Subversive Lives. Susan F. Quimpo
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the question could not be pondered in an academic way. If you participated in the parliament of the streets, sooner or later you would be involved in a bloody confrontation with the police. And if Manila was a battleground, in the countryside there simmered a continuing, if undeclared, class war.
This war was an extension of centuries of agrarian conflict. Peasants fighting for land rights, or lower rent, or simply against eviction, have been confronted by landowners and their allies or hirelings: local governments, local police, the courts, the Philippine Constabulary, hired thugs, private armies, even other farm workers who had been bought off. Who could cite a case where courts, sheriffs, policemen, or militia went out of their way to support a peasant’s grievance? Do you wish to organize peasants to help them win concessions? Then you can be certain that your work at some point will be met with violence.
The middle classes heard about confrontations between landowners and tenants on one or two specific estates but were shielded from the full scope of the violence. We should not have been asking, “Shouldn’t Christians turn their backs on violence?” but rather, “As Christians, you’re called to do your share in uplifting the sad lot of the poor and the oppressed. If you decide to go—out of your usual way—to help them, are you prepared to defend yourself and them?”1
THOUGH MY FEARS of the NatDems were fading, I did not want to join KM or SDK. They were still too red for me. Even with a KM member living in our apartment, my own brother Jan, I was in awe of them, seeing them as battalions of communist organizers seasoned by labor struggles.
Thus, when I heard of some activist Protestants who were friends of Father Ed, I did not think twice about meeting them. Some of us in Catholic schools might have hesitated to work with Protestants, but it was only a fleeting obstacle for me. My father’s siblings were all Protestants; I had spent my childhood years in the neighborhood of Central Philippine University, founded by Protestant missionaries, and my best friend came from a devout Protestant family.
At the office of the Student Christian Movement of the Philippines, the local chapter of an international youth organization affiliated with the World Council of Churches, I met Jurgette Honculada, Bernie’s friend from her days as a campus editor. It was just the right time to connect with this organization. An ecumenical group of its members, including Father Ed, Carlos (Caloy) Tayag, Elmer,2 and some others, had begun to realign it to join the activist mainstream. A significant step they took was to change the name of the organization to the Tagalog translation of the original: Kilusang Kristiyano ng Kabataang Pilipino (3KP).
I was surprised to discover how far ahead of Catholics local Protestants were in considering questions of faith and politics and translating their conclusions into action. They had been exposed to the ideas of liberation theology, imported from Latin America, long before Catholic religious in the Philippines heard about it. Chapters of the Student Christian Movement in Latin America had been deeply involved with victims of the repressive military governments of the time, and some of their members were being hunted by the military. There was no interest in liberation theology in other quarters in the Philippines until the 1970 student protests.
I had met Jurgette’s husband, Ibarra (Bong) Malonzo, who was also part of the ecumenical group, in 1966 at the Silliman University Summer Writers Workshop. Bong was in Dumaguete to do work for KM (as I learned later) and wandered into an early session of our workshop, the event of the summer at the university, to see if he could get into some stimulating discussion on global political issues, such as the Bomb and the danger of nuclear winter. However, we workshop fellows were remarkably naïve about world affairs; we were concerned only with the structure of poems and the plots of short stories.
When I met Bong again at the organization that was to become 3KP, I was awed by the depth of his and Jurgette’s experience and theological commitment. They explored the Christian-Marxist dialogue in earnest and were living their lives according to their beliefs. Apart from being an early KM member, Bong had experienced working with unions—his father was a veteran labor leader. He had been beaten by police at a picket and had spent time in jail. It was enough to convince me to join their organization.
Since there were few warm bodies around at the start of the reorganization, I was put in charge of the education department. We drew up a curriculum for new members, including readings and discussions of Renato Constantino’s essays, SND, and articles on liberation theology. We started a newsletter called Breakthrough, which Jurgette edited expertly. One of the articles it carried, a primer on liberation theology by the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, was my constant companion in the days that followed. Breakthrough offered its readers an activist perspective. It published, more than a year before martial law, Pastor Niemoeller’s prophetic warning to German Christians during the rise of the Nazis: not to turn a blind eye to the persecution of Jews, gypsies, and other minorities, before the regime turned to persecuting Christians.
Breakthrough carried in one of its first issues a Biblical passage that I thought best summed up the motives of the 3KP activists. These were the opening lines of Isaiah 61, read by Jesus at the synagogue in Bethlehem at the start of his public ministry:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free.
And to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.
3KP proclaimed our NatDem credentials in an exchange with the SocDems carried in the UP campus paper, the Philippine Collegian. The SocDems had published a long article about the national crisis and their program for change. We formulated a point-by-point rebuttal that the Collegian also carried. We pointed out that the Church had been a reactionary force in Philippine history, always protective of the establishment. It could not lay claim to a preeminent position in the struggle for change. We observed also that the SocDems appeared more interested in derailing the revolutionary movement than in seeking fundamental societal change.
The SocDems responded with another article that denounced 3KP, as well as Christians for National Liberation (CNL)—an organization of NatDem priests, nuns, ministers, pastors, and lay religious workers—as constituting a communist Trojan horse that attempted to disguise the NatDem program as an allowable Christian choice. The article warned that the reds might appear welcoming now but would eventually turn on Christians and suppress them as a reactionary force. I thought the accusations unjust. They did not credit the difficult choice 3KP members had made in “fear and trembling,” they did not recognize that Christians would always have to fight for their beliefs in whatever society emerged, and they rejected dialogue in favor of preaching about the correct party line for Christians. Whether or not we won that exchange with the SocDems, the banner of 3KP was now flying.
Norman (seated extreme left) first met Bong Malonzo of the SCM at a writers’ workshop in 1966. Bong could not interest the participants in a discussion of socio-political issues, of which they had little knowledge.
IN THE SHORT PERIOD from its reorganization in 1971, the SCM was able to participate in the three main activities of NatDems in the city—protest mass action, support of workers’ strikes, and “integration with the masses.”
I joined practically all the major rallies of 1970 and 1971, first as an unattached angry citizen, then later as a member of 3KP. Bernie joined me in several of the rallies. The one she remembers best is the Good Friday march of 1972 sponsored by the Movement for a Democratic Philippines, the umbrella organization for all NatDem groups. Lent, Good Friday in particular, is a high point of Catholic religious ceremony in the Philippines, so CNL and 3KP were expected to play a big role in this rally. I remember the huge banner we carried that day—a squarish panel of katsa (rough cotton cloth) that loomed like a sail. Painted on it was a cross borne by the people—the three evils of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism. Below the picture were the words, “Ibaling ang pagdadalamhati