Jailed by Marcos : Dissident Free; Lost Family, 7 Christmases

BICUTAN, Philippines —  The last time Reynaldo Maclang was a free man, it was Christmas Eve, 1979. Agents from President Ferdinand E. Marcos’ Military Intelligence Security Group pounded on his door, and the young dissident had to apologize to his wife and four children that he would not be with them that Christmas morning.

Nor, it turned out, for the six Christmases that followed.

Charged with rebellion, arson and, ultimately, plotting to assassinate Marcos and his wife, Maclang was sentenced to death by electrocution and held in a stark prison cell for more than six years. He had insisted during hearing after hearing that he was guilty only of detesting Marcos for having enriched himself and his friends at the expense of his people.

On Thursday, someone finally believed Rey Maclang.

Many Dissenters Imprisoned

Philippine President Corazon Aquino, just two days into her term, included the 34-year-old inmate in the first group of political prisoners to be released from Marcos’ prisons under an amnesty program that is expected to include more than 450 people, some of them teen-agers, who are locked up in Philippine prisons because they disagreed with one man.

The program itself is the first of several radical steps that Aquino and her top advisers plan in what one called “the undoing of a dictatorship.” When all the measures are in place, Aquino hopes they will help unify a nation still deeply divided.

Divisions afflict Maclang too. When he strode out of the Bagong Diwa detention camp in this military town 10 miles south of Manila on Thursday evening, his wife and children were not waiting for him at the prison gate with a hero’s welcome.

‘A Long Time to Wait’

“I don’t even know where they are any more,” Maclang said. “Six years is a long time to wait.”

Too long, according to Rene Saguisag, who was Maclang’s lawyer when the young organizer of political opposition demonstrations was on trial for his part in a movement called “Light a Fire.”

The group was formed in the late 1970s to protest Marcos’ declaration of martial law in 1972. Their protest campaign began as a boycott of businesses and products owned by Marcos’ cronies.

One-by-one, Marcos had each of them arrested. And, with each arrest, the protest escalated until, finally, the demonstrators resorted to the tactics of urban guerrillas--setting fires at the crony-owned establishments.

All along, Saguisag, who is now Aquino’s official press spokesman, believed in Maclang’s innocence. And on Thursday, Maclang became something of a symbol--the first prisoner to step out of a nationwide network of 103 military detention camps that Marcos used as his personal dumping grounds for political dissenters.

Only Spoke Out

“It’s true, I did something to protest against what I believe was an illegitimate government,” Maclang said as he packed his suitcase and slung his guitar over his shoulder in his cell Thursday. “But it wasn’t setting fires. In those days, all you had to do was speak out and you were in jail.”

The price in Maclang’s case was particularly high. His wife took the children and left him, he said. It was only through the Bible that he found the strength to endure his six years in Marcos’ prison.

“That was the raw heartlessness of the regime,” said Saguisag after a full day of meetings on the political prisoners issue. “It ripped families apart, and these were the small, private tragedies of the Marcos regime.”

But just after sunrise Wednesday, a new government had come to power after a three-day revolution built on a military revolt and people like Rey Maclang. On Thursday, it freed him and tried to cast him as an example of a new order of freedom in the Philippines.

‘Must Bind Wounds’

“Never have I been prouder to be a Filipino, “ declared Manila’s archbishop, Cardinal Jaime Sin, at a 6:30 a.m. Mass for the political detainees at Camp Crame, the Manila military camp that had served as rebel headquarters. “We must bind the nation’s wounds.”

Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, the rebel leader who had once implemented Marcos’ detention orders, declared at the Mass that the prisoner release was “in line with the government policy of national reconciliation.”

And, across the street at Camp Aguinaldo, the headquarters of the other rebel leader, Juan Ponce Enrile, now Aquino’s defense minister, said he, too, was signing pardons for people that he had been instrumental in jailing less than a decade ago.

Enrile had been Marcos’ martial law administrator between 1972 and 1981, and part of his job then was tracking down protest leaders like Maclang.

Act of Contrition

As much as anything, it was contrition for work like that, Enrile said Saturday, that had made him declare open revolt on Marcos, an act that ultimately forced Marcos to flee the Philippines for the United States on Tuesday night.

It was Enrile’s signature on Maclang’s pardon Thursday morning.

“I believe in my heart that Minister Enrile has undergone a major conversion,” Maclang said as he was leaving Bagong Diwa camp. “I want to believe he is a modernday Saint Paul.”

But then, Maclang was asked whether Marcos himself ever underwent such a conversion.

“At the moment, I just cannot think of anything good to say about Marcos,” Maclang replied.

He paused for a moment. “There is one thing,” he added. “The only thing Marcos has done is make a lot of heroes.”