Not too many knew that Davao Prison and Penal Farm (Dapecol), was mainly a swampland accessible only via the waterways linking the open sea. It was an uninhabited forest when American governor-general Dwight F. Davis issued Proclamation No. 414 on October 7, 1931, classifying it as a reservation area and the future host of a prisons colony. Roughly 28,816 hectares in its original measurement, the old penal farm straddled the areas of Kapalong and Tagum (now a city) in Davao province.
When war broke out, it became an inferno for the prisoners of war (POWs) such that even the Japanese flag, known as the ‘Rising Sun’, was pejoratively called by the detainees as the ‘flaming asshole.’ In its website, the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) described this war episode:
“On December 20, 1941, the Japanese Imperial Forces attacked Davao and the colony was among the establishments taken over by the invading army. The entire settlement was thrown into confusion and a great number of prisoners escaped. Normal operations were inevitably disturbed. November 8, 1942, a representative of the Director of Prisons transferred the colony and its properties to the Japanese authorities. The remaining colony employees, their families and the inmates evacuated to Iwahig where they organized the Davao Penal Colony at Inagawan sub-colony (Palawan). The organization of the colony in exile was authorized by virtue of Memorandum Order No. 60 dated June 28, 1943 and signed by the Director of Prisons.”
John D. Lukacs, in Escape from Davao (2011), wrote about the sacrifices the inmates had to surmount in the face of enemy brutality while in detention. To feed themselves, they were required to do hard labor, producing staple food for the table under the worst condition:
“Rice was Dapecol’s ‘cash crop’ and much of the colony’s labor pool and acreage—depending on the season, between 350 and 700 prisoners and as many as 600 paddies—was devoted to its cultivation. The rice detail was undoubtedly the dirtiest, most demanding, and perhaps the most dangerous. The sunken paddies were filled with cobras and rice snakes, but an invisible predator called Schistosoma japonicum, a parasite that penetrated sores and cuts, would prove to be their sinister enemies.”
To get to the rice field, called Mactan by the inmates after the name of the vessel that brought them to Davao in 1932, they had to board wobbly flatcars pulled by a small diesel engine running on a narrow-gauge track, which they called as Toonerville Trolley after a popular cartoon strip. It took twenty minutes of chug-chugging before the wagon, passing small banana and abaca plantations, reached its destination.
Lukacs further described the ordeal the prisoners had to undergo in enemy hands:
“Just beyond Mactan [rice field], POWs hauled wet gravel in five-gallon cans from a creek bed onto flatcars. Seven miles down the rail line, others grunted and pulled in two-man teams felling mahogany behemoths with long bucksaws. The trunk of these ironclad hardwoods were so wide that when lying on their sides some were taller than the lumberjacks.”
In Clark Kinnaird’s This Must Not Happen Again! The Black Book Of Fascist Horror – Graphic (1945), he described the scene the liberators met after the Americans recaptured the penal farm:
“When Americans recaptured Davao, they found about 150 skeletons in hospital beds, on the porch and on an untended walk overgrown by wild squash. Some were identified as Filipinos, but many officially are recorded as Americans. There was evidence the deaths were caused by deliberate neglect and desertion. Retreating Japanese took physical-able prisoners and left the remainder to starve or die of disease. “
Through the decades, the size of the penal colony, depicted by an author as a wartime “hell-hole rivaling German concentration camps in its horrors,” has been reduced, through the decades, by about eighty-one percent on account of the presidential fiats allowing the distribution or exclusion of some of its assets in favor of the war veterans and their families. In later years, the implementation of the comprehensive agrarian reform program (CARP) would further decimate its coverage.
Bertham Bank, in Back From The Living Dead: An Original Story Describing The Infamous March Of Death ; 33 Months In A Japanese Prison And Liberation By The Rangers (1945) wrote:
“On October 26, 1942, they also shipped 2,000 Americans to Davao penal colony in Mindanao. I was one of that group. We were selected at Cabanatuan to go because we were all sick. The Jap CO at Cabanatuan told us we were going to a rest camp where no one would work and there was food and meat, and vegetables were plentiful. We were all sick and did not believe the Jap commander, but we thought that maybe it was true.
“We left on the morning of the 26th walking to Cabanatuan five miles away and there we began a trip that was going to eventually mean death to many of us. At Cabanatuan we were loaded into box cars with a capacity of 75. They threw 125 of us into each of these cars. The doors were locked and we had no air at all. Many suffocated. We lived in filth as many had dysentery and diarrhea. This trip in the box cars lasted for approximately 10 hours. When we arrived in Manila we had a stampede in getting out of the cars.”
On the other hand, Dapecol’s peacetime integrity as a thriving penal farm, in large part due to its being the first to enlist inmates to work with pay in a plantation as part for their rehabilitation efforts, is under threat given the political undercurrents that have recently surfaced.
