Legal Papers of the Ferdinand Marcos Human Rights Litigation Case

This Corky comic appeared in the Honolulu Advertiser in 1970. It portrays a line of dictators following democracy that resembles former U.S. President Richard Nixon.  The comic suggests that the miltiary governments of these Asian nations, including the Philippines, are just the "seven experiments" of American democracy. 

This image was among the documents Jon Van Dyke used to teach about the detention centers in the Philippines.  The map shows how the centers were located in different provinces across the archipelago, in Luzon, Cebu and Mindanao.  Camp Crane, Quezon City was where the Command for Detainees (COMCAD) was located.  RECAD stands for the various Regional Command for Detainees (RECAD) that coordinate the groups of detention centers throughout different parts of the archipelago.

This was the General Order No. 1 through which former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law. This document positioned him as the “commander-in-chief of all the Armed Forces of the Philippines,” which eventually made him responsible for the human rights abuses that occurred during this administration.  

Order No. 1 explains that Martial Law was declared because of “wanton destruction of lives and property, widespread lawlessness and anarchy, chaos and disorder now prevailing throughout the country.”  But why was there chaos and disorder? The book Development Debacle by Walden Bello and David Kinley (1982) explained that the Marcos administration worked with the World Bank to implement national development projects that prioritized technocratic implementation, leaving many of the poor and working populations out of the process, and thus, from the economic benefits.  The displacement, poverty, and hunger from this development debacle led to mass civil protests, which Marcos responded to in the form of state repression.

This document quantifies the numbers of people tortured, executed, disappeared, or arrested between 1972-1986. We can see an increase in torture from 1977-1982.  

Van Dyke and his law partner and spouse, Sherry Broder, served as legal counsel on the case against the estate of former President Marcos. This is a judgement on Celsea Hilao, et al v. Estate of Ferdinand E. Marcos, decided on March 10, 2009 in the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.  It shows that the court was in favor of plaintiffs Celsea Hilao, Danilo De la Fuente, Renato Pineda, Adora DeVera, Domiciano Amparo, Rodolfo Benosa, Jose Duran, Joefina Forcadilla, Arturo Revilla and Chrisopher Soria, indvidually and in their capacity as representatives of the Class of Filipino Human Rights Victims, and against the defendant the Estate of Ferdinand E. Marcos, represented by its legal representatives, Imelda R. Marcos and Ferdinand R. Marcos.  The Estate of Ferdinand E. Marcos was required to pay the original amount of $1,964,005,859.90 plus interest to the plaintiffs for damages caused by human rights abuses.  

This document includes a procedural history of the Hilao v. Estate of Marcos where "despite substantial efforts by Class Counsel, which have been met at every turn by the active opposition of the Marcos heirs and the Republic of the Philippines, only $36.4 million has been collected on the Judgement to date" (p. 5).  

This document is a timeline of the case Revelstoke v. Hilao, which was to procure the monies from the Marcos estate to satisfy the order from the Hilao v. Estate of Ferdinand Marcos case.  Revelstoke was one of the corporations where Marcos had invested Estate funds.  As the timeline continues, we can see efforts of Revelstoke to appeal the motion.