Antonio Fortich

Antonio Fortich, fighting bishop of the Philippines, died on July 2nd 2003, aged 89

The ceremonial opening of the Martial Law Museum in Manila in 1999 was carried out by Antonio Fortich, a bishop in the Roman Catholic church. He was handed wire-cutters and snipped through the barbed wire that was thought more appropriate to the occasion than a ribbon. Those who had suffered under the martial law regime of Ferdinand Marcos felt that the bishop had done as much as any public figure in the Philippines to oppose the dictatorship. More than that the bishop, known to his supporters as Commander Tony, was still in fighting mood long after Marcos had been deposed. The museum conveyed a “sense

of horror”, he said, but for millions of people in the Philippines their horrors had not ended when Marcos quit in 1986. The subsequent restoration of democracy had meant little to his own people in Negros.

Negros is a large island in the southern Philippines. Antonio Fortich was bishop of Bacolod, its main town. Negros has long been the sugar bowl of the country. From an aircraft you can see a vast stretch of green cane that covers much of the land. The United States expanded Negros’s sugar industry when it took possession of the Philippines after defeating Spain in 1898, and it continued to be its main export market after the Philippines gained independence in 1946. The landowning families of Negros, mostly of Spanish stock, became rich, providing welfare for their sugar workers in return for subservience. But America eventually developed its own sugar industry. In the 1980s the price of Philippine sugar crashed.

The sugar barons were no longer making money, and the welfare system for the workers was collapsing. Hundreds of children were dying of malnutrition. Bishop Fortich said that what was known as tiempo muerto (the dead season, after the sugar has been harvested) had expanded and become tiempo del muerto (a time of death). The island, he believed, could become a “social volcano”.

The poor in Negros turn to the church or the communists. In its hunt for communists, the army made Negros an area of “low-intensity conflict”. Many communists were killed, but many innocent people died too, either because they were accused of helping the communists or because they were caught in crossfire. Bishop Fortich rushed to a church hall in Negros where 500 villagers were being threatened by army “death squads” and persuaded the soldiers to leave. He once showed reporters a dead sparrow he had found. The bird, he said, was just like any poor citizen caught in the crossfire of contending ideological forces. The bishop had the sparrow stuffed and mounted and kept it on his desk.

Bishop Fortich said he did not support any ideology. But in the Philippines, as in Latin America, not even a priest can escape politics. For many in authority priests are still considered to be as dangerous as in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Bishop Fortich’s superior, Cardinal Jaime Sin, archbishop of Manila, provides guidelines to his clergy: like the bishop, he thundered in the pulpit against the iniquities of Marcos, but granted him the blessings of the church.

Bishop Fortich probably stretched the guidelines. He spoke against the hanging judges of Manila who called themselves the Guillotine Club. He was one of the first people to alert the government to the activities of timber bandits who had stripped hundreds of acres of forest in Negros. He supported the election of Joseph Estrada as president of the Philippines; it was clear that he was the overwhelming choice of the ordinary people, sick of successive governments being run for the benefit of the rich. He persuaded the president to release 200political prisoners. It was only when it became clear that Mr Estrada had betrayed his supporters by lining his pockets that the bishop withdrew his support.

In keeping his flock together, he sought to show that the church was a better fighter for their interests than the communists. He said the sugar barons should be more generous to their workers. Cutting sugar cane, swinging a machete all day and loading lorries is a tough job, made worse in the suffocating heat by having to wear thick clothing to provide protection from the sharp leaves. After paying his employer for food a worker might be left with only a few pesos at the end of a month. To tide him over he would get in debt, which would grow year by year.

Bishop Fortich set up a co-operative composed of small landowners and sugar workers, to show what could be done. He wanted the great sugar estates broken up and land distributed to small farmers, who would grow other crops. The Philippines no longer exports sugar. To satisfy its sweet tooth, most years it imports some, at a price lower than the home-grown cane. The sugar barons accused the bishop of being a traitor to his class: after all, his parents had themselves been landowners in Negros. As a warning, a hand grenade was lobbed into his house in Bacolod.

He was nominated for a Nobel peace prize, praised by Pope John Paul II, and many of his followers thought of him as a saint. Cardinal Sin said that he was sure that, in heaven, the bishop would “intercede for us”.