“Survived wartime torture to head Manila’s police” from the October 17, 1974 Door County Advocate
The Tamayos get together—Dr. Alfonso G. Tamayo and his brother General Gerard Tamayo pose at the doorway of the Tamayo home at I07 S. Ninth av. shortly before the general departed for Washington, D.C. Monday.
Survived wartime torture to head Manila’s police
By KETA STEEBS
Outwardly he’s more the MacMillan than Columbo type but once you get to know him General Gerard Tamayo, Chief of the Manila Metropolitan Police Force, needs only an ankle-length raincoat and chewed-up cigar to personify television’s soft spoken but doggedly determined detective. Tamayo, like Columbo, never gives up.
We met, the chief of police and I, at a dimly lit restaurant selected by his local relatives, Dr. Alfonso Tamayo and his wife Coney. The decorous dining room proved an incongruous setting for the three hour conversation which ensued. Somehow our hushed discussion of death, drugs, violence, terror and martial law seemed out of place with linen tablecloths, sparkling tableware, steak sandwiches and the sound of laughter from other tables.
After the first few minutes, however, the restaurant atmosphere receded and I, a pampered American citizen who accepts our constitution’s guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as my just due, relived via Tamayo’s emotionless voice three decades of a nation’s struggle for survival, a struggle which began with the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in 1942.
The two Tamayos are brothers but the general is 12 years older than the doctor, an age difference which accounts for their vastly dissimilar backgrounds. While Alfonso, a first-grader, was saluting the Japanese flag every school morning, his 20-year-old brother was imprisoned in Fort Santiago a few miles away after being suspected of guerrilla activities — namely, shooting a Japanese officer.
His captors couldn’t prove he had done the actual killing or they would have beheaded him on the spot but for three months Gerard Tamayo was confined in a room, built to accommodate perhaps 15 persons, with 69 other men. They stood shoulder to shoulder, unable to sit or lie, for months on end. They existed on a handful of rice and a mouthful of water per day. Their bodily functions were performed standing in the same cramped position in which they slept and ate.
The only break in the monotony came when one by one they were taken to the “interrogation” room and tortured until they broke. Many never returned but their places were taken by fresh suspects daily. It was this unremitting “questioning” which had led to Gerard’s imprisonment. One of his captured relatives and fellow guerrilla fighters had gasped Gerard’s name in a final moment of agony.
Tamayo doesn’t know how long he himself could have held out but after 90 days his weight had dropped to less than 100. pounds and his body was of skeletal proportions. Fortunately the Americans made a welcome appearance about this time and placed a few well aimed bombs on the infamous fort. They could have killed the prisoners of course but this particular bombardier apparently knew what he was doing. He bombed the walls, allowing most of the fort’s far from obese inmates a chance to escape through the holes, dive into a river and swim to safety. An excellent swimmer, Tamayo was one of the few who managed to escape being hit by a bullet fired by his frustrated Japanese captors.
“Did you do it?” I asked, finding it difficult to imagine civilized man standing in human excrement for weeks on end. “Did you shoot that Japanese officer?”
“Of course,” Tamayo answered, with a touch of impatience in his otherwise emotionless voice. “I had to get rid of that beast.”
I later learned the officer, a, lieutenant, had watched smilingly as his men tied a young Filipino girl to an electric fence and as she writhed from the repeated shocks began slicing her into ribbon-like fragments. The gun Tamayo used to rid the earth of this -------- sadist was never found (his mother shoved it in the bodice of her dress when the house was searched) but because his relative had mentioned his name under torture Gerard was nevertheless hauled off to Santiago’s infamous dungeon for the duration.
Technically the Tamayo family’s oldest son was member of the Philippine police force, a department which served as window dressing for the Island’s invaders, at the time of his arrest. The fact he was a police officer may be one reason he was incarcerated instead of killed but despite the advantages of his vocation Gerard had no burning desire to be a law enforcement officer. His first love was engineering but his family (who had fled to the provinces during his imprisonment) was in financial need and Gerard forsook his opportunity to become an engineer in favor of bringing home a rookie policeman’s weekly wage.
It should be noted that the six Tamayo children under the guidance of their teacher-father all have college degrees, thanks to the Filipino tradition of having the older children help pay for the education of their younger siblings. As the eldest son, Gerard (who obtained his own law degrees in night school) helped his four brothers and one sister earn either medical or law degrees.
The climb from political prisoner to chief of Manila’s 3,500 man force took 25 years. These years were, to use a Hardy boy expression, “fraught with danger” and hardly conducive to either a long life expectancy or low insurance premiums. They also account for Tamayo’s present bachelor status because, as he puts it, he’s seen enough grieving widows and fatherless children to last a lifetime.
Had Tamayo been a married man his opportunity to add his own widow to the roster came early in his police career. The Gung Ho Gang (the Philippines answer to John Dillinger and his thugs) had baffled the Manila police for months. With their affinity for pillaging, murdering, raping, and terrorizing the countryside. These seven young desperados led the country’s most wanted list.
In the best detective story tradition one of Tamayo’s undercover contacts informed him that the gang had holed up in an isolated home at the edge of a desolate swamp. The tip came at midnight and at two o’clock in the morning the far from seasoned officer found himself stumbling out of the marsh in back of what appeared to be a deserted shack. Alone (his tipster didn’t mind talking but drew the line at acting) Tamayo took solace in the thought that if he was destined to be killed the hand grenade he was carrying would finish off his opponents equally as effectively. He was also armed with a shotgun but knew if it came to a shoot out they had an arsenal at their disposal.
Fortunately all seven were sleeping the sleep of the unjust — two and three to a room— and even more fortunately for Tamayo’s state of well being none of the Gung Ho Gang was a light sleeper. He was able to herd them together, tie their hands and march them in total darkness to the nearest police station. This coup didn’t hurt his rapid advancement (although his sergeant took the credit) and before long Gerard was made traffic investigator, then homicide investigator, then chief of homicide and in 1969 appointed chief of police, a title which also entitled Tamayo to be called General.
During his seven year tenure Tamayo has seen the number of violent crimes decrease from 145,000 to 23,000. The police chief says that since President Marcos initiated martial law in September, 1972, and came up with his oft quoted formula: guns equal violence, take away guns and you’ll take away violence, Manila is one of the safest cities in the world in which to live. The penalty for gun-related crimes (rape, robbery, assault, etc.) is inevitably life imprisonment or death by musketry. (The Gung Ho Gang got life.)
As head of the Manila police force Tamayo hasn’t put in less than a 15-hour-work day for the past 30 years nor has he taken a vacation during that time. Even his trip to the United States is work oriented and hardly qualifies (outside of his brief stay in Sturgeon Bay) as a restful interlude. From Sept. 19 through Sept. 26 General Tamayo attended a convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and is now participating in a senior officers course on modern police management and administration conducted by the International Police Academy of the Office of Public Safety under the auspices of the state department.
Altogether he’ll be in this country approximately three months. When asked how Sturgeon Bay impressed him he replied “It’s even more peaceful than Manila. I wouldn’t mind retiring here because even in Manila we don’t leave our car doors unlocked.”
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive
[The censored word starts with an "O". The original and uncensored version is available from the newspaper archive.]
Articles related to his brother, A. G. Tamayo
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/a-g-tamayo
Other visitor profiles
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/visitor-profiles
Articles by Keta Steebs
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/keta-steebs