instigated by the former dictator,” Baribar narrated.

“I was only freed when the school administration and our former Student Council President Jerry Treñas insisted that I was innocent of the accusation. I was a student scholar at the height of the Marcos dictatorship,” he said.

The release of the financial claims only reinforced our claims that Marcos really got something from the Filipino people, said Baribar.

Former President Marcos did not admit he has hidden wealth. It was also very difficult and even life-threatening to accuse a dictator but the oppositonists to his rule did, pointed out Baribar.

The cruelties of Marcos eventually came to an end, stated Baribar.

Until now the remains of the former President are still waiting for the final decision of Congress whether he will be allowed to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

“If we change the definition of heroes into somebody who caused this mess and plundered the nation, then he can be allowed to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani,” Baribar declared.

“I don’t think it is proper for him to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Heroism bespeaks of nobility. Heroism has an element of self sacrifice. We can only bury him at the Libingan ng mga Bayani if we will redefine the meaning of heroism,” Baribar said.


(2011-3-30/sunstar)