The Philippines - Past and Present (Vol. 1&2) - Dean C. Worcester

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be a fact. The victim sacrificed that melancholy night, still remembered with a shudder by the priests, was Lieutenant Salvador Piera. This brave soldier, who had made up his mind to die in the breach rather than surrender the town of Aparri, was persuaded to capitulate only by the prayers and tears of certain Spanish ladies who had been instructed to do so by a man who should have been the first one to shoulder a rifle. After having been harassed in Aparri he was taken to Tuguegarao at the request of Esteban Quinta or Isidoro Maquigat, two artful filibusters thirsting to revenge themselves on the Lieutenant, who during the time of the Spanish government had justly laid his heavy hand upon them. In the latter part of September they conducted him on foot and without any consideration whatever to the capital of Isabela. In this town he was at once placed in solitary confinement in one of the rooms of the convento and allowed no intercourse with any one. The sin for which they recriminated Piera was his having charged Dimas13 with being a filibuster, and their revengefulness reached an incredible limit. The heartrending moans of this martyr to his duty still resound in that convento converted into the scene of an orgy of blood. The unfortunate man was heard to shout: ‘For God’s sake, for God’s sake, have pity,’ and trustworthy persons tell that under the strain of torture he would challenge them to fight in a fair field by saying: ‘I will fight alone against twenty of you;’ but the cowardly torturers, a reproach to the Filipino race, looked upon it as an amusement to glut their spite on a defenceless man whose hands were tied. They had him strung up all night with but insignificant refreshment and rest, sometimes being suspended by his arms which finally became disjointed and useless, and at others he was hung up by his feet, the blood rushing to his head and placing him in imminent danger of sudden death. It was the intention of these brutes to torture him as much as possible before killing him, just as a member of the feline race plays with, tosses in the air and pirouettes around the victim which falls into his claws. If to the torture of the rope are added the blows with cudgels and the butts of rifles which were frequently rained upon the victim it will be no surprise that early on the morning of the 30th he was in the throes of death in the midst of which the sufferer had just enough strength to say that he was hungry and thirsty; then those cannibals (the heart is filled with fury in setting forth such cruelty) cut a piece of flesh from the calf of the dying man’s leg and conveyed it to his mouth and instead of water they gave him to drink some of his own urine. What savagery!

      “The blood from the wound finished the killing of the fainting Piera. The blood shed served to infuriate more the barbarous executioners who in order to give the finishing stroke to the martyr, as an unrivalled expression of their savage ferocity, thrust a red-hot iron into his mouth and eyes. That same night these treacherous and ferocious tyrants whose sin made them hate the light, buried the body in the darkness of the night in a patch of cogon grass adjoining the convento.”

      Piera’s torture was by no means confined to this last night of his life, as the following account of it shows:—

      “In the first days of this accursed month, while the padres were bemoaning their fate in jail, a dark drama was being enacted in the convento, whose hair-raising scenes would have inspired terror to Montepiu himself.

      “Lieutenant Salvador Piera of the Guardia Civil, commanding officer at Aparri, who, realizing that all resistance was useless, gave way to the persistent solicitations of Spaniards and natives and surrendered that town on honourable terms, which the Katipúnan forces did not respect after the capitulation had been signed, was sent for by Villa, the military authority of Isabela. Something terrible was going to happen as Piera himself felt confident, for it is said that before leaving Aparri he went to confession where he settled the important business of his conscience in a Christian manner with a representative of God.

      “And so it turned out, for as soon as he arrived in Ilagan he was taken to the convento and placed incomunicado in one of its apartments. Soon after, three or four vile fiends—for they do not deserve the name of men—bound him with strong cords and hanged him to a beam. Then they began to charge him with having prosecuted a certain Mason, and inflicted upon him the most frightful tortures. The pen refuses to set forth so many atrocities. For three days they had him in that position while his vile assassins made a martyr of him. Our hair stands on end to think of such crimes. The heart-rending cries of this unfortunate man while prey to such barbarous torments could be heard in every part of the town and carried panic to the homes of all the inhabitants.

      “The late hours of the night were always chosen by those treacherous fiends to give Piera the trato de cuerda (this form of torture consists in tying the hands of the victim behind his back and hanging him by them by a rope passed through a pulley attached to a beam; his body is lifted as high as it will go and then allowed to fall by its own weight without reaching the ground); but this torture was administered to him in a form so terrible that all the pictures of this kind of torment found in the dreadful narratives of the calumniators of the Holy Office, pale into insignificance in comparison with the atrocious details of the tortures here recited; at each violent jerk the unhappy victim feeling that his limbs were being torn asunder would cry out ‘My God! My God!’ This terrifying cry reverberating through the jail would freeze the very blood of the poor priests therein incarcerated.

      “On the third day, when those infuriated hyenas appeared to have spent their diabolical rage; after they had thrust a red-hot iron into his eyes and left him with sightless sockets; the poor martyr, the prey of delirium, cried out that he was hungry, and one of those sicarii cut a piece of flesh from Piera’s thigh and was infamous enough to carry it to his mouth. On the night of the seventh of the month very late a number of wretches buried in the convento garden a body still dripping warm blood from the lips of which there escaped the feeble plaints of anguish of a dying man.”

      The feeling of the Spaniards relative to this matter is well shown by the following statement of Father Malumbres:—

      “This horrible crime cannot be pardoned by God or man, and is still uninvestigated, crying to Heaven for vengeance with greater reason than the blood of the innocent Abel. So long as the criminals remain unpunished it will be a black and indelible stigma and an ugly stain on the race harbouring in its midst the perpetrators of this unheard-of sin. Words of reprobation are not enough, justice demands exemplary and complete reparation, and if the powers of earth do not take justice into their own hands, God will send fire from Heaven and will cause to disappear from the face of the earth the criminals and even their descendants. A murder so cruel and premeditated can be punished in no other way.

      “If the courts here should wish to punish the guilty persons it would not be a difficult task; the public points its finger at those who dyed their hands in the blood of the heroic soldier, and we shall set them forth here echoing the voice of the people. The soulless instigator was Dimas Guzman. The executioners were a certain José Guzman (alias Pepin, a nephew of Dimas) and Cayetano Pérez.”

      The matter was duly taken up in the courts, and Judge Blount himself tried the cases.

      “Villa was accompanied by his aide, Lieutenant Ventura Guzman. The latter is an old acquaintance of the author of the present volume, who tried him afterwards, in 1901, for playing a minor part in the murder of an officer of the Spanish army committed under Villa’s orders just prior to, or about the time of, the Wilcox-Sargent visit. He was found guilty, and sentenced, but later liberated under President Roosevelt’s amnesty of 1902. He was guilty, but the deceased, so the people in the Cagayan Valley used to say, in being tortured to death, got only the same sort of medicine he had often administered thereabouts. At any rate, that was the broad theory of the amnesty in wiping out all these old cases.”

      He adds:—

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