BOOK SEVEN

IN THE EYE OF THE STORM

CHAPTER I

LEADERS of various labor unions were cramped on wooden benches inside one room of the second floor of the apartment housing the headquarters of KASAMA. The apartment was one of three attached two-floor sections of an edifice in the heart of Sampaloc, Manila, typical of second-rate housing that characterized the city. Even in the commercial districts like Quiapo, Sta. Cruz and Ermita, this kind of housing abounded in streets behind the main avenues such that tenants had easy time moving from one residence to another accordingly as certain advantages took place, like proximity to workplace or school, lower rent, or peace and order. This last consideration could not have been the reason why KASAMA decided to establish its headquarters in the area. Rather, for a radical federation of workers’ unions, KASAMA felt it was in good hands in the community.

Sampaloc had become the breeding ground of activists in Manila, as Pampanga and Tarlac were in Central Luzon. The district was a cradle for among the best institutions for higher education outside of the University of the Philippines, which was in Diliman, Quezon City. The so-called University Belt ran that whole stretch of Recto Avenue beginning Quezon Boulevard all the way to Mendiola, smack into the very gates of Malacanang: to the left facing east, Far Eastern University, University of the East, Philippine College of Commerce (falling short by some degree of being dubbed the Philippine College of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Tse Tung Thought), then veering on Legarda Street to the left, the University of Manila, with the University of Santo Tomas, the oldest university of the country, a good many blocks to the north, at the corner of Espana and Governor Forbes; and then further up Legarda across to the right are the Sta. Rita College and the largely populous Arellano University; back to Recto, to the right, the San Sebastian College, after which across the small but extremely historic Mendiola Bridge, the Centro Escolar University and the all-girl Catholic school La Consolacion College both to the right, and finally to the left, the all-boy Catholic school San Beda College and the exclusive, all-girl Catholic school, College of the Holy Spirit after which, finally, across Jose P. Laurel Avenue, Gate 4 of Malacanang which in the January 30 Battle of Mendiola of 1970 Kumander Freddie, earning his diploma as a Red Fighter for the NPA,  crashed with  a fire truck, setting it aflame. That was when Metrocom soldiers unleashed their violence against the student protesters, terribly beating those they caught and chasing those they didn’t, all over the district, through side streets and dingy alleys where residents just threw their doors open for escaping protesters and then locking them back shut so they would be spared from having their share of state fascism.

The KASAMA headquarters must have been one of those residences in the January 30 Battle of Mendiola that gave shelter to activists, now openly proclaiming itself as the hub of workers revolution.  

Speaking to the gathering was a man in late twenties whose mannerism including that in his speech obviously indicated his proletarian breeding. He was Ka Erning, secretary general of the KASAMA secretariat. He spoke with a visible wiggle of his torso as he gestured with his hands.

“And now, Comrades,” he said, amiably smiling, “here is Ka Mao to discuss the next topic…”

With a chalk, Ka Erning wrote out the words across the blackboard in front of the gathering: “political economy.” He underlined what he wrote.

Unlike Ka Erning who kept beaming even as he yielded the floor, Ka Mao wore a serious face. It was some kind of a defense posture, a way of not betraying to the audience the good degree of jitters he was having inside. Though he had been into sales and had had a good amount of speaking experience, it had all been selling insurance or encyclopedia. This time around, he was supposed to sell revolution.

How was he to do that?

The task of teaching the subject of political economy to his listeners now had been given to him on a very short notice. KASAMA was into a continuing educational program aimed at fast-tracking the political, read that revolutionary, consciousness of workers. The KASAMA secretariat had been monitoring the development of Ka Mao, and taking cue from the way he had handled KAMAO and from his fiery speeches in the KAMAO strike and in the public rallies he had participated in, Ka Erning was confident Ka Mao could tackle the subject matter and insisted that Ka Mao do it. Besides, inasmuch as Ka Mao had signified his intention to go full time with the federation, he had to be given tasks in order to continuously hone him up on the workers revolutionary struggle.

It was Ka Mao who was yet unsure of himself.

“Political economy!” he gushed to himself. How could he ever tackle that job when prior to this, what he had been writing about were the avarice and ostentation and vanities of show business personalities. He was actually nervous as he took the floor, and he felt the best way not to show it was to not say a word by way of acknowledging Ka Erning’s introduction. That’s why he looked stern and serious, and this mien was what sort of intimidated those in the gathering. Otherwise fidgeting due to the humidity in the room, fanning themselves with a variety of means, like a folded tabloid, a handkerchief, foldable fan, or a face towel, they sat in attention as soon as Ka Mao took the chalk Ka Erning had left on the table.

Ka Mao proceeded to write out across the blackboard his own words: “Theory of Surplus Value”, similarly underlining it.  

There was a kind of a mix of glow and wonderment on the faces of the audience. It appeared like it was the first time they ever got to know there was such a subject, or that the subject, written out in English, instilled in them a feeling of being capable of learning, and this made them feel important. And so it was that when Ka Mao began his lecture, he had earned the complete concentration of his listeners. They believed he was a master on the subject.

Ka Mao was none such of course. Everything was impression on the part of the audience and he was acting out perfectly it seemed.

“The theory of surplus value is the theory of the terrible oppression and exploitation the working class has been suffering in the hands of capitalists. It is also the theory of why and how the workers should overthrow the capitalist class and install themselves as the new rulers of society.”

The audience applauded spontaneously.

 “That’s it,” Ka Mao sighed to himself with relief.

Ka Mao, once told that he would speak on the subject in today’s seminar, had gone on a quick reading of Das Kapital at the National Library, focusing precisely on that subject of surplus value. Although KASAMA had a designated Educational Department in its Secretariat popularly referred to as ED, it had not come up with formal modules by which to conduct seminars like the one today. Lecturers worried about forming those modules.

In doing his task, Ka Mao tackled the subject of political economy by reducing it to the question: How are the workers exploited?

After posing the question, Ka Mao drew an elliptical figure on the blackboard, labeling it “commodity”.

“Commodity is that thing which we, workers, produce with our labor. It’s the wine and liquor which (pointing to a section of the audience) you produce in La Tondena, the meat you (to another section of the audience) make at Vitas Slaughter House, the driving that you (pointing to a section wearing T-shirts with the sign: “Pambansang Samahan ng mga Tsuper (PSMT [National Association of Drivers]) render your passengers, and the magazines we make at the Makabayan Publishing Corporation, etcetera, etcetera. In the view of Karl Marx, commodity is the smallest particle, like the atom to matter, of society. It was through the study of this element called commodity that Marx was able to dissect the capitalist set-up, traced its historical origins  leading to the conclusion that the liberation of the working class can be achieved only through a violent crushing of the capitalist system. Only upon the rubble of capitalism can socialism, and ultimately communism, be established. It is essential therefore that we study how capitalism works, how it oppresses and exploits the workers. How?”

Ka Mao drew a vertical line across within the ellipsis he drew, splitting it into halves.

“How do commodities change hands?” Ka Mao asked, posing the question to his audience. None indicated a willingness to answer. He addressed somebody from the PSMT group.

“How do you get your meat, for instance?”

“I buy it,” said the PSMT man.

“Where do you get the money by which to buy meat?” asked Ka Mao.

“From the passengers that ride on my jeepney,” replied the PSMT man.

“Among whom might be a worker in the slaughter house, right?” asked Ka Mao, indicating those in the section occupied by the slaughter house union.

“Right,” said the PSMT man.

“And where do you get the money for paying your transportation fare?” asked Ka Mao of the slaughter house workers.

“From our salary,” said the slaughterhouse folks almost in unison.

“And where do you get your salaries?” asked Ka Mao.

“From the slaughter house owner,” answered a slaughter house worker, adding, “That sonnavabitch!”

“So now we ask the sonnavabitch where he gets the money for paying his workers’ salary,” said Ka Mao. “What do you suppose will he answer?”

A woman among the slaughter house workers coyly answered, “From people who buy the meat.”

“Right!” blurted out Ka Mao. “And among them I suppose is our driver from the PSMT, right?”

“Right!” chorused the PSMT folks.

Everybody applauded in delight.

“Right,” Ka Mao agreed with pleasure. “So now we see our comrades from the slaughter house make meat for getting salary by which to pay for their transportation fare which our comrades from the PSMT use in turn to buy that meat.”

The audience seemed to delight at Ka Mao’s words.

“Now, let me ask you,” said Ka Mao. “What change hands in this, should we say, transaction between the jeepney driver and the meat maker?”

“Money,” answered aloud almost the whole audience.

Ka Mao amused to himself, glad that the discussion is going perfectly as needed, as he had intended.

He brought out a hundred-peso-bill.

“I got here one hundred pesos. Who has got one hundred pesos among you?” he asked.

A few raised their hands. Ka Mao stepped near one of them, and then said to him, handing over his one-hundred-peso bill, “I give you my one hundred, you give me your one hundred,” taking the other fellow’s money.

The audience laughed without really bothering to know what Ka Mao did that for.

“Was there an exchange of money between us?” Ka Mao asked.

“Yes,” said the audience almost to a man.

“No,” said a dissenter. “You get exactly the same thing that you gave, you call that exchange. You give one kilo of rice to get one kilo of rice, where’s the exchange? The exchange is when for the one kilo of rice you gave you got one kilo of fish in return.”

A few applauded the dissenter. Ka Mao clapped hands with them.

“That brings us to the first point of our study. That every commodity is made up of (labeling one half of the drawn ellipsis as “exchange value”) exchange value and (labeling the other half as “use value”) use value. Exchange value, because it is capable of being exchanged with another commodity, and use value because it has use for the owner of the other commodity. I am a farmer and I have rice but have no viand for meals, and you are a fisherman and have fish to spare but have no rice to cook. So you give me your fish which I need in exchange for my rice which you need. Here we see that the exchange value of the commodity is determined by its use value. Only when people have use for one another’s commodities will they exchange their respective commodities for the other. I hope this is clear.”

“But that’s true only during the period of barter trade,” commented someone. “That’s been long past. Today, all you need is money to have the things you want.”

“I’m afraid that’s not quite true,” Ka Mao countered snappily. “What you seem to see is what appears on the surface. But like I said, Marx really dug it up and saw correctly that (brandishing his one-hundred-peso bill) money in itself has no value. This is just plain paper really and the paper used for printing this, I would not buy for even a centavo.”

“The fact is that your one hundred can buy at least four kilos of rice,” somebody snapped likewise.

“That’s the fact that we are going to find out just now,” said Ka Mao, turning to the blackboard. He erased the words earlier written there and began writing. To the left of the blackboard, he drew a polo shirt.

“Here we have an example of a commodity, a polo shirt,” Ka Mao began outlining the demonstration he had planned out for this session.

“Let’s enumerate the different materials used in making the polo shirt. First we have…”. Ka Mao paused to get the answer from the audience.

“Textile,” said the audience.

“That’s right,” said Ka Mao, drawing a piece of textile under the drawing of the polo shirt. Again he addressed the audience. “What else?”

“Buttons,” said a number of the audience.

            “Buttons, of course,” said Ka Mao as he drew five tiny circles under the drawing of the piece of textile. “What else?”

            Nobody from the audience could make an immediate answer.

            “What else?” Ka Mao said in a tone meant to encourage anybody from his listeners to speak up.

            A woman, as though hitting an idea, said aloud, “Thread!”

            Ka Mao looked amused. He said as he drew a roll of string under the drawing of the buttons. “Yes, thread.” Done with the drawing, he asked again, “Anything else?”

            Ka Mao scanned the faces of the audience to see if anybody was ready with an answer. Seeing none, Ka Mao decided to volunteer the answer by drawing a tiny chip of something under the drawing of the thread.

            “The depreciation in the value of the machine used in sewing the polo shirt, which we represent with a tiny chip of metal… I hope you are following closely.”

            The audience signified their affirmative answer.

            “Very well,” said Ka Mao.

            He began labeling the items he drew with corresponding amounts.

            “How much is the average cloth for making polo shirts?” he asked as he drew a horizontal line corresponding to the drawing of a piece of textile.

            No immediate answer came from the audience.

            “Yes?” he prodded.

            A woman in the audience quoted a price, “On the average, sixty pesos per yard.”

            A man butted in, “Depends on the kind of cloth. There are more expensive ones.”

            “Okay,” said Ka Mao, “we take the average. At sixty per yard times one and a half yards, the cost of the textile is ninety pesos.”

            Ka Mao wrote “P90.00” corresponding to the drawing of the textile. Afterward he faced the audience.

            “How about the buttons?” Ka Mao asked.

            “Put it at two pesos apiece, times five,  ten pesos,” another woman volunteered.

            “Okay, ten pesos,” said Ka Mao, labeling the drawing of buttons “P10.00”.

            Knowing what was to come next, somebody volunteered, “For the thread, one small spool is enough. Put there twenty pesos.”

            Ka Mao amused at the lady who volunteered the information.

            “Twenty pesos,” said Ka Mao as he labeled that amount to the drawing of the thread. Hardly was he done with the labeling when he spoke, “Finally, the depreciation of the machine.” He proceeded to draw a line corresponding to the drawing of a chip of metal.

            “It is safe to assign ten centavos for this,” he said, labeling the drawing with the figures “P0.10.”

            Ka Mao faced the audience to gage their reaction. He thought they were anticipating his next words, and the way he saw it they were anxious for something nice.

            “As you can notice,” he said, “it is easy to count the cost of one polo shirt. Just add the amounts corresponding to the materials that make up this clothing.”

            And Ka Mao added the amounts he had written on the blackboard and wrote down the total “P120.10”.

            “Ninety plus ten plus twenty plus ten centavos… One hundred twenty pesos and ten centavos. That’s the cost of this polo shirt.”

            “Very cheap. This one I’m wearing costs two fifty,” a man commented.

            “So this costs two hundred fifty pesos,” Ka Mao said as he labeled the drawing of the polo shirt “P250.00”.

            A woman snapped, “No… No…The latest I bought for my mister (husband) cost three hundred.”

            “So does mine,” said another man.

            “So… what price do we put for the polo shirt?” asked Ka Mao. He was enthused by all the reaction.

            “Put there three hundred. That’s the average price in the market,” the woman insisted.

            That got Ka Mao delighting inside him, and as though lest somebody asked to lower it again, he quickly erased the first amount he wrote and in its place put the label “P300.00”. He wanted to place this amount at as high as possible: the higher, the better to prove the point he was driving at. It had been commonplace in the movement to talk about oppression and exploitation of workers but always in vague, general terms that achieved only the effect of sloganeering. In the prepared readings of KASAMA, mostly in manifestoes, oppression and exploitation of workers were mainly expressed in terms of low wages making for the miserable living of workers and their families. But why, on the plane of parity, low wages were oppressive and exploitative was never sufficiently explained, if at all. From his reading of Das Kapital, Ka Mao thought he saw the underpinnings of such oppression and exploitation and formulated the lecture he was undertaking now. He resolved to himself that it was this kind of presentation that would crystallize the issue to the workers and thus mobilize them into a militant, revolutionary action.

           

            Continuing his lecture, Ka Mao asked, “If I sold this (indicating what he referred to) piece of textile, these buttons, this thread and this representation of the machine at costs higher that what are indicated, would you buy them?”

            No answer came from the audience, who just wondered what Ka Mao was talking about. As though desperate to keep his intended impact from slipping away, he said, “In other words, would you buy the textile at higher than ninety pesos.”

            “No,” said the woman who had given the cost quote of three hundred pesos. “I’d go for the right price. That’s why some sellers lose customers. They price themselves out of the market.”

            “How about the buttons?” Ka Mao asked.

            “Same thing,” said the woman. “ So with the thread and the… what’s that.” The woman pointed to the bottommost drawing.

            “Depreciation on the sewing machine,” said Ka Mao.

            “All those I won’t buy for more than their market price,” the woman firmly declared. “Why would I let myself be cheated?”

            Ka Mao beamed delightedly, at the same time sighing with relief for having succeeded in leading the lecture to what he had intended it to go.

            “Indeed, why would you?” said Ka Mao. “Or for that matter, why would I? Now, notice that once these different materials are sewn together to make the commodity polo shirt, their prices suddenly shoots up to more than double. To be precise, at a markup of one hundred seventy nine pesos and ninety centavos.”

            Ka Mao wrote the figure on the blackboard: “P179.90.

Then underlining the figure, he said “Where has this markup come from?”

One man interjected, “Of course, there has got to be profit?”

“What determines the profit?” asked Ka Mao.

“The capitalist.”

“Capitalist?”

“The shirt manufacturer.”

Ka Mao did not find it necessary to add anything more to the man’s comment. Rather he saw that it was time he shifted to a flow of the lecture necessary to lead it to his intended conclusion.

“Consider, comrades an exchange between, say, a sofa and a sack of rice. Do you think the exchange is possible?”

The man who had interjected earlier took up the discussion again.

“Surely. Why not?” he said.

“How may the exchange be carried out?” asked Ka Mao.

“I give you my sofa, you give me your sack of rice.”

“As simple as that?”

“How else?”

“What if I say, my rice is dearer than your sofa?”

“Ah… Of course, your rice should be of the same value as my sofa.”

“Yes, certainly. Now, how do we determine that my rice is of the same value as your sofa?”

The man gaped at Ka Mao’s question.

“How?” asked Ka Mao.

“Well, if they’re both worth a thousand pesos, then we exchange,” said the man.

“But that’s precisely what we’re trying to find out. How to determine that our commodities are both worth a thousand pesos,” Ka Mao pointed out.

“You can tell from the craftsmanship of my sofa …”

“You mean, its quality.”

“Yes, of  course.”

“But your sofa is wood, my rice is cereal. No way to measure anything that is equal  between our commodities so that one could be exchanged for the other.”

“My sofa is big, should be worth exchanging with your sack of rice.”

“ My rice is composed of countless grains, your sofa is just a single piece of furniture.”

“But if I sell my sofa for one thousand pesos, I can buy your sack of rice.”

“And I can buy your sofa using that amount you pay me.”

“Right! Great. As if  we have just exchanged my sofa with your rice.”

“So there must be something in your sofa which when measured is worth one thousand pesos…”

“And something in your rice that is also measurable to be worth one thousand pesos?”

“Precisely.”

“What’s that goddamn thing?”

“Let’s get back to our drawings,” said Ka Mao, indicating the drawings on the blackboard. He circled with the chalk the illustrations and labels of the materials for the polo shirt.

“What is not in these materials which is in this polo shirt?” he asked.

No one answered. Everybody stayed quiet for a moment. They seemed to realize that Ka Mao is up to something and they appeared to be bracing themselves for it.

“What is not in these materials which is in this polo shirt?”

Somebody thought he noticed something.  He said, “The polo shirt is a finished product. The materials are just what they are, materials. They have not been worked yet.”

“Exactly,” Ka Mao almost exclaimed. “These materials are simply just what they are, materials for making the polo shirt. While the polo shirt is no longer just the materials but have been sewn together. Mark that, sewn together so as to comprise the polo shirt. In short, as far as making polo shirt is concerned, the materials do not contain labor power, while the polo shirt does. And the labor power expended for making the polo shirt is precisely what can be measured in order to determine its value.”

The audience stared in pleasant surprise.

“That polo shirt you are wearing has no other value than the labor power put in it by the worker who made it. All commodities have no value other than the value created by the workers who made them.”

The audience applauded. Ka Mao inwardly enthused at it, his voice beginning to ring with militancy.

“And yet, who claims that value as his own. The workers?”

“No!” chorused the audience, getting carried now by Ka Mao’s agitation.

“Who!”

“The capitalists!” cried the audience.

Ka Mao was convinced the discussion was going the way he wanted it to go, but he refrained from making any conclusions yet. Get them fired up more, he told himself. Like steel thrust into a blacksmith’s furnace for easy pounding into a desired shape.

“Consider this. A sewer makes an average of five polo shirts in an eight-hour working day. Multiplying the created value of the polo shirt by five, we get a total of… One hundred seventy nine pesos and ninety centavos times five, equals eight hundred ninety nine pesos and fifty centavos. But how much is a sewer paid for working eight hours? One hundred twenty pesos. Subtract this amount from eight hundred ninety nine fifty, how much? Seven hundred seventy nine pesos and fifty centavos.’

Ka Mao wrote the amount in figures “P779.50”, then at once proceeded to draw a horizontal line, labeling its top as “eight hours”. He then divided its entire length into five equal segments, each segment he labeled thus: “I polo shirt”.

“As you can see from our example,” Ka Mao explained, “during the first hour and a half, the sewer produces a value worth one hundred seventy nine pesos and fifty centavos, but his daily wage is only one hundred twenty pesos...”

“Wait a minute,” a man cut in.

“Yes,” said Ka Mao.

“Are you saying that after roughly just an hour working, the sewer already earns his pay for the day?” said the man.

“Precisely,” said Ka Mao, delighted in himself that he did not have to make that conclusion.

“But he continues working all the way to the eighth hour,” said the man.

 “Or a total of seven hours more. This seven hours, Marx calls surplus labor time. Why surplus? Because it is time no longer necessary for the sewer to work. The first hour is the only necessary labor time. The sewer needs that time to work in order to earn his pay for the day.”

“Why does he continue working for the next seven hours?” asked the man who had cut in earlier.

Ka Mao got an idea of attack. Rather than answering the question, he threw it back to the man.

“Why do you continue working at the distillery all throughout those next seven hours.?”

“That’s the rule. We work for eight hours.”

“Just fine with you?”

“I don’t follow the rule, I get fired.”

Somebody quipped, rather jestingly, “No choice.”

Ka Mao fixed a piercing stare at that somebody, who just found himself fidgeting. He slightly shrugged his shoulders, letting out a lame, indecisive smile.

Ka Mao took a subtle deep breath. He turned to the blackboard and indicated the drawings there as he spoke.

“When we work in factories, we are exactly like commodities being exchanged with other commodities, in this case the capitalists expressed in the form of the salaries they gives us, money. Capitalists exchange their money with the labor power of the workers. (He drew a sketch of a worker, labeling it “labor power”, and that of a capitalist, labeling it “money”.) Now, what did we find out earlier? ( He drew two circles, labeling one “A” and the other “B.”) That for two commodities to be exchanged with each other, they must be of the same value. Right?”

The audience indicated their response either with a nod of the head or a pressed smile, while a few voiced out their answers.

“Right.”

“Very well,” said Ka Mao. “So, in the exchange of the workers’ labor power with the capitalists’ money, the same rule must apply.”

“Of course,” chorused a few among the audience.

“What we give (drawing an arrow from the sketch of the worker to that of the capitalist) is what we get (drawing an arrow from the sketch of the capitalist to that of the worker). Even Stevens. Fair enough?”

“No!” protested somebody abruptly as he rose.

Ka Mao held back his delight. To be sure, that was exactly the tenor he wanted everybody to have. But he had not quite driven his point yet, it was only getting near. He felt that he needed to fire up his entire audience before delivering the impact he had intended to do. So he just let the man who rose to go on with what looked like a tirade.

“You call it Even Stevens because that’s the way you have drawn it,” said the guy as he wiped sweat off his face and neck with a small towel that then he would hang around his nape, now take it again to wipe his face once more. “But look at what you drew earlier.”

“Which one?” asked Ka Mao, looking at the blackboard.

“That one where you illustrated the working hours,” said the man.

Ka Mao smiled, already confident that he got the man.

“What about this illustration?”

“It’s clear.  It’s not Even Stevens. After working for only one hour, the sewer makes a value equivalent to his salary. If we are talking about making the workers equal with the capitalists, then after the first hour, the sewer should stop working, since he has already given back to the capitalist the amount that he gave you for your salary. But no, the sewer is made to work from the second hour up to the eighth hour, That means for seven hours the sewer is made to work without pay. You call that Even Stevens?”

Another man rose, asking, “What are you driving at anyway?”

“After the first hour, stop,” snapped the first man. “That’s what’s Even Stevens.”

“No, that wouldn’t be fair.”

“Why not?”

“What about the factory owner? He is entitled to returns on his capital.”

“The fuck!” said the first man, walking over to Ka Mao and then grabbing the chalk from his hand.

Ka Mao wouldn’t yet know what the man was up to nor would the audience, who were rather stunned by the man’s sudden flare up.

The man drew a hard big “x” across the sketches of the materials for making polo shirt, gnashing his teeth as he spoke, “Didn’t we say, these fucking materials don’t have any value in the polo shirt? So why the fuck give him fucking returns. He’s just a damn fucking capitalist. He created no nothing in this dear, dear shirt. Capitalists don’t deserve no damn fucking shit! Not in the first hour (indicating the illustration of working hours on the blackboard). Not in the second hour. Not in all of these eight hours where only us workers work. Only us workers create. Only us workers must own the products we create.”

The audience got carried away by the flare-up of the man and applauded.

“Yes! Long live the working class!”

It elicited a smile of satisfaction from Ka Mao. He withdrew to a side, quietly yielding the floor. He felt he had driven his point clearly and was content being just a listener for the moment.

“But the factory owner needs to live also. His children. His family…,” cut in still another man.

“Let him work!”

 “He wont’t.”

“Why won’t he?”

“He owns the factory.”

“We take the factory!”

“Poor sonnovabitch.”

“At least you speak pity of him. How about him? Does he even say to us: “Poor fucked up, suckered scums.”

“Down with capitalism!” shouted somebody in the audience.

The man speaking for the factory owner made a mock surrender gesture with his hands.

“Okay, get it on,” he said and turned to Ka Mao. “How do you suppose will we take the factory?”

The question gave Ka Mao the final assurance that he had succeeded in placing the audience on a plane where once he cried his final message, they would follow. He got the chalk from the first man who had interjected into his lecture and wrote on the blackboard in big, bold letters: “Economic power begets political power, political power serves economic power”. He underscored what he wrote.

“Who owns the factory gets elected in government and uses the government to enrich himself even more! On and on and on, in a never-ending cycle of feeding the capitalist’s greed for wealth and power. For long we thought the fight is in the factory. But we’ve been wrong. Oh, how hard we at the Makabayan Publishing Corporation have fought. Offered our lives even. Did we get anything? No, nothing. Not a bit of fucked up damn stinking shit. We don’t take the factory. The fight is not there. We take the monster that feeds capitalism. We seize political power!”

All of a sudden everybody seemed to melt in a trance, just savoring what sounded to be a beautiful resonance of Ka Mao’s voice: “Have no fear! Fight!” 

CHAPTER II

THE STRIKE MOVEMENT was the theater Ka Mao found himself thrown into after that first stint as a lecturer on workers revolutionary politics. The strike at the Makabayan Publishing Corporation was a fight in the periphery of that movement; this time around, Ka Mao was in its midst, in fact having much hand in directing it.

Workers strikes were the first order of the day in the national democratic movement, which continued to be led mainly by young activists coming from the students sector. Of course, it was an open secret that the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founded by Jose Maria Sison in 1968 was behind all the upheavals and the party had been proclaiming itself as the “advance detachment of the working class”. But though the party did have quite a few truly proletarian elements in the central leadership (i.e., Ruben Guevarra and Arthur Garcia had been union leaders at the US Tobacco Corporation), quite a number likewise were of petty bourgeois origins like party Chairman Jose Maria Sison, who was a professor at the University of the Philippines. The strike movement must be seen by the revolutionary leadership as the necessary process by which to bolshevize the party down to the lowest level of the party organization, the Party Group, and by that give the entire movement a proletarian mass character.

            The strike movement did serve a practical utilitarian revolutionary purpose. It made  individual workers with combat capabilities surface and get steeled in revolutionary struggle. The movement, therefore, served as a half-way house for testing recruits into the New People’s Army for the real fight in the countryside. Though Ka Mao never realized that he was getting led toward this end, the process he was undergoing indicated he was.

            The KAMAO strike must have been the first step. Next was what he did eventually, lecturing on Marxist trade unionism.

            Then some shake-up came about in the KASAMA secretariat. Ka Erning was to take his turn now joining the people’s army. Ka Edwin, the present head of the Education Department (ED), was elevated to the post of  Secretary General, instead of Ka Choleng, who, as head of the Organizational Department (OD), should get the post, as per party tradition. But Ka Choleng, a steadfast proletarian who fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Ruben Guevarra and Arthur Garcia in the union strike at the US Tobacco Corporation, was meek enough to recognize the intellectual superiority of Ka Edwin, an SDK member honed in student protests. The arrangement resulted to Ka Mao, a member of the Education Department (ED) staff, getting elevated to the post of ED head. There was a little discrepancy in such elevation, because Ka Mao was not a party member. But it didn’t offer much problem. After undergoing the basic party course for membership in the party, Ka Mao was formally sworn in as Candidate Member (CM) of the Communist Party of the Philippines.  

            It was nothing short of euphoria which Ka Mao felt as he repeated after Ka Edwin the solemn oath of holding high ever the party’s supreme principle of serving the people. Ka Mao had gone thirty years at the time and got honed on living up to the words he said. In that oath-taking, he was not just going through a formality. When he swore to serve the people, he was expressing his own, personal resolve.

            That resolve would prove to be the real trouble Ka Mao had to contend with in the course of performing his duties. As ED head, he worried about educating every core group organized in a workplace around which to form a union. Forming core groups was a task of the OD, but once formed, the core groups and the actual unions that would be organized around them were a responsibility of the ED, hence of Ka Mao. Only after the unions had undergone the thorough education process devised by Ka Mao would he turn them over to the Legal Department headed by Ka Ernie, a lawyer, for necessary legal processing in close coordination with the OD for legal and administrative work.

            It was in the kind of education Ka Mao was doing for the workers where he immediately encountered a problem. A good number of local party leaders in the workers sector were vehemently questioning his presentation of the theory of  surplus value. These leaders, though heading local party organizations, were not workers but from the studentry, and it was their view that Ka Mao was omitting entrepreneurship in his presentation of the elements in a commodity. But Ka Mao, invoking Marx, insisted that that was just what it was, capitalists didn’t have a part in the value of commodities, which value is to be wholly credited to the workers.

Allan, a young man with mixed Japanese and Malay looks, was a scion of a rich landed family in Bicol and a student leader from the Ateneo University. He headed the Quezon City-Marikina Area Coordinating Committee of KASAMA. During one seminar, he had strongly protested, “Commodities don’t exist in themselves. They become commodities only when they enter the market for exchanging with other goods. Who enter commodities into the market? The commodities themselves. No! The entrepreneurs do it. It is entrepreneurship that gives life to commodities.”

            “Entrepreneurship!” argued Ka Mao just as strongly. “That’s what capitalism is. And are we not crushing capitalism?”

            “No!” said Allan, like roaring. “We are crushing imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism in order to establish national democracy. Read PSR!”

            That had gotten Ka Mao tongue-tied. All of a sudden, he realized a mistake he must have been making from the very start: to believe that the movement was for overthrowing capitalism and in its place, installing the workers as the new ruling class – the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Allan declared clearly now, the fight was for establishing national democracy, whatever that was.

            Ka Mao was prudent enough to have chosen not to argue any further. National democracy was a subject completely alien to him. Though that topic actually comprised mainly the basic party course he had undergone leading to his oath-taking as Candidate Party Member, he took national democracy as another title for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it was this mindset that carried him through that brief period of the primary party course.

            “National democracy,” he told himself, recalling Shakespeare. “But what’s in a name? A rose called by any other name would smell as sweet. Socialism called national democracy would be just as proletarian as dictatorship of the proletariat.”

            But now that the Atenista  shook him to it, going deeper into the subject took  much of Ka Mao’s time after that. As ED head, he had in his custody a stockpile of five volumes of Mao Tse Tung’s thoughts. He reviewed one thoroughly, Class Analysis of Chinese Society. To his astonishment, he discovcred that the text of the book had been lifted almost verbatim to make for the text of Philippine Society and Revolution by Amado Guerrero, believed to be the nom de guerre of Jose Maria Sison.

            The basic proposition of the Mao Tse Tung book was that because China was a semi-feudal, semi-colonial society, it could not proceed to socialism directly but must pass through the stage of national democracy first. Mao Tse Tung believed national democracy embodied the ideals of the Chinese nation, which was comprised of peasants and workers, petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie.

            To Ka Mao all these Mao Tse Tung thoughts sounded good, except one: that on the so-called national bourgeoisie. Ka Mao believed capitalists have no nations, they only have one universal interest, and that interest thrives on oppression and exploitation of the working class. This was precisely why while Pepito suggested to him to link up with Ninoy early on in the organization of KAMAO, Ka Mao never did; he thought Ninoy was a capitalist and could not be trusted upon for help in forming a union aimed at destroying his class. This belief was strengthened even more by Johnny Litton when he told Ka Mao that he was on the side of the management in the KAMAO strike and so why would he help the union?

            To begin with, didn’t Marx declare in the Communist Manifesto in unequivocal terms: “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.”

            And so in reading Mao Tse Tung’s class analysis, Ka Mao tripped badly on the question of national bourgeoisie: no such thing.

            As applied now to the Philippine condition, Ka Mao’s tripping slammed him flat face to the ground. What could be so semi-feudal about the Philippines already priding in industries in steel, textile, garments, and even car manufacture? It was true that large tracts of lands were used for agriculture, as sugar and rice plantations, but agriculture is an indispensable component of capitalism, and in fact, the owners of the industries are the same owners of the plantations, all the more denying the semi-feudal setup of Philippine society. The thoroughgoing vigorous money economy obtaining in the Philippines was the best proof that the country was a capitalist society.

            Without reservations, Ka Mao would contend that the establishment of the Philippine 1946 republic signaled the final installation in political power of the Philippine bourgeoisie. What else would that bourgeoisie rule in but an economic system corresponding to its political power – capitalism.

            On the other hand, that the Philippines was harboring a number of US military installations did not make the country any less independent than say Japan and Spain, which were also hosting similar US military bases. These bases were cited in Sison’s PSR as a most telling proof that the Philippine government was a stooge of America, thereby making the character of the Philippine revolution one of anti-US imperialism, and hence a struggle for achieving “genuine independence – national democracy.”

            Considering all the foregoing, Ka Mao began essaying Sison’s thesis with suspicion. Why would he reject a straightforward anti-capitalist line? If this line would lead direct to socialism instead of a half-way house called national democracy, so much the better for the workers. But no, Sison, as propounded by his loyalists in the movement, advanced it even with passion and such obstinacy as to have no qualms whatsoever in driving a wedge through the ranks of the workers sector which Ka Mao insisted in continuously honing up on a struggle for achieving socialism.

            Early in his work as trade union educator in the movement, he tried in various instances to link the workers’ struggle to the anti-US imperialism line. In each instance, he got a stinging rebuke from his audience.

            At the seminar of the La Tondena Incorporada, one worker shouted from the back rows quite candidly, “Enough of your isms. Do what you can, we will do what we can.” A thorough learner, Ka Mao drew lessons from all these instances, and the lessons saw him increasingly getting crystallized on what proletarian revolutionary struggle should be.

            As far as educating the workers was concerned, Ka Mao persisted in the line he had devised, which the workers understood anyway and indicated resolute willingness to practice.

            Reaction to this was severe. One evening, an ED staffer to whom Ka Mao had delegated coordination work in the Quezon City-Marikina area reported that he was being denied access to that area. The next morning, he went out of his way to seek Allan and demand from him the reason why the ED staffer was prevented from accessing workers in his area.

            “I’m in charge here,” said Allan.

            “Yes, that’s given,” said Ka Mao. “But I’m in charge of education overall. Anybody I send over does it for me.”

            At Ka Mao’s obvious irritation, Allan chose to be non-belligerent.

            “Look, Ka Mao. This is not really between you and I. It’s a party matter.”

            “What party matter?” asked Ka Mao. He saw Allan was not quite ready to pick a fight.

            “The regional party committee is overall in the NCR. This was the directive from Ka Glo.”

            Suddenly it began to dawn on Ka Mao. He knew Ka Glo, a short, plump lady who looked an ordinary market character and moved about not with any air of a revolutionary. Many times a visitor in the KASAMA headquarters, she impressed Ka Mao as somebody in the higher echelon of the Party leadership. Ka Mao got this impression from the way those who had been in the  KASAMA staff ahead of him were deferring to her. As Ka Mao had consciously made it a personal policy not to ask for information about anybody in the party, he didn’t get to know who Ka Glo was until the information surfaced voluntarily in a discussion with KASAMA co-workers. Ka Glo was the NCR Regional Party Committee head.

            Ka Mao now thought that for Ka Glo to be asserting her assumed territorial authority over the National Capital Region (NCR), some serious thing must be happening in the party. As far as he knew, overall authority on the entire workers sector in the movement was exercised by the National Trade Union Bureau (NTUB) of the Executive Committee of rhe Central Committee of the Party.

            That evening Ka Mao made sure he saw Ka Banero, a mild mannered, fair complexioned gentle guy in his late twenties, whom comrades fondly called Bane. Otherwise minding a college masteral course perhaps, Bane was now bruited about as the new Secretary General of the CPP for which post his credentials were his being head of the NTUB, considered a very powerful bureau under the Central Committee. With the creation of the party regional committees, there arose a conflict between them and the national sectoral bureaus over questions of administration.

For the other national bureaus like women’s and youth and students’, the conflict was more of theoretical in nature and offered no problem on questions of policy. Everybody toed the Sison line.

For the NTUB, the problem was one of policy and hence a serious one.

Bane admitted that there was that serious problem. But beyond such curt admission, the soft-spoken revolutionary would not speak anything anymore. Ka Mao was way down in the CPP ranks to be made privy to sensitive internal higher party matters, though Ka Mao strongly felt it.

Next time Ka Mao needed to coordinate work in the Quezon City-Markinia area, he didn’t think of delegating it to his subordinate but thought of doing it himself. Thus he came into a collision with Allan who insisted he had the mandate from the Regional Party Committee.

Ka Mao banged the table in irritation, declaring, “Fix this mess, damn you!”

            Of course, he was referring to the conflict among higher Party organs. This conflict was the agenda of the next meeting Ka Mao had with Allan, who saw it fit to bring  Benny Tiamzon into the discussion. Benny, head of the workers’ bureau under the Regional Party Committee of NCR explained that according to the party organizational discipline, the lower organ is subordinate to the higher organ, all organs are subordinate to the Central Committee. The regional party committee, Benny said, is a reflection of the Central Committee within a specific region and exercises authority over all sectoral works in that region. Finally,  Benny stressed, the workers sector bureau in the region is subordinate to the regional party committee.

            “All party members are expected to follow party organizational discipline,” Benny said.

            For a moment, Ka Mao stayed just staring at Benny. So young, Ka Mao thought, so lean, so frail, practically no different from ill-fed vagabonds who roamed the streets in nearly tattered blue denim pants and white T-shirt yellowed by time, yet had the cool, callous authoritative mien of a seasoned red political officer able to put across the subtle threat in his words.

            “NTUB or RTUB (Regional Trade Union Bureau)?” was how Benny would have said it tactlessly.

            A very impulsive guy, Ka Mao immediately riled at it. “Fuck, the hell! Here we are fighting for workers liberation and there you are bothering about making proletarian fighters submit to your selfish thirst for political power.”

            Benny kept his cool, the mien of a superior confident about his moral high ground. In contrast, Ka Mao let loose all his temper.

            “The strike movement had not quite taken off the ground,” he continued. “Worrying about who should be authority over which territory only betray a most despicable pettiness in the conduct of the proletarian revolution. Worry about overthrowing the bourgeoisie first, then decide on who ruled over whom and where.”

           

            Thenceforth, Ka Mao just busied himself conducting education among workers elsewhere in the metropolis. Among the KASAMA ACC heads only Allan defied him anyway. In the other areas, local leaders did their jobs in the spirit of proletarian selflessness and petty issues like who exercised authority already did not come into play.

            In the current phase of the strike movement, the urgent task is to promote it nationwide. Workers had to be made aware that liberating the country from oppression and exploitation could not be undertaken by any class other than themselves. This was the core principle of the workers strike movement. Workers provide the lifeblood of capitalism; remove the lifeblood, capitalism dies.

            Thus while the Sison strategy of protracted people’s war had the agrarian revolution as its main form, the strike movement –  with its assertion of having a mass character and of the workers’ placement in the most advanced stage of social production making them wield the most potent weapon, the strike, by which to deal capitalism the final death blow –   inclined to put stress on the working class struggle as the decisive form of the revolution.

            Fierce adherents of the Sison line would take issue on how “decisive form” differed from “main form” in placing the context of the revolution. Could something be “decisive” without being truly the  “main” form? If not, then the strike movement, by being the “decisive form” of the revolution, becomes truly its “main form”.

            And so it was that controversy on the issue got intense in that period when Ka Mao was undergoing the intermediate Party course for his elevation to full-fledged membership in the CPP.  Ka Edwin conducted the study, contained in a pamphlet titled “Gabay sa Pagsasanay ng mga Kadre (Guide in Training of Cadres). It was popularly referred to by party elements as IPO (for Ideological, Political and Organizational), guideposts for summing up the experiences of the Communist Party of the Philippines from the time of its founding by Crisanto Evangelista in 1930, then known as the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), to its merger with the Partido Sosyalista ng Pilipinas (PSP) headed by Pedro Abad Santos, all the way to its re-establishment as the new Communist Party of the Philippines in 1968  by Jose Maria Sison.

            According to the presentation of the study course, the foundation of the PKP committed a dogmatist error by limiting its membership to workers to the neglect of the peasantry. Moreover, the PKP was established as an open legal party and on a mass scale for its membership, neglecting in turn the fascist nature of the state, particularly the obtaining American aggressive colonization of the country. And above all, the establishment of the PKP was under the heavy influence of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) through the Communist Party of the United States America (CPUSA), this in line with the directive from the First International which mandated that communist parties in the colonies were directly under the administration of the communist parties in the colonizing countries. During the Japanese Occupation, the PKP did right by merging with the peasants-based PSP and forming a resistance army called Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon (People’s Army Against Japan) [HUKBALAHAP], resulting to the liberation of the entire Central Luzon, a gain squandered by the Vicente Lava leadership which, in the face of massive Japanese attack, embarked on a strategy of “retreat for defense”. That loss was redeemed subsequently by the guerilla leadership of HUK Supremo Luis Taruc but was squandered anew when the Huk leadership welcomed the returning Americans, who had abandoned the Philippines for most part of Second World War, and decided to participate in the elections for the newly-installed Republic of the Philippines. The Huks, running under the legal party called Democratic Alliance, won 6 seats in the Philippine Congress but were refused to sit, prompting them to return to the hills and carry on the armed struggle until 1950 when Ninoy Aquino brokered the surrender of Luis Taruc, and thus of the revolution.

            In conclusion, the study presentation had the PKP committing Left and Right errors, i.e., either dogmatism or empiricism in ideology, opportunism and military adventurism in politics, close-doorism and ultra-democracy in organization. The correct line, according to the conclusion, was what the re-established CPP had embarked on after its founding on December 26, 1968: Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought (MLMTT) in ideology, protracted people’s war in politics; democratic centralism in organization.

             Ka Mao made his own summing-up of the study. He noticed one unifying thread which ran through the history of the communist party. From its founding in 1930 up to the period   of the founding of the re-established CPP, the guiding hand of the Soviet Union shaped its course. With its open, resolute avowal of adherence to MLMTT – the ideological line of China – the CPP now appeared to be supplanting the Soviet influence in the Philippine revolution with that of China.

            Quite curiously for Ka Mao, 1968 was the year Soviet Premier Brezhnev declared the International Dictatorship of the Proletariat. By that declaration, he was putting all socialist regimes the world over under Soviet tutelage, if not administration and control. China rejected the idea and together with Rumania split from Soviet Russia – driving a wedge through the world communist movement. Intrigued by the anti-Soviet passion that seized Ka Edwin in conducting the intermediate party course, Ka Mao began wondering whether or not the Sison-led revolution was in fact a perfect parallel of the world-scale communist split. In that event, the revolution was not for pushing Philippine workers’ struggle but for advancing the position of China in its world confrontation with Russia.

            The intermediate party course itself brought out the fact that even after the re-establishment of the CPP, the left-leaning Philippine labor movement inclined to Soviet influence. This was betrayed by the way the national democratic movement was fiercely condemning the “Lava-Taruc gangster clique” for promoting what they termed “Soviet social imperialism”.

            Much to his horror, Ka Mao realized that he was not really just in the eye of a Philippine revolutionary storm but also the international storm called the Cold War. And the horror turned into sorrow, and the sorrow into a rage that needed venting.

  

            “I did not enter the movement to fight for China,” Ka Mao riled to himself, even as he repeated after Ka Edwin the words of the Party oath which he was swearing to as full-fledged Party member, having passed the intermediate course.

            Thus it was a labyrinth of not just  nuances but actual realities of world politics which Ka Mao found himself contending with in pushing his part in the workers strike movement. It occurred to him that the deeper you get inside the Party, the more confused you become and more difficulty to overcome in wanting to get out of your one-track mindedness.

            And Ka Mao was a supremely one-mind man. He bet in the races, he stuck to one horse runner instead of several ones as average bettors do to ensure winning. “Only one horse will win, so why bet on many?” he’d tell himself. “What if you lose?” a companion would ask him. “Blame it on your stupidity of not correctly analyzing which horse will win.”

            For that reason, Ka Mao could not hold back on his criticism of Sison’s analysis of the classes in Philippine society. Being a plagiarizing of Mao Tse Tung’s analysis of the classes in Chinese society, he saw it utterly baseless in the concrete Philippine conditions. Moreover, the analysis was made by Mao Tse Tung in the 1930s, when China was a splintered nation, with its regions ruled by warring landlords, which was why while there was an existing central government in Shianghai, the reaches of that government could not go much far.

            “There was no way Sison’s strategy of surrounding the cities through the countryside, and in a protracted struggle at that, could win,” Ka Mao began expounding to the KASAMA secretariat in casual conversations.

            In every instance that Ka Mao took up the topic, he elicited from the KASAMA staffers a kind of collective horror, as from worshippers hearing a great blasphemy. And as always, he would expound on his view that the Philippines was a capitalist society and that the character of the revolution was proletarian – for the liberation of the working class.

            “That’s Troskyite,. Ka Mao,” a girl ED staffer would remind him. “Revisionist. Gilit ka dyan (You’d get your throat sliced)” The girl sliced the point of her thumb across her throat.

            Again the one-track-mind, Ka Mao would dismiss the reminder, “Let it be. That’s how I see it.”

            On the whole, therefore, what Ka Mao realized in his promotion of the strike movement was not only that his entry into the national democratic movement was as a stupid bet on a horse he had not quite analyzed for its propriety at winning. But then he argued to himself time and again: “I am not betting for national democracy. I am betting for the dictatorship of the proletariat. As it is stupid to change horses in midstream, so it is to change horses in the middle of the race.”

            “The thing to do,” Ka Mao had resolved to himself, “is to divest the purely proletarian revolutionary character of the workers’ struggle of its contamination by a misguiding, inappropriate if not deliberately distractive line of national democracy.”

            “Promoting the workers’ strike movement was one big way of doing it,” confided Ka Mao one time to members of the KASAMA ED staff, who inwardly cowered, keeping their thoughts to themselves.

            Ka Mao had thoroughly gone over the NTUB guiding document for the workers’ strike  movement. While acknowledging the workers’ revolutionary struggle as a component of the national democratic struggle, the document laid stress on the decisive role of the workers in dealing the enemy the final death blow. This was fine enough a formulation for Ka Mao. He was not promoting the strike movement as a mere adjunct of the national democratic movement but as a decisive component tasked with bringing about the downfall of the enemy.

“It only behooved me,” so Ka Mao resolved to himself, “to crystallize in the workers that the enemy they would have to crush was capitalism.”  

Or that was what Ka Mao thought. In reality, he would realize that it was easier thought than done.

 At the founding congress for UPM (Ugnayan ng mga Progresibong Manggagawa [Progressive Workers League]), a grand alliance of workers federation organized by KASAMA, Ka Mao realized crushing capitalism cannot be a multi-sectoral undertaking. The affair was only just beginning when  a boy not yet quite a man, student also of the Ateneo, rose to challenge the slogan spread across the wall behind the presidential table: “WORKERS MUST LEAD IN ALL REVOLUTIONARY WORK”.

Speaking like a true blue pedagogue complete with pomp and braggadocio, the boy declared, “While it is true that workers are the leading class, such leadership is not to be meant as  physical leadership by the workers but rather leadership by workers’ class consciousness. And where do workers get their class consciousness, from themselves? No! Proletarian class consciousness is brought into the factories from elements without, from the advance detachment of the proletariat, from the Party of the Proletariat.”

Ka Mao felt like punching the boy on the nose.

He rose, propounding a stirring rebuttal, “Marx said it quite clearly: ‘Social consciousness is determined by social being.’ What your goddamn existence is in society is what your goddamn thinking is. Nobody is exempt from this social truism. Surely there had been exceptional individuals like Marx and Lenin who had transcended their class boundaries and joined up with the class struggle of the proletariat, but their case was not to say proletarian consciousness emanating from without but rather bourgeois individuals turning traitors to their class in order to embrace the class standpoint of  the proletariat. Having thus turned traitor to their bourgeois class, is it correct to say Marx and Lenin were outside of the working class? They had embraced proletarian class consciousness, had attained the glorious social being of proletarians, and when they proclaimed “Workers Must Lead In All Revolutionary Work”, they were proclaiming it, not from without, but from within the workers’ social being.”

Ka Mao would have riled on and on but that he was sane enough to observe basic good manners and right conduct. He would have been just as guilty of violating norms of decorum and civility, no less contemptuous than that boy smarting in his Atenean price tag. You are invited in all graciousness to a feast, you find the servings unpalatable to your tongue, the least you can do is beat it quick, albeit gracefully, as expected of your Areneo breeding. But no, you rant at your host, rattling to all and sundry your displeasure at the meal which, after all, everybody else was enjoying with gusto. So everybody else was a haute cuisine ignoramus; only he had a taste for elegance.

And then Ka Mao recognized the boy. He was the one who cringed shrieking in horror at sight of a cockroach creeping beside his foot during that night of discussions at the KAMAO strike. The rascal had gotten over the creeps, so Ka Mao thought as he essayed the kid rather derisively. But a moment after, Ka Mao concluded that the petty bourgeois was into the spasm of a beast pushed against the wall and must growl in a vain attempt to repel its eminent extinction.

For long before that occasion, Ka Mao had begun feeling it, a sly attack on his person by certain leading elements in the national democratic movement. One such detractor had the guts to say it to him in the face, “You are not a worker yourself. You are a writer. In fact, you belonged to the supervisory ranks at the Makabayan Publishing Corporation.”

Ka Mao would have retorted, “Tell that to Marx.” But he had gone through much a gamut of human relations so that he would realize right off whether one was speaking out of principles or was motivated by empty conceit. That detractor belonged to the latter category; there was no use arguing with a nit head.

            “Petibugoy,” was how workers had begun to describe detractors such as were cited in the foregoing. That was a corruption of the French “petit bourgeois”, referring to the middle class. At the outbreak of the upheavals last year, the petibugoy were at the helm of the movement,  but they were in the main just a noisy, if sincere and brave, mass of mostly students whose only revolutionary credentials were experiences in campus protests on top of lectures and readings on Marxist literatures and histories of revolutions elsewhere in the world. In the lead up to the First Quarter Storm the year before and for most part of the year subsequent to the storm, the petibugoy hogged the limelight in confrontations with the police and the military. But beginning 1971, energetic, fired-up activists made a conscious, determined crash through the walls of factories, organizing unions where there were none or swaying into the mainstream of the national democratic movement unions that were already there.  Into the next half of the year, unions were sprouting all over like mushrooms wherever there was if but a semblance of a capitalist enterprise: a modest-size convenience store or a restaurant or a bakery here, a small garments shop or a tannery or a surplus yard there. While KASAMA began with unions in strategic industries like cigarette manufacture (US Tobacco Corporation), beverage (San Miguel Brewery), and transportation (JD Transit), in the frenzy of 1971 hardly was there any distinction made among enterprises in which to organize unions. The only criterion union organizers were instructed to observe was that those enterprises had at least ten employees, that being the minimum required by law for an employer-employee relationship to be deemed to exist in an enterprise for it to be qualified for organizing a union in. Thus did that period of  1971 offer  a tragic-comic profile of workers’ strike featuring pickets in a small gas station, a petty haberdashery shop, or  a very obscure taho, or mongo bean curd, factory. Invariably these unions ended up going on strike, because that was what they were organized for anyway. Ka Mao would remember that at the start of the KAMAO strike, Jojo reminded him about being wary of activists, as they were not out to win strikes but to just get them exploding.

            To the last cited strike of curd workers had Ka Mao gone toward lunch break that day. He had been into making a film documentary on the strike movement, intending it to be the highlight of a theater play, Isulong ang Kilusang Welga, which he was organizing together with an activist theater group, Panday Sining. For the documentary, he still needed a few footages and for that purpose, he visualized the pathos of poor curd makers having for lunch reject products smuggled out to them by houseboys sympathetic to the strike. But it had been raining hard early on in the day. When he reached the strike area, not a single picketer was in sight in front of the factory gate covered by dilapidated, rusty steel doors.

            Ka Mao took shelter from the rain under the awning of a small store across the street from the factory building. The pesky store owner spoke to him at once.

            “Hey, move over to the side. You are covering my merchandise,” said the plump, middle-aged woman.

            Ka Mao got peeved inwardly. He addressed the woman, “Got cigarette?”

            “What cigarette?” asked the woman in turn .

            “Marlboro,” said Ka Mao.

            “How many?” asked the woman.

            “One pack,” answered Ka Mao.

            The woman smiled as she turned to get the cigarette from a shelf.

            “Make it three,” said Ka Mao, noticing the men crowding themselves inside a makeshift tent on the sidewalk further from the factory gates.

            The woman froze and looked back to Ka Mao, staring inquisitively.

            “Three packs?” she asked.

            “Three packs,” said Ka Mao, already placing on the counter top  a number of peso bills and some loose change for payment.

            The woman beamed wide. She grabbed the money then took three packs of Marlboro from a shelf and gave them to Ka Mao.

            Ka Mao took a little time just standing under the awning, essaying the factory building, while he smoked a stick of Marlboro. The structure almost looked like ruins. He had gone inside that building many times during the period of organizing the union there. Each time he got nausea. So terrible were the working conditions, men bare from waist up, their sweat mixing with the curd from mongo beans which they worked in vats fired in crude wood-fueled ovens. Ka Efren, president of the striking union, a frail middle-aged man, with ribs clearly outlined in his chest, coughed endlessly as he did his chore, with cockroaches swirling all over the floor together with earthworms and an onrush of rats every now and then. One cockroach would find its way up Ka Efren’s trousers and onto his chest where he would slam it with the palm of his hand, crushing its brittle body and getting its fluid innards thrown out, and who knows if they did not make it to the vat where the curd being worked was just as whitish.

In normal circumstances, Ka Mao would have reported these conditions to the health authorities, but if he did and the factory got closed, what about the workers? They’d lose their jobs, all of them being casual employees and enjoyed not any form of legal protection whatsoever; it was precisely because of this that the mongo curd workers formed the union.

Workers were into a war, so Ka Mao honestly believed, and in war he thought people should not bother about fineries of living. That’s the least of their worries. What was most important was for them to get organized in one big, mighty wave by which to sweep the capitalist class off their political rule over society. And Ka Mao had been devoting his whole time and energy organizing workers’ unions and promoting the workers’ strike movement in various facets of the media in order to help bring about that mighty upheaval. He enthused each time he assessed his activities and realized that the movement was achieving substantial headway.

The one single hindrance, Ka Mao thought, was the strong aversion to workers taking the initiative in pushing the revolution. The petibugoy hardly bothered about hiding this aversion.

Early that morning, Ka Mao had been summoned by Bane to the latter’s UG (underground) house for consultation on something. Ka Mao nearly missed Bane, who was in a hurry to leave when he reached the place. It was seven o’clock.

“There is an urgent matter I have to attend to,” said Bane even as he got inside the back seat of his sedan, with a hare-lip guy behind the wheel.

“Our appointment was at eight,” Ka Mao said.

“Emergency,” said Bane, and then continued, “I got feedbacks on how you have been giving education to workers.”

            “Oh,” said Kamao, sensing it wasn’t quite nice, what Bane was going to tell him.

            “I’ll see you later,” said Bane, and the sedan drove away.

            It would only be after nearly two decades later when Ka Mao would learn that Bane would be picking up Ruben Guevarra for bringing to Jose Maria Sison in an apartment in Malibay, Pasay City. There Ruben Guevarra would be introduced to two youth, Danny Cordero and Cecilio Apostol, who would be bombing a political rally in the evening. The reason for the introduction was that Ruben Guevarra would be tasked with bringing the two youth to the interior of the Isabela jungles after the completion of their mission, thereafter to be integrated full time with the New People’s Army.

            That was August 21, 1971.

When the rain subsided, Ka Mao hurried to the tent where the mongo curd strikers were crammed in while having shots of gin.

            “Oh, Ka Mao,” greeted everyone.   

            The skinny union president poured a shot of the liquor in a glass and offered it to Ka Mao.

            “Join us Ka Mao. For a little warmer. It’s cold,” said the man.

            Ka Mao took the glass and gobbled up the gin quick, then handed the glass back to the union president.

            “Just that one, Pres. We’d better hurry up and get this done before it rains again.?

            Ka Mao gave the extra two packs of Marlboro he had bought to the strikers, who eagerly took them and lit sticks to smoke.

            “What are we going to get done with?” asked the man as he lit his own stick, immediately coughing as he took a puff at the cigarette.

            “We’re making a movie,” said Ka Mao. He brought out a handy 8 mm camera from the bag he was carrying.

            “Oh, a movie!” exclaimed the man, again coughing hard.

            “We are going to act!” exclaimed another.

            “Yes,” said Ka Mao, prompting everybody to step out. “Come on, everybody out.”

            “Oh, my, we’re movie actors now.”

            “Ok, Comrades. Pick up your placards. Picket the gate and shout: ‘Have no fear! Fight!’”

            The union president walked up to the gate, already chanting, even as he continued to cough, “Have no fear! Fight!... Have no fear! Fight!... Hey, Ka Mao, you want me to put on my shirt? To make me look better.”

            “Oh, no. Don’t,” said one striker. “You’d look like a clothes hanger.”

            “Be just what you are,” said Ka Mao.

            “A palatable grilled spare ribs,” kidded another man.

            The union president did an act with the chant, “Have no fear! Fight!”

            “Okay, everybody,” prompted Ka Mao. “Have no fear, fight!”

            Everybody else took after Ka Mao with the chant and joined the union president in picketing the front of the gate.

            Ka Mao kept prompting the group with his chant as he made a close coverage of the picket. Then on Ka Mao’s drawing real close to him, the union president threw in spasmodic coughing…

THAT WAS AUGUST 21, 1971.

Done with his chores in the curd factory strike, Ka Mao proceeded immediately to a well-appointed bungalow in a second-rate suburban community. It was the house of Sonny, from whom he had borrowed the 8 mm camera and who maintained a developing laboratory for exposed films in one room. Sonny was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken officer of the workers union at the Philippine Appliance Corporation (Philacor) and the OD head of the Party Group (PG) in that union. Ka Mao intended to finish his work on the film because that was August 21, the eve of his birth anniversary. He had long before set aside August 22 as some kind of a break from his revolutionary work in order to have a furlough with his family.

Sonny and the rest of the Philacor PG were enjoying themselves viewing the television coverage of the big Liberal Party miting de avance (grand rally) at Plaza Miranda in Quiapo; the country was into the heat of the so-called mid-year elections for local and senatorial posts. Onstage were all the Manila local candidates of the LP as well as its entire senatorial ticket.

Ka Mao wished to join the group in the living room. But the present speaker in the rally, a minor local candidate, wasn’t interesting to him and he would rather attend to his business of editing his shots of the curd factory strike. In the improvised darkroom that had been provided him by Sonny, Ka Mao viewed the shots through the light of the fluorescent bulb on the ceiling, cut the tiny strip of film with an ordinary elementary-grader pair of scissors, and then spliced the strips together using a nail polish brush for applying the celluloid cement on the joints.

He gingerly joined the ends of two strips of film and kept them jointed permanently by pressing them in the splicer. Then he viewed the strips of film made through the light from the fluorescent bulb on the ceiling. This way, he scrolled through the series of shots ending in the spasmodic coughing by the curd factory union president. He squinted inwardly, anticipating what the scene was leading to: the skinny guy coughing blood profusely.

At this precise instance, a loud bang startled Ka Mao.   

“Susmaryosep [a religious gasp, contraction of “Hesus, Maria y Hosep (Jesus, Mary and Joseph)]!” came the loud, shrill gush of a girl’s terror from among the  television viewers; the others were shocked to speechlessness.

            Ka Mao rushed out into the sala where the group was viewing the television coverage of the LP rally. Another blast was taking place in the rally, from a grenade  exploding right in front of the stage but below it. People were panicking while the television announcers excitedly made impulsive comments.

            “There goes another one,” Nap, secretary general of the Philacor Party group, said with bated breath.

             “The LP rally is being bombed, Ka Mao,” Sonny spoke excitedly, seeing Ka Mao rushing out of the dark room. “That’s the second grenade blast. The first one landed on the stage. Everyone was hit.”

            “God, this is terrible, terrible,” came the impassioned commentary by the television announcer, who was cowering against a wall while people shrieking in terror stampeded past him, some tripping and falling and then getting up again and rushing on. “It’s a massacre. Everybody onstage is down and bleeding and unmoving. Mayor Bagatsing. Senator Salonga, Senator Osmena. All the senatorial candidates of the Liberal Party look like they’re dead. God. What satanic act this is!”

            “Can Ninoy be dead?” asked a girl among the group, nearly in tears.

            “We don’t see anybody on the stage who’s up on his feet. Ninoy must have gotten it in that first blast alone. He should be the first target.”

While the others in the living room focused on the continuing television coverage, Ka Mao all of a sudden melted in recollections of events past, now like pieces of a puzzle falling into place.   

The third quarter of 1971 did present a picture of waves upon waves of workers’ strike sweeping over the metropolis in what Ka Mao would like to think as that one mighty crescendo toward toppling capitalism in the Philippines. Along with the workers’ strikes, students protests on the streets and in campuses were a daily fare. And appearing as an exclamatory punctuation mark to all these protests was the intriguing intensification of the political battle between President Ferdinand Marcos and Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr., with the latter exposing an alleged plot by the former to stay in power beyond his constitutionally-allowed two-term tenure.

It was a gift or something which Ka Mao had of being able to read through a social phenomenon and at least postulate on its actual impact. In this particular case, Ka Mao strongly noticed a unifying thread, though not quite clear as to what such thread exactly was, among the students’ protests, the growing participation in demonstrations and rallies of those sectors in the middle class like teachers, medical professionals as doctors and nurses, and a sprinkling of so-called nationalist businessmen. In every convergence of vari-colored protests, Ka Mao would single out the workers as bannering the slogan “Down with capitalism!”, with the other sectors sharing the common cries of “Down with US imperialism!”, “Down with feudalism!”, “Down with bureaucrat capitalism!”, “Down with Soviet social imperialism!”, and “Marcos Hitler, Diktador, Tuta! (Marcos Hitler, Dictator, Puppet!)” And Ka Mao would notice that marshals of the demonstrations would reprimand those carrying the KASAMA anti-capitalist streamer and coerce them into holding the streamer down.

In every such big rally, Ka Mao would stress his observations if only to himself. The workers sector were not one with the others in the line of anti-US imperialism, ant-feudalism and anti-bureaucrat capitalism. Raising the slogan of “Down with Soviet social imperialism” indicated that the movement was anti-Soviet, and in the context of the heightening cold war, what was most anti-Soviet but the US, and yet in the context of the national democratic movement, US imperialism was being depicted as the main enemy. So it struck Ka Mao as a possibility in such rally that as far as the “Soviet social imperialism” issue was concerned, the movement was working to US favor.  But China was also at odds with Russia on the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, so the national democratic movement must also be pro-China, which in fact it avowed it was. But then again, getting the optimum flak in these protests was Marcos, and whom would such turning Marcos into smithereens profit the most but Ninoy Aquino whose obstinate obsession was to become president in 1973!

Going by basic syllogism, Ka Mao figured out that by demonizing US imperialism and depicting Marcos as a US stooge, the national democratic movement was advancing the political ambition of Ninoy Aquino. So Ninoy was anti-US?

Ka Mao would think back on the 17-year-old Manila Times cub reporter who gained fame covering the Korean war. Ninoy eventually ingratiated himself to then Secretary of National Defense Ramon Magsaysay and brokered for the would-be president peace negotiations with the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (peacetime offspring of the HUKBALAHAP). Magsaysay would soon be elected president and Ninoy would sit as his adviser on peasant affairs and eventually broker the surrender of Huk Supremo Luis Taruc, hence of the 50,000 militarily strong rebellion he headed.

Now in reading through Ninoy, Ka Mao had observed, you read him through Magsaysay, and in reading through Magsaysay, you read him through then US Air Force Lieutenant Col. Edward Lansdale, whom Magsaysay had befriended back in 1950 when, as a congressman then, he visited the United States to seek help in modernizing the Armed Forces of the Philippines. When Magsaysay became president, Lansdale was already Chief of the Joint United States Military Assistance Group (JUSMAG). In that capacity, Lansdale was one of two main players in crushing  the Huk rebellion; the other one, Ninoy Aquino.

How then, Ka Mao thought now, could Senator Benigno Aquino Jr. be anti-US when from way back he had been one with US in crushing the proletarian struggle in the Philippines?  Yet it was very apparent that as the year was into its second half, Ninoy’s attack against Marcos matched in intensity the national democratic salvo against US imperialism, as if one was mutually contingent upon and serving the other.

Ninoy’s incessant demonizing of Marcos and the revolutionary movement in turn increasingly striking at US imperialism were phenomena always paralleling each other such that it prompted Ka Mao now to wonder if the anti-US imperialist line had not indeed been crafted so as to ensure the downfall of Marcos and the installation of Ninoy at the presidency of the land.

“What would happen to the anti-US struggle?” Ka Mao would even end up scolding himself for arriving at the logic of it all, “With Ninoy in place, what need was still there for a revolution?” 

But there was the reality of the Constitutional Convention of  1971 which would amend the constitution in order to extend the Marcos term beyond 1973. This would frustrate for good Ninoy’s personal scheme for the presidency, hence all other designs attendant to the scheme, US or otherwise. If putting a front against “US imperialism” would do the trick, why not? In the first place, US imperialists had had a history of damaging their own people just to get popular American resentment for an enemy they wished to war against. They blew up their own battleship Maine just off the coast of Havana, Cuba, killing thousands of US navy men aboard, whereupon the enraged American people gave their approval and support to the US imperialists war against Spain, then colonizing Cuba. It was an imperative for US imperialism to defeat the Spaniards in Cuba as a bargaining chip for Spain’s cession of the Philippines to America. Just this kind of imperative was what the US faced into the second term of Marcos. The Philippine President had begun charging the US exorbitant rentals for its several military installations in the country, foremost among them being Clark Field in Pampanga and Subic naval station in Zambales, the largest US military bases outside of America. And the rentals had been increasing accordingly as there were a number of reviews of the rental agreement, which reviews taking place every five years. Likewise, getting Marcos to support the US war adventure in Vietnam was costly: billions of dollars for the 2,000-strong troops support dubbed “Philippine Civic Action Group (PHILCAG)”.

Moreover, with Marcos inclining more and more toward developing friendly relations with the Soviet Union and China, he was increasingly turning out to be not the docile US boy American imperialists had programmed him to be.

Ka Mao saw that Ninoy’s urgency – hence that of US – was to get the country exploding in chaos and violence so as to prevent the approval of the eminent 1971 Constitution. This had been worrying Ka Mao exceedingly. In the first place, he didn’t join the revolution to help push the Ninoy ambition to be president. And in the second place, he was not fighting US imperialism for the life of him. He was aspiring to help in the overthrow of capitalism. No amount of demagoguery would convince him that the main enemy in the current struggle of the Filipino workers was US imperialism. He believed that every Filipino worker had for his adversary a specific capitalist and that capitalist could be overthrown by overthrowing the political power that served him. Did Castro openly fight US imperialism? Ka Mao would always argue: No, he didn’t; he fought Batista and won. So it was always possible to overthrow capitalism in one nation; consolidate the gains in that nation for the time being; and worry about overthrowing capitalism in other nations later. Of course, US would do its mighty best to prevent this from taking place, as it should be doing now in the Philippines.

            Seeing the mayhem at Plaza Miranda, Ka Mao wondered to himself if this was not the beginning of the US damn best way of frustrating the revolutionary struggle of the Filipino working class. By ordinary logic, the bombing would damn Marcos as he had not been damned yet before, and this could lead to a popular rising that would bring about the downfall of what had for long already been depicted as a would-be dictator. Quickly soon after, with the 1971 constitution frustrated, the political processes, after a brief period of revolutionary situation, would go their normal courses under the 1935 Philippine constitution, presidential election would be held in 1972 which Ninoy would win, and in 1973 he would start serving as President.

            All according to plan, which Cory Aquino, his wife, would admit during her presidency, thus: “As we all know, Ninoy really wanted to be president. Everything was just planned for 1973.”

            However, as political pundits would observe, Marcos was always a good five years at least ahead of Ninoy. For instance, in the lead up to the declaration of martial law, it would be said that Marcos would individually confide to his circle of generals varying versions of his plans. None of such plans might be the real one on his mind. It was just his way of finding out who among his generals would be telling his plans to Ninoy. That was how the alleged plan for the declaration of martial law,  Oplan Sagittarius, came into the knowledge of Ninoy. Because Marcos had confided that Oplan Sagittarius to only one of his confidante generals,   once Ninoy began ventilating the issue to the public  it became easy to identify who leaked the info to him and so must be sacked.

            Now, this night of August 21, 1971, Ka Mao’s paramount concern was, who ordered the bombing of Plaza Miranda? Since he was of the conviction that Marcos could not have given that order, then it must be somebody else who did it, and where else would that somebody come from but the anti-Marcos camp who would benefit most from Marcos’ thorough damnation.

            “I know Marcos is evil,” said Nap. “But the fuck, this one’s driving me crazy. It can only be the act of a monstrously mad man.”

            “Isn’t Marcos that mad  a monster?” said Tats, the ED head of the Party Group.

            That was one thing Ka Mao disliked about the tendency of most people involved in the national democratic movement: to equate Marcos to anything bad that happened in the country. Government corrupt, blame it on Marcos. Middle East crude oil prices rising, blame it on Marcos. Criminality rampant, blame it on Marcos. Prices of goods in the market skyrocketing, blame it on Marcos.

            “Has any of us ever paused to think?” Ka Mao said, expressing his displeasure over the comment.

            “What about, Ka Mao?” asked  Sonny.

            “That by calling Marcos monster, we are in fact calling the Filipino people idiots!”

            “Marcos is a monster but I’m no idiot,” snapped Tats.

            “If Marcos were a monster, then all the more should his monstrosity attest to his exceedingly high intelligence,” Ka Mao elaborated. “Imagine how cleverly he had camouflaged his beastliness to the extent of hoodwinking the entire nation into voting him president of the Republic of the Philippines.”

            “Indeed, he fooled us all,” said Tats.

            “Have sixty million Filipinos been such a condemnable bunch of idiots?” countered Ka Mao.

            Tats could not find a word to say. He stared at Ka Mao, like asking, “Et tu, Brutus?”

            “I voted for Marcos in 1964, mesmerized by his brilliance.” declared Ka Mao.

            “You voted for his re-election in 1969?”

            “Yes,” snapped Ka Mao. “And I did it not as an idiot.”

“You baffle me, Ka Mao. Are you saying Marcos is good?” Tats said almost chidingly.

“I have no quarrel with Marcos…” said Ka Mao, but he was cut short by Tats.

“He is our enemy!” snapped Tats, scolding Ka Mao now.

“People don’t become enemies of Marcos all because Marcos is an enemy of Ninoy.” Ka Mao declared with resolve.

“Who is your enemy, Ka Mao?”

“My enemy is capitalism.”

“Isn’t Marcos a capitalist?”

“Indeed, yes.”

“So why don’t you have quarrel with him!”

“I can’t have quarrel with Marcos for Ninoy!”

Tats found no immediate retort. Ka Mao went on speaking.

“We are into this Plaza Miranda bombing. I’m saying Marcos is such an intelligent man that it should be an elementary matter for him to refrain from doing anything – much less a monstrous act! – that would be popularly blamed on him.”

Everybody in the living room gaped, realizing the impact of Ka Mao’s words.

“Who would order the bombing?” asked Sonny.

At that instance, the television coverage of the bombing incident focused on Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr. briskly walking down the stairs of the Manila Hilton Hotel, flanked by belligerent-looking aides and gripping a cocked .45 in his right hand, eyes rolling from side to side, grit on his face, evincing the daring and bravado of a Rambo out to engage an opponent in a shootout.

“Hey, there’s Ninoy,” said Nap, almost exclaiming.

The girl in the group exclaimed, “Thank God! He’s alive!”

An announcer was delivering an annotation: “It was plain luck that at the time of the bombing at Plaza Miranda, the secretary general of the Liberal Party and the perennial star of the party extravaganzas, Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr., was at the Manila Hilton attending a wedding reception in which he was the principal sponsor. But now, as we can see, he is rushing to the bombing scene ready to do battle. Fellow countrymen, let’s all pray this does not degenerate into something worse, something terrible. Already two have been confirmed dead, more than a hundred injured, and it is still uncertain what exactly were the injuries the LP senatorial candidates sustained, though it’s been ascertained Senators Salonga and Osmena along with Manila Mayor Ramon Bagatsing have been hurt real bad.”

Ka Mao stayed staring at the scene. The announcer’s annotation repeated continuously in his mind: “Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr…. secretary general of the Liberal Party… perennial star of the party extravaganzas… plain luck that at the time of the bombing… was at the Manila Hilton attending a wedding reception… plain luck… plain luck…”

Ka Mao kept his horror to himself: the brilliant political superstar, executing a magnificent fighting stance, while grieving people moved in desperation to carry the scores of injured to the hospital, as well as the apparently already dead, still hoping to get them revived somewhere, somehow.

But the horror would haunt Ka Mao through the years: oh, the long years of much-anticipated but never-came-about rampant and widespread Marcos repression of people’s liberties in, first, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus that Marcos announced within hours of the Plaza Miranda bombing, and subsequently the Marcos declaration of Martial Law a year after that, and finally, the fourteen years of Marcos dictatorial rule that although was characterized by, indeed, repression of civil liberties, such repression was carried out on a highly prudent and selective manner so as to clearly distinguish between Marcos’ rabid political enemies and the people at large who were spared from fascist terror. Ka Mao keenly observed that while the New People’s army grew by, in a manner of speaking, leaps and bounds and accounted for military confrontations between it and government forces, battles had been limited between armed combatants of either side and did not harm civilians in any marked, mass-scale manner. In fact, during the first decade of martial law, the Philippines registered significant economic growth such as it had never done in the past; a trace-back of statistics would bear this out. The country’s economy began experiencing rapid decline with the assassination of Senator Benigno Aquino upon returning from his self-imposed exile in the United States in 1983.

 CHAPTER III

  

THAT, AGAIN, WAS AUGUST 21, the date when Plaza Miranda was bombed – when the entire Liberal Party senatorial ticket were critically injured but for one, Ka Mao’s unending source of horror, Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr.

            Just as Ka Mao refused to believe the popular notion that Marcos ordered the bombing of Plaza Miranda, so did he that Marcos ordered the assassination of Ninoy Aquino. Again, he would reason out that Marcos was of such high intelligence that he would never commit the stupidity of killing a man who, politically, would be better off alive than dead. Why would Marco get Ninoy killed when doing so would only make Ninoy a hero? If Marcos would never order the assassination of Ninoy, then that Ninoy got assassinated anyway became Ka Mao’s cause of greater horror. Ka Mao increasingly saw the logic of Ninoy’s death and accordingly cringed from the horror of it all.

            In 2010, at the approach of the Presidential elections where Ninoy’s son, Benigno Aquino III, was the leading contender, Ka Mao finally decided to commit his supreme horror to writing. Without any publication outlet in mind, he wrote:

KNOWING NINOY AQUINO

      By Mauro Gia Samonte

Part 1

The Celebrated Speech

            “People who claim to know you before Martial Law say that if you were elected president you would have acted exactly (like) if not worse than Marcos. Will you comment on this impression? Has seven years of solitary confinement changed your political attitude, character and credibility?”

            The question was one of several posed to Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr. during the open forum following his celebrated speech at the Freedom Rally organized by the Movement for Free Philippines  at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angeles, California on February 15,1981. While Ninoy had done away with other questions with characteristic rhetorical pomp, this particular reaction from the audience appeared to dumbfound him for a moment, and he visibly had to resort to a standard recourse in a debate whereby for want of a ready retort one grabs at the first diversionary ploy: ignore the topic.

Ninoy grabbed the question sheet from the moderator and in a move betraying that his mental reflexes were at work, he fashioned his rebuttal from a deep glance at the question. He said, “I would like to begin with the first line of the sentence ‘People who claim to know you before Martial Law say if you were elected president you would (have) act(ed) exactly (like) if not worse than Marcos.’ The defect is in the first line, ‘People who claim to know you…’” And with that came his curt, final answer: “They don’t know me.”

For the rally participants, it had been a nice afternoon listening to the  legendary Marcos antagonist dishing out diatribes they all wanted to hear, and now that he delivered yet another splendid punch line, the packed capacity audience rippled their amusement all over the huge landmark auditorium. They were all anti-Marcos elements (save of course for those who came incognito Marcos supporters) and here was a man who since recuperating from triple heart bypass operation a year ago had gone  on a speaking spree all over the United States, denouncing what he called Marcos tyranny. A common desire with the man to see Marcos ousted seemed all it took for them to believe they knew him.

But how many of the hundreds who paid their way to the rally really knew Ninoy; how many privy to what had been going on in his mind all his past forty eight years, more specifically the period when he began nursing his ambition for the presidency of the Philippines? How sure were they that they were not among those Ninoy alluded to as not knowing him.

To be sure, even as they  amused at his remark, Ninoy’s facial expression did not at all indicate that he intended to entertain. He stared at the audience like seeing there the guy who sent in the question and with a cocksure, not-so-subtle intimidating grin signaled to him the message: “You don’t play smart on Ninoy, man.”

The Knowing Begins

Knowing Ninoy is  no mean job.

It requires, first, gaining access to information that ordinarily are limited only to the immediate circle of his family. But any disclosures in this regard will necessarily undergo a thorough sanitizing in order to preserve the hero-image that for the great majority of the Filipino people has already been institutionalized for the man. It’s worth citing here that a wealth of information about Dr. Jose Rizal and the propagandists in Spain in the late 1800s was provided by personal letters he wrote to her sisters. These letters have been compiled in a book titled “100 Letters of Rizal”. Might we ask in this light if any of Ninoy’s children, Kris, Noynoy, etc., would be willing to share with the public the letters Ninoy wrote to each of them immediately prior to his coming back to the Philippines in 1983. Despite the visibly relentless and meticulous efforts made in projecting the supposed heroism of Ninoy, none of these letters which could lead to a better understanding of the circumstances that compelled Ninoy to come home had ever been made known to the public. Those letters, for one, could best depict the real state of mind and health Ninoy was in at the time, making it possible to solve the paradox of a man knowingly walking into his death. Quite unlike Rizal who was fleeing the Spanish authorities when captured to be subsequently tried and executed at Bagumbayan, Ninoy had been advised by the very authorities of the country not to return to the Philippines for fear for his life, yet he insisted in coming home to face death exactly as he would describe it. The letters Ninoy wrote to his children might just help unravel the mystery of Ninoy’s death.

The necrological services for Cory at the Manila Cathedral was one golden opportunity for Kris to have touched on those letters to dramatize with even greater  pathos the passing of her mother in the same perceived  and promoted heroic fashion as did her father. Certainly Kris touched on little anecdotes with Cory which effectively mesmerized her listeners. Couldn’t Kris have made a greater performance had she quoted, too, from the last words her father sent her?

So far, Noynoy, too, has not come forward to reveal what Daddy wrote just before he walked right into his death.

The day Ninoy left America in his return journey to the Philippines, Ninoy telephoned Steve Psinakis, head of the Movement for Free Philippines in the United States, to bid him goodbye. It is to our fortune that Psinakis had seen it fit to record the talk that transpired between him and Ninoy on the phone. Twenty five years after Ninoy’s death, the recorded phone talk was aired publicly for the first time in Ricky Carandang’s show on ANC. The talk gave much hint on what  had gone on in Ninoy’s mind when he decided to come back to the Philippines.

Final Revelations

Here is an excerpt from the phone conversation:

NINOY: Now, this is the latest, Steve, that I can give you.

STEVE: Yeah…

NINOY: My source is Cardinal Sin.

STEVE: Yes…

NINOY: Number One. Marcos checked in at the Kidney Center.

STEVE: Yes…

NINOY: The experts went, saw him, they did a test. He flunked all tests and the                                          conclusion was if they operate on him it would be fatal.

STEVE: Uhuh…

NINOY: So he went back to the palace. He is no longer responding to medication and  

              he will have to be hooked up to the dialysis machine now more often. How he

             will last with that machine on, I don’t know. If they apparently… they are now                              moving to put Imelda in effective control and they are going to revamp the                                      cabinet with Ongpin (Jaime) most probably emerging as prime minister and                                finance minister, Danding Cojuangco or Ver, defense minister, O.D. Corpuz,                             possibly foreign minister, and maybe Ayala, I mean Enrique, maybe

             agriculture minister, I don’t know.

STEVE: Uhum…

NINOY: But there’s a major shakeup. Marcos met with his generals and apparently

             said goodbye to them last Friday. He was on television in Manila 24 hours ago                              commenting on the boxing fight of Navarette and Talbot to show the people he                  is okay. But it’s a matter of time, so he wanted three weeks to collect his                                   thoughts, write his memoirs, complete his book and most probably

             craft the final stages of his administration. He is a man now, terminal. He

             knows he is going and that’s the background that I am coming in.

STEVE: Well the… I heard some of this yesterday. After I came on TV, I got some                                 reports that, not of course as authoritative as yours but pretty much the same

               that something was wrong and they could not operate and so forth. At any

              rate the thought that comes to mind is that this is good and bad – good in that

              he is   going and he knows it. He might show some compassion for the country

              and treat your return with pragmatic… I don’t know what they are thinking. I                           hope… and that’s the good part.

NINOY: Yes…

STEVE: The bad part maybe  that the hardliners like Ver who are bulldogs without

              any political savvy, who may think that they are next in line. Obviously such

              people would look at your return very oh…

NINOY: Well there are two reports I received along that line.

STEVE: There’s not so much time and see…That’s what I’m afraid about.

NINOY: Well, if they pinpoint the plane I’m coming in. The rumor in Manila is that

             I’m taking the private jet of Enrique from Hongkong. But that all places are

             being guarded and they may close the airport by Sunday or turn back the plane

             if they would be able to pinpoint which one I’m coming in.

STEVE:  (muffled reaction)

NINOY: The third one and this is the real iffy. They have two guys stationed to knock

              me out at the airport. They will try them for murder, they will convict them,

              but they have assurances.

STEVE: Ah… let’s not think about that.

NINOY: Yeah, that’s the… these are the things that I”ve been alerted. So, I don’t

              know what options they will do now. But I’m meeting with ASEAN leaders

              beginning Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Indonesia, Suharto might

              receive me.Malaysia is already firm, and Thailand is just about firm. Now,

             Japan has sent me word that if Imelda is in place, Nakasone is willing to use

             his economic clout.

STEVE: Ah, really, huh?

NINOY: Yeah… To tell Imelda that if you treat Aquino nicely, we can dialogue.

STEVE: Oh, that’s good news, alright.

NINOY: Yeah, that’s the best news I got from Japan.

STEVE: That is darn good news.

NINOY: Nakasone is willing to send a private envoy, a secret private envoy with a                                   personal letter making a plea for me. If I’m still alive and in prison, that if

              they will treat me gently and come up with some kind of an understanding,

              Japanese economic assistance will continue. Because they are very uptight

              that if the woman takes over and there will be chaos, you know, it would be

              bad. Now the ASEAN leaders on the other hand, feel this way. ASEAN today

              is already one region. And any instability in one part of the ASEAN will scare

              investors in the entire region.

STEVE: (reaction)

NINOY: That’s why they are very very uptight about the possibility of chaos and                          instability in the Philippines with Imelda. And that is the background of my                          conversation with them. That I am not going to upset the apple cart but that

              we can harmonize our movement.

STEVE: (reaction)

NINOY: Now to what externt they will be able to mitigate the hardliners, I don’t know.                           That’s a chance we’ll have to take. If I survive Sunday and I get to prison,

              and I’m there in a week’s time, I can get the works going.

STEVE: (reaction)

NINOY: I’m picking up a letter from Nur Misuari telling them that if the government                             will trust me as a negotiator, then they can start talks again. But they will not                          talk to anybody else.

STEVE: It sounds to me that you have an awful lot of plusses on your side.

NINOY: Right. Those are the trump cards I’m bringing home. Which of course can be                          negated if one character gets to throw me out.

STEVE: (reaction)

NINOY: If I get into prison, there is no doubt, like a 100%, I will be brought directly to                             prison. I may not even get a chance to talk to anybody. There on the ground.

              But it’s okay. As long as I’m alive and in prison, I can start using my trump

              cards. I will try to hold out for a meeting with Marcos. Now that he is about to

              meet his Maker, I’m almost confident that I can talk to him and sell him

              something. Although the Cardinal tells me that “If you think you can sell

             Marcos a bill of goods like return to democracy and electoral processes, forget

              it. You’re dreaming. He’s no longer in that stage.” This is the Cardinal’s idea.

              I don’t buy it. Because I don’t think that a man who is about to die will be, you

              know, too hard-headed.

STEVE: Well, just an input for an opinion here. I hope you are right, but as far as I’m                           concerned I think the Cardinal is right. I think Marcos not only because he                                  doesn’t to… that’s academic at this point in time. But I think he has just…

              he’s so deep and he has no choice but to stay where he is and leave things as

              they are. And certainly, we hope that that’s wrong because we don’t want that.

NINOY: Okay, oh, goodbye Steve.

STEVE: One last question.

NINOY: Yes?

STEVE: Any whatsoever… Any indication from US side that there might be somewhat                          help on the cooperative or absolutely nothing?

NINOY: No. No indication. Except that they are watching me.

STEVE: Of course.

NINOY: They are following all my steps. But I’m still hopeful that sanity will prevail                               and they will know that eventually, they’ll have to come to talk. Because I

              don’t think they’re very happy with the woman running the show.

The Psinakis document reveals, among other things, the following elements: Firstly, that Marcos was rumored to be dying in three weeks time and that there was a scramble for taking over power among the First Lady Imelda Marcos and Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Fabian Ver.  Secondly, that Ninoy was moving in desperation to prevent the power grab most probably by Imelda and that Ninoy intended to fill in himself the power hiatus in the event Marcos died, a fact borne by Ninoy’s revelation to Psinakis his having already made arrangements with ASEAN leaders like he were already the Philippine head of state and government. Thirdly, that Cardinal Sin was in on Ninoy’s plans, whatever they were. Fourthly, that the US had not distanced itself from Marcos until that time but was keeping track of Ninoy’s every move. And fifthly – and this is what intrigues – Psinakis is afraid about time running out on something.

Recall the line by Psinakis: “There’s not so much time and see… That’s what I’m afraid about.” What is time in this dialogue running out on? They are talking about an imminent power grab by either Imelda or Ver in the event of Marcos’ death. What seems to be so pressing that Ninoy should return to the Philippines now in order to prevent the Imelda or Ver power grab or else never be able to do it anymore at a later time? So what if Imelda or Ver succeeded Marcos in three weeks time.  Ninoy was having a grand time delivering speeches in the US lambasting Marcos. He could shift his attacks to whoever would take Marcos’ place and stay on track in his campaign against the dictatorship meanwhile that, as he complained in his LA speech, “the Filipino people loved their slavery, if the Filipino people have lost their voice  and would not say no to a tyrant.” But no, he must return to the Philippines that August 21 of 1983  -- like a journalist rushing to meet a deadline. What deadline did Ninoy have at that stage of his life which prompted him  to return to the country that day or else forever fail in his resolve to dismantle the Marcos dictatorship?

Records of Ninoy’s Secrets

From the way Psinakis and Ninoy punctuated their phone conversation with an exchange of  pleasantries, Psinakis sounded one who shared intimate things with Ninoy. But would Psinakis be willing to share further with the public the secrets he shared with Ninoy?

 In any truly objective inquiry into the person of Ninoy, accessing intimate family records and those of close associates who must also protect his hero-image is, if not eliminated outright, given the least priority.

            For instance,  Dr. Rolando M. Solis, the doctor who operated on Ninoy in Dallas, Texas for a triple heart bypass, admitted in an interview with the Philippine Daily Inquirer his being made privy to many of Ninoy’s confidential undertakings to such an extent that he wondered why Ninoy was that so trusting to him.

            “Well,” recalled the doctor of Ninoy’s answer, “if I could trust you with my life, I can trust you with anything.”

            But would Dr. Solis reveal anything?

            “I will carry his secrets to my grave,” declared the doctor.

On the other hand, certainly nothing bars one from sourcing information from public records, particularly newspaper stories and various other media accounts. But in the specific period of the Marcos-Ninoy conflict, media reportage almost always suffered from having to take sides in the struggle, and in this respect, Ninoy enjoyed a great deal of advantage all the way. In his testimony in the joint Senate Blue Ribbon Committee and Committee on Justice and Human Rights investigation in October 1989 on the Plaza Miranda bombing, Communist Party of the Philippines central committee member Ruben Guevara described the media character at the time quite succinctly, if aptly: “…ang buong mass media ay kritikal sa administrasyon (the entire mass media was critical of the administration).”

The demonizing Marcos was subjected to reverberated not just in the tri-media but also in such underground fora as discussion groups (DGs), teach-ins, rallies and demonstrations, ODs or operation dikit (posting of slogans) or OPs or operation pintura (writing out graffiti with paint brush) all over city walls, and in every forum shrieked the singular slogan: “Marcos! Hitler! Diktador! Tuta!” And that was just the First Quarter Storm at the advent of the 70s, a long way off to Martial Law. 

It would be dangerous to rely purely on the media for data in drawing a truthful picture of Ninoy, not only because on the scale of parity it would be unfair to Marcos but, more importantly,  also because the need for objectivity would be the ultimate loser. What could result from such an endeavor would be, at the very best,  a rehash of  pieces already written, many of which may even have by now been  archived in libraries and in cyberspace, or at the very worst a futile attempt to straighten out what have been crooked depictions of the character of Ninoy.

Far from being a dry chronology of events, history is a living thing. It does not stagnate, must not be allowed to stagnate. It is to the misfortune of the Filipino people that in that very crucial period – the end of Spanish colonialism –  when Philippine history needed to be presented in its utter reality, what dominated the undertaking were works that accommodated the desires of the new colonizers, the Americans. In that accommodation, gaping blanks in the story of the Philippine nation were created. Only at the advent of a few exceptional historians who dared unshackle from American-sponsored  strictures did writing of history take on a determination to fill in those blanks  – setting the records straight, saying what had not been said before, and more importantly, undoing what had been wrongly done.

Such, too, is the task facing anybody desiring to put Ninoy now in the correct perspective.  No such a writer would be sufficed by the clichés and concoctions that though in time of tumult effectively sucked multitudes into the grand spectacle of deifying Ninoy, this time around those multitudes urge a redoing of history in the face of the realization that from the time of his “martyrdom” 28 years ago, things have not gotten any better.

Acquisition of Hacienda Luisita

The ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor is no more dramatically demonstrated than in the continuing struggle of the Hacienda Luisita farmers to regain the land taken away from them by Cory’s branch of the Cojuangcos by virtue of a government deal facilitated with President Ramon Magsaysay by, yes, Ninoy in 1957.   As special emissary of President Ramon Magsaysay, Ninoy successfully brokered in 1954 the surrender of Huk Supremo Luis Taruc and the entire Huk rebellion.

According to the arrangement that emerged out of Ninoy’s effort, ownership of the 6 thousand-plus hectares of the Hacienda Luisita together with the sugar mill, Azucarera Central de Tarlac,  was acquired by Jose Cojuangco, Sr., Cory’s father, through dollar loans from the Manufacturer’s Trust of New York as well as from the GSIS amounting to P16 million on guarantee by the Philippine Central Bank. The condition for the CB guarantee was that within 10 years, the hacienda would be distributed to the farmer tenants.

            As history would have it, Ninoy eventually became the manager of the hacienda. Under his watch, the largest sugar land in entire Asia was converted into a commercial corporation in which the farmers’ claim were converted into shares of stocks.

Though it looked good in one respect, for that seemingly placed the farmers on equal footing with the Cojuangcos in owning the hacienda, it nonetheless brought about the effacement of the tenancy relationship between the Cojuangcos and the hacienda peasant toilers: no tenancy, no land, no farmers. Thus did the 10-year period lapse but no distribution ever take place of even a square inch of the land.

In December 1985 the legal battle waged by the farmers had resulted in a favorable court ruling ordering the enforcement of the original condition of the Central Bank-guaranteed loans used for the Cojuangco acquisition of Hacienda Luisita. But that was the period of upheavals resulting from Cory’s contesting Marcos’ win in the 1986 snap presidential elections. With Cory’s installation in power by virtue of the EDSA people power revolt just two months after the promulgation of the court order, nothing had been heard of the ruling ever again.

The next time the Hacienda Luisita farmers figured again in the news was in the infamous Mendiola Massacre on January 22, 1987. Led by the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, farmers marched to Malacanang, where now sat Cory as president, to press for genuine agrarian reform, the distribution of the Hacienda Luisita to its farmers being among the demands. Courageously breaching the police and military containing forces, the protesters were fired at mercilessly, a carnage that, along with the scores wounded, resulted in the killing of thirteen – Hacienda Luisita farmers included.

One familiar with the events of the First Quarter Storm in 1970 cringes with horror at recalling that at no instance on Mendiola at the time did Marcos ever unleash such monstrosity. Of course what this comparison with Marcos should reckon with is Ninoy; the one sitting at Malacanang at the time of the Mendiola Massacre was not Ninoy, it was his wife. But then, as their marriage vow in 1955 went, “for better or for worse”, and Ninoy having borne all the “worse”, Cory now enjoyed all the “better”.

Cory was no longer president on November 16, 2004 and having rid herself of national worries –  except perhaps persistent threats to touch her 1987 Constitution – she could have made more focus on the domestic concerns of Hacienda Luisita. On that day, 3,000 sugar mill workers and  hacienda farmers went on strike demanding better wages and  improved working conditions as well as the implementation of the Central Bank and GSIS loans condition to distribute the hacienda to the tillers and farm workers. The strike was broken up with Simba tanks from which came the heavy fire that wounded over a hundred and killed 14 strikers.

That carnage had gone down in history as the Hacienda Luisita Massacre, doing a lot better than the Mendiola Massacre, but at any rate, as far as Cory was concerned, doing herself one better in terms of protesters killed and, well, a lot better, too, in terms of wounded. Until that time, no other personally-motivated killings in the people’s memory could match the Hacienda Luisita incident, so that for Cory it should be a pity that the Manguindanao Massacre took place which with the murdered numbering 57 bettered her record fourfold – nay, counting the Mendiola Massacre victims, just two-fold. But nothing to worry about, her son is aspiring for exactly the same post Ninoy had lain his life for, which she got anyway, and with the hacienda farmers’ struggle going unceasing and Noynoy’s victory at the 2010 polls anchored on the demise of her parents, the number of dead Hacienda Luisita farmers could go up… and counting.

One trembles with horror at Cory’s remark made sometime after taking over Malacanang: “Now I know why people would kill for this position.”

Plan for the Presidency

It would appear that Ninoy’s political career was one grand plan for his ascension to the presidency. At 23, he became mayor of Concepcion, Tarlac. At 27, he was the youngest to become a  vice-governor of a province; he took over the governor’s post of Tarlac in 1961 from the incumbent who resigned. In the succeeding gubernatorial elections, he won in all 17 municipalities of Tarlac, scoring the biggest majority win by a gubernatorial candidate. And in the senatorial elections of 1967, he became the youngest ever – at 35 – to be elected senator of the land. That was two years into the first presidency of Ferdinand E. Marcos.

In 1969, Marcos won his second term as president, something Ninoy could have effectively contested due to his already immense popularity at the time. In his 700 Club television program interview in 1981,  Ninoy already called the  heights he had reached in Philippine politics as “the pinnacle of political power”. The only problem was that under the 1935 Constitution, the age requirement for the president is at least 40 years old, which he would exactly be in 1973. So as Cory confirmed, for Ninoy everything was just planned for the 1973 elections.

Early on, therefore, the stage was set for the classic confrontation between Ninoy and Marcos – a strife that would drag on for the next two decades, with each side digging into his treasure chest of tricks, dirty or otherwise, to gain the upper hand.

Here’s how a  voiceover on a video presentation on Youtube makes a comparison between the two.  “Bago nag-martial law, si Ninoy ay isang tradisyunal na pulitiko. Isang  henyo sa larangan ng pulitika, pero tradisyunal pa rin. Tulad ni Marcos, eksperto siya sa paggamit ng mga tradisyunal na instrumento ng eleksyon sa Pilipinas: guns, goons and gold. Tulad ni Marcos, isa siyang balimbing. Umalis siya sa Partido Nacionalista at lumipat sa Partido Liberal noong nasa kapangyarihan ang Partido Liberal. (Before Martial Law, Ninoy was a traditional politician. He was a genius in the field of politics, but just the same, traditional. Like Marcos, he  was an expert at the use of the traditional instruments in Philippine elections: guns, goons and gold. Like Marcos, he was a turncoat. He bolted the Nacionalista Party and joined the Liberal Party when the Liberal Party was in power.)

Curiously enough this narration would have perfectly answered the question posed at the start of this piece: Would Ninoy have acted exactly like or even worse than Marcos if he were elected president?

In his speech proper in the Los Angeles MFP gathering, he admitted early on his use of the “gold” element in his electoral campaigns.  He said, “For the past 25 years I have been a politician, we used to pay people to hear us.” The statement is self-explanatory; Ninoy was used to paying money to electorates. But of course, that was a prelude to a jest, which he uttered thus: “This is the first time people paid to hear me.” And the gallery cheered. But whether jest or not, the admission was a statement of fact.

As to “goons and guns”, Ninoy admitted in his speech that he had had at least  liaison with  groups advocating the use of arms for the attainment of political ends. He narrated an incident when a group of young men and women “from the better families in the country” and “from the better schools” took him to their training camp outside the United States and showed him their stockpile of weapons and ammunition and told him “they were ready” and they wanted him to lead them.

Ninoy admitted telling this revelation to Marcos, who, however, reacted by declaring that Ninoy should have been operated on not in his heart but in his head, the implication being that Ninoy was insane. Soon after, as Ninoy related, bombs exploded in Manila.

Says Tina Monzon Palma in her narration  for a video presentation titled Beyond Conspiracy: 25 Years After by the Worldwide Foundation for People Power: “But if one were to confront him with guns, he (Ninoy) would not hesitate to meet violence with legitimate force. Some theorize that pushed to the wall, Ninoy could be just as ruthless as Marcos.”

Part 2

The Plaza Miranda Bombing

The most shocking event that rocked the nation in 1971 was the Plaza Miranda Massacre. Here are pure facts of the incident. It was the  proclamation rally of the Liberal Party for its senatorial and Manila local candidates in the mid-year elections that year. Present were all the Liberal Party local candidates and the party’s  entire senatorial ticket. Absent was the LP secretary general and star of the show, Ninoy Aquino.

Ninoy’s absence strikes one as quite odd. As Senator Jovito Salonga says about Ninoy, “Siya ang aming star. Dahil pagka siya ay nakita ng tao na nasa stage na, naghihiyawan ang tao ng bomba. Gusto namin ay bomba. (He was our star. Because once the people spotted him onstage, the people shouted bomba (bomb). We want bomba (bomb).)”

That August 21, 1971, bomba did explode in Plaza Miranda.

 Two powerful grenades rocked the rally. One missed the stage, blasting people on the spot, killing 8, among them a 10-year-old girl vendor, and seriously injuring 120. The other grenade landed onstage, seriously injuring all senatorial candidates, the most critical being Senator Jovito Salonga and Senator John Osmena.

By this time, the conflict between Marcos and Ninoy had intensified so that their respective positions on the incident became the focus of the people’s attention. Who had the more credible story and who told that story in the more convincing way?

On other occasions before the Plaza Miranda bombing, Ninoy had enthralled as much as thrilled throngs of listeners with theatrics  on the ostentations of Imelda –  her jewelry, her shoes and hand bags and parasols; had enraged audiences with statistics on corruption in the Marcos conduct of government; and had particularly appalled the nation with his expose of the Jabidah Massacre, which killed all but one of 60 Muslim youth allegedly recruited and trained for an invasion of Sabah to regain the territory for the Philippines. These exposes provided the backdrop for Ninoy’s revelations that the Plaza Miranda bombing was a step toward the full-blown implementation of Oplan Saggitarius, the plan Ninoy alleged as the scenario for the institution of military rule in the country.

            Subsequent events appeared to bear Ninoy out in the  propaganda war. [Within hours of] the Plaza Miranda carnage, Marcos suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and indeed by virtue of it proceeded immediately to arrest  a number of activists without the customary warrants. And Ninoy had a heyday condemning the writ suspension as a prelude to martial law.

            On the other hand, Marcos accused the Communist Party of the Philippines as the perpetrators of the massacre. According to Marcos, the CPP carried  out the bombing in order to advance its design of toppling the government and taking over political control of the country. Since Marcos had on various occasions accused Ninoy of coddling the communists, if not being a communist himself, he, too, had a leg to stand on in his battle with Ninoy for credibility in the eyes of the nation. By equating Ninoy with the communists and then accusing the communists as the perpetrators of the Plaza Miranda bombing, Marcos cleverly impressed upon the nation that it was, in the end, Ninoy who masterminded the dastardly gruesome act.

            In point of logic, Marcos’ slant was quite sound. If it hadn’t been Ninoy who planned it all, why was he safely away when the bombing took place? Normally, as Secretary General of the party conducting the rally and as the perennial star of LP public meetings, Ninoy was expected to be at the Plaza Miranda occasion even much earlier than the others. True, there was this wedding celebration he was attending at the precise time of the bombing, still he could have easily prioritized the Plaza Miranda LP rally, it being expectedly for him the most urgent concern that evening.

            In point of truth, Marcos’ equating Ninoy with the communists did have, too, a substantial measure of it. But not after nearly two decades would proofs surface that such Marcos equation of Ninoy with the communists were substantially valid.

Testimonies of CPP Top Brass

            Beginning July 1989 or thereabouts, the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee and the Committee on Justice and Human Rights chaired by Senator Wigberto Tanada conducted a joint hearing aimed at ferreting out the truth in the Plaza Miranda bombing. Invited to the hearings were former stalwarts of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) Ruben Guevarra, Ariel Almendral and Pablo Araneta.

            As a backgrounder, it must be cited that in 1972 the Communist Party of the Philippines sent a delegation to China to work out a shipment of arms to the  left insurgency in the country. But the arms shipment aboard the old fishing vessel named MV Karagatan was botched and much of it fell into the hands of the Philippine military. The arms shipment fiasco formed part of the immediate reasons why Marcos declared martial  law in September 1972.

            The bungling of the MV Karagatan operations was traced by the CPP to an alleged mutiny led by one Danny Cordero which prevented many operatives from carrying out their mission of transporting the arms from the vessel to the interior of Isabela jungles.  As a consequence, government forces discovered the operations.

            Eventually Cordero was tried for the alleged offense of mutiny. Guevarra and Almendral  were members of the military tribunal constituted to conduct the trial; Guevarra was the tribunal chairman. Araneta was one of three accused of the munity offense.  Cordero was found guilty and sentenced to die;  the other two co-accused were meted lighter punishment. In a desperate attempt to avoid the death sentence, Cordero declared that he had done a great mission  for the party so that he did not deserve to be executed. When questioned what mission he was talking about, Cordero said he was one of three party operatives who bombed Plaza Miranda.

            Following are excerpts from the minutes of the joint hearings conducted between July and November 1989 by the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee and Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

XXXXXXXXXXX

             EXCERPT FROM MINUTES OF THE OCTOBER 25 HEARING:

             THE CHAIRMAN: Ngayon, babalik tayo kay Danny Cordero. Kilala mo ba yan, si                                                   Danny Cordero, at kailan mo nakilala ? (Now, we go back to

                                          Danny Cordero. Do you know him, Danny Cordero, and when did

                                           you   know him?)           

MR. GUEVARRA: Si Danny Cordero po, hindi ko po… una ko po siyang nakita pero  

        Danny Cordero, Sir, I don’t… I first saw him but)  

            THE CHAIRMAN: Kayo lang dalawa? (Only the two of you?)

MR. GUEVARRA: Nuong bago po ---- hindi po, kasi nuong nag-usap kami, tatlo

                               kami, si Jose Maria Sison, ako at iyong isang Ka Erning na kasama

                              namin. Pero po sa bahay na ‘yon, ang nanduruon mga kasapi ng

                              Komite Sentral, nanduruon din si Herminigildo Garcia IV at saka si

                              Manuel Collantes. Si Manuel Collantes po ang sumundo sa aking                                      kinalalagyang UG house nuon, inihatid naman ako doon sa                                         kinalalagyan nila Sison at ang sumalubong sa amin sa ibaba sa                                        apartment ay si Herminigildo Garcia.(At the start ---- I mean, no,

                              you See, Sir, when we were talking, there were three us, Jose

                              Maria Sison, me and one Ka Erning who was with us. But in that

                              house, members of the Central Committee were there,

                              Herminigildo Garcia IV was also there and also Manuel Collantes.

                              Manuel Collantes fetched me from my UG house then, he then

                              brought me to the UG house of Sison and company and the guy

                              who welcomed us downstairs was Herminigildo Garcia.)  

                               

                              Kaya po nuong dumating ako, sinenyasan ako ni Herminigildo

                            Garcia na “hintay ka sandali may kausap si Ka Alex sa itaas.”

                            Ginagamit po iyang alyas nuon sa amin Alex, ibig sabihin si Amado

                            Guerrero.(That’s why when I arrived, Herminigildo Garcia signaled

                            to me “wait a minute Ka Alex is talking to somebody upstairs.”

                            That was the alias used then as Alex, meaning Amado Guerrero.”

                             

                                         So, naghintay  po ako, wala pang ilang sandali sumenyas na si Ka                                                Erning sa akin, sabi umakyat ka na. Nuong pag-akyat ko po,

                                       inabutan ko si Sison kausap iyong ilang kabataan lalaki nuon. (So, I

                                        waited, Sir, and then a few moments after Ka Erning signaled to

                                        me, saying go up now. As I went up, I came upon Sison talking to a

                                        few male youth.)

            THE CHAIRMAN: Kausap sino? (Talking to whom?)

                          

            MR. GUEVARRA: Mayroon pong ilang kabataang lalaki na kausap siya sa loob ng                                                 kuarto at patapos na po nuong dumating ako. Iyon nga po, duon ko                                                    unang nakita ito si – natatandaan ko, nakita ko duon si Danny                                               Cordero, si Ka Daniel, nakalimutan ko na ring pangalan, at si                                                Cecilio Apostol. (He was talking to a few male youth inside the

                                         Room and the talk was ending when I reached upstairs. So there,

                                         that was when I first saw this – I remember, I saw there Danny

                                         Cordero, Ka Daniel, I have forgotten his name, and Cecilio

                                         Apostol.)

            THE CHAIRMAN: Pinakilala ba sayo? (Were they introduced to you?)

            MR. GUEVARRA: Hindi. Sa Partido po kasi --- sa Partido po kasi, merong                                    

                                         compartmentalization na policy ang Party na kung hindi -- kung

                                         wala  kang direktang kinaalaman sa isang gawain, hindi mo na

                                         dapat malaman ito, kung hindi sinabi sa ‘yo, huwag ka nang

                                         magtanong.(No. You see, in the Party, Sir – in the Party, Sir, there

                                         is a policy of compartmentalization whereby if you are not – if you

                                         have no direct involvement in an activity, you are not supposed to

                                         know this, if you are not told about it, don’t ask about it.)

            THE CHAIRMAN: Papaano mo nalaman na iyon na ngang mga tayong iyon ay si                                                    Danny Cordero, si Ka Daniel at Cecilio Apostol.(How did you

                                            know that those three were Danny Cordero, Ka Daniel and

                                         Ceceilio Apostol?)

            MR. GUEVARRA: Nuong nasa Isabela na po sila. Kasi po, kaagad silang ipinadala sa                                             amin sa Isabela (When they were eventually in Isabela. You see,

                                          Sir, they were immediately sent to us in Isabela.)

           

            MR. CHAIRMAN: So, nakita mo lang itong mga taong ito kausap ni Jose Maria Sison                                  nuong kahaponan na ‘yon? (So, you only saw these people talking

                                         To Jose Maria Sison that afternoon?)

            MR. GUEVARRA: Opo, kasi po, nuong araw na ‘yon, bago nangyari po iyong                                                         pambobom… paghahagis ng granada nuon, may pinag-usapan

                                         kami ni Sison na ano ba ang dapat gawin talaga sa mga hinihiling

                                        ng mga pulitiko. Nabanggit ko nga po sa kanya nuon “ano kaya,

                                        kung may humiling kaya sa amin na likidahin namin o tambangan

                                        namin ‘yong kalaban ni ganitong partido, ano kaya magagawa kaya

                                         natin.(Yes, you see, Sir, that day, before the bomb… the throwing

                                         of  grenades then, I discussed with Sison about what to do about

                                         certain requests by politicians. I mentioned to him, “what if

                                         somebody asked us to liquidate or ambush an enemy of certain

                                         party, could we do it?”)

                                           Ang natatandaan ko pong sabi ni Sison sa akin nuon, “Hindi

                                         naman tayo mga ano, eh, mga bayaran eh. Hindi naman tayo

                                         nagpapaupa para pumatay. Sa katotohanan…”sabi n’ya, “may ---

                                          magsasagawa tayo ng pambobomba ngayong gabi sa isang meeting.

                                         Hindi sa dahilang humingi tayo ng kabayaran, kundi dahil gusto

                                          nating umiral and gusto nating mangyari.” (What I remember

                                          Sison telling me then, “We are not that, eh, mercenaries, eh. We

                                           are not hired killers. In fact… “he said, “there will be --- we will

                                           be bombing a meeting tonight. Not for reason that we are asking

                                           payment, but because we want our plans to materialize.”

            THE CHAIRMAN: Sinabi sa iyo ‘yan mismo ni Jose Maria Sison? (That was told to

                                           You  by Jose Maria Sison himself?)

            MR. GUEVARRA: Magkaharap ko kami sinabi n’ya. (We were face to face when he

                                            told me that.)     

            THE CHAIRMAN: Kailan sinabi sa iyo ‘yan? (When did he tell you that?)

            MR. GUEVARRA: Nuon pong gabi na – na nakita ko sina Danny Codero sa bahay na                                                       ‘yon. (That night when – when I saw Danny Cordero in that

                                         house.)

            THE CHAIRMAN: At sinong kaharap nuong sinabi sa iyo ‘yan? (And who was

                                         Around when he told you that?)

            MR. GUEVARRA: Tatlo po kaming magkakaharap, iyong isang Ka Erning.

                                          Pagkatapos po…. (There were three of us in a huddle, there was

                                          Ka Erning. And then, Sir…)

            THE CHAIRMAN: Ka Erning. (Ka Erning.)

            MR. GUEVARRA: Opo. (Yes, Sir.)

            THE CHAIRMAN: Hindi mo alam ang kanyang tunay na pangalan? (You don’t

                                          know his real name?)

            MR. GUEVARRA: Kilala ko po ‘yong kanyang tunay na pangalan pero hindi ko po                                                  masasabi kung anong legal n’yang pangalan.         Tapos po, nuong                                                    matapos masabi ni Jose Maria Sison ‘yon, sabi niya .                                                                    “alis na ako”. Nagmamadali po siyang umalis. (I know his real

                                          name but I can’t tell what his legal name is. Afterward, when Jose

                                          Maria Sison was finished with the statement, he said “I will be

                                          going”. He left hurriedly.)

                                           Ngayon ang sabi n’ya kay Ka Erning, “ipaliwanag mo sa kanya ang                                             isang mahalagang bagay” (Now he told Ka Erning, “explain to

                                          him an important thing”)

                                           Di, umalis na po si Sison, kami naman ni Ka Erning naiwan sa                                                    kuwarto.  Dito ko po nalaman iyong tiyak na plano.(So Sison left,

                                         Ka Erning and I were left in the room. Here I learned the specific

                                          plan.)

Ang sabi ni Ka Erning, “Bobombahin natin ngayon ang miting nga                      (sic) Liberal party. Pinababatid ko sa ‘yo ang bagay na ito, dahilan                   ang mga taong magsasagawa nito o iyong mga kasamang                            magsasakatuparan ng misyon ay ipadadala sa Isabelo (sic). Kung        matutuloy ang misyon…” sabi n’ya “sa loob ng ilang araw o sa loob            ng isang linggo ay ipadadala sa Isabela itong mga taong ito at dapat                    na ito’y kaagad na maipasok sa loob ng forest region, huwag nang           magtatagal sa mga bahay-bagsakan, at subaybayan ninyong mabuti   sa ideologia at pulitika”.(Ka Erning said, “We will bomb today the meeting of [translation of “ng” instead of “nga”, obviously a typographical error] Liberal Party. I am letting you know this thing, because the people who will do it or those comrades who will perform the mission will be sent to Isabela [instead of “Isabelo”]. Once the mission is accomplished…” he said “within days or within a week these comrades will be sent to Isabela and must be kept inside the forest region, must not be made to tarry long in the safehouses, and you should closely guide them in ideology and politics.)

                                            Nuong ko lang po natiyak iyong gam…. pero hindi ko po alam na                                               ‘yong mismong miting na ‘yon ang hahagisan ng Granada. Kaya

                                         po, nagpahatid na rin ako sa kila Collantes nuon at kay Magtanggol                                               Roque, inihatid ako sa isag (sic) UG House naming dito sa Pasay.                                                        Nuong umaga ko na lang po nalaman na nabasa ko --  nadinig ko

                                         na sa radio at nakabasa na ako ng diyaryo na iyon na ang nangyari.

(Only then was I became sure about the gam… but I did not know that that very meeting was the object ot the bombing.”

                                            So, naghanda na po akong bumalik ng Isabela nuon, nuong

                                         dumating sa akin iyong miyembro ng National Liaisons Commission

                                         naming, dalawa sila ang naghatid sa kinalalagyan ko si Magtanggol

                                         Roque, may iniabot na maliit na sulat uli sa akin, galing kay Ka

                                         Erning.(So I was preparing for my trip back to Isabela when two

                                         members of our  National Liaisons Commission came to see me,

                                         Magtanggol Roque handed me a letter from Ka Erning.)

Ang nakasulat po ganito: “Alam mo na ang nangyari kagabi, ilan         lamang ang nakakaalam nito at ito’y hindi na dapat pang malaman        ng ibang pinuno maging ibang kagawad ng Komite Sentral. Ang                  inumang maglabas ng impormasyon na ito, ay may pinakamatapat        … ay may pinakamabigat na kaparusahan.” Ganoon po ang                  nilalaman ng sulat. (The letter stated:  “You already know what happened last night, only a few know about this and it should not be known to any other leaders including members of the Central Committee. Who ever discloses this information, will have a most faithful… the heaviest punishment.” That was what the letter contained.)

            EXCERPT FROM MINUTES OF THE OCTOBER 18 HEARING

            MR. ALMENDRAL: ... Kinaumagahan ay isang maghapon na naman iyong

                                          pa(g)lilitis pa  rin.(The following  morning, it was another day-long

                                         trial.)

THE CHAIRMAN:  Anong oras nag-umpisa nang kinaumagahan? (What time did it    

          start that morning.)

            MR. ALMENDRAL:  Pagkakain lang ho ng agahan. (Right after breakfast.)

            THE CHAIRMAN: Mga anong oras iyon? (Around what time was that?)

MR. ALMENDRAL: Siguro po mga alas otso, alas nuebe nag-umpisa na ulit.

Pagkatapos ay pagdating ng hapon, kalagitnaan ng hapon, ay     ubos na ang lahat Ng pali-paliwanag ay hiningian na lang si Ka Cris ng huling salita niya kung ano ang kanyang magiging paliwanag. At nagsalita iyong tao. Ang sinabi niya, “Kailan man ay hindi ako magtra-traidor sa partido. Sa katunayan, bilang patunay sa aking katapatan sa partido, ay mayroong isang napakaselan na gawain na itinalaga sa akin ng mga namumunong kasama na hindi ko mababanggit kung ano iyong gawain na iyon.” (I think around eight o’clock, nine o’clok the trial went on. Then in the afternoon, mid-afternoon, exchange of arguments was done and Ka Cris was asked to make his statement. And the guy spoke up. He said, “Never have I turned traitor to the party. In fact, as proof of my loyalty to the party, there is this very sensitive task that leading comrades had asked me to perform which I cannot divulge.”)

THE CHAIRMAN:  At pagkatapos niyang masabi iyan,  ano ang naging reaction

                                   Nuong mga nandoon sa hukuman? (And after he said that, what

                                   was the reaction of those who were in the court?)

          MR. ALMENDRAL: Noong masabi niya iyan, iyong isang naka-upo doon sa

bandang harapan na may hawak na carbine, si Ka Ambo, ay nagsalita siya. Ang sabi niyang ganyan, “Niloloko mo yata kami, e. Ano iyong sinasabimong misyon-misyon, e, hindi mo mapapatunayan iyan” (After he made that statement, someone who was seated somewhere in the front row who was holding a carbine, Ka Ambo, spoke up. He said, “You’re fooling us all.  You talk about a mission which you cannot prove.”)

                                             Ngayon, bilang presiding, si Ka Peters naman binigyan niya ng                                                    instruksyon si Ka Cris na, “Sige, ipaliwanag mo kung ano iyong                                                   misyon na ‘yon.” (Now, as presiding officer, Ka Peters for his

                                            part instructed Ka Cris, “Go ahead, explain what that mission

                                            was.”)

Nag-isip ng kaunti si Ka Cris, pagkatapos sinabi niya, “Ako ang                           naghagis ng… ako ang isa sa naghagis ng granada sa Plaza                             Miranda.” (Ka Cris thought for a while, then he said, “I was the

One who threw… I was one of those who threw the grenades in

Plaza Miranda.”)

                                             Di, dahil ako wala akong kaalaman tungkol doon at buo nga iyong                                              kaalaman ko, paniwala ko noon na si Marcos ang may kinalaman

                                           sa pagbomba ng Plaza Miranda, nagulat ako noon, at palagay ko                                                              ganoon din ang naging epekto sa napakarami doon sa kagrupohan                                                     Walang nagsalita. Kahit si Ka Peters sa pagka-ala-ala ko hindi pa                                               siya unang kumibo, at sinundan pa ni Ka Cris ‘yong kanyang

                                          salita. Sabi niya: “Sa katunayan”, sabi n’ya “nandito sa

                                          kapulungang ito ang isa pa sa kasama ko doon  sa Plaza Miranda.

                                          Hindi ko babanggitin ang pangalan n’ya, kung gusto niyang tumayo

                                          para patotohanan ang aking sinasabi, bibigyan ko siya ng ilang

                                          minuto.” (So, since I had no knowledge about the matter and I

                                          fully

                                          believed that Marcos had a hand in the bombing of Plaza

                                          Miranda, I was shocked then, and I presumed most everyone in

                                          the gathering was also shocked. Nobody spoke anything. I

                                           remember Ka Peters was not even the one who spoke first after

                                           that, and Ka Cris went on with

   his revelation. He said: “In fact,” he said, “another one of those

   who were with me is here with us in this meeting. I won’t

   mention his name, if he wants to stand up in order to prove my

   words, I’ll give  him a few minutes.”) 

                                            Di tahimik na tahimik na ganyan, wala ring tumayo. Hindi

                                          naglaon,nagsalita na ulit si Ka Peters at sinabi niya na na “ayon

                                          sa….” Una sinabi n’ya, tawagin na lang nating PMB, Plaza

                                          Miranda Bombing”. (So it was all quiet, nobody stood up. Soon Ka

                                          Peters spoke again and he said that “according to…” To begin

                                          with, he said, let’s call it PMB, Plaza Miranda Bombing”.)                                       

            THE CHAIRMAN: Sinong nagsabi n’yan? Sino?” (Who said that? Who?)

            MR. ALMENDRAL: Si Ka Peters po. “Tawagin na lang nating PMB”, dahil nga sa

                                            laki ng – aywan ko kung anong dahilan nila, pero tinawag nilang

                                            PMB at tinawag na nga naming PMB ‘yon noon, dahil sabi n’ya,

                                            “Itong PMB ay tinukoy ng partido na kagagawan ni Marcos. Kung                                                 tinutukoy mo na kagagawan ng partido ‘yan ay isang panibagong                                                usapin iyan”. (Ka Peters, Sir. “Let’s call it PMB,” precisely 

                                             because of the gravity of – I don’t know their reason, but they

                                             called it PMB and we called it PMB then, because he said so.

                                             “This PMB had been referred to by the party as the handiwork

                                             of Marcos. If you refer to it now as an undertaking by the party,

                                             that’s another issue.”)

                                              Doon sa bagay na ‘yon, hindi na dinagdagan ni Ka Cris ‘yong                                                      kanyang pananalita tungkol sa Plaza Miranda at doon na rin                                                      natapos, humigit kumulang ‘yong usapin ng pagtatanggol n’ya sa                                                   sarili n’ya. (On that point, Ka Cris didn’t add anything to his

                                            words on Plaza Miranda and that’s where more or less he ended

                                            his  defense of himself.)  

           

XXXXXXXXXX

Questions from Jose Maria Sison

            In the senate hearings, Jose Maria Sison was given the right to shoot questions which were amply accomplished by his counsel, Atty. Romeo Capulong. But the questions needed to be submitted first to the joint committees for asking, consonant to senate rules, by the Chairman himself.

            In the October 25 hearing, Almendral reiterated his stand on the Plaza Miranda Bombing and to a question by Jose Maria Sison he made a stirring repartee.

            “Okay,” said the Chairman, “The next question. You denounced the CPP/NPA and its leaders particularly Jose Maria Sison in your statement of February 17, 1984. Would it be correct to say, since this date you have declared war against this revolutionary movement and its leaders and vowed to do the best you can to crush this movement. Are you now working or cooperating with the Philippine military, any public official or any other person or group, local or foreign, whose duty, interest or political objective is to crush the Philippine insurgency?”

            Although he betrayed hurt sensitivities and a long-lurking exquisite pain within him that needed to be expressed, Almendral nonetheless answered in high-breed fashion, succeeding in boomeranging the intended damage of the question while clearly demonstrating the man’s sincerity and purity of intentions.

            He said, “If somebody from the right wing did Plaza Miranda, and I knew about it, sir, I will speak against it, sir, and I will lay down my life to testify on that question, sir. It so happened that this Joma Sison is affiliated, sir, with the CPP and presents an idea that he is a communist, sir, but it is not as an anti-communist that I stand before this body nor is it as an anti-communist that I present that statement of denouncing Jose Maria Sison and the bombers of Plaza Miranda, sir. It is the act and the crime of Plaza Miranda that is the thing that I’m questioning, sir. And, you know, sir, they had a favorite saying that Marcos was the best recruiter of the NPA, sir. I think in the Philippines, the best agent of the CIA is Joma Sison, sir, because what he has done is, he has created a polarization of Philippine society especially through the Plaza Miranda bombing, and he should be answerable for that crime, sir.”

Interview with Dante Buscayno

            During the period of the Plaza Miranda bombing, it would have been completely impossible for us to discern even a semblance of truth in Marcos’ equating Ninoy with the communists and, hence, with the carnage. Activists at the time were steadfast on the side of Ninoy and we just didn’t have any basis to believe otherwise. Only after 16 years would we have the opportunity to talk to Bernabe Buscayno, aka Kumander Dante, and got straight out of his mouth Ninoy’s real connection with the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army. We had occasion earlier to interview Luis Taruc for a movie contemplated to be made in the eighties by the late Fernando Poe, Jr. in which the intimations by the Huk Supremo regarding the formation of the CPP served to corroborate the disclosures by Kumander Dante in the latter interview.

            But the swell of indignation manifested in mass protests following the Plaza Miranda bombing indicated that Ninoy was gaining the upper hand in the propaganda war. To us who by then had embraced the ideals of the proletarian aspect of the national democratic movement, these revelations by Dante corroborated by Taruc were particularly shocking. All of a sudden we realized that we entered not a war for the liberation of the working class but  a personal battle for the advancement of one man’s magnificent obsession.

KAMAO

            We are a modest, self-made writer who after several stints in various second-rate entertainment publications landed the editorships of the Movie Confidential and Entertainment Section of the Weekly Nation, the latter being one of three leading magazines in the country until 1971; the other  two were the Weekly Graphic and the Philippine Free Press. Movie Confidential and Weekly Nation together with the vernacular magazine Tagumpay were publications of the Makabayan Publishing Corporation, owned by Amado Araneta, grandfather of now vice presidential aspirant Mar Roxas. The corporation used to have its offices and plant on the site now occupied by the first-ever SM Mall established, at the Araneta Center.

            The ideals of the First Quarter Storm had presented to us the romance which proved irresistible to any youth at the time: the golden opportunity to participate in the people’s struggle and partake of its promised  everlasting fruits: socialism and communism.

            Summer of 1971, even as we had been elevated to the management committee of the corporation, we could not recoil from the challenge posed to us by the rank-and-file employees to lead them in organizing a workers’ union, something unheard of in the Araneta empire. We sought out our friend Pete Lacaba and asked for an advice on how to go about it, considering that they had successfully done it at the Free Press. Pete advised us to seek Ninoy’s help. Why the advice, we did not bother to ask nor to be concerned with deeply. Our general sense was that organizing a workers’ union was an anti-capitalist undertaking and had no business dealing with somebody whose social status cannot but be pro-capitalist. Our only concern with Pete was to get an insight into the mechanics of organizing a union – which he provided anyway by joining us in our organizational meeting on the banks deep in the recesses of the Montalban River. We had come across a passage in Teodoro Agoncillo’s Revolt of the Masses which narrates how Andres Bonifacio and other Katipunan organizers would take a boat from Manila, paddle through the Wawa Napindan (now called Napindan Channel), then paddle on upstream in the Marikina River, and finally settle to discuss on the Montalban riverbanks. How vivifying to tread the path of history.

            Thus was born the Katipunan ng mga Makabayang Obrero (KAMAO) ng Makabayan Publishing Corporation.

            In what had the trappings of a conspiratorial move, we intimated to National Labor Relations Commission Commissioner Gat Amado Inciong the need to register the union in as discreet a manner as possible, and with dispatch as well. And betraying his heavy leanings toward trade unionism, the commissioner acquiesced. And we got our registration  certificate pronto.

            Upon presentation of the union’s labor demands, we got the expected – a termination letter, which again, as expected, immediately led to a union vote to strike.

            The strike began in April, signaling our integration into the mainstream of the so-called national democratic movement. It was very heartening that even as we were met with the stark might (at the time it was conventional to term it “fascism”) of the Araneta security force of 300,  droves upon droves of youthful activists poured in to give us support. KMs (Kabataang Makabayan) and SDKs (Samahang Demokratikong Kabataan),  elements both of the studentry and faculty of the University of the Philippines, workers of other unions and students from other schools, you name it, they were there. But that was precisely the reason why before long, we were no longer just battling  Araneta security  guards but  QC police as well. We were no longer a local union fighting for standard workers’ benefits; we were fighting for something else.

Jojo Binay as Counsel

            Jojo Binay, now Makati Mayor and vice presidential candidate, who was one of some three lawyers of the LUMABAN (Lupon ng mga Manananngol ng Bansa) assigned to us by President  Dr. Nemesio Prudente of the Philippine College of Commerce (PCC), now Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP),  would advise us to be wary of the activists, as, he said, they were trained to agitate workers to go on strikes, not to win them.

            By August 1971, the strike had been decimated, that’s as far as the picket line was concerned, which was taken over by the Araneta security guards. How the services of Jojo to us came to an end, we could no longer recall. What we remember as our last session with him was the conciliation meeting in which we proposed a return-to-work by the strikers as a tactical maneuver in the negotiations but which Jojo vehemently objected to, albeit in a hush: “Wag kang banat nang banat. (Will you just shut up!)”

            The next time we saw Jojo after that was in 1978 when we visited a businessman from Catanduanes, Teofisto Verceles, intending to sell him the idea of film producing. We were surprised to find Jojo and Verceles conferring rather seriously in the latter’s home in Pasig. We had the prudence not to inquire on what business Jojo was there for, what connections Jojo had with Verceles, etc. Rather, after a brief exchange of greetings with Jojo, we had our agenda with Verceles gotten over with quickly, begged leave, and the two went on with their conference.

            Then a decade after that, we were amazed at two incidents. First was Jojo figuring in the retaking of the ABS-CBN network facilities, brandishing an M-16 at that. Second was the brother of Teofisto Verceles, Leandro, winning in the 1987 congressional polls in Catanduanes and Jojo winning as mayor of Makati. These developments motivated us to do some figuring out. Between Jojo and Leandro Verceles appears the common factor of Cory. But since Jojo’s connection with a Verceles throws us back to as far as 1978, the common factor could be Ninoy, who at the time was still in jail. Now, Leandro Verceles was, over a long period, a UN diplomat based in New York. So we tend to draw a vague picture of US hand figuring in whatever scenario these interconnections indicate. To be sure Jojo and Verceles emerged beneficiaries of the Cory rise to power, which we dare ascribe to strong perennial US intervention in the Philippines. .  

            But back to the labor union Jojo served once upon a time gratis et amore. Years after, we would eventually win the union legal battle, under the counsel of our lawyer brother, but the Araneta corporation called Makabayan would dissolve even before Marcos could declare martial law, and there was no entity left that could be served the ruling that the corporation was guilty of unfair labor practices.

Proletarian Revolutionary Line

            Now, pursuing the original story, we just found ourselves flowing with the current of the national democratic movement, but always strictly along  proletarian revolutionary line, i.e. line that advances workers’ interest. Within this parameter, we found it revolting to call native capitalists revolutionary class, particularly when viewed in the context of Marx’s declaration in the Communist Manifesto: “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.”

            But otherwise we were a good soldier in the movement, organizing unions, doing education work, conducting propaganda and cultural presentations, and ever participating in mass actions. All that,  we did   always in a sincere effort to do a share in the “liberation of the working class”. We certainly did not realize that we were always under close observation, checked on  all our moves. In intelligence parlance, being cased.  Until, perchance, sure of the sincerity of our intentions, those responsible for developing cadres in the movement entrusted us with the secretaryship of the nationwide federation of labor unions, the KASAMA (Katipunan ng mga Samahan ng mga Manggawa) under the umbrella of the national democratic movement, while in a parallel aspect began grooming us for the real fight – the armed struggle in the countryside.

            The baptism of fire would come to pass on a rainy afternoon at the junction of T.M. Kalaw and Roxas Boulevard, a hundred meters or so from the US Embassy, the object of the protest rally we were conducting at the time. Under the command of Manila Police  Chief Robert Barbers, the police had blocked our advance at the intersection and our march toward the embassy was at a standstill.

            While the lead agitators were taunting the police and mouthing anti-US imperialist tirades, Ka Estrel sidled up to us and in a stealthy manner slung on our shoulder a soft, innocent-looking bag made of cloth (backpacks were not yet in vogue at the time), then whispered: “Ganyan ang ginamit sa Plaza Miranda. Pagbunot ng pin, ibato mo agad. Four seconds sasabog yan. (That’s the same kind used in Plaza Miranda. After pulling out the pin, throw it at once. In four seconds it will explode.)” And with that, Ka Estrel made herself scant. Shortly after, those at the front line succeeded in intimidating the policemen, who started charging. Those assigned with pillboxes exploded their weapons at the police onrush.

            That was supposed to be our cue to explode our own fireworks.

            We thought we passed our test in terms of quick-decision making. At the last minute we decided not to throw the grenade but  kept it in the bag, lugging it  as we rushed along with the retreating rallyists. Realizing that the pursuing policemen were gaining in on us unavoidably, we dived into the foot of the Rizal Monument in which, it turned out, police pursuit was taboo. At the eye-signal from one of the Marines soldiers guarding the monument for us to stay put there,  we crouched even lower behind the concrete railing as the policemen rushed by.

            Col. Barbers and the policemen who got hit only with the non-fatal pillbox shrapnels should  owe us a debt of gratitude for not having been blasted by the explosive we had in our bag. And to the Marines guards, thank you whoever you are and wherever you are for not telling us to the pursuing policemen. Had they done so, we would have exploded the grenade just the same then and there and thereby  gone down in history as the guy who blasted Rizal the second time around. But since we had made it a habit not to carry any identifying papers in the performance of our tasks, nobody would have found any identifying mark among the shattered pieces of our flesh and nobody would  ever have known whodunit.

            Thus did we flunk the baptism of fire.

             Now, nearly four decades after that incident, we still feel goose pimples creeping all over our body every time we think of  what would have happened had we thrown that grenade. We would imagine the mangled bodies of those in Plaza Miranda that evening of August 21, 1971 and we would ask ourselves endlessly if we could have lived by the memory of it afterward. And the answer  would be: No, never mind if we failed the test, failed to have risen to that supreme rank of a red fighter to which every activist at the time was aspiring. Serving the people does not mean blind obedience to an order done in a manner no different from the military dictum that we used to see inscribed at the gates of Camp Aguinaldo: “Ours is not to reason why/Ours is but to do or die.” For if this, too, were our doctrine, how distinguish us then from the fascism that we were supposed to fight in Marcos?

            In his book Art of War  Sun Tzu speaks of three ways in which “a sovereign can bring misfortune upon his army.”  One such way is, Sun Tzu says, “By commanding an army to advance or retreat, being ignorant of the fact that it cannot obey…”

Antagonism  within CPP

            Martial Law was declared, throwing our unit in disarray, rocked further by an endemic  antagonism in the party structure whereby regional leadership clashed with that of the national workers’ sector, with the former tightly toeing the Jose Maria Sison “mass line” of  establishing a broad alliance with all “progressive” sectors that included capitalists, the bottom line being opposition to the Marcos dictatorship; and the latter closely adhering to the proletarian revolutionary line which it argued to be the correct “party line”. Our individual criticism of the Sison strategy as well as of his Mao Tse Tung copy-cat analysis of Philippine society must have reached all the way to the “sovereign” so that when the directive for the unit to retreat to the countryside was made it was not meant to include us.

            Years later – after we successfully sneaked back into mainstream entertainment writing onward to writing and directing films – we would hear of Ka Estrel getting killed in Cebu in an encounter with government forces. This, along with stories about other elements from our unit meeting with the same fate in Central Luzon, in Bicol and in the Cordilleras, fate that would most likely have befallen us as well had we passed the test Ka Estrel, in all good faith, led us to.

            And now, looking back at how the movement got splintered, with the people’s army reduced to guerilla unit formations in contrast to the exhilarating size of 25,000 regulars in company formations on the eve of EDSA 1, we can’t help raising the question: Have those deaths of comrades been worth it? Have those in fact in the Plaza Miranda Massacre, in the Mendiola Massacre, in the Hacienda Luisita Massacre, and those, oh, God,  who would have met with their own gruesome demise had we, in one moment of insanity, thrown our own assigned grenade?

            For a time, we kept the grenade in a relative’s apartment together with a stockpile of the five volumes of Mao Tse Tung’s writings, which were in our custody as ED (Education Department) head of the national party group in the workers’ trade union sector. After a time, we surrendered it to the HO (higher organ): we wouldn’t be good grenade exploders.

            Only then were we told, as a matter of side talk, that the grenade came from Ninoy.

Part 3

The Dante Cookie

            Friend and kumpadre Diego Cagahastian,  News Editor of the Manila Bulletin, came to see us shortly after the EDSA 1 to break the news that our common friend, Felix Dalay, had won the contract with Cine Suerte to film the life story of Bernabe Buscayno aka Kumander Dante. Diego suggested that we co-write the screenplay for the film project, a very welcome idea as far as we were concerned. Film assignments had been long in the coming during those days and the opportunity offered some relief from what was virtually a long drought in earnings. More importantly, however,  was the fact that it would truly be a great honor to do the film on the legendary hero who had been in our high esteem since as far back as the late sixties.

            That was 1969. The Age of the Aquarius hadn’t quite begun, and if the Philippines were a volcano, society was just manifesting the early tremors of a full-blown eruption that would take place at the advent of the 70s.          

            All of a sudden Kumander Dante was the hero of the hour, landing the pages of newspapers and magazines, and radio and television programs, too.  Our readings thus far on Philippine history had already discredited Rizal as a hero and had as a consequence entrenched in our consciousness the image of Bonifacio as the real hero in the upheavals of 1896. Dante’s bursting into the media had the effect of reinforcing our regard for Bonifacio, for, indeed, Dante was being projected as the Bonifacio of the modern times.

            At the time, we were editing our second magazine and we took much pride from carrying, too, in our publication an editorial on the young Supremo of the just-organized New People’s Army, together with a photo which we lifted from other publications – the one single photograph of the man that was being published anytime, anywhere during that period. We didn’t know why, but shortly after that issue came out, we found waiting at our office a rather coy pretty lady whom our publisher introduced to us as Juliet Delima.

            We didn’t know Juliet from Adam and she didn’t give us any opportunity to find out anything about her except her name, for a couple of minutes or so after the introduction, she begged leave and went. Only this year, when the  current Commissioner on Human Rights Leila Delima was revealed as a relative of  the wife of CPP founder Jose Maria Sison, have we realized that that coy pretty lady introduced to us at our editorial office in 1969 as Juliet Delima could be the same woman referred to now as wife of the topmost communist in the country.

            Why Juliet went to see us then, we don’t know. And why she rather mysteriously chose to leave after being introduced to us, was the greater mystery, but one which we would no longer bother about.    But the EDSA revolt in February 1986 had resulted in the installation of Cory as president of the nation and among her first acts upon assuming power was the release of top communist leaders Jose Maria Sison and, our hero, Bernabe Buscayno aka Kumander
Dante.

            Pursuing the opportunity to write Dante’s story on film, Diego and us got an interview with the former NPA chief during which Juliet all of a sudden must come to our mind again. The NPA was an infant armed group in 1969 and it could use all support it could gather. Our play up of  Dante in our editorial must have impressed upon the wife of the communist party founder that we were a potential sympathizer.

            The interview took place in a well-appointed farm which was placed at our complete  disposal by a friend, who never bothered to ask what the occasion was. That’s one good thing about being a filmmaker. You get to do things which otherwise are sensitive but which are passed off by observers as routine matters.

            Over a simple native lunch, our talk began on a cordial note. We particularly reminisced on an idea hatched up among friends to get him out of detention during one of his morning walks at Camp Crame; the gambit was to make him masquerade as somebody else, complete with a wig, moustache and barong attire. Even before EDSA 1, we were already contemplating to do a movie on Dante’s life, and if the getaway succeeded, it would be a good marketing strategy for the project. Dante was amused by the scenario but thought it was workable.

                Anyway, the meeting turned out to be just exploratory talks. Dante did signal his consent to the movie project we were proposing but didn’t quite make any commitment that he would give such consent to us. It turned out, as early as then, the so-called rift between the RA (reaffirm) and the RJ (rejection), semantics on the ideological differences between the Sison faction and that of those opposing his line in the revolutionary movement, was already underway and our sponsor to Dante happened to be in the anti-Sison camp.

            Diego and us were left out in the cold for the screenplay job.  But when finally the film project was shown, we had  good reason to sigh with relief. The Ricky Lee-written photoplay was a monumental flop. Was it a foreboding of the debacle Dante would meet with in his subsequent run for the senate in 1987? He suffered a monumental  defeat.

            But then, as an old Chinese sot goes, “Nuns sing different tunes in different mountains.” Diego and us would definitely not have  done a Ricky Lee. For us, that interview with Dante had been most enlightening and we would have endeavored to share our enlightenment with the broad masses of the people.

            Dante admitted that he and Sison had not been acquainted with each other prior to a meeting held to join up their efforts at launching a revolution. Their meeting was facilitated by Tarlac Governor Apin Yap.  In that meeting, it was agreed upon  to re-establish a breakaway communist party from the old merger party, the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas-Partido Sosyalista ng Pilipinas, and a new armed group, the New People’s Army (NPA), composed of breakaway guerilla troops from the Hukbalahap. It was as  direct results of this meeting that the Communist Party of the Philippines was established on December 26, 1968 and the New People’s Army (NPA), March 29, 1969, The meeting was held at Hacienda Luisita. Presiding over the meeting was the main broker in the Sison-Dante tandem – Ninoy Aquino.

            These are the true essentials which in our hands would have turned the Dante material into a vehicle for shattering myths in Philippine revolution thereby freeing the minds of the people continuously being fettered by false gods and fake heroes.

Part 4

To Sacrifice A King

To the  fortune of us all, there has been a wealth of speeches and revealing utterances by Ninoy that has been preserved on video. With Ninoy gone and with the volumes of literature and journalistic records about him rendered not absolutely reliable due to the nature and circumstances of their publications, there can be no better proof of what he really was than the words he spoke, how he spoke those words and in what context he spoke them. Perhaps the producers of these video presentations had never intended it, but their works now constitute a most precious legacy by which the discerning may attain a true unadulterated  understanding of Ninoy – forever.

A case in point, a video clip taken of him prior to boarding the China Airlines jet that took him to  the Manila International Airport that fateful noon of August 21, 1983. Ninoy explains to those in front of him (presumably journalists, not in camera) the features of the bullet-proof vest he would be wearing when he disembarks from the plane, after which he enjoins his listeners: “You have to be very ready with your hand camera, because this could become very fast. It could be all over in a matter of three, four minutes, you know… (laughs) And I may not be able to talk to you again after this.”

From the video clip, three astounding elements stare us in the face. Firstly, that Ninoy knew he was going to be shot, hence the protective bullet-proof vest. Secondly, that he knew he was going to be shot not on a spot elsewhere in the airport but right as soon as he steps down from the China Airlines plane, hence his injunction: “It could be all over in a matter of three, four minutes...” Thirdly, that he knew he would be picked up by whoever not on any other plane but the China Airlines jet.

On the first element, while he took the precaution to protect his body from gunshot with the vest, he admitted that he was defenseless if he would be shot on the head. In any case, he was sure death was coming, not elsewhere, not later, but here and now, and yet he went on with the journey back home and walked right into his death.

In another video clip, a text precedes the presentation proper: “What do you call a man who knowingly walks into his death? Where I come from, we call that a… MORON!!!”

No, that’s foul. Ninoy was an intelligent man, oh, too intelligent to be fathomed by ordinary mortals. That despite knowing he would be walking into his death yet went walking right into it only demonstrates the exceedingly high level of intelligence Ninoy possessed. It was a superhuman kind of  intelligence, one that gave him a full grasp of the wondrous workings of dialectics which enabled him to be strong at his weakest, to turn failure into success, and execute  that divine magic of springing back to life from death. Because magic, none of us non-supermen ever noticed it, but it was there that midday of August 21, 1983, the greatest political sleight of hand transpiring right under our very eyes.

From Boston, Ninoy flies to Los Angeles, then to Singapore, then to Johore, then to Hongkong, and finally  to Taipei for the final flight to Manila. The idea is to lose anybody monitoring his moves and thereby assure his successful return to Manila. In the Tina Monzon Palma AVP, Ken Kashiwara, Lupita Aquino’s husband who accompanied Ninoy in the trip, quotes Ninoy’s words to the effect that just for him to be able to land in Manila would be victory enough. That sufficiently explains the vest – to protect him from getting killed before reaching Manila. As soon as the China Airlines jet stops on the tarmac, uniformed Avsecom soldiers together with security personnel clad in barong tagalog board the plane, search down the aisle until they pinpoint Ninoy whom they accost and lead out of the plane, not through the customary tube that leads to the arrival lounge but down the stairs, with the exit door being closed and secured by the men in barong tagalog to prevent anybody else from following. And then, presto! A shot rings out, followed immediately by successive bursts of gunfire. The next thing  people realize is that Ninoy is sprawled on the tarmac, visibly dead, close by the dead body of the “man in blue,” who days later will be identified as Rolando Galman, the supposed assassin of Ninoy.

Going back to the Ninoy interview, we shudder at realizing that everything perfectly fell into place as Ninoy had cautioned: the soldiers’ precise zeroing in on the plane (“…this could be very fast…”); the swiftness (“It could be all over in three, four minutes…); the shot in the head

(which Ninoy admitted having no defense from at all.)

            It was like a brilliantly-scripted movie finale, where each and everyone of the partakers did their parts precisely according to the instructions of the director. There was no way Ninoy,  the soldiers and the barong-clad security personnel could have reacted to one another if they were not acting from the instructions of a single, common director.

            Several planes were landing that day. Why didn’t the soldiers board any other planes? Ninoy could have been aboard any of these. Bear in mind that Ninoy was travelling under an assumed name: Marcial Bonifacio. This meant the soldiers could not determine which plane Ninoy would be taking based on passengers’ manifest. The normal move would be for the soldiers to search every plane that came in and check the identity of every passenger aboard

But we must admit that surely good intelligence work could easily identify early on in Taipeh  which plane  he would be on, then convey the information in advance to operatives at the Manila International Airport.  The prudent thing to do, once the plane was pinpointed, would be for the soldiers to take him, as they did, rush him to the waiting Avsecom van, whisk him away, and if they must finish Ninoy, finish him in some isolated nook, away from the eyes of witnesses. But no, they shot him in midday, under the prying eyes  of  a throng of witnesses and the glare of cameras, and in the presence of thousands of Ninoy’s supporters who could easily turn the event into a violent rampage.  And  the most disturbing thing about it really was that Ninoy knew it would be “very fast” and would be “all over in three, four minutes”, which discounted every possibility of him getting shot elsewhere. Ninoy knew to the littlest detail that things would turn out the way they did.

And Ninoy could not have gained such exquisite prescience  unless, first, he was God, which he was not, or second, he was, indeed as in a movie shoot, the director of the show.

 The video presentation, “Beyond Conspiracy: 25 Years After” by the Worldwide Foundation for People Power, gives us an astonishing hint on the issue. Hosting the AVP,  Tina Monzon Palma likens the Marcos-Ninoy conflict to a chess match. After an engrossing series of valuable documentation and testimonials by respectable personalities in Philippine business and politics, which depicts what are described as the brilliant moves the two traded in the political chess game, Tina makes the staggering conclusion: “In the end, Ninoy won his political chess game with Marcos by doing the unthinkable – in a manner of speaking, he  sacrificed the King.”      

Now, in chess, sacrifice is a maneuver in which a higher-value piece, say, a knight or a bishop, is exchanged for a lesser-value one, i.e. a pawn, for the purpose of gaining a positional advantage leading to victory. Along this concept, the highest sacrifice that could be made is that of the Queen, the point of triumph being the survival of the King.

But that’s in chess, where you play with inanimate objects – and the king never gets sick or operated on for heart ailment and so remains capable of ruling, cannot be sacrificed until captured.

 In political struggles where the stakes are high and alive – economic fortunes, like the biggest sugar land in Asia; political power, the awesome Philippine presidency;  and the social respectability that goes with the two, like the heroism of Ninoy and the sainthood of Cory – and more so when the attainment of  high and living stakes must be made in a frenzied race against time, battles are won through unorthodox – truly indeed, unthinkable – methods.

In one of his speeches in the United States, Ninoy had declared: “The Filipino is worth dying for.”

The sentimentalism endemic in the phraseology and the imagery that as though in a sudden burst of brilliance was crystallized in Ninoy’s  photo as he laid lifeless on the MIA tarmac instantly turned the quote into the battle cry in surges upon surges of indignant masses in protest rallies and demonstrations, in prayer meetings, and in other sorts of mass protest actions, each one of which contributed to the final pressure upon Marcos to call for a presidential snap election. Marcos won the count but Cory cried “Cheat”, and continuously armed with the battle cry, Cory went on to mobilize millions in her civil disobedience campaign, culminating in EDSA 1. And as the cliché goes, the rest is history.

Cory became president.

As to Ninoy, he had the privilege of  executing an act of supreme arrogance. In that celebrated speech in Los Angeles February of 1981, Ninoy declared, voice quivering with grim confidence: “But while I have vowed never to enter the political arena again, I shall dedicate the last drop of my blood to the restoration of freedom and the dismantlement of your (Marcos) martial law.”

For whom did Ninoy sacrifice his King? For the Filipino worth dying for? Or for the Filipino coward? Either way, the words amount to nothing but salt to injury. The hard fact is, whether courageous or coward, Filipinos continued to wallow in misery. But Cory proceeded to bask in the power and the glory of the presidency. That’s the harder fact.

Ka Mao stretched his back against the backrest of his chair, pausing as he thought of words by which to put his closing sentences.  

“Ninoy’s death had been good after all,” he told himself.

 It took more than three months for Ka Mao to finish the essay, but now that he was ready to write finish, he could  not get himself to sigh with relief, as all writers do whenever they type out with emphasis the number “30” at the end of their manuscripts.

One question was bothering him. If he typed out the words now teetering at his fingertips, would he be doing right? One thing sure, he would be putting at stake his whole reputation as a writer. Surely it was not much of a reputation, but nonetheless it was something he and his family at least would love to treasure. A wrong conclusion for the piece could ruin his writing career.

“Good death, good death.,” he repeated the phrase in his mind.

“Ahh..” Ka Mao wrung his head. What’s good about a death that had succeeded only in bringing the oligarchs back to power? It restored democracy, was the popular notion about the EDSA rising. Not just by the Philippine ruling elite but by the massess at large as well, ever gullible at the propaganda by the rich. But was democracy restored? Of what use is democracy if it is not for the poor! Hardly did he realize it was Marcos who actually wrote those words in the past.

And then suddenly he lit up.

“Good death, good death,” Ka Mao now murmured to himself as he prepared to type on the computer keyboard. Why, that’s euthanasia in Greek!

Euthanasia is something the law allows to be administered by doctors to a dying patient so as not to prolong his agony anymore. Ninoy was a terminal case, having undergone triple heart bypass operation, though this had been a secret that his physician had sworn to carry to his grave. But then, as Psinakis feared about in his phone conversation with Ninoy, time was running out as far as concerned Ninoy’s obsession to dismantle the Marcos dictatorship. Only way to bring this about was to get himself killed and thereby spark the chaos that led to EDSA 1986.

Ka Mao felt very strongly that he saw a clear unifying thread between the assassination of Ninoy and the downfall of Marcos. In fact, he saw that unifying thread going through a labyrinth of events not happening as independent phenomena but appearing to be masterly crafted in tight interrelation with one another in order to accomplish a singular intention.

From the brokering by Ninoy of the meeting between Jose Maria Sison and Kumander Dante, which meeting resulting to the re-establishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army; to the spread of the conflagration that was the National Democratic Movement; the failure of Ninoy and his cohorts to prevent the declaration of Martial Law; the continued defiance by Ninoy of the Marcos dictatorship, albeit in incarceration; the intervention by US on the triple heart bypass operation of Ninoy in America, the subsequent frenzied campaign by Ninoy in America for the dismantlement of the Marcos dictatorship; and finally the return of Ninoy that fateful August 21, 1983 when Ninoy foretold to the littlest detail his assassination at the MIA tarmac.

Ka Mao saw that from that day on until the so-called EDSA People Power Revolt the dismantling of the Marcos dictatorship had been a done deal.

So now as Ka Mao readied his fingers to write 30 to his essay, he gritted his jaws, indicating his firm resolve to stand pat on his conclusion. His fingers struck the keys of his computer keyboard: Ninoy sacrificed the King and by so doing caused the ascension of the Queen to the throne.  

CHAPTER IV

WITHIN HOJRS from the bombing of Plaza Miranda, Marcos went on television issuing the proclamation suspending the writ of habeas corpus.Already, this foreboded of the greater Marcosian act which Ninoy had wanted to prevent: the declaration of martial law. Was it a mere coincidence that while the strike movement intensified to pestering if not fearsome proportion in the period after the Plaza Miranda bombing, the natdem movement convulsed with greater fury, now clearly involving not just the middle class but a good section of the oligarchy too. Toward the end of 1971, the Movement of Concerned Citizens for Civil Liberties (MCCCL) took the frontlines of marches and rallies lambasting Marcos, exposing his design for the institution of martial rule in the country and calling for mass uprising to stop it. The personages in these mass protest actions included elites in Philippine politics like Senators Lorenzo Tanada, Jose W. Diokno, Eva Estrada Kalaw and prominent publisher Don Joaquin “Chino” Roces.

            It was during this period that Ka Mao presented his film on the strike movement to a cheering throng at the St. Scholastica auditorium, climaxed by an exhilarating mass singing of the NPA theme, “Bandilang Pula (Red Flag)”:

            Tangan ko sa kamay ang badilang pula

            (Held up high in my hand the red banner of war)

            Tungo sa tagumpay

            (Onward to victory)

            Anumang hirap ay tinitiis

            (Whatever difficulties I will bear)

            May sugat man sa dibdib

            (No matter the wound on my chest}

            Iwagayway and bandilang pula

            (Bravely wave the banner red)

            Rebolusyon ating isulong

            (Revolution we push on and on)

            May maso’t karet, may gintong kasaysayan

            (It’s hammer and sickle, pride in golden history)

            Di kita iwawalay sa hirap at kamatayan

            (Never shall I forsake in dire sufferings nor in death)

            Kahit masawi niyaring buhay, buong ngiting iaalay

            (If my life be the single prize,  gladly I offer as prize)

            Ang hiling bago pumanaw ay isang halik sa bandilang pula

            (My only wish before I die is one single kiss to my dear banner red)

            But at advent of 1972, the  MCCCL rallies were  clearly taking the initiative in the struggle against the impending Marcos one-man rule. And Ka Mao was simply perplexed when he was summoned by Banero and instructed to be done with the strike movement. He was told to focus rather on the campaign against “US imperialism and its hireling the Marcos puppet regime.” The good soldier that he was, he shifted to publishing articles combating the oil price hike, a hot issue which was easily linked to US control of the Philippine economy.

            Ka Mao didn’t relish the job. His conviction had always been that US imperialism was not the enemy of the working class. He believed the anti-US imperialist line was a handiwork of so-called nationalist bourgeoisie desiring to oust US capitalists from control of the nation’s economy and put themselves in that position. Lying low on the strike movement could only strike Ka Mao as a maneuver to subordinate the working class struggle to the struggle of native capitalists. This fear was confirmed when Banero informed Ka Mao that the party Central Committe had ruled that party elements under the National Trade Union Bureau would henceforth be subordinate to the Regional Party Committee.

            “Is that ruling final,” Ka Mao asked.

            They were riding a car crossing the Guadalupe Bridge on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue when the incident happen. Banero appeared weakening inside as he trained his eyes ahead.

            “We will appeal,” he said lamely.

            Banero had picked up Ka Mao from the KASAMA headquarters for a discussion of plans for holding a big workers rally in commemoration of Labor Day. Banero informed Ka Mao that Marcos was about ready to declare martial law.

            “The labor day rally must be a showcase of the workers determination to combat martial law in the event Marcos declares it,” Banero said. Ka Mao thought he heard Banero saying, “Let’s show them we don’t deserve the treatment the Party is doing to us.”

            At a subsequent meeting among leaders of various progressive secrors  held at the executive office of the Philippine College of Commerce, a May Day Revolutionary Committee was formed. Designated Chairman of the committee was Felixberto Olalia, grand leader of MASAKA, a giant organization of peasants in Central Luzon. Ka Mao was named Secretary General.

            That designation surprised Ka Mao. He didn’t work for it; too much self-respect kept him away from making any initiatives at getting named to any post of leadership in the revolutionary movement. To be designated now as Gensec of a revolutionary committee indicated to him that somebody or people in the higher echelon of leadership in the revolutionary movement was or were acting as his patron/patrons for top posts in the movement. In any case, Ka Mao never cared finding out who these patrons were. He kept to his own criterion for conduct in the revolutionary movement: perform whatever tasks given him.

            His failure to throw the grenade in the US Embassy rally was a very rare exception. He was on the verge of doing it and would have escaped in the ensuing melee, but what he felt as a kind of revolutionary prudence prevailed on him at the last minute. What good would throwing that grenade do? At best it could kill a number of policemen, but if it did, would killing cops sent there to keep peace and order advance the cause of liberating workers from oppression and exploitation? If he were assured that it would, then he would not have exercised the prudence he found himself following, but because it did not give him such assurance even in the remotest measure, he held himself back from throwing the grenade.

            Surprisingly, Ka Mao was not reprimanded for his failure to throw that grenade. Now he felt he was even being rewarded with his designation as Secretary General of the May Day Revolutionary.

            This time, however, something really big was expected of him at the job. As May 1 drew near, he increasingly felt the burden. Whatever that big thing was, how it would take place and where he would figure in the scheme, Ka Mao wouldn’t know. Neither would he ask nor did any of those he was getting directives from would tell.

            Actions in the movement were being directed by people working behind the scenes. The legal mass organizations did the actions as apparently directed by the open leaders of these mass organizations. In the case of the May Day Revolutionary Committee, it did not actually did the nitty gritty of mobilizing forces for the planned May Day celebration. Activists of the participating mass organizations did the job according to directives by the Communist Party of the Philippines through its sectoral organs, i.e., for Kabataang Makabayan and Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan through the Youth and Students Bureau, MAKIBAKA through the Women’s Bureau, and for KASAMA through the National Trade Union Bureau or NTUB, which Banero headed.

            On the eve of May Day, the details of the planned mass action were discussed by the KASAMA party group, with Banero, assisted by Ka Willy, leading the discussion. Though Banero conducted the meeting in his characteristic soft, amiable manner, his instructions sounded ominous to Ka Mao.

            “You watch Ka Mao’s back all the time,” Banero told Ka Leo, Ka Mao’s deputy in the Education Department of the KASAMA Party Group.

            “So I stand to be stabbed from behind,” Ka Mao quipped kiddingly, eliciting a cold, stern reprimanding stare from Banero.

            “Safety precaution,” said Ka Willy with that ubiquituous wide smile bringing out his deep dimples that somehow softened the chiding glare in his eyes.

            Actually what horrified Ka Mao was the fact that Ka Leo was a lean follow, taller than him to be sure but had a frame so frail that Ka Mao doubted if he would be able to repel any assailant from behind. Anyway, Banero’s instructions foreboded to Ka Mao some violent chaos the likes of May Day Massacre of 1971 or the Battle of Mediola in 1970.

            Inwardly, Ka Mao already cringed with horror.

MAY DAY 1972 saw Mendiola being filled to the seams by marchers and rallyists that had converged on the historic street from various sections of the metropolis. Leaders of the Revolutionary Committee were at the head of the march. Ka Bert Olalia under the streamer of MASAKA, Dr. Dante Simbulan, the Committee’s Vice Chair, among student activists, and Ka Mao and Ka Peter San Pedro, KASAMA’s president, at the head of various workers’ groups carrying their respective streamers, banners and slogans.   

            Tension hung in the air as the marchers swerved from different directions, clogging the narrow entrance to Mendiola. This entrance, the narrow, short Chino Roces Bridge, had the semblance of an octopus with it as the head, its tentacles branching out forward (Recto Avenue), to the left (Ayala Avenue), and to the right (Legarda St.).  In ordinary times, this interplay of intersections caused the area to be prone to heavy traffic. All the more now must the area be clogged by both pedestrian and vehicular traffic as the ten thousand-strong rally executed a veritable occupation of the entire stretch of Mendiola, from the bridge and up to the very gates of Malacanang Palace. The marchers only stopped as a phalanx of Metrocom soldiers blocked their path.

In front of the soldiers’ formation were three layers of troops armed merely with shields and truncheons. Maximum tolerance had become a popular term alluding to the minimum use of force by state troopers against mass expression of the freedom of speech and assembly. But that maximum tolerance had only been a hypocritical glossing over of state fascism had always been borne by the fact that behind the frontlines of apparently minimally-armed soldiers were troopers in full battle gear. This was the case that afternoon. Behind the apparently less fearsome troopers in the frontlines were formidable arrays of soldiers wielding M-16 rifles, sticking close to the Malacanang gates, ready to fire away at whoever would dare crash through the presidential palace.

            This was why it was not the usual kind of tension that pervaded. Ordinarily people would expect such a confrontation to break out into physical skirmish that in the end would send the rallyists scampering to safety. And then it would be over, turning into a mere segment of the cliché which the so-called anti-fascist demonstrations had actually become.

This time, however, the tension was not for observers of the event to feel but felt particularly by either side in the confrontation. As though having been briefed that the rally was planned to make a crash attempt through the gates of Malacanang, the Metrocom soldiers manifested frayed nerves, as indicated by the nervous beating of their sticks on their palms, as bullies would to intimidate guys who get the guts to face up to them.

On the other hand, there was a kind of nervous tameness in the manner the main speakers delivered their speeches. They did not sound as militant and daring as the speakers in the past May Day rally in Congress who after a few incendiary call to arms sent activists lobbing pillboxes at the Metrocom soldiers guarding the entrance of the legislature. Ka Mao saw that this was the expectation of members of the Armed City Partisans (ACPs) whom he recognized among the crowd just a breath away from the front columns of Metrocom soldiers. 

The ACPs were an elite combat group trained specifically for guerilla warfare in the city. These combatants operated under the direction of Banero for the CPP military commission, but since Banero headed the National Trade Union Bureau, too, the ACPs were quartered in the UG house of the NTUB where Ka Mao had become acquainted with them, though he had been familiar with them already in the open mass movement.

And so as Ka Peter San Pedro was obviously heading for the conclusion of his speech and none of the crowd was responding in a manner indicating they were about to burst in violent confrontation with the state troopers, the ACPs were making frantic eye signals for Ka Mao to take the mike and make the call for battle. Ka Babette Esrada, the youngish lady who was the open leader of the mass organization Movement for a Democratic Philippines (MDP), sidled up to Ka Mao and with similar panicky manner urged Ka Mao to grab the microphone.

Some sections of the crowd directly in confrontation with the state troopers in the front lines began bracing themselves for trouble. In response, some troopers made harder beating of their sticks on their palms while other began pressing close to one another, holding their shields in front of them so as form a veritable wall of defense.

But the great multitude of rallyists didn’t appear fired up.

Ka Babette egged Ka Mao, “Come on, Ka Mao, take the mike.”

“I have not been scheduled to speak,” Ka Mao said. “Ka Peter had been introduced as the last speaker.”

“The people are not getting inflamed,” said Ka Babette.

Obviously Ka Babette had grown accustomed, too, to Ka Mao’s capacity of agitating workers in strike areas. The workers were wont to ask for pill box bombs at the end of his speeches, ready to do battle.

Ka Hector, a dark, robust fellow stared hard at Ka Mao as he dug his hand into a cloth bag in which he was actually clutching a hand grenade.

“Come on, Ka Mao. Come on,” prodded Ka Babette.

Ka Mao took a second just exchanging stares with Ka Hector and then another second staring at Ka Babette as he finally gritted his jaws, finally determined to do as he was asked. But meantime Ka Peter had ended his speech and as the crowd reacted weakly, the emcee took the mike and announced the end of the program.

“And with those words from the brave president of KASAMA, we end this our militant commemoration of May Day, the day the world proletariat signaled their determination to take destiny into their own hands. Down with US imperialism. Down with feudalism. Down with bureaucrat capitalism. Long live the working class of the world.”

            Most of the crowd responded in stereotype manner and then began turning away even as a small section surrounding the stage improvised on top of a passenger jeepney broke into the closing singing of the Internationale, led also by the emcee.

            “Bangon sa pagkakabusbos, bangon alipin ng gutom

            (Arise from your wretched existence, slaves of hunger break loose from your chains)

            Ka Mao, Ka Babette, and Ka Hector exchanged weak stares and then feeling defeated joined in the singing.

CHAPTER V

WHAT EXACTLY the May Day Revolutionary Committee had been planned to accomplish, Ka Mao had not bothered to know; nor did anyone from the higher Party organs care to explain. But judging from the actual outcome, May Day 1972 was the most peaceful May Day celebration in the country in recent memory. And what effect this peaceful outcome had on the overall revolutionary movement may be gleaned from the fact that afterward, the workers strike movement appeared to loosen up on taking initiatives in the revolution. At the forefront of subsequent big rallies and demonstrations was the MCCCL, indicating the growing influence of the country’s elite class through the pettybourgeoisie over the Philippine revolutionary movement.

            It should come as no surprise therefore that when Martial Law was proclaimed on September 22, 1972, among the first to be arrested and incarcerated were the leading personalities in the MCCCL led by Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr. These leaders appeared to be lumped together with smuggling lord Lino Bocalan and drug lord Lim Seng, who was executed by firing squad.

            Quite surprisingly, none of the leaders of the May Day Revolutionary Committee or the big names in the open workers strike movement was a victim of arrest and detention. This indicated clearly that Marcos played selective enforcement of martial rule, separating, in a manner of speaking, the chaff from the grain, distinguishing between the real parties-in-interest in the revolutionary movement and the innocent partakers.

            Ka Mao was among those not touched by Martial Law. This did not intrigue him at all. He thought he was conducting himself so prudently in the circumstances, giving the enemy no reason at all to suspect him. One time he needed to come to Ka Nap and the Philacor group, he suddenly realized state troopers were patrolling the area in Mandaluyong where the group met. As had been his habit, he was lugging in his hands folders and envelopes containing incriminating revolutionary documents. Making a quick decision, Ka Mao thought it not wise to change direction and avoid the troopers; that would arouse their suspicion. Instead he approached the soldiers and inquired from them on where to find an address he said he was looking for. One soldier directed him where to go.

            But two significant developments early on in the martial law era crystallized in Ka Mao the real reason why he had been spared from arrest and detention.

In 1973, Banero was said to have deserted the CPP, and while back to resuming his college course at the University of Santo Tomas, was gunned down by unidentified assailants in a manner reminiscent of CPP operatives assassinating erring elements. Banero had been accused within the Party of being a deep penetration agent of the government and was believed to have  been rubbed out because of that. If Banero were a government agent, then he must have relayed to his superiors in the Philippine military that Ka Mao was a mere fingerling and did not deserve attention as did the big fish in the revolutionary movement.

            And Babette, the lady who had been privy somehow to Ka Mao’s activities in the  movement, was uncovered to be a Staff Sergeant in the Armed Forces of the Philippines. She was the same lady who kept prodding Ka Mao to agitate the crowd in the May Day 1972 rally, which Ka Mao did not. So what report could Babbette have made to her own superiors in the Philippine military about Ka Mao but his being a weakling who could not be responsible for any serious offense by the movement?

            Ka Mao had a hard time figuring out how these developments could have anything to do with his suddenly getting ex-communicated by the Party at the time. The Party Group in the KASAMA was in dire need of leadership. Ka Edwin, the PG gensec, had fallen into enemy hands. According to Party rules, in the event of incapacity by the gensec, the OD head should take over, but the rules also provided that the gensec must be a full-time Party member, and the OD head, Ka Teng, conitnued until then to be working in the NMI, hence non-full-time Party member. So the way was open, also according to the rules, for Ka Mao to take over as gensec of the Party. This he did, and for his first action in the face of Ka Edwin’s arrest by the military, he hastily moved the group from its Malibay underground house to a rented room in a Paco. Manila apartment. As a precaution against detection by government deep penetration agents in the movement, he pursued a policy of isolating the group from any other party groups pending contact with the higher Party echelons. He hoped that leading Party elements could make clear what policy of conduct needed to be pursued in the martial law situation, particularly on matters of security.

            Ka Teng reacted belligerently to the policy of  isolating the KASAMA Party Group. When he met up with Ka Mao at a cheap eatery that afternoon, he was none any of the amiable, ever-smiling fellow that he had been known for. He was ready to pick a physical fight had Ka Mao only bit at his provocation. But Ka Mao kept his cool. There was nothing personal in his differences with Ka Teng. All he wanted was to keep the KASAMA Party Group safe. How Ka Edwin fell into enemy hands hadn’t been cleared up yet. Previous to this, Ka Felix, Ka Rowena’s deputy at the Finance Department, had reportedly been arrested and detained for a time. The party unit had quickly moved to another UG house as a result of this. Then suddenly at the new UG house, Ka Felix appeared, inwardly astounding the unit members. Ka Felix explained the circumstances of his arrest and detention and then eventual release by the military. The party unit didn’t appear convinced by the explanation. In a secret huddle, the rest of the unit decided to change UG houses, and that’s why they came to move into the Malibay UG house, completely isolating themselves from Ka Felix. In that same token, Ka Mao decided to have the party unit distanced from Ka Teng.

            Ka Teng had consistently refused to resign from his post as mechanic at the Northern Motors, Incorporated until he was assured of leadership in the KASAMA Party Group. He had confided this attitude to Ka Mao during one discussion on just what serving the people really meant. So Ka Teng was putting a personal price for serving in the revolution. And it came to be the yardstick for Ka Mao’s evaluation of Ka Teng. When Ka Edwin fell into enemy hands, Ka Mao had much worry about placing the KASAMA Party Group under the command of Ka Teng. For this reason, Ka Mao stood steadfast in keeping the party unit isolated pending clearance from party higher-ups.

            The table where Ka Mao and Ka Teng discussed was bare but for a bottle of Coca Cola each on which they drank as they talked.

            “Let’s not quarrel over this, Ka Teng,” Ka Mao told the robust, short fellow whose white, Chinesey complexion was red from rage.

            “What you are doing is splitism,” growled Ka Teng, his clenched left fist pressed hard on the table while his right hand gripped the Coca Cola tighly.

            To Ka Mao it looked as though Ka Teng was contemplating on slamming the bottle into his face.

            “I’m trying hard to establish contact with the Party. What splitism are you talking about?”

            “You’re splitting the unit from me.”

            “I’m not denying you contact with me.”

            “You’re denying me contact with my unit.”

            “I don’t think you have a complete claim to the unit as your own. Not as yet, at least.”

            “I am OD head. I assert my right to succeed to the post vacated by Ka Edwin due to his arrest.”

            “You cannot succeed to the post. You are not a full-time party member.”

            Suddenly Ka Teng found occasion to let out his amiably impish smile. He declared, “I had resigned from NMI.”

            The information rather staggered Ka Mao, “Oh… Since when?”

            “I resigned this morning. I am a full-time party member now,” declared Ka Teng triumphantly.

            That got Ka Mao tongued-tied. Staring hard at Ka Teng, he gulped what remained of the Coca Cola from the bottle.

CHAPTER VI

            Smarting to himself, Ka Mao trudged the sidewalk, his gait as though attuned to the strains of the Martial Law theme blared out by a public address system somewhere in the vicinity.

            He signaled for a passing passenger jeepney to stop. It wouldn’t. Two Metrocom soldiers courteously approached him.

            “Please take your ride at the jeepney stop.”

            Ka Mao eyed the soldiers inquisitively.

            “Disiplina po tayo,” said one soldier.

            Ka Mao caught sight of the sign done in big bold letters painted on a wall: “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan disiplina ang kailangan (For the country to progress, let us have discipline.)”

            Ka Mao glanced around to notice order in the surroundings. Unlike before when people would spill out right into the street in walking in the city, this time they were walking orderly on the sidewalks. Instead of crossing the streets indiscriminaely, this time they used the pedestrian lanes. And instead of elbowing one another in getting inside transportation vehicles, passengers queued at the bus and jeepney stops.

            Ka Mao couldn’t  help betraying a feeling of satisfaction at the sights.

            Joining the queue at the jeepney stop, Ka Mao observed that what was transpiring was a complete reverse of the chaotic city streets particularly in the period immediately preceding the declaration of Martial Law. Then people were unregulated in moving around in the city, even more so when dominated by the so-called street parliamentarians advocating social order but ironically using methods of disorder. For one so used to city chaos, in fact one who directly participated in creating that chaos, the obtaining peace and order should be most welcome. Ka Mao delighted at the smooth way people were loading themselves into the public transportation vehicles, quite in contrast to the jostling one needed to do in the past in order to get a ride.

            Ka Mao sat comfortably inside the jeepney which he took. He contented himself just listening to the talk of folks expressing delight at the obtaining orderliness around.

            “Have you seen our streets as clean as this in the past?” asked one woman, then answered her question, “Naaah! The whole city stank from rubbish thrown indiscriminately all around.”

            “Look at our sidewalks and walls,” said another woman. “All spruced up. Street sweepers diligently making sure they are neat and clean all the time.”

            An elderly man who spoke with an air of authority remarked, “It’s really high time an iron-fist rule obtain in our land. You know, we Filipinos are a disparate nation, with different breeding and conflicting cultures. There is no other way to harmonize these differences but through a strong arm method.”

            One youth, obviously a student as could be told from the things he carried, interjected, “That’s just like saying Marcos Martial Law is good.”

            “Indeed, it’s good!” exclaimed the elderly man.

            “He jailed our leaders. All of the opposition, he arrested without warrants. You call that good?”

            “Marcos arrested no one who was not after personal selfish political ambition. He did not jail anyone for being a true leader of the people,” declared the elderly man.

            The young man spoke in protest, “Ninoy, Diokno, Tanada…”

            “Suits them fine!” yelled the elderly man, silencing the young man who stared, keeping his disgust to himself.“They all desired to put the oligarchs in political supremacy. How else do you expect Marcos to react but get rid of them?”

            “They are true leaders of the people,” insisted the young man.

            The elderly man, sighing subtly, patted the young man on the knee. He said, “Son, you don’t become a true leader of the people for pursuing your seflish political ambition. Just make good your studies. You’ve got a lot to learn.”

            In his state of mind at the time, Ka Mao just found himself raging inside. He could only sympathize silently with the young man who felt so humbled he didn’t say a word anymore.

            It was the jeepney driver who cut in, breaking the momentary quiet. He said, “But where have all the NPAs gone. I thought they would be swooping down on Manila once Marcos declared martial law. As we can see, it’s all quiet in the city.”

           

“Yes, indeed!” Ka Mao exclaimed to himself. “Everybody was saying chaos would rock society the moment Marcos instituted martial law. But none such chaos took place. Instead, what’s happening now is the exact opposite. Peace and order, cleanliness, discipline all around. Indeed, where has all the revolution gone?”

“WHERE HAVE THEY GONE?” asked Ka Mao of the landlady as he found the rented room of the KASAMA Party Group deserted. Tell-tale signs of hasty pack-up litter the room.

            “Search me,” grumbled the chubby woman whose age was betrayed by wrinkles on the face and the loosened flesh on the underside of her arm.

            Lightning bolts and deafening cracks of thunder startled Ka Mao as he threw open the apartment door, stepping out. From atop the stairs, the landlady’s angry voice chases him out.

            “You people don’t even have the decency of bidding your landlady goodbye. Ah, had I known that you would be leaving the room that soon… I could have rented it out to others with good manners and right conduct. ”

            Ka Mao couldn’t care less though.  He walks on out into the street, not minding that he is getting drenched in the starting rain. That’s how he always had been. No downpour, no matter how heavy, could sway him away from whatever his mind wanted to reach.

            His shoes splashed through the nascent flood on the gutter as he trudged on.

                        CHAPTER VII

            The fall of raindrops on Ka Mao’s face was heavy. But it was never enough to erase the grit that even grew more intense with every step he made. These steps would take him on a journey that in one fell swoop he seemed to be crashing through events yet to come.

            In a cheap snack shop, he meets up with Bong, who reveals, “Ka Totoy had told on us to Ka Glo, who in turn ordered Ka Teng to assert leadership over the whole Party Group. You must understand Ka Mao that we’re all soldiers that must obey orders from commanders.”

            In a workers’ union headquarters, he lectures on seriously listening unionists, “Lenin said, never forget class conflict. Even in a revolutionary movement, this tenet determines the action you make. You act according to which side you take in the struggle between workers and capitalists.”

            In a rural setting backdropped by a wide expanse of  rice fields, he speaks militantly, “It is not right to say that because farmers largely outnumber factory workers in the Philippines, the mode of production is feudal. The minute the native Philippine bourgeoisie was installed in political power in 1946, capitalism was entrenched in the country as the dominant economic system. Besides, who are the owners of factories, like the Aranetas who own the Makabayan Publishing Corporation, but the same people who own the haciendas. And in these haciendas, like the Yulo estate in Laguna, the working men are no longer peasants but farm workers, earning wages not tenant shares. Like what you are now, you have dropped into that formidable multitude called proletariat. In your hands you hold the destiny of the Filipino people.”

            A couple of farmers come forward, carrying a sack of rice, one declaring. “This, to help tide you over in your undertakings.” Another one speaks with resolve, “We’re with you. Give us arms.”

            Ka Mao cringes inside him. Where will I get arms? he aches to himself.

They come flashing in his mind, the days following the discovery by the Spanish colonialists of the existence of the Katipunan. The katipuneros must revolt now in the open, but they had not yet had the arms promised by Dr. Jose Rizal according to the arrangement in the La Liga Filipina back in 1892.. So Andres Bonifacio sends an emissary, Dr, Pio Valenzuela, to Dapitan to ask Rizal, there in exile since 1892, to give the go signal for turning over those arms which had already arrived in the country aboard a Japanese ship. Rizal demands that Antonio Luna lead the armed uprising. Bonifacio rages at the demand, refusing to surrender leadership in the revolt. So the promised arms are not given to the Katipuneros, which is why when the revolt breaks with the Cry of Balintawak in August 1896, the Katipuneros are armed with nothing but bolos and bamboo spears.

Ka Mao is inwardly raging at feeling the pathos of the Katipunan rising as he and Ka Leo  smuggle sacks of firecrackers out of a fish pond bodega.

 “These are powerful firecrackers, all right. Fishermen use them in improvising dynamites for bombing fish. But how much will they amount to in pushing a revolution?” Ka Leo says, even as he helps out Ka Mao in the undertaking,

“A single spark can start a prairie fire,” retorts Ka Mao, loading the last of the firecrackers into a canoe and then paddling it across the river toward the other side. “We can make enough number of pill boxes and explode them in different parts of the city, creating the conditions for citywide mass insurrection.”

Together with Louie, Ka Mao explodes a number of pillboxes at the Manila City Hall, hiding in the dark. Then they hurry to take a passing JD Transit Liner.

On Espana Extension, they hurl pill boxes right from inside the speeding bus, blasting them in a car dealer shop.

In a residential area, they blast pill boxes at the house of a known class enemy, then rush away, taking a taxi.

In the morning, the two scan several newspapers.

“Nothing said in any of the papers,” says Louie rather amusedly, then adds a sarcasm. “Our revolution is a picnic.”

Ka Mao rages, “Tell that to those farmers having complete faith in what we bring to them as the true revolutionary line. They are willing to go our way. How do we admit that we really don’t have arms? That we are nothing but a handful of scalawags. Determined dissenters maybe, Devoted to serving the people, yes. But utterly powerless to provide them the guns they ask to make our revolution real?”

Tears from his eyes struggled to get distinguished from raindrops splashing on his face as Ka Mao trudged on down the street.

His shoes splashed through the increasing flood waters in the gutter.