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It’s not loneliness, not boredom, nor frustrations over her case and national affairs, that Amanda Echanis considers her biggest enemy in detention. It’s time, she said, because her son is growing up and her mother is growing old.
“Kalaban ko ang oras ngayon. Oras na mahalaga dahil lumalaki na ang anak ko at nagkakaedad na rin talaga ang nanay ko (Time is my enemy. Time that is important because my son is growing up and my mother is growing old),” Echanis said. We corresponded in letters coursed through her lawyer.
Echanis, 36 years old, has been detained at the Cagayan Provincial Jail in Tuguegarao City since December 2020, after she was arrested in a government raid bannered under a counter-insurgency campaign. Echanis said the purported evidence of illegal firearms found on her were planted, meant to portray her as an armed rebel, a template of Rodrigo Duterte’s crackdown during his time as president. When she was arrested, she had just given birth to her son Randall, named after her father, the peasant leader Randall “Ka Randy” Echanis, who was killed four months earlier.
Baby Randall is now five years old, as old as her time in detention. He has a new nickname “Babap,” which is something the boy thought of himself, said Echanis, guessing it must have been influenced by the nursery rhyme “Baa Baa Blacksheep.” Babap stays with his grandmother, Echanis’ mother. Amanda has not seen him in two years, but is grateful that she was allowed to take care of her child inside detention for the first three years.
On her third year in jail, Echanis decided to go back to college. She was a graduate of the Philippine High School for the Arts, and had been enrolled at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. She re-enrolled in 2023 as a creative writing student. She is on track to graduate this year.
She doesn’t like to mention it a lot, she said, but her current general average is 1.44, which means she is running for honors (she makes a humble caveat that her underloading — or taking fewer units than required — might affect this).
On May 16, Echanis made history as the first political prisoner to be elected to the UP Diliman student council. She ran a campaign from jail, and topped the councilor race with 4,830 votes.
“Sabi nila di ba parang nawawalan na ng pakialam yung estudyante, hindi ako naniniwala na nawawalan na ng pakialam ang mga students,” she said. (They say the students are beginning to become apathetic, I don’t believe students are becoming apathetic.)
‘I will not settle’
Echanis is a poet, following in the footsteps of her uncle, poet and playwright Emmanuel “Eman” Lacaba, who was killed while fighting the Marcos dictatorship. One day in speech class, they were asked to write around the theme of “what if.”
“What if I was free? Then the callout for candidates of the University Student Council (USC) popped up. What if I run for the USC? So the what if became ‘why not’? PDLs [Persons Deprived of Liberty] can vote, and be voted, so why not try?” she said.
There was a 10-year period when Filipino prisoners could not vote, until the Supreme Court lifted the injunction in 2022 in time for the barangay elections in 2023. This covered Echanis’ aspiration to become a student councilor.
“Ang mindset ko kasi, hindi ko hahayaan na pati ang isip ko, ang critical thinking ko ay makulong ng situwasyon ko,” she said. (My mindset was to allow for my mind, for my critical thinking, to also be imprisoned by my situation.)
She campaigned via video call, where she was allowed to dial in and interact with UP students. This arrangement had been sanctioned by her jail management, because there’s already a setup for her classes anyways.
This semester, Echanis is a regular student with a full load, and attending her classes online, rejecting offers to just take modules. Sometimes, a classmate would dial her on Zoom from the classroom, sometimes it’s the professor, and either way she gets to be “present” in class.
Her treatment inside detention is “relatively” better, Echanis said, but it depends, “how do you quantify better?”
“Are we supposed to adjust to life in jail? Relatively speaking, siyempre mas nasanay na ako sa routine life ng jail etc. at kung paano i-manage ang stress pero hindi pa rin madali at sa palagay ko, hindi dapat makasanayan ang makulong,” she said. (Relatively speaking, I am more adjusted now to the routine of life in jail, how to manage my stress, but I don’t think it’s easy, I don’t think you should get used to imprisonment.)
That she reenrolled, ran for student council, on top of writing gigs to earn some income for her son, is her going on “overdrive.”
After five years of imprisonment and her trial still slowed down by overwhelmed courts, Echanis said she remains hopeful. “Hope with so much fervor,” she said. To retain hope is difficult for prisoners, and Echanis said she is aware, “pero hindi (but no), I will not settle.”
Like a swan
“I’m like a duck,” she said, “or maybe a swan.” It’s a metaphor often used to describe someone who appears calm on the outside, but is really struggling.
“Sobrang nahihirapan na talaga ako sa tagal na nandito ako,” Echanis said. (I’m really struggling because I’ve been here for a long time.)
Her case is onto its final stages, but the judge has just retired, and the case was assigned to a pairing judge. In court language that means that a judge shuffles between courts, and the caseload mounts as a result. Recently, she’s been having a hearing once every two to three months.
This has pushed her to want to study law, Echanis said, and when she’s free, to push for justice reform so prisoners wouldn’t have to suffer this much from slow trials.
For now, her priority is the UP Diliman student body, which just voted her their top councilor. Known to be the seat of activism in the Philippines, UP Diliman has been going through tumultuous transitions, such as the revocation of a decades-old pact that used to bar the presence of state forces on campus, and commercialization of community spaces.
Echanis said she will push for “hybrid, out-of-the-box” approaches to education and student consultation.
She gets to see her son three or four times a week through video calling via the jails’ e-dalaw initiative. If she thinks about it, she said, the moments that pushed her to run for student council were the moments she was missing her son so much.
When Randall was still with her inside detention, Echanis said she would have to put him to sleep first, before she could study. Now she has all this time — and running in the student elections was her way of fighting. “Dahil sobrang gusto ko nang lumaya…Maaari nilang ikulong ang aking katawan, ngunit hindi ang aking diwang palaban,” she said. (I want to be free so badly…they can imprison my body but not my fighting spirit.)
Echanis kept Randall’s last clothes before he changed to leave jail and live with his grandmother in the meantime. “Katabi ko pa rin matulog hanggang ngayon. Nasa tabi ng unan ko,” she said. (It’s with me when I sleep, next to my pillow.)
There are around 800 political prisoners nationwide, 157 of whom are women. “Hindi po kami mga istatistika, kami po ay mga tao,” she said. (We are not statistics, we are humans.) – Rappler.com
