For much of that period, there was very little information about the underground movement, unless one made the decision to go up into the hills and join them. The organization was set up as a clandestine operation and by its very nature that meant that information was closely guarded and monitored. The little information that got out to the public rarely depicted them in a positive light. This was the problem for those willing to support their cause. The left’s lack of transparency and its growing penchant for violence was starting to cast doubt about their integrity. The largely untold and unknown directive in which they would take over and present a superior alternative to civil society, in sharp contrast to the dictatorial Marcos regime, remained shrouded in a cloud of secrecy. It was also wearing thin on me. I was deeply disappointed. I still am.
Even so, and in the early days, legions of Filipinos signed on or sympathized with the rebels’ cause, an enthusiasm that the movement then exploited to grow its ranks. By the mid-1980s, reports in reputable and scholarly publications were claiming that both the Communist Party and its military arm, the NPA, had grown and expanded in many regions of the country. They extended from Luzon through the Visayas and then spread like wildfire among the Muslim enclaves of Mindanao, where some reports alleged, the CPP had effectively become the de facto local government in villages and towns, where official government rule had collapsed and the army had effectively abandoned these uncontrollable places.
Without a doubt, sentiments against economic and political expression, injustice, lack of economic opportunity, grinding poverty, Philippine-style oligarchic politics, and other social ills, were legitimate justifications for founding the CPP. Filipinos wanted an alternative. But the opacity of an inherently clandestine undertaking left too much room for speculation, untruths, and sometimes, pure fabrication. Marcos exploited their vulnerabilities whenever an opportunity arose. He used his traditional media pulpit to discredit the left with his own brand of truth, knowing full well that the CPP and the NPA would be unable to disavow whatever had been written in the press or announced over the airwaves. He controlled all the media outlets at that point. It was unfortunate that it was these fabrications that filtered down to the general public. For the gullible, these lies were made sufficiently believable. But for those who did not trust the media, who believed that the media was an appendage of the Marcos government, these fabrications proved that the Marcos government would use any means necessary to stay in power. It was also in these areas—in the avenues of public discourse and in the media marketplace—that shades of gray proliferated. Over time, the deadly cat-and-mouse game between the government and the rebels produced egregious lies, which resulted in consequences that impacted the lives of ordinary Filipinos. Some of these fabrications have now been exposed for the lies and deceptions that they were. But it would be foolish to hold my breath for every single one of these fabrications to be repudiated. Many will continue to be regarded as gospel truth by those who benefited from Marcos’ largesse. Or they will simply be buried under the deeply polemical and one-too-many embattled periods of Philippine political history. Many of the characters that played prominently in significant events of those days are still around today. It remains in the interest of the opposing sides to continue to obfuscate the truth.
One of the suppressions by the left is the denial that the CPP and NPA were behind the now infamous Plaza Miranda bombing in1971. In a third incarnation of Ben Pimentel’s book, which is an account of the life of revolutionary and former Ateneo de Manila University student leader, Edgar Jopson, entitled, U.G An Underground Tale: The Journey of Edgar Jopson and the First Quarter Storm Generation, the author provides newly disclosed information claiming that it is entirely possible that the Communist Party ordered the bombing and that Jopson learned about it later and was troubled by the allegation. Similarly, one of the more well known victims of the bombing, Senator Jovito Salonga, in his autobiography, also expressed his belief that the CPP was responsible. The CPP and the NPA, in their current incarnations, have not admitted responsibility and it is possible that they will never acknowledge their guilt. But Plaza Miranda will persist as a significant piece in the history of the country and remains a watershed event in its political history.
It is common knowledge in Philippine society that it was Marxist-leaning students that sowed the initial seeds of dissent and unrest in the 1960s, giving rise to the Communist Party of the Philippines as well as the New People’s Army. It was during this period when much of the world watched on as students took to the streets; when they had dialogs in Marxist-Leninist sit-ins and lectures, and attempted to topple the complacent 1950s free market apple cart. By 1969, when Marcos was re-elected for his second term of office, this ragtag band of students, many coming from upper middle class backgrounds, rebel farmers and laborers, chartered the organization known as the CPP. Later, as its membership grew, they formed the NPA.
Like its counterparts in Asia and Latin America, the development of insurgency in the Philippines was initiated first by intellectuals and middle-class radicals who composed its dogma, offered organizational skills, and sparked the necessary revolutionary zeal. And like the foot soldiers who make up the front lines in combat, the cadres that populated the nascent organization came from the peasant class. Shouts of feudalism, imperialism, and bureaucrat capitalism rang out frequently during student street demonstrations, while the more serious study of Maoist-Leninist doctrine occupied budding revolutionaries in their spare time, away from academic halls and straight into candle or kerosene lamp-lit country huts and mountain hideaways.
Analysis in Western publications about the Philippine insurgency posited that the movement was not taken seriously in its beginning stages. The reason? The West saw the Philippines as very different from the Communist revolutions waged in China, Indochina, and Latin America. It was also based on the country’s economic picture from its early days as a fledgling democracy and the supposition that it was a budding economic powerhouse when compared to its poor and ailing Asian neighbors. To take it a step farther, it was argued that the country did not have anything in common with its counterparts in the East except for Japan.
Frankly, I found this idea preposterous. Try explaining this to many who could barely feed themselves and then ask how they saw their lives during that period. Would I have heard the Americans or other Westerners say this about the Philippines when I was living there, I would have told them to come, visit, and then see the predominantly poor people around the country. The country was at that time dominated by rural landscapes, not the urban ones associated with metropolitan cities that signal a bustling economy and growing national wealth. I am certain such a visit would change their minds about the Philippines being a “budding economic power.” I would also feel confident that many Filipinos would identify themselves as poor and distinctly aligned with the peasant class. They would also more than likely regard the whole country as poor, especially when compared to the America they looked up to as the epicenter of success and wealth. Many of us never even bothered learning about our neighbors across the borders. We were pretty ignorant about what was happening in the region because our eyes were always looking towards America. We were fixated on a specific prize: We wanted a piece of the American dream. Desperately. This was not surprising given the lack of economic opportunities at home; the fact that the Philippines was a former American colony and many still professed American allegiance, coupled with the dominance and influence of American pop culture in every home. Thousands migrated to American shores and many more would leave the country in succeeding years. In this regard, we were easily the unquestioning recipients of American culture and consumers of a vast American free enterprise.
Like many Filipinos, I saw images of poverty at a young age. Sometimes these experiences would hit close to home. I often wondered, for example, why it was that every morning, poor country folks from the rural barrio of Divisoria lined up the door to grandma’s house. Our family owned land there and sha
recroppers like the ones I saw at grandma’s house, regularly borrowed money from her to feed and clothe their children, buy seeds for their crops, or use for their weddings. I always found the scene distasteful, much as I loved grandma. I was none too pleased that she made these people wait for hours, asking them to do things for her around her house before she came around to giving them the money they needed. Later, I was mortified to discover that the loans were provided under an arrangement locally known as “Five-Six,” a usurious practice commonly perpetuated in those days by the land-owning class. I was deeply disappointed that a relative would participate in such an inequitable exchange. But the disappointment pales when compared to the fact that many more members of the landowning class made these loans to sharecroppers, which put them in an endless cycle of debt and poverty.
Perhaps it was due to experiencing this scene at grandma’s house that I knew quite early the difference between the haves and the have-nots. By the time I was ten years old, I thought it was unfair that I was attending the most prestigious private school in town, while the children of the folks who worked my family’s land, would barely finish elementary school. I played with some of these children when grandma took me to Divisoria. I became friendly with them. I would even sometimes teach them things I learned in school and was surprised that they did not know the things I knew. Their mothers were like family to me and they treated us like family too. Yet, despite this closeness, they knew where they stood in terms of social standing. To add further tension, some of my older relatives looked down on children who went to public schools, many of which were considered inadequate. As my relatives said, “the teachers were not well trained and could not get better jobs and only public schools would hire them.”
Rather than feeling smug about being a private school kid, I was embarrassed that my family could afford this opportunity. It is no accident then that my sympathies would be invested in those who advocated raising the poor out of poverty.
Sometime during high school, I was introduced to a university student who came to talk about imperialism and feudalism. Her lecture was punctuated by big words I did not understand, though it did not matter. What mattered was that what I would learn would allow me to help the poor, and that was good enough for me.
As a teenager, the only way I could understand the meaning of imperialism was to portray it in simplified terms. I grew up not far from Clark Air Force Base in Angeles City. What I saw there of American servicemen, particularly as they roamed the streets of Angeles, did not do credit to Americans. It was commonly understood that they were out looking for “call girls.” At the US Subic Naval Base in Olongapo City, while undergoing bivouac in my high school cadet training required under martial law, I came across some American soldiers drinking and cavorting on the beach, their language so foul and so distressing. These kinds of scenes left a very bad impression on me. It was not just the moral dimension that left a bad taste in my mouth; it was also that I saw the subservience of Filipinos regarding prostitution, or in the local merchants who would do anything to please their free-spending American buyers. I admit that it was these scenes and images that cemented anti-American sentiments in my mind and made me easy prey to the ideas of Maoist-leaning, anti-imperialist zealots. To be fair, once I enrolled at the Ateneo de Manila University, my American professors, all of them Jesuit priests, taught me far more about social justice than I expected. I admired them greatly. The years I spent at Ateneo stoked my intellectual curiosity. I will not forget that it was they who taught me liberation theology, a kind of theology that grew out of the fabellas in Rio de Janeiro. Its dogma resonated among Filipino intellectuals and university students just as it did in Latin America. The same way I was attracted to the lectures on Marxist and socialist concepts, I appreciated what I heard from Jesuits on how religion can potentially be used to understand the dynamics of inequality, injustice, and disenfranchisement of the poor.
I lived not a half hour away from Clark and a mere two hours away from Subic, close enough to see the effects of the Americans on Filipino lives. It was therefore not far-fetched that I would be, as a teenager, against continuing the US bases’ placement in the Philippines. Keeping the US bases in the Philippines was one of the most politically contentious issues at the time—hotly debated both in the popular press and in leftist circles. I was sympathetic to the left’s insistence that the Philippines got a bad deal as far as the bases were concerned. It was not difficult for me to understand this point of view, given that Clark, with its high fence and tight security, was designed to keep Filipinos out. Dismaying scenes of poor children dressed in rags, rummaging through American garbage, scavenging for metal, plastic or glass bottles that they then sold for a pittance, while being repeatedly shooed away by the base’s security guards, were experienced often. For many of us, Clark was another world. It was definitely not part of the Pampanga I knew or the circles I belonged to. It could not even be considered part of the Philippines despite the country being such a willing and subservient host. The Americans also made it clear that the base was the United States. Yet, when they went out to have fun in the streets of Angeles City, it was to Filipino women they turned to. There were Filipino maids in their homes that took care of their children or cleaned their houses. It was to Filipino guards they hired to secure their homes. I knew personally about the security because one of my uncles own a security agency in Angeles. A majority of his clients in the 1970s were American military servicemen. To a young and naïve teenager, what was done on these bases and how American soldiers behaved towards Filipinos was imperialism personified.
Despite my having gone to private school and my family being landowners for generations, it was difficult for me to consider myself a member of the elite. My family was not very wealthy, even among the standards of wealth in my hometown. It was a different story when my mother was growing up. My grandmother was a Spanish mestizo, whose father hailed from Spain, sent to the Philippines to become a colonial government official when the islands were a Spanish colony. He owned more lands that he knew what to do with, using the income to finance his opium habit, or so family tales claim. Everyone addressed him as cabeza, which means ‘head’ in Spanish, and with the title, the prestige it gave his family.
His only child, my grandmother, knew intimately what it meant to be part of the mestizo class. According to stories from adult family members, she had gone to school with President Noynoy Aquino’s paternal grandmother at the Instituto de Mujeres in Manila. Part of the family lore handed down was that Apu Pa was comfortable with her role as a socialite. Even more intriguing was the belief that she didn’t spend a lot of time raising her five children herself. We were told that my mother and her sisters each had a nanny to see to their needs so that their mother was free to visit friends or do as she pleased. She was reported to have been away in the summer capital of Baguio enjoying good times with her friends when her husband died of a heart attack. But when my siblings and I were growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, we saw ourselves as middle class, even though Apu Pa continued to socialize with San Fernando’s mestizo class.
The political chaos rampant during the 70s when I was a young girl meant we were subjected to the persistent back and forth between the rebels and the military. If you read newspapers or watched TV during the martial law years, it seemed as though the government was winning against the insurgents. But the word of mouth and the books that came out soon after the 1986 People Power Revolution revealed that the NPA had gained traction soon after its establishment in 1969 and had reached its largest membership by the mid-1980s. In one such book, Inside the Philippine Revolution by former Washington Post writer, William Chapman, it is claimed that:
“By 1986, many large areas of the Philippines, like Negros, were affected by the communist guerillas and their converted citizen allies. Begun in the mountains of northeastern Luzon, the insurgency had edged down the archipelago’s eastern provinces and had become deeply rooted in many places. It grew most swiftly in
the Bicol region south of Manila; in Samar, an impoverished island in the eastern Visayas, and in some islands of the Western Visayas, such as Negros, and Panay. By the time President Ferdinand E. Marcos was deposed, in February 1986, it was known that the NPA was active in sixty-two of the country’s seventy-three provinces and that it controlled or influenced at least twenty percent of the barangays, the basic local political units of the Philippines.”
To feed their swelling numbers, leftist rebels relied on regular handouts from peasants and gentlemen farmers. The farmers we knew in Pampanga, not surprisingly, did not disclose that they gave the rebels money or food. And we would not have asked. But the stories persisted anyway. I remember wondering if they had asked help from my paternal grandfather, whose farm was in the remote village of Kulubasa. I wondered if they demanded that he provide them a portion of his harvest. And did he acquiesce to their demands? My father never talked about whether Grandpa was approached. Even if he knew, I doubt if he would have told me. This was a difficult subject to broach under martial law, especially given what happened to me in 1973. It was also common knowledge that in exchange for the provisions the dissidents received; they protected villages from the abuses and atrocities committed by the military. This fact was confirmed in Chapman’s book, where he writes,
“It [the NPA] had approximately 20,000 full-time armed guerillas in the field and perhaps half that number in armed militia units formed for local protection.”
It is not an exaggeration to say that peasant folks needed protection from the military. The Armed Forces of the Philippines had, by the mid-1980s, unleashed its brutality on the countryside because they suspected that peasants were aiding and abetting the rebels. The military came to be seen as undisciplined, corrupt, abusive, and sometimes regarded as common thieves and ignorant bullies who stole, raped, and killed innocent people. The opposite could not be more true of the rebels that came into their midst in the early years of the underground movement. Their Robin Hood-like personas won them vital support from peasants.
A Thousand Little Deaths Page 10
