Bulatlatan
Written by: Ka. Cris
Published: Bulatlatan, August 2, 2009;
Source: Bulatlatan snapshot at the Internet Archive;
Markup: Simoun Magsalin.
After reading the article of Mr. Silvana, my conscience wouldn’t allow me to sleep again. It has been this way, off and on, since more than two decades because I knew we had a responsibility behind a most heinous incident in Philippine political history on January 22, 1987. If you all remember it was the massacre of marching farmers at Mendiola Bridge.
At the background was the ceasefire that the NDF-GRP agreed upon in December 10, 1986 more than a month before the massacre. The ouster of the Marcos dictatorship caused the people to question the basis of the ongoing armed struggle of the NPA. The new government then, under Cory Aquino, offered a reconciliatory hand. The principal rebel leaders, no less than Jose Ma. Sison and Bernabe Buscayno, and all the rest of their incarcerated followers were gifted with presidential clemency. The process for a constitutional convention was already set into motion and hopes for basic reforms ran high. A peace negotiation was started in July 1986 and a consensus for armistice was reached by November 1986 under the leadership of Satur Ocampo, the NDF negotiator at that period. The next rounds of talks were geared to tackle substantial social reforms.
The December 10, 1986 proclamation of the ceasefire was celebrated by the people nationwide in Davao, Tacloban, Cebu, Bacolod, Iloilo, Lucena, Lipa, Infanta, Baguio, Manila, etc. For us in the NCR underground then, we shared the euphoria in the provinces and marveled at how the Filipinos welcomed the representatives of the national democratic revolution in different cities as people’s champions of the 13-year anti-dictatorship fight.
Our celebrations among comrades in NCR were suddenly cut short by an underground memo that Jose Ma. Sison vetoed the ceasefire decision of the NDF with the GRP. Sison declared that with the 1986 ceasefire agreement the NDF surrendered the revolutionary initiative of the CPP and NPA. He angrily ordered for the immediate break-off from the ceasefire agreement and used his authority as the founding Chairman of the CPP. He accused Satur Ocampo and all the others in the CPP Politburo of treason. Sison ordered that the CPP should lay down the basis for a clean cut-off from the ceasefire agreement.
In January 1987, the peasant federation, KMP under Jimmy Tadeo, had a caravan from Southern Tagalog (KASMA-TK) and Central Luzon (AMGL) and nearby provinces of Metro Manila to demand genuine land reform from Cory Aquino. As scheduled, from January 15–21, 1987 they had a camp-out at the Department of Agrarian Reform at the Quezon City Elliptical Road. On January 22, the peasants were scheduled to march to Mendiola to air out their demand for genuine land reform.
Underground revolutionaries formed a plot to implement the Jose Ma. Sison order to break the ceasefire. Our unit, the campaign command of NCR under the National Urban Commission of the CPP, planned to push the peasant march to ram the barricades at Mendiola and to provoke the anti-riot police to violently disperse the rally. Some armed self-defense units were deployed by the CPP-NUC to fire at the crowd-dispersal squads and allow the peasants to run to safety. But most will fight the police with rocks and wooden poles. It would be the first violent dispersal under Cory’s presidency.
On January 22, 1987, our mission was done. The Mendiola Barricades were rammed open by self-defense units. The anti-riot police were hit with rocks and wooden poles. First shots were fired by the police. Our rally commander was hit at his right leg. Our self-defense units fired back with handguns. The campaign command failed to foresee that there were militarists among the AFP who were also waiting for this chance. A merciless massacre of innocent farmers followed. Several peasant youth and women from Laguna who were unprepared for the clash were killed. A Sison scenario for the break-up of the ceasefire agreement was successfully staged.
Now I realize what Mr. Silvana meant when he said that, “the peace talks was treated as an arena for political struggle.” The staged Mendiola Massacre only showed that Jose Ma. Sison and the CPP leadership have no regard for lives of the ordinary masa, and that they could be easily sacrificed in political struggles, all for their highest goal of winning the revolution for the CPP-NPA-NDF.
I am posting this confession to share the lessons from our past. I join the others in calling for reforms in the Party.