HINDSIGHT By F Sionil Jose Updated June 29, 2009 12:00 AM
The murder the other week of Rene Peñas, who led the Sumilao farmers in their march from Bukidnon to Manila, and the violent eviction of the demonstrators from the premises of Congress at about the same time, evoked painful memories of peasant travail in the past. Rene Peñas was certainly not the first farm leader to die at the hands of those who oppose agrarian reform. And those demonstrators in Congress belong to a devoted lineage of farmers who tried — and failed — to redress their sorry lot. Sure, the comprehensive agrarian reform program has been extended but so much has yet to be done, particularly in the coconut and sugar lands.
We are an agricultural country that should be able to produce enough food for ourselves, but this government, dominated as it has always been by landlords, has long ignored the peasantry. In a sense, its hierarchs have never grasped the profound nationalist and religious roots of the aspirations of our very poor as well as their rigid compulsion to revolt.
Let us start with the Colorums of Tayug, Pangasinan in 1931. My first informant on that mini-rebellion was the late Narciso Ramos, father of President Fidel V. Ramos. He was then a journalist in Asingan near Tayug, just like Rosales where I was born. He had written about the uprising, knew its origins in landlord oppression for in Asingan, as in Rosales, were believers of the faith.
Colorum is not the official name of that peasant group. The word is from the Latin mass, and they believed in quasi-religious chants and anting-anting (charms), which supposedly endowed them with superpowers. Soon after the word came to mean illegal objects like colorum jeepneys, colorum firearms and the like. Indeed, peasant organizations here and elsewhere in the developing world derive their triumphalist motive from religion.
I interviewed the Colorum leader Pedro Calosa twice in Tayug in the ‘50s when I was with the old Manila Times. It was the harvest season and I came upon him and his wife at work in the fields just outside the town. He was small and very dark. In his youth he had gone to Hawaii like so many young Ilokanos to work in the sugar and pineapple plantations there. While in Hawaii, he organized the farm workers. Deported home, he worked the land as a tenant farmer and started organizing the barrio folk.
Pedro Calosa claimed that the spirits of Rizal, Bonifacio, Mabini—all these illustrious dead—had entered his body. Why these heroes? Because they sacrificed for this land. We see in this simple explanation then the nationalist cant become flesh.
Calosa also said all the peasants in the country were bonded together by the soil and when the Colorums struck, they expected the entire peasantry would rise with them. It did not happen for though suffering had fired them, the rest who were oppressed had become comfortable with their chains. The Colorums holed up in the Catholic church until the following day when a Constabulary company from Manila arrived and dislodged them.
Like Rene Peñas of Sumilao, Pedro Calosa of Tayug was murdered; his passing evoked no outcry even from the poor he so tenaciously defended.
The Sakdal revolt erupted a scant four years after the failed Colorum uprising. The acknowledged founder of the Sakdal (to defend) movement was Benigno Ramos, a minor government functionary, Tagalog writer and eloquent rabblerouser. He advocated the partitioning of the haciendas and the expulsion of the United States. He was also pro-Japanese as were some politicians at the time who saw in the Japanese experience a possible model for our own modernization, as well as emancipation from Western imperialism. As a political party, the Sakdalistas were well knit, welded together by class feelings. On May 2, 1935, they seized municipal buildings in Laguna and Bulacan. The revolt was immediately crushed but not after many were killed. Benigno Ramos fled to Japan and returned during the Japanese Occupation. The Sakdals then morphed into the Ganap Party and formed the dreaded Makapili which brought death to many Filipinos. We see in the Sakdals, a nationalist peasant-based movement, corrupted into a tool of Japanese conquest.
In spite of its ignoble deterioration, like the Colorums, the Sakdals signify peasant support for revolution.
In the mid ‘50s in Laguna, in the shadow of Mt. Makiling, which is deified by many of the people in its environs. I met Valentin de los Santos, the leader of the Watawat ng Lahi — the Rizalista faction, later known as the Lapiang Malaya. He figured in the front pages of the newspapers in May 1967 when he led a motley band in a planned Malacañang demonstration. They paused in Taft Avenue in Pasay.
They were in gaudy red and white uniform with yellow capes, and were armed with long bolos. Like the Colorums, they believed that their pig-Latin chants and amulets made them invincible. The Constabulary challenged them and when the smoke of battle cleared, more than 30 of De Los Santos’ ignorant followers lay dead on the pavement. What a waste of human life! Had the military any sense of the past and learned from the Colorums and other nativistic peasant movements, they would have simply sent a sergeant in the resplendent regalia of a high-ranking officer, with golden epaulets and all that gleaming braid to mollify the farmers. Valentin de los Santos was arrested and confined to the Mandaluyong Psychopathic Hospital where he was murdered like Pedro Calosa,
The Hukbalahap (short for Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon or the People’s Army Against the Japanese) started as guerrillas during the Japanese Occupation and became the best organized guerrilla force; later demonized by the United States at the start of the Cold War in 1946. It became HMB (Hukbo Magpalaya ng Bayan) (Army to Liberate the People). I followed closely its genesis and eventual decay. I knew some of its leaders, Fred Saulo, Casto Alejandrino, the Lava brothers and Luis Taruc who became my compadre. Their iron commitment, their tremendous capacity for sacrifice were truly admirable.
Only the other day, Francisco Lava of the succeeding Lava generation and I were reminiscing about his forebears who certainly were not dirt poor tenant farmers. The Lavas, Casto Alejandrino belonged to the wealthy principalia as did Pedro Abad Santos whom Luis Taruc idolized. Juan Feleo of Nueva Ecija who was elected member of Congress in the early Forties was also one such paragon — rich, urbane, he gave up everything, his lands, his family, his life for the peasantry. I recreated Luis Taruc whom I knew best as Ka Lucio, the faded revolutionary in my novel Mass.
The Huks were eventually fractured not really by ideological disagreements or ethnic loyalties but by the unsinkable egoism of its leaders — the very same tragic flaw which sundered the New People’s Army and almost all of our fledgling political institutions.
An element of religiosity also suffused the Huks, not so much in their allegiance to the communist creed. Among the lower echelons was the same religiosity that infused the Colorums and the Sakdals. As Luis Taruc himself had confided — if he was a bit more opportunistic, he would have exploited that religiosity of his followers, some of whom had regarded him as possessed with unearthly powers, which explained his miraculous escapes.
The greatest tragedy during the administration of President Cory Aquino happened in the late afternoon of January 22, 1986 when some 20 farmer demonstrators were killed in Mendiola street by the military. How could such a tragedy occur? Whose fault was it? The farmers under Jaime Tadeo had wanted to see the President to press their claims for agrarian reform which Cory, in the previous election campaign, had promised. She was not ignorant of the agrarian unrest that cankered Central Luzon where her vast 6,000 hectare-hacienda is located — the sanctuary no less of the New People’s Army Commander, Dante Buscayno. She refused to see the farmers because, as she explained, “they had no appointment.”
It was all there on television for us to see — the volleys of gunfire, the frenzied dash for cover of the demonstrators, the dead and wounded sprawled on the pavement.
Prof. Toru Yano of the Kyoto Center of Southeast Asian Studies told me later that Cory was elected to get the Nobel Peace Prize that year after the triumph of EDSA I. Professor Yano who was the Asian member of that Nobel Committee said that senseless massacre aborted it.
In death, that tiller from Sumilao, at the very least, will be remembered for he had a name. But those who fell in Mendiola, and all over the world as well, those selfless men with the plow who feed us, will pass as anonymously as the beasts of burden that help make this sweet earth bear fruit. We who survive, who are sustained by their labor are yoked with them. If we can, nameless though they were, we must always remember what they did, render imperishable the terrible injustice of their dying — an outrage which will never be redressed. This, too, is the indelible shame we must bear for having elected to power the very same tyrants who forged their chains, and worse, became their remorseless executioners.
In the Senate, the most important agenda in Senator Loren Legarda’s 2010 platform is her espousal of agriculture, her hopes that eventually we will be able to feed 90 million Filipinos. In media, I salute the economist Solita Monsod for her dogged support for the peasantry, an advocacy backed by competent scholarship. Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales, the Catcholic Bishops’ Conference, too, and all those religious orders, the Jesuits— demand agrarian reform. We are grateful to the late Fr. Hector Mauri who devoted a lifetime to the welfare of the sacadas of Negros, so, too, to Fr. Arsenio C. Jesena, Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, and to so many young priests and nuns.
The revolutionary tradition fortified by the peasantry is the dimly remembered continuum in our history. Even the New People’s Army — in spite of its wretched failure after 40 years — is agrarian in its inspiration. I had asked Luis Taruc if any of the NPA cadres ever visited him to learn from him or, at the very least, establish that connection — and he said, no.
There, of course, lies what ails so many of the attempts to reform this country. The methods are not indigenized, the young revolutionists think they are reinventing the wheel.
For those of us who have plowed a fallow field and planted rice, who have watched the greening of the land, the transformation of emerald expanses into vistas of shimmering gold as the grain ripens — we know there is no sight more evocative than this, or a scent as fragrant as that of the newly harvested field. Verily, it is the peasants who understand the vibrant meaning of all these, of mother earth as the nation we must love and worship, our most precious gift from God. Such devotion is enshrined in our national anthem, sang by every schoolchild. To sing the anthem in its prescribed form, to honor our flag — these are much too little a price for us Filipinos to pay.
So then, if the peasant is the true nationalist — he could also be the sterling revolutionary who subscribes implicitly to what that Sakdal general, Salud Algabre said in 1935. “No rebellion ever fails — each one is a step in the right direction.”
Philstar
Monday, June 29, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
What’s happening in a Nueva Ecija town by Tonette Orejas
HARVARD TAKES NOTICE By Tonette Orejas
Philippine Daily Inquirer, Central Luzon Desk
First Posted 02:36:00 06/24/2009
MANILA, Philippines--A progressive municipality in Nueva Ecija, whose patron, Saint Isidore, was a farmer like most of its 47,000 people, has gained attention at the prestigious Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government (KSG) in Massachusetts.
“I never thought that the small things that we do in our small town—the things that the ‘great’ leaders of our country take for granted—will be magnified, felt and noticed here in Boston today,” Mayor Sonia Lorenzo of San Isidro in Nueva Ecija said in her presentation on governance and democratic leadership at a KSG conference last week.
The conference mainly tackled the ministry of Gawad Kalinga (GK), a Catholic Church-affiliated group that has helped more than one million Filipinos reach their dreams to own homes and live in peaceful, productive communities.
“What happened in San Isidro went beyond building houses and organizing communities. In our town, we applied in public governance the GK-style of working from the bottom,” she said in an interview by e-mail.
Her speech, “Creating a Culture of Change,” sums up for the first time the steps that local officials and residents have embarked on and hurdled together to take San Isidro out of the rut of traditional politics and really make local government serve the people.
Out of domestic duties
Lorenzo was hardly prepared for public governance. A chemical engineer, she went full-time in rearing four children.
But four days before the 1998 elections, her townmates plucked her out of domestic duties, pleading her to run for mayor when a candidate was disqualified. She won.
But the town was in a financial mess, the municipal employees demoralized and many of the residents distrustful of government.
GK came after a storm devastated the town. “Our partnership opened the gate for social transformation in San Isidro. We learned the effective way of addressing poverty through citizen’s participation. We learned the GK way,” Lorenzo recalled.
By that, she meant making people “co-own the issues and co-create the solutions to come up with a common response in addressing the issues.”
The result, she said, is a guide for “bottom-up governance that now prevails in the town.”
In this leadership style, she said “listening is the foundation to participation because it enabled us to respond to the right problems quickly.”
Their venues were multisectoral planning sessions. Local officials pushed this further by engaging students in doing basic surveys.
“This deepened their understanding of San Isidro; at the same time, it saved us from expensive survey,” she said.
Integrating people is a must.
“We found that when we strengthened the interest groups, we effectively spread the leadership and stewardship of the issues and empowered people who are concerned. In other words, we effectively decentralized governance and let citizens manage some of the response through advocacies and civic initiated projects,” Lorenzo said.
“We integrated the people into the work in order for us to deepen our understanding and make our responses more effective.”
People’s affirmation
It did not stop there. The officials had to ask the residents to validate the programs before actually doing the projects.
They also needed to change how they regard themselves in the change process.
“As we engaged institutions who can help, we went back to the people and slowly defined our accountabilities. We did this in order to ensure the success of the programs and maintain the trust of the funders,” Lorenzo said.
Making the people understand this new way of doing things was difficult. Barangay health workers, the frontline workers, put in the magic.
Trained in leadership and communication, they explained the goals of the local government and the roles of the residents.
Following their own score cards, they enrolled 95 percent of the population in the municipality’s health insurance program. No dole, it required the residents to pay their share of the dues.
“As we launched other programs, we slowly formulated a barangay-based health care system which became the basis for our Client Needs Centered Clinic. We still have a long way, but we have already addressed many pressing issues in health,” she said.
Zero infant mortality
The work is paying off and one of the best results is that, the town had zero infant death in 2008.
“Even with the flaring of dengue epidemic, we have kept the town dengue free last year, as well. And with the inevitable coming of H1N1, we are praying we can respond adequately,” Lorenzo said.
Sustaining the gains is another challenge.
“As much as we scaled down to the barangay, we also scaled up to expand the work. And we found GK to be a great venue for transformative learning. When we ran out of houses to build, we brought GK into the other programs we have. We brought GK to the schools. We brought GK to the work of the parishes. We brought GK to the [people’s organizations],” she said.
She added: “It was a whole new perspective of enabling people [to] participate and gradually making them accountable to the needs of the community.”
Local officials also integrated the GK approach into the curriculum of the College of Immaculate Conception (CIC) so students would learn it, according to Julia Embuscado, a teacher.
Nurturing the enabler
The fifth lesson is nurturing the enabler.
“We encountered many obstacles and resistance. This is when we realized that we needed more people on our side. As we work to build constituencies, we also engaged in leadership training to bring more people to the work,” Lorenzo said.
Ateneo de Manila University and CIC were called in to put together a master’s program for local executives. The 18-month program in public management seeks to enhance technical competencies.
San Isidro, Lorenzo said, has now become a “sanctuary” of engagements for change.
Next month, local officials will launch the Sinag Ecija Leadership and Social Accountability Institute. The institute will house the different initiatives that are ongoing on the ground.
Communities have their own score cards of what they want to attain and how to deliver the targets. Farmers have almost doubled their harvests from 80 cavans of rice to 150 cavans.
San Isidro’s income from taxes has increased by 515.61 percent from 1999 level, prompting the Department of Finance to classify the town into second class (annual income: P45 million-P55 million) from fourth (annual income: P25 million-P35 million).
Better electoral behavior
Citizens’ participation, Lorenzo said, “resulted in trust in governance and better electoral behavior.”
“While we still suffer and struggle through poverty and traditional politics, we present a clear avenue for change that people can follow,” she told participants in the KSG conference.
“We will think of innovative and practical means to preserve this freedom. We will extend ourselves to bridge the democratic gap that our country is now suffering from. We will continue to realize the republic that our country is chartered and not merely as our lawmakers profess. And most importantly, we will continue to integrate the needs of the poor into our policies. This is the ultimate measure of our transparency,” she said.
Filed Under: Elections, Health, Culture (general), Governance
Philippine Daily Inquirer, Central Luzon Desk
First Posted 02:36:00 06/24/2009
MANILA, Philippines--A progressive municipality in Nueva Ecija, whose patron, Saint Isidore, was a farmer like most of its 47,000 people, has gained attention at the prestigious Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government (KSG) in Massachusetts.
“I never thought that the small things that we do in our small town—the things that the ‘great’ leaders of our country take for granted—will be magnified, felt and noticed here in Boston today,” Mayor Sonia Lorenzo of San Isidro in Nueva Ecija said in her presentation on governance and democratic leadership at a KSG conference last week.
The conference mainly tackled the ministry of Gawad Kalinga (GK), a Catholic Church-affiliated group that has helped more than one million Filipinos reach their dreams to own homes and live in peaceful, productive communities.
“What happened in San Isidro went beyond building houses and organizing communities. In our town, we applied in public governance the GK-style of working from the bottom,” she said in an interview by e-mail.
Her speech, “Creating a Culture of Change,” sums up for the first time the steps that local officials and residents have embarked on and hurdled together to take San Isidro out of the rut of traditional politics and really make local government serve the people.
Out of domestic duties
Lorenzo was hardly prepared for public governance. A chemical engineer, she went full-time in rearing four children.
But four days before the 1998 elections, her townmates plucked her out of domestic duties, pleading her to run for mayor when a candidate was disqualified. She won.
But the town was in a financial mess, the municipal employees demoralized and many of the residents distrustful of government.
GK came after a storm devastated the town. “Our partnership opened the gate for social transformation in San Isidro. We learned the effective way of addressing poverty through citizen’s participation. We learned the GK way,” Lorenzo recalled.
By that, she meant making people “co-own the issues and co-create the solutions to come up with a common response in addressing the issues.”
The result, she said, is a guide for “bottom-up governance that now prevails in the town.”
In this leadership style, she said “listening is the foundation to participation because it enabled us to respond to the right problems quickly.”
Their venues were multisectoral planning sessions. Local officials pushed this further by engaging students in doing basic surveys.
“This deepened their understanding of San Isidro; at the same time, it saved us from expensive survey,” she said.
Integrating people is a must.
“We found that when we strengthened the interest groups, we effectively spread the leadership and stewardship of the issues and empowered people who are concerned. In other words, we effectively decentralized governance and let citizens manage some of the response through advocacies and civic initiated projects,” Lorenzo said.
“We integrated the people into the work in order for us to deepen our understanding and make our responses more effective.”
People’s affirmation
It did not stop there. The officials had to ask the residents to validate the programs before actually doing the projects.
They also needed to change how they regard themselves in the change process.
“As we engaged institutions who can help, we went back to the people and slowly defined our accountabilities. We did this in order to ensure the success of the programs and maintain the trust of the funders,” Lorenzo said.
Making the people understand this new way of doing things was difficult. Barangay health workers, the frontline workers, put in the magic.
Trained in leadership and communication, they explained the goals of the local government and the roles of the residents.
Following their own score cards, they enrolled 95 percent of the population in the municipality’s health insurance program. No dole, it required the residents to pay their share of the dues.
“As we launched other programs, we slowly formulated a barangay-based health care system which became the basis for our Client Needs Centered Clinic. We still have a long way, but we have already addressed many pressing issues in health,” she said.
Zero infant mortality
The work is paying off and one of the best results is that, the town had zero infant death in 2008.
“Even with the flaring of dengue epidemic, we have kept the town dengue free last year, as well. And with the inevitable coming of H1N1, we are praying we can respond adequately,” Lorenzo said.
Sustaining the gains is another challenge.
“As much as we scaled down to the barangay, we also scaled up to expand the work. And we found GK to be a great venue for transformative learning. When we ran out of houses to build, we brought GK into the other programs we have. We brought GK to the schools. We brought GK to the work of the parishes. We brought GK to the [people’s organizations],” she said.
She added: “It was a whole new perspective of enabling people [to] participate and gradually making them accountable to the needs of the community.”
Local officials also integrated the GK approach into the curriculum of the College of Immaculate Conception (CIC) so students would learn it, according to Julia Embuscado, a teacher.
Nurturing the enabler
The fifth lesson is nurturing the enabler.
“We encountered many obstacles and resistance. This is when we realized that we needed more people on our side. As we work to build constituencies, we also engaged in leadership training to bring more people to the work,” Lorenzo said.
Ateneo de Manila University and CIC were called in to put together a master’s program for local executives. The 18-month program in public management seeks to enhance technical competencies.
San Isidro, Lorenzo said, has now become a “sanctuary” of engagements for change.
Next month, local officials will launch the Sinag Ecija Leadership and Social Accountability Institute. The institute will house the different initiatives that are ongoing on the ground.
Communities have their own score cards of what they want to attain and how to deliver the targets. Farmers have almost doubled their harvests from 80 cavans of rice to 150 cavans.
San Isidro’s income from taxes has increased by 515.61 percent from 1999 level, prompting the Department of Finance to classify the town into second class (annual income: P45 million-P55 million) from fourth (annual income: P25 million-P35 million).
Better electoral behavior
Citizens’ participation, Lorenzo said, “resulted in trust in governance and better electoral behavior.”
“While we still suffer and struggle through poverty and traditional politics, we present a clear avenue for change that people can follow,” she told participants in the KSG conference.
“We will think of innovative and practical means to preserve this freedom. We will extend ourselves to bridge the democratic gap that our country is now suffering from. We will continue to realize the republic that our country is chartered and not merely as our lawmakers profess. And most importantly, we will continue to integrate the needs of the poor into our policies. This is the ultimate measure of our transparency,” she said.
Filed Under: Elections, Health, Culture (general), Governance
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