The Eye Of The Fish. Luis H. Francia
a friend of mine described the weekend-long People Power uprising in Manila as a coup d’etat. Most people then would have disagreed, as I did initially. My friend wasn’t a loyalist, as those who never broke faith with the Marcoses were called—but she was from the upper class and knew enough of herself and her peers to distrust their sudden discovery of egalitarianism. Yet it was a concept this friend took seriously, all the more reason for the acuteness of her realization that the idea of achieving it without bloodshed was quixotic. After the parties, the self-congratulatory spirit, the euphoria in which everyone basked, what then? Expressing a feeling that was still muted among most people I knew, she explained that the country had merely postponed the bloodshed. “We’re so good at that, always putting off the day of reckoning.”
In terms of the Philippines’ history, that statement isn’t accurate. Before the 1896 revolution against Spain, there had been at least two hundred recorded uprisings over the course of more than three centuries of colonial rule, precisely because people had grown tired of “putting off the day of reckoning.” The problem was, either such revolts were put down by force of arms, or their leaders were coopted. But the fever of resistance never died out. In the nearly fifty-year American colonial occupation that followed the bitter 1899 Philippine-American War, the colonial authorities had to suppress a dozen revolts, mostly due to agrarian unrest. In 1930, the Partidong Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) was founded. When the Japanese invaded the archipelago during World War II, the PKP, sometimes in collaboration and sometimes at odds with pro-U.S. underground units, fought the Japanese with its Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon, or the Anti-Japanese People’s Army. The Soviet-leaning Huks, as these guerrillas were known, remained a disruptive opposition to the U.S.-backed government after the war, in 1946, when the United States formally relinquished its hold on the country. In the first postwar elections, two PKP candidates from Central Luzon, the country’s heartland, were elected to the national legislature. When they were prevented by the government from taking their seats, the Huks took up arms once again. After an initial string of victories that enabled them to come perilously close to capturing Manila, the Huks suffered defeat in the early 1950s.
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the PKP leadership decided to abandon armed struggle in favor of the political arena. There, blocked at every turn by a pro-U.S. government, it made no gains whatsoever. A number of Huk detachments refused to disarm, and only in 1974 did the last group surrender to the authorities. But six years prior to the final capitulation in 1968, a breakaway PKP faction, led by an intellectual and former student leader, José Maria Sison, founded the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). The PKP, not surprisingly, was hostile to the newly emergent CPP, but limited most of its hostility to polemical barks, though it did try once to assassinate Sison.
I knew a member of the CPP, one who had joined in 1971 and who had known its leaders since its beginnings. I had met him shortly after the Aquino government had come to power. He was the move-ment’s Manila press liaison, and was arranging a trip for me to a guerrilla zone up north. Since those first meetings, I had met him on other occasions—whenever I needed to set up interviews with top-ranking members of the underground. The requirements of this man’s job necessitated name changes all the time, but at the time of our initial meeting, “Roger” was his nom de guerre.
Roger was efficient, quiet, well-educated, and thoroughly non-descript—not just in his appearance but in the way he moved about in public, a calculated virtue essential to his job. After more than twenty years in the underground, he had become the breeze that scarcely ripples a lake’s surface. I knew Roger’s story would reflect the movement’s own, and asked him if he would arrange an interview with himself. We decided we would meet not at a public place but in a hotel room. This would be a change from the fast-food outlets he usually designated as rendezvous spots, always at an hour when business was slow—usually mid-afternoons, when people, including government operatives, took siestas. Two decades of having to be invisible had bred in Roger, a thin man in his late forties, an innate sense of caution that served him well. He had an almost imperceptible method of viewing a room even as we conversed. His head would swivel slowly from side to side, as though he were thinking about what you had asked, when in fact he was taking stock of who was sitting near us. Sometimes he would shift in his seat so he could look to his rear. He performed this reconaissance smoothly, without a break in the conversation. He had reason to be even more cautious of late. Since I had last seen him, the government had captured several key members of the movement, the result of a marked improvement in the army’s intelligence services. So far, however, Roger had eluded the net.
Roger drifted into activism when he was a student at the state-run University of the Philippines in the late 1950s. He originally began attending political meetings and demonstrations out of a sense of camaraderie: though he was trained in the sciences, his friends were mostly writers and political activists. At the university’s Listening Center, a lounge Roger described as “a place run by the Writers Club where you could hang out, have some coffee, and listen to music, poetry, and dramatic readings on record,” he remembers reading publications from the Soviet Union and The Progressive Review, a publication put out by Sison, by then already a well-known student activist and member of the PKP. Roger described himself as “an avid reader, very eclectic. I read texts on Hinduism, Marxism, a lot of fiction, especially Sartre and Camus.” It was a heady mix of ideas and ideology, giving him a sense of engagé.
Intellectual and cultural life on the UP campus in Roger’s student days was polarized around two groups: an activist Catholic group, the University of the Philippines Student Catholic Action (UPSCA), which was led by a charismatic, fervent anticommunist Jesuit, Father John Delaney, and the Student Cultural Association of UP (SCAUP), whose name had been picked out by the free-thinkers, writers, and rebellious nationalists who formed its core, precisely to mock that of UPSCA.
At the nearby Ateneo de Manila High School my classmates and I heard about the on-campus ideological struggle between UPSCA and SCAUP. Since Delaney was a Jesuit, the conflict between UPSCA and SCAUP was played up by our teachers as a struggle between Christianity and Communism, between the good guys and the bad guys. The university, a hotbed of activism, was pictured to us as a godless place where one could easily lose one’s faith and even one’s soul. We were discouraged from visiting its grounds, and certainly from pursuing our college degrees there. Unlike the private Ateneo, the much larger public university, with its mix of social classes, would have meant a dilution of our elitist notions, filling our heads with doubts about the way the country was run, about ourselves and our privileged status—not a very good psychological base if we were to eventually rule the country, as we were led to believe.
By the late 1950s, when Roger enrolled as a freshman in the sci-ences, ideas on collective self-determination, especially in protest against the heavy hand of American imperialism and the burdens of a colonialist history, had become the central tenets of campus activism. Roger immediately felt an attraction to the anarchists and free spirits congregating around the Writers Club and the SCAUP rather than to his presumably more somber collegues in the sciences or to the churchgoing members of the UPSCA. Roger played the role of activist, though never a leading one. By temperament, and by the detachment necessary in the sciences, he preferred the sidelines. Even now, though close to the top, he shies away from center stage, the quintessential civil servant in a position the government felt little civility for.
Two years after graduation, in the early 1960s, Roger got married to a writer from UP, who moved in the same circles. The SCAUP activists would regularly meet at the couple’s apartment. It was at this time that Kabataang Makabayan (KM, or Nationalist Youth) was founded, a radical left-wing students’ group with ties to the PKP. Roger was close to its founders. After a while, he soon found himself deeply involved with this new group.
By then radical university students had come out against the Vietnam War, earlier than the students on American campuses. But public opinion was largely stacked against them. Nationalism may have found fertile ground in the different campuses (though not at the Ateneo), but the rest of the country was unabashedly pro-America. This meant that the war was supported by the government, by the media, and by the man on the street. And certainly by Jesuit boys like myself, still ignorant of Vietnam’s history, barely aware of our own or of American greed and paranoia and racism. If I had met Roger then, I probably would have shied away,