Danilo dela Fuente, a 73-year-old community organizer in an urban poor community in the Philippine capital Manila, will not be retiring any time soon.
First, because Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., has been elected as the country’s next president, and second, “because disinformation must be fought with truth-telling.”
Days after the May 9 elections, Dela Fuente visited his friends in the coastal village of Dagat-dagatan in the outskirts of the city of Caloocan City in the capital.
Since 2016, the elderly organizer has been walking in the narrow alleys, has been knocking on doors, and has been campaigning against the return of the Marcoses in power.
“I have pledged my remaining days to battle any attempt to erase the abuses of martial law under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.,” said Dela Fuente. “This is all about justice,” he said.
He was a labor organizer in 1982 when the police arrested and detained him for allegedly violating the Anti-Subversion Law.
“They brought me to Camp Crame (a police camp). There, they started to torture me …. They held my head and rammed it against the wall. When I doubled over in pain, they would punch me again,” he said.
Dela Fuente was imprisoned, without the benefit of a trial, for four years. After the fall of the dictatorship in 1986, he was released with the other political prisoners under the government’s general amnesty program.
