Asylum Network

Stories of Survival

Isabella Sombillo

Philippines

Like many university students in the United States, Isabella Sombillo was an idealist and political activist. She viewed her educational experience as an opportunity to organize fellow students to work for social justice and to protest unfair university and governmental policies. But she was studying agricultural science at the University of the Philippines during the corrupt and brutal dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

She never completed her studies. In 1979, the Dean of Student Affairs twice called her to his office to answer questions about her participation in student boycotts and government protests. The second time, she was met by four military police officers, who demanded the names of the leaders of the protests. They threatened her with arrest if she continued her political activities.

Terrified, but determined not to surrender to tyranny, Isabella fled from the university and went underground. “As a human rights activist and grass-roots organizer in the underground anti-Marcos movement, I traveled to various rural areas to educate the people about the rampant corruption in the Filipino government, the human rights abuses being perpetrated on innocent people by the Filipino military,” she said. “I encouraged the Filipino people to stand up for their rights.”

Isabella married another political activist and had two sons, who were cared for by her mother-in-law while she and her husband worked underground. On a trip to visit her young children in 1983, four military policemen in plain clothes abducted Isabella at a bus station. Holding a hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming for help, they handcuffed her and violently threw her into a nearby van, striking her head against an interior wall. Injured and disoriented, Isabella was just beginning an ordeal that would last fifteen years.

Inside the van, an officer covered her head with a jacket. Another held her handcuffed hands while yet another covered her nose and mouth with his hand, forcing her to fight for every breath. As the van drove through the night, the officers kept threatening: cooperate “or else.”

She spent her first two days and nights of captivity in a military “safe house”—a remote building “safe” from public scrutiny—where she was tormented with verbal abuse and threats of harm if she did not cooperate by betraying her colleagues. When she refused to answer their questions, her interrogators left her alone with two guards, who stripped her naked and sexually abused her. Terrified and under constant watch of her tormentors, she was unable to sleep. Not trusting the food, she did not eat. On the third day, she was handcuffed and shoved into a van with 10 military police dressed in civilian clothing. She asked, “Where are we going?” “Someplace,” one of them answered. For several hours, the van drove on while Isabella trembled, afraid they were taken her to be executed and buried.

'We Have Your Children'

They took her instead to a military camp, where the more systematic interrogation began. For two weeks, agents from various military and intelligence agencies demanded the names and locations of her colleagues, questioning her day and night, denying her any chance to sleep. She could not escape the sounds of terror that echoed in her prison cell. Throughout the day, she heard screams of prisoners being interrogated. Both day and night, she was forced to listen to a song played over and over, the refrain of which asks, “Why don't you try a little suicide?”

During relentless grilling, an interrogator often took out a pistol and placed it on the table. Then, to emphasize his point, cocked the hammer and demanded answers. Although terrified she would be shot, she continued to refuse them the names of fellow activists or any other information they sought. Finally, they played their trump card: “We have your two children,” they told her. “We will kill them if you do not tell us what we want to know.”

She agreed to answer all the questions on a four-page list that they handed her. She answered each question as evasively as possible, however, giving them none of the information they sought. Eventually, the relentless and intensifying interrogation, severe sleep deprivation and lack of food took its toll. After two weeks in severe psychological and physical stress, Isabella suffered a breakdown. The left side of her body convulsed in spasms and became paralyzed. She collapsed. The police carried her back to her cell and called a doctor, who injected her with a sedative. When she awoke the paralysis was gone. Isabella spent the following month in solitary confinement.

No Right to a Trial

She emerged to find that the military police had charged her with conspiracy to commit subversion and rebellion and—to her astonishment—nine counts of murder. She is able to laugh about it now: “I was one of nine political prisoners and there were 81 military men who had been killed in various operations, so they divided 81 by nine and charged me with nine,” she said. Isabella was never tried for murder. Nor was she tried for conspiracy to commit subversion or rebellion. There was no need. Under Marcos' dictatorship, anyone charged with subversion or rebellion could be held in prison indefinitely without any evidence until Marcos ordered his or her release. They locked her up and threw away the key.

“When they put me inside the cell, when they closed the door of the cell, I felt heaven and earth close down on me and I can't do anything,” she said. “I want to cry but I can't.” During the three interminable years she spent in military prison Isabella endured still more physical and psychological torture, including a severe beating with a police baton in punishment for another political prisoner’s escape.

Finally, in 1986, the successful “People Power Movement” ousted Marcos from the presidency and swept Corazon Aquino into office. A week after the dictator and his family went into exile in the United States, Aquino issued an order freeing all political prisoners. On March 4, 1986, Isabella went home to her children.

Resuming the Struggle

Over the next decade, she continued to work for political reform and human rights. She worked on behalf of the 10,000 men and women who had survived imprisonment, torture, rape, and the loss of family members to state-sanctioned murder under the Marcos regime. She helped bring a successful lawsuit against Marcos and his wife Imelda in U.S. court and ran an assistance program for former political prisoners. She and her husband had two more children. But Isabella feared that, despite Marcos’ exile, the military would remain an ominous force against political reform. Indeed, the kidnappings, imprisonments, torture, and summary executions continued. Human rights advocates, like Isabella, were as vulnerable as ever to the close scrutiny of the military.

In 1995, alerted by a human rights worker that she had been targeted by agents of the National Intelligence Security Agency (NISA), Isabella fled to the United States. Twice during the next two years she returned to the Philippines, to her human rights work, and to her children—and twice, haunted by memories of detention and torture, she was driven back into exile in the U.S. by threats of arrest.

Political Tides Turn

Meanwhile, following Ferdinand Marcos’ death in exile in 1989, his family’s fortunes steadily improved. His widow Imelda and their grown children returned to the Philippines in 1992 and, despite a conviction on corruption charges, Imelda was soon after elected to congress. Her three children also won political office and, in 1998, Joseph Estrada, a popular movie star and a Marcos friend, was elected President. That same year, the Supreme Court of the Philippines overturned Imelda Marcos' conviction.

It was clear to Isabella that the tides had turned in the Philippines once again and that she could no longer return safely to her home. “It would just be a matter of time before I would either disappear or be placed under arrest again in the Philippines,” she told the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). “I can no longer endure the mental and emotional anguish of the possibility of further torture and imprisonment. I believe I can continue to help my people here in the United States, by continuing to work for the human rights of all people and by bringing the international community's attention to the continued corruption and human rights abuses which exist in the Philippines.”

Isabella applied for asylum in the U.S. and requested help from the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network. Network member Dr. Frances Geteles, a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the City College of New York documented the psychological evidence of the torture and abuse she had endured. “When you do a psychological evaluation like this,” Dr. Geteles explained, “what you are doing is providing evidence of the scars—but they're not physical scars, they're the psychological scars.” The INS granted Isabella asylum in October 1998.

Since then, life has improved. In June 2000, she resumed her commitment to social justice, working as an organizer for New York's Health and Human Services Union. With more than 220,000 workers, it is the largest union of healthcare employees in New York State. She is organizing home health care workers, who, without benefit of a contract, receive only about $7.00 an hour – the rough equivalent of a teenage baby sitter’s fee in Manhattan, she said.

Above all, having obtained asylum and a good job, she was able to bring her children to the United States. It's going to take a long time for many of her psychological wounds to heal, Dr. Geteles says. It's also going to take time for her family to feel whole and secure. But for the first time in her life, Isabella Sombillo is able to help others fight for social and economic justice, in safety, and with her children by her side.

© Physicians for Human Rights