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.
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.