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Thursday, May 14, 2026

'Historian' spreads fake claim falsely attributed to Amnesty International - The Manila Times

DR. Ambeth Ocampo, the renowned collector of historical trivia, again revealed his Yellow bias and unprofessionalism as a historian when he wrote in his column last week that an Amnesty International document declared the following, and therefore true: "From 1972 to 1981, some 70,000 people were imprisoned and 34,000 were tortured; over 3,200 people were killed."

Obviously, Ocampo didn't even bother to rebut my arguments made in three columns* in March — which he obviously read — that proved that alleged AI document to be fake.

That allegation was smuggled into a Sept. 18, 2018 statement written by the AI Philippine representative, an anti-Marcos activist for years, which was actually a manifesto of sorts against President Rodrigo Duterte's regime, with those human rights figures during martial law, mentioned only as an afterthought in its "background" part.

There are absolutely no AI studies on the martial law period that had claimed those false figures written only in 2018 by the AI representative for the Philippines.

Those figures were rather concoctions made in the 1990s by rabid anti-Marcos American academics who wanted to portray that Marcos' martial law was on the same level of brutality as those in Latin America. They swallowed hook, line and sinker the reports from entities they were not aware of or pretended not to be aware of as being Communist Party fronts, whose main propaganda tack was to portray the Marcos regime as a ruthless fascist regime, in order to...



Read Full Story: https://www.manilatimes.net/2022/05/30/opinion/columns/historian-spreads-fake...