MANILA — The torture was more than 40 years ago, but Loretta Rosales remembers it vividly.

Twice during the dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos she was arrested by his henchmen for leading street protests. During her detention, she said, she was sexually molested, choked with a belt, given electric shocks and subjected to Russian roulette.

So the news that President Rodrigo Duterte wants to transfer Mr. Marcos’s remains to a heroes’ cemetery in Manila hit her in the gut.

“Now they want to make him a hero,” Ms. Rosales, a leftist politician who is now 77, said in a recent interview. Doing so would betray Mr. Marcos’s victims, she said, and whitewash the past.

“We have a right to the truth,” she said, “and so, too, do the generations after us.”

The debate over the reburial of Mr. Marcos, 30 years after he was ousted in the People Power uprising, has forced a national reckoning over a wrenching period of Philippine history.