The Other Story of Luisito Bustamante

Luisito Bustamante told a Davao City court this week that he was not abducted, that he was not tortured, and that he, in fact, surrendered to the military because, according to him, he was a communist guerrilla. But an hour after the court ordered him freed, Luisito showed friends and relatives torture marks on his body — and started telling an altogether different story.

By Germelina Lacorte
Davao Today

DAVAO CITY — Luisito Bustamante, the youth earlier reported missing after militiamen held him in a checkpoint in Davao City last month, had two stories to tell.

The first one he told the court in a writ of amparo hearing that freed him from his captors. The other he told friends and family after the court set him free.

Luisito, 22, admitted during the hearing that he was a member of the communist New People’s Army (NPA). He told the court that not even his fingertips was touched when he was in captivity.

But an hour after the hearing, Luisito told a different story.

He showed his mother and friends the cigarette burn marks on his neck and back, and the scars on his ankles that had been, days before, tied with wires. He also told them how, for several days after he was held for questioning on Oct. 27, he was blindfolded, repeatedly beaten. He said he did not know where he was. In one of those beatings, he said, he defecated in his pants and was made to eat his own feces.

“I heard someone say, ‘Wash him, he stinks’,” Luisito recounted in Cebuano. “They washed me.”

“After that, I heard someone say, ‘Open your mouth!’”

“So I opened my mouth. They put it inside my mouth. I wanted to spit it out but they threatened to beat me again.”

“Swallow!” one of them shouted.

“Did you swallow it?” one of his neighbors asked.

A grimacing Luisito nodded. Silence momentarily seized those who surrounded him.

“Never mind, dong,” a neighbor, Ederlita Lorenzana, comforted him. “Just think: it was your dirt and not someone else’s.”