Forget Sleep at Siesta Time in Philippines : Motels Are for Love, Death in Afternoon

They are used for love, torture, even suicide. In the Philippines motels are for just about anything, except sleeping.

Softly lit and fortified by thick walls, they have been the setting for the grisliest of passion crimes, suicides and rapes. Men have been tortured there. And love has blossomed within their tawdry rooms.

In the staunchly Roman Catholic Philippines, love affairs are common, and motels have become the daily hideaway of thousands of couples longing for even the briefest moment of fugitive love.

For Lirio Garnace and Elmer Felex that moment was all too brief.

In March, the lovers checked in at Manila’s Halina Motel. Minutes later, Garnace’s husband, a captain of President Corazon Aquino’s personal guards, flung the door open and shot them dead.

“They had suddenly become like silhouettes to me,” the captain said, recalling what he felt just before he emptied his gun on the lovers he caught naked in bed.

Police say a motel room is ideal for grilling suspects.

“The place is quiet, you raise uncertainties in the guy’s mind, and soon enough he breaks down,” said one officer.

In one of the most celebrated cases, soldiers took Carlos Yari to a motel room in 1982.

According to the church-backed monitoring group Task Force Detainees, the soldiers arrested him as an alleged communist rebel. In a room that muffled Yari’s screams, the group said, soldiers poured water through his nose, nearly drowning him, and burned his skin and genitals with hot sauce and pepper.

Out of 10 couples that check in daily at the Anito lodge--the best-run and the least-touched by scandal among 123 Manila motels--seven are illicit lovers, a survey shows.

Room 320 at the Anito offers the intimacy of a low, bouncy bed, wall and ceiling mirrors, a reclining “love seat” and a bathroom stool for sex in the shower.

“We have a full house on Fridays and Saturdays, especially if they fall on a payday,” said an Anito spokesman. “The need for sex is basic.”

Afternoons are when lovers come, in cars with blacked-out windows or in taxis, where women hide their faces behind newspapers in the back seat.

Anito (Filipino for “pagan God”) runs six motels, two of them in Manila’s seedy Pasay district, where whole blocks of pleasure houses stand alongside residential homes.

Rival Halina lodge offers X-rated movies and “love lotion for more lasting enjoyment.”

In a tropical city with frequent power outages, most motels advertise “no brownouts.” Customers need not worry about the air-conditioning cutting off in the middle of lovemaking, or the pornographic videotapes being interrupted.

The motels offer “short-time” rates of three hours ranging from $5 for rooms with public entrances to $22 for suites with huge beds, Jacuzzis and private garages. Rooms with public entrances are cheaper because customers can be seen--and noticed.

Many of the lodges offer discount cards, with savings of up to 25% for regular customers.

Between 40% and 50% of the clientele are foreign tourists, spokesmen said, many of whom come to Manila for the city’s many girlie bars.

Moral crusaders once demanded their closure. Marching down the street of a red-light district, they sang religious songs and shouted at shut motel windows, “Get out of there. God also loves you.”

But times are not always good.

In January, 1986, 21-year-old Jonathan Cruz checked into a downtown motel, ordered a beer, and then fired a bullet into his temple.

“We learned later it was his birthday and he and his sweetheart had quarreled,” said waiter Jaime Serrano.