Fighting on all Fronts (58 page)

The system created a larger layer of educated Filipinos than could be accommodated within the state and party bureaucracy. This in turn bred resentment, even within the beneficiaries of the US occupation, at the lack of opportunity provided by the colonial system. “New dissident leaders”, wrote historian David Sturtevant, “tended to be middle class professionals with grievances against the Nacionalista oligarchy. Disgruntled lawyers, unsuccessful union organisers, disappointed office-seekers and frustrated journalists attempted to assume control of popular movements in both the city and the countryside. While they failed to achieve that objective, their efforts provided organisational models for a handful of attentive contemporaries”.
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The US regime was politically more liberal than that of the Spanish, but the situation for the majority, particularly those in rural areas, deteriorated with colonial economic dependency. Much discontent was based on the culmination of a belated process of capitalist development opened up by new US markets. New machinery was coming into use. Previously tenant farmers had been able to borrow informally from landlords; they now required moneylenders or were forced to pay interest. One told historian Benedict Kerkvliet: “You know, before the time of the Japanese, the most important thing was that relations between tenants and big landowners went from decent to indecent”.
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The situation proved radicalising. Luis Taruc, who came from an impoverished barrio (village) in San Luis, Pampanga province, and would later become chief Huk commander, explained:

When I was still crawling the dust of the barrio street, I remember the landlords coming into the barrio, shouting, “Hoy, Puñeta!” and making the peasants run to carry out their demands… If they delayed or perhaps did not do things to the landlord’s liking, they were fined, or given extra work. In an extreme case they might be evicted. And where would they go for justice? The landlord owned the barrio. He was the justice, too.

Every year, after harvest, I watched from the dark corner of our nipa hut the frustration and despair of my parents, sadly facing each other
across a rough dulang [table], counting corn grains of palay [unhusked rice]… The debts grew from year to year… By the time I was six years old I had begun to resent the landlords, who made us, children of peasants, go to their houses and clean the floors and chop their wood and be their servants. When I saw them coming I ran to hide in the bamboos. I no longer wished to be their janitor.
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Grievances against individual landlords became generalised as it became clearer that the rural masses were all in the same boat. An upsurge in agrarian revolt ensued from the 1920s and grew into the 1930s. In central Luzon the ostentation of the rich was driving the growth of resistance. But the new radicals were often informed by grassroots traditions and took inspiration from the ideas and struggles of previous generations. “Movements led by self-styled messiahs, secret societies with roots in the revolution and revivals of old organisations…burst upon the scene all over the archipelago”, wrote Constantino. “Although they were contemptuously dismissed by American officials and Filipino politicians as fanatical movements or plain banditry, they represented the blind groping of the masses for solutions to real and grave socio-economic problems”.
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Manila was the centre of the working class, but the majority were dispersed throughout small enterprises; most lacked significant industrial power. In 1928, 80 percent of workers were in “scattered, non-industrial types of employment”, and the 59 registered unions claimed a membership of just over 40,000, about 16 percent of the total workforce. Apart from the structural and legal barriers, there were significant ideological weaknesses. Richardson explains:

The labour movement that developed during the early years of the American occupation reflected the traditions of the revolution in whose embers it was forged… The most striking legacy from the 1880s and 1890s was the obsession with moral regeneration, the conviction that the problems confronting the ordinary Filipino were in large measure internal, springing from weaknesses of his own soul and character… This view of the common masses was still coloured by that amalgam of shame, disgust and fear that had troubled the nineteenth-century ilustrados.
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The early years of labour organising were fraught, but powerful workers’, peasants’ and agricultural labourers’ organisations eventually were
established under secular leadership. The Workers Party of America (which would become the Communist Party USA in 1929) forged links with Filipino labour movement leaders in the early 1920s, after the Comintern directed affiliates to advance solidarity to revolutionaries in their country’s colonies. A number of Filipino leaders also attended a Profintern (Red International of Labour Unions) hosted conference in Canton in 1924.

A left-right split in the main union federation resulted in the majority of unions walking out in 1929 to form the Association of the Sons of Sweat (KAP), which affiliated to the Profintern.
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The KAP leadership subsequently set up the Philippine Communist Party (PKP) in 1930. The KAP and the National Council of Peasants in the Philippines (KPMP) had communist leadership; the new party therefore considered that the two organisations constituted its mass base. This was despite the fact that, as Richardson says, “the number of KPMP cadres with more than a rudimentary grasp of communist theory can scarcely have reached double figures”.
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A Socialist Party had also been formed and was organising in central Luzon under the leadership of Pedro Abad Santos. His movement was theoretically inchoate, with an orientation to mass action and self-organisation.
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The party was relatively small, but led the General Workers’ Union (AMT—the largest peasant and tenant farmer organisation in central Luzon) and counted among its ranks Luis Taruc, one of the most talented organisers in the country.

As ripples from the Great Depression lapped the archipelago’s shores, labour unrest grew. “Latent discontent among the poor…is developing into a…definite state of unrest”, warned an article in
Philippine Magazine
in 1932.
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The KMPM grew from 15,000 to 35,500 in 1929-31, but the state was now cracking down on the communists. Twenty PKP leaders were jailed, then exiled to different provinces. Along with economic conditions, the fortunes of the revolutionaries now declined. KPMP numbers plummeted to 5,000; KAP affiliations dropped by three-quarters to 7,000; and PKP membership collapsed from up to 2,000 to 230 in late 1933.
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The lack of funds and organisers greatly inhibited the work of the party. Some of the problems were brought on by the Comintern’s ultra-left Third Period orientation, which was uncritically accepted.
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As the economy improved and the orientation of the party, along with the world movement, began to shift from mid-1934, the PKP began notching up victories. The leaders were released in 1936, partly because the government was anxious to bring about national unity in the face of
what it perceived as Japanese militarism. According to former guerrilla Alfredo Saulo the CPUSA had also dispatched an envoy to lobby President Quezon for the communists’ release and, later, for their pardon. The announcement of the United Front Against Fascism (the Popular, or People’s, Front) at the Comintern’s seventh world congress provided a sweetener. In a letter to President Quezon, the PKP leadership pledged: “We stand ready to drop all difference of the past in the face of the present national emergency in order to make possible the democratic unity of the people”.
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The party, whose leading members were primarily Manila-based workers, now pushed for unity with the socialists, whose mass rural base had “succeeded in raising hell in Pampanga”.
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Unity was consummated on 7 November 1938 at a convention in Manila. “The discussions had very little to do with ideological and doctrinal differences”, Taruc later wrote. “The emphasis was on an urgent program for a united front to fight against fascism and war”.
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The parties merged, retaining the name PKP but maintaining their own organisations for a number of years under the arrangement. Two years after the merger the new PKP had 3,000 members, the KPMP and AMT combined boasted well over 100,000, and KAP affiliations were reportedly 80,000.
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The position of the Catholic church had been undermined by US colonialism. Not only had the friars lost their estates in central Luzon and around Manila, but the doctrine of the separation of church and state was introduced, reducing their political power, the education system had been secularised, partly undermining their social role, and the schismatic Independent Church—a nationalist breakaway formed in the wake of the war against the US—brought a degree of formal ecclesiastical competition, particularly in the far north of Luzon and to a lesser degree in the central plains where Catholicism could be associated with the elite.

Yet the vast majority of the population remained true to the faith. The Catholic hierarchy in the 1930s ran a propaganda campaign against the left and abstained from any social movement associated with communists.
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On one hand the hostility emanated from Rome and the establishment in general. But there was also a deeper reactionary current. Franco’s takeover in Spain was backed by the Spanish clergy. Some of their counterparts in the Philippines began writing tracts extolling the virtues of fascism, Franco and Salazar’s New State in Portugal,
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which no
doubt pushed them further to the right and possibly made them less able to respond to the needs of the labouring classes.

The PKP, “a significant number” of its leadership being members of the nationalist church,
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was initially staunchly anti-clerical, but not necessarily anti-religious—although there seems to have been no shortage of “opium of the people”-style denunciations. It was hostile to the Catholic church in particular. The party programme demanded that priests be disenfranchised and barred from public office. After the People’s Front reorientation 25,000 copies of “An appeal to our Catholic brothers” were circulated. The pamphlet sought to pry open the divisions between the parishioners and the church elite and gain the sympathies of devout labourers. Some of the passages were politically appalling, such as that “the Communists are staunch upholders of the family and the home. We consider sexual immorality and looseness in family life as the harmful result of bad social conditions.” But the broader approach was considered necessary not only to avoid isolation, but to enable the party to gain a mass audience:

Sections of the Catholic hierarchy, and fascist elements associated with it, are working hard to influence the mass of Catholics against every democratic and progressive tendency or idea… They are trying to create a conflict between Catholics and Communists, a conflict which is not of our choosing at all…a growing number of Party members retain their church affiliations.
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On 9 December 1941 Japan invaded the Philippines. The impact was immense. People left the provinces for Manila, they left Manila for the provinces and they left the towns and the villages for the mountains. Everywhere they saw looting, burning and people cut off from their families. Abad Santos (by this time frail and sick; he would die before war’s end), Evangelista (soon to be executed) and PKP general secretary Guillermo Capadocia were quickly arrested and imprisoned. In Pampang, Pampanga, “the civilians lived in terror”, Maria Rosa Henson remembered. “People were afraid to leave their homes, even to plant crops…only the Japanese Army had the fuel to run their trucks and other vehicles. Electricity was only for the Japanese Army… People did as the Japanese ordered because anyone who violated their rules was punished”.
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The people also had grounds for anger because they had to bow
to the Japanese in the towns, and especially because of violent raids called “zona” staged against much of the populace.
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Not everyone opposed the new invaders. A certain number of the middle class nationalists, many of whom were united under the Ganap Party, hoped that Japan would grant independence. These hopes were not as unreal as they might seem: Japan did take some tangible steps towards Indonesian independence, though not till very late. Also, the Japanese were Asian and claimed that they and the Filipinos were one race; they were going to free the country from the whites.
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Many of the oligarchy of landowners and local politicians also were pro-Japanese. They were used to collaborating, and Japanese policies were not radically different from those of earlier regimes. Given that much of the Philippine state was run by the Nationalist Party, it was easy to realign power structures to work with the new occupiers.
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The leader of the ill-fated first republic, Emilio Aguinaldo, also supported the invaders. But broadly speaking there was an interconnection between rural elite, local officials, the Philippine Constabulary and a new puppet government: a loose alignment of everyone hated by the people was supporting the Japanese occupation.

A combined meeting of the AMT and KPMP in Pampanga immediately after the invasion drew 50,000 to offer their services to the government.
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Here in central Luzon, where peasant organising was most advanced, the resistance would be most intense. Many were already preparing to fight when the PKP issued a call to prepare for guerrilla warfare. Taruc explained: “Out of [the] call to the peasants and the workers to resist the Japanese, the Hukbalahap was born… Its growth was spontaneous. Whole squadrons came overnight from the towns and barrios”.
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The most interesting battle took place in Pampanga in March 1942 and led to the formal constitution of the Hukbalahap (Huk). Legendary woman fighter Felipa Culala, known popularly as Dayang-Dayang, led some 130 troops in an ambush of the Japanese. The invaders lost 30 to 40 soldiers, along with almost 70 police officers. It was the first organised encounter against the enemy, and it “electrified the countryside”.
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Dayang-Dayang had been a KPMP member who led squads against strike breakers. Later she was executed for corruption. Such were Huk justice and discipline.