The Huk rebellion was the most important guerrilla insurgency in Philippine history and one of the most effective resistance operations of the Second World War.1 Comprising up to 12,000 people under arms with a similar number in reserve, the People’s Anti-Japanese Army represented 5 to 10 percent of the total guerrilla forces across the archipelago.2 Its fighters were drawn primarily from the central provinces of Luzon, the largest and most populous island. Huk commander in chief Luis Taruc later wrote:
The resistance movement that sprang up in central Luzon was unique among all the groups that fought back, in one way or another, against the Japanese. The decisive element of difference lay in the strong peasant unions and organisations of the people that existed there before the war. It gave the movement a mass base, and made the armed forces indistinguishable from the people.3
As the Japanese were swept from the island in late 1944, often by Huk rebels ahead of the advancing US Army, there was relief at the prospect of peace. But soon Huk were being arrested, imprisoned and murdered under US occupation. The example they had set by placing areas under democratic government rattled both foreign occupiers and domestic elite. Returning landlords, who often had been collaborators with the Japanese high command, now sought to exact tribute from the heroes of the conflict. “The war against Japan was a people’s war without a people’s victory”, wrote Taruc.4
The guerrilla units were soon reactivated as the People’s Liberation Army, drawn from a base of some 50,000 part-time soldiers and half a million sympathisers for whom the question of national liberation was not easily disentangled from class oppression.
A history steeped in rebellion
When Miguel Lopez de Legazpi established a Spanish beachhead in Asia at Manila Bay in 1565, the archipelago was inhabited by fewer than a million people. Social structures were based on a kinship system, the barangay, with a simple class structure.5 There were no great cities and no central power; the economy was subsistence. The Spanish brought with them an embryo of the society from which they had departed. But the colonists were few in number and concentrated in Manila—the galleon trade with China was the obvious path to wealth. Tribute and forced labour were the conquerors’ rewards for securing the territory for King Philip ii. Those were enabled by royal land grants to administrators and Catholic religious orders. Jeffry Ocay explains:
The absence of a centralised government in this society made it extremely difficult for the Spanish colonialists to establish their colonial power and to collect tributes and exact services from the native people. In order to address this problem, the Spaniards systematically reorganised the pre-Hispanic Philippine society…into larger communities called pueblos…[which] became the most effective tool of domination used by the Spaniards during this time because it brought the native people together within close scrutiny and direction of the Spanish colonial officials and friars.6
The island provinces by and large were “pacified” by the priests. By one estimate there were more than 1,500 priests throughout the country—more than the Spanish lay population—by the early 18th century.7 Not until the 19th century was a European garrison stationed in the area.8 “The fact that the people became Catholics made God the powerful ally of their rulers”, explained the radical left nationalist historian Renato Constantino.9
Not all co-option was spiritually based. Cooperative local chiefs received tribute and labour amnesties and the lion’s share of the official land grants in return for facilitating the exploitation of their barangay.10 Exploitation often required force, but the paucity of exploitable natural resources throughout the archipelago meant that the occupation was relatively less brutal than had been the case in parts of Latin America.11
Still, numerous revolts took place against colonial excesses.12 In the early years, wrote historian John Phelan, rebellions “usually began as protests against economic exploitation or political injustice, but they invariably terminated on an anti-Catholic denominator”.13 Friars established themselves as landlords and their abuses became systematic.
The Spaniards played one ethnic group against another in the early years. But with integration into the world division of labour, commercial relationships penetrated deeper into the archipelago. A national market was established, the basis of a national consciousness. Revolts also began to take on a class character. Labourers were working on large, often church-controlled estates, breaking their backs to fill sugar, hemp and tobacco quotas. A broader indigenous hierarchy developed. This included the chiefs and other layers of civil authority such as inspectors, deputies and elected officials. They were often more exploitative and corrupt than the friars.14 A class of wealthy mestizo traders formed (the most important of which were the Philippine born Chinese/indigenous). The mestizos had an interest in the maintenance of the existing economic order. They too began accumulating land and benefitted from the exploitation of the mass of the population. They also received protection from the colonial authorities and culturally became more European than indigenous.
“In the 19th century particularly”, wrote US colonialist James Le Roy, “the mestizos (mostly the propertied class) have flocked to [the two Jesuit and Dominican colleges]”.15 Universities in Europe were taking greater mestizo enrolments. Educational and economic advance increased social and political aspirations. These were not welcomed by the Spanish. Peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain) considered even creoles (those of Spanish descent born outside Europe) socially inferior. Rebellion began to ferment within the ranks of the mestizo and indigenous secular clergy from the 1820s because the Spanish friars often blocked indigenous priests rising to positions of authority and restricted the teaching of Spanish.16 Colonial policy also limited social advance within the administration and the military. One doctor related the prevailing attitude of the oppressors: “The friar would say [to the indigenous or mestizo who had gained an education], ‘You are a very ugly person to try to imitate the Spaniards; you are more like a monkey, and you have no right to try and separate yourself from the carabaos’ [water buffaloes]”.17 The social order, however, was butting up against a new reality. As a visiting German observed in the mid-19th century:
The old situation is no longer practicable, with the social change the times have brought. The colony can no longer be excluded from the general concert of peoples. Every facility in communication opens up a breach in the ancient system and gives cause for reforms in a liberal sense. The more that foreign capital and foreign brains penetrate, the more they increase the general welfare, the spread of education, and the stock of self-esteem, the existing ills becoming in consequence the more intolerable.18
In late 17th century Spain physician Diego Matheo Zapata had warned that Enlightenment philosophy was a threat not only to the church, but to society.19 Two hundred years later the radicalism associated with that country’s 1868 Glorious Revolution was transmitted to the colony, where an alliance of lawyers, liberal businessmen and clergy began pushing for reform. They were joined by students demanding academic freedom and an end to discrimination against the indigenous population. Enlightenment ideas were permeating through an increasingly literate class of Filipinos. Originally the latter term referred exclusively to the creoles. But with the rise of the mestizo the term broadened in scope. The growing intelligentsia—the ilustrada, the educated sons of the landowning and trading elite—“infused it with national meaning”.20
The secular concepts of equality, democracy and citizenship contradicted the political and social barriers erected against the Filipinos. Newly appointed governor Carlos María de la Torre wrote to Spain in 1870: “The whole country points its finger at certain individuals of the clergy and certain lawyers, all mestizos and [creoles]… Everything, I repeat, leads one to believe that these lawyers and priests…dream of the independence of the country”.21 His impression wasn’t accurate. For many of the Filipino elites, genuine equality meant the political integration of the Philippines with Spain and the granting of citizenship. This was the outlook of the mainstream of the anti-clerical Propaganda Movement, which was organised by Filipino exiles in Europe and in Manila was embodied in the Liga Filipina, founded in 1892 by the European-educated mestizo novelist Rizal and others, including a young self-taught radical named Andres Bonifacio. Its goals were broadly liberal. And while it was anticlerical, it also attracted priests interested in reforming the church.
The ilustrados were, in Constantino’s appraisal “vacillating [and] opportunistic”.22 Rizal and his collaborators were loyal to empire and to the class from which they emerged. He never advocated (at least publicly) Philippine independence and denounced the idea of revolution. Yet de la Torre’s intuition captured something of the dynamic in the growing movement: “Liberalism…became a revolutionary force”, wrote historian John Schumacher, “when it became evident that the traditionalist, friar-dominated Church, which was the sworn enemy of liberalism, was perceived by Spain as the only prop on which the decadent colonial regime could maintain itself”.23 The Spanish colonial authorities made paltry accommodations to the reformists. But each clear demand for Filipino advancement carried broader implications: to concede one in reality would be to concede another logically.
The logic of belligerence led in the same direction. The Katipunan,24 a radical separatist wing of the nationalist movement, grew under the leadership of Bonifacio. This wing involved provincial elites but also the labouring classes, who were concerned as much with the appalling social conditions they endured as with social status. By the late 1800s the working class was expanding in Manila. It, and the masses suffering in central and southern Luzon, rallied to the radicals. “The convergence of thousands of workers in a single place necessarily developed in them recognition of their solidarity of interest as Filipinos, though not yet as proletarians”, wrote Constantino.25 Affiliations with the organisation grew to the tens of thousands or more.26
National identity as Spaniard or Filipino expressed competing claims. The urban Filipino elite mostly spurned the radical movement—at least at first. Many sought equality with the colonialists, not with the lower classes. Yet the Spanish administration, suspicious of any liberal sentiment, struck out at all—even wealthy Filipinos with a stake in the colonial regime. There could be little distinction when Spanish class privilege rested on notions of racial superiority. As the colonialists lashed out and the ranks of the Katipunan swelled, the latter launched an uprising in August 1896. The Philippine revolution had begun.
Adding to the class and national antagonisms was religion. On one hand, the aspirations of the Filipino clergy were bound up with the anti-colonial question. On the other, the agrarian question dominating the minds of the central Luzon labourers also had a religious dimension due to friar control of the large landed estates. The anti-clerical revolutionary movement faced a conundrum—only through alliance with the Filipino clergy could the masses be mobilised. The local clergy played a significant role in bringing their parishes to the revolutionary cause,27 but often the priests had divided loyalties between the rebellion and the church.28
Ultimately the revolutionary forces were not strong enough to rout the Spaniards. Emilio Aguinaldo, one of Bonifacio’s lieutenants, took control of Cavite province, just south of Manila. Skilled military leadership and the backing of more conservative rural elites propelled him to prominence. In an ensuing factional struggle Bonifacio was executed. The revolutionaries eventually retreated to inaccessible areas and engaged in guerrilla warfare before Aguinaldo negotiated an armistice in return for a financial settlement and an agreed exile in late 1897. Popular revolt resumed in several provinces in March the following year.29
By the time the US declared war against Spain in April 1898, the rebellion was regrouping. Aguinaldo, in alliance with and funded by the US, returned from exile. As commodore George Dewey’s squadron smashed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on 1 May, a 30,000-strong insurgency took control of Luzon. A revolutionary government was proclaimed and independence was declared on 12 June. The leaders were keen to demonstrate loyalty to the economic status quo. “We sufficiently guarantee order to protect foreign interests in our country” and “the most holy right of property”, wrote Aguinaldo in December.30 The US allegedly gave assurances that it was the Filipinos’ friend despite refusing to recognise the new republic.31 It was not bringing freedom, but negotiating the transfer of power. “The insurgents and all others”, declared President McKinley, “must recognise the…authority of the United States”.32 Aguinaldo capitulated and recognised US authority—at least in Manila and its surrounds. He hoped that international negotiations would nevertheless result in recognition for his independent republic. It wasn’t to be. War broke out between the rebels and the US in early 1899.
National and religious questions remained intertwined. Gregorio Aglipay, military vicar general (later excommunicated by Rome for his role in the revolutionary government), attempted to overcome the divided loyalties of the Filipino clergy and pull them decisively into the revolutionary camp. Ultimately he was unsuccessful, but many clergy participated in the war. “Sixty percent of the native priests”, advised apostolic delegate Guidi, “are Katipuneros”.33 Some saw the struggle as a religious war—both against what was seen as widespread US desecration and looting of local parishes, and in defence of Catholicism against Protestantism.34 Arcadio Maxilom of Cebu, for example, was confident:
that should the starry flag of the Union dominate these islands, our children will not receive the Christian education which is found in the Philippines, through the grace of God, now strongly rooted, and should they be converted to Protestantism and will continue corrupting Christian customs… Let us fight then without hesitation or dismay, because God is in us and his power is great.35
The conflict left 200,000 Filipinos dead. The revolutionaries endured defeat after defeat. General Jacob Smith, commander of US forces in Samar, ordered death to every person over the age of ten: “The more you kill and burn”, he instructed his commanding officer, Major Littleton Waller, in late 1901, “the better you will please me”.36 Yet in some areas the struggle continued and periodic uprisings occurred for more than a decade. “The diehard resistance”, observes historian Jim Richardson, “was sustained almost entirely by less privileged elements who had less to lose from protracted war and less to gain from surrender”.37
Under the US colonial regime resistance was brutally put down and the archipelago was unified under the rule of Manila. The Filipino elite flourished. In the provinces surrounding the capital the Spanish friars had accumulated more than half a million acres of land. The new administration confiscated most of this and sold it to the mestizos. So long as the Philippines remained a colony, many of these landowners were protected behind the US tariff. That meant favourable treatment exporting primary products to the largest market in the world. They became the greatest of collaborators. The US substituted education for religion in its pacification attempts. The civil service and government also were opened up to expand the Filipino middle class. This “Filipinisation” helped create a crony political system, by and large controlled by the landowners. The early Spanish rural reorganisation provided the foundation of the modern political unit and the power base of the Nationalist Party, which was originally established by more radical nationalists but in time became the main party of the establishment. Under its domination the Filipino state was built and prepared for eventual US handover. Historian Benedict Anderson explained:
It was above all the political innovations of the Americans that created a solid, visible “national oligarchy”. The key institutional change was the stage-by-stage creation of a Congress-style bicameral legislature… The new representational system proved perfectly adapted to the ambitions and social geography of the mestizo nouveaux riches. Their economic base lay in hacienda agriculture, not in the capital city. And their provincial fiefdoms were also protected by the country’s immense linguistic diversity. They might all speak the elite, “national” language (Spanish, later American), but they also spoke variously Tagalog, Ilocano, Pampango, Cebuano, Ilongo, and a dozen other tongues.
In this way competition in any given electoral district was effectively limited, in a pre-television age, to a handful of rival local[s]. But Congress, which thus offered them guaranteed access to national-level political power, also brought them together in the capital on a regular basis. There, more than at any previous time, they got to know one another well in a civilized “ring” sternly refereed by the Americans… They were for the first time forming a self-conscious ruling class.38
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”.39
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”.40 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.41
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”.42
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.43
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.44 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”.45
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.46 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 1932.47 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 1933.48 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.49
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”.50
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”.51 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”.52 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 80,000.53
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.54 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,55 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,56 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.57
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”.58 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.59
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.60 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.61 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.62 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”.63
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”.64 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.
Women such as Sakdalista Salud Algabre had played an active role in earlier resistance movements. The Huk, however, were reportedly the first significant political or resistance organisation to actively recruit them. Jesus Lava, a post-war general secretary of the PKP, estimated that females made up around 10 percent of the guerrillas. In a deeply conservative country—because of the Catholic tradition and the central role of the family in rural life—the participation of women as commanders and comrades in arms, rather than simply as sisters and wives, provoked passionate debate about the role and status of women in Filipino society. It also created conflict within the Huk and the PKP, whose ranks harboured the prejudices of the time.65 Nevertheless, rebel practice seems far more enlightened than the “civilised” Japanese or US occupiers. Taruc paid particular tribute to two commanders—Remidios Gomez, a former beauty queen and AMT organiser who took the name Liwayway (Dawn), and a former KPMP organiser who took the name Guerrero (Warrior):
Liwayway…[prior to a battle] would comb her hair, apply lipstick, manicure and polish her nails. “Why shouldn’t I?” she said. “One of the things I am fighting for is the right to be myself”… Guerrero…[was] fond of wearing a man’s clothes. She became adept at handling an automatic rifle, and would command on the firing line. She was one of the organisers of Apalit Squadron 104, which became one of our best. Guerrero was also a good speaker and an effective rallier of the people’s support.66
By September 1942 the number of Huk squadrons had grown from five to 35. Gradually, the amateur fighters, who had been trained primarily in labour solidarity, learned through military engagements to become efficient soldiers. The Japanese mounted a show of force against the rebels at this time. But the atrocities and terror tactics of the invaders only drove more locals into Huk ranks. By the end of the year the guerrillas had 5,000 active supporters. US military analyst Lawrence Greenberg later wrote:
In January 1943, Huk attacks resumed against Police Constabulary garrisons and Japanese supply depots. As their tactical successes grew and the people saw them as more effective fighters, Huk strength grew again—doubling to 10,000 by March 1943. As their strength and popularity mounted, the Huks activated additional squadrons and helped form an all-Chinese force.67
In addition to the Huks’ main presence in central Luzon and the widespread, but less effective USAFFE (United States Armed Forces in the Far East), there were highly effective fighters in the southern islands of Mindanao and Sulu. Despite their superior resources, a hint of weakness on the side of the US and their protégés in the USAFFE emerges from popular anecdotage. When US forces on Corregidor gave up the fight, General Wainwright ordered all USAFFE fighters to surrender. Their commander, Wenceslao Vinzons, angrily refused. The order was ridiculous, he argued, because local guerrilla fighters had, up to that point, beaten the Japanese. In the following period Huk fighters travelled to the Bataan peninsula to stock up on weapons and munitions dumped by the Americans. Similar procurement exercises occurred in other provinces.68
Huk guerrillas were seen as heroes. They killed some 25,000 Japanese, Philippine Constabulary (which worked hand in glove with the Japanese High Command from very early on) and spies. They fought on multiple fronts: against the Japanese, the constabulary, the Ganaps and against potentially thousands of other pro-Japanese collaborators who not only gave up guerrillas to be tortured and murdered, but who sometimes participated in such activities. “There is a point”, wrote Taruc, “…where ‘turn the other cheek’ means to have your head knocked off. Rather than have liberty in our country destroyed, we would destroy the destroyers.” In such circumstances mistakes were bound to be made. “Innumerable cases of execution of Filipinos, deemed to have had some kind of rapport with any Japanese, were perpetrated to such an extent that many Filipinos feared the guerrillas more than the Japanese”, wrote the historian Teodoro Agoncillo.69 Yet the guiding principles were clear. Two documents drafted with the assistance of the Chinese guerrillas, “The Fundamental Spirit of the Hukbalahap” and “The Iron Discipline of the Hukbalahap”, set protocols for interactions both within the movement and between the guerrillas and the people:
Everyone shares the same fortune and endures the same hardship… Insults, coercion or deception are forbidden… Neither officers nor soldiers can have any individual privileges… A revolutionary army should not only love and protect the people, but it should represent the people… It should struggle for the benefit of the people. It should regard the people’s benefit as its own benefit in all things it does.70
A severe defeat in March 1943 at the hands of 5,000 Japanese troops resulted in demoralisation and some strategic rethinking. One result was greater emphasis on broad civilian resistance in the villages and towns. Barrio United Defence Corps (BUDC) were originally developed in 1942 to help supply and provide intelligence to the guerrillas and, importantly, to govern in rebel territory. “After centuries of [appointed administrators] the people were given the opportunity to rule themselves”, wrote Taruc.71 Barrio councils set up schools, carried out anti-Japanese propaganda and administered local non-military justice. Ultimately, self-governing areas under the democratic control of the inhabitants were considered facts on the ground that would shape national politics and lay the basis for independent Philippines at the end of the war. “From the experiences and the pioneering of the BUDC it was only a short step to the establishment of local people’s governments, which we began to build in the last stage of the war. The people’s horizons had been immeasurably expanded”.72 This was problematic. BUDCs were conceived as cross-class alliances, which would display to those who were not peasants “that the resistance movement was not ‘a class organisation’.”
The Hukbalahap was as much a political as a military organisation. “Mass schools” were set up to train organisers who could forge links between various resistance organisations and propagate the ideas of democracy and national independence in order to broaden the base of the rebellion and prepare for victory. Similar study groups were established in the guerrilla units.
The guerrillas regrouped after the March defeat and by the end of the year were better positioned. In Huk strongholds “both the landlords and the Japanese grew reluctant to attempt to seize any of the rice harvest. Freed from the heavy rice payments to their landlords, many of the peasants recalled 1942-1947 as the period in which food was most abundant”.73 They also fought in southern Luzon, particularly Laguna province. Huk growth alarmed the US. USAFFE detachments in Nueva Ecija province fought against the rebels from as early as 1942—sometimes in concert with the Philippine Constabulary and even the Japanese. Captain Alejo Santos, commander of the Bulacan Military Area, in 1943 described the Huk as the enemy.74 In 1944 General MacArthur, the commanding officer of the US military’s Pacific operations, ordered US-controlled guerrilla units to take them on.75 The broader momentum of the war and USAFFE disorder seem to have made this a distraction rather than a disaster. The US was pushing back into South East Asia and the Japanese were redeploying troops from Luzon. Guerrillas across the archipelago were on the offensive.
Just before the US regular forces landed on the islands in late 1944, the PKP started spreading a leaflet with the slogans “Long live America, defender of democracy! Destroy the puppetry! Establish people’s democratic governments everywhere!” PKP leaders Casto Alejandrino, Juan Feleo and Jesus Lava were elected provisional governors in the liberated provinces of Pampanga, Nueva Ecija and Laguna in early 1945 as BUDCs gave way to local government in town after town. However, the party would soon find that the leaflet’s first exaltation was misplaced. The US Army took control of the archipelago and was little interested in defending the democratic advances made in its absence.
Before the Japanese invasion a small coalition of groups had campaigned against Japanese aggression and atrocities, and against the Axis: these included the League for the Defence of Democracy, the Friends of China and the PKP. These groups organised demonstrations and boycotts of Japanese goods, along with fundraising for China. After Japan invaded they formed the core of the United Front, which sought to bring together all resistance organisations, regardless of political differences, and coordinate the struggle against the occupying army. Other elements operating underground included the organisation Free Philippines with its movable radio broadcasting anti-Japanese and pro-US propaganda, as well as Filipino programmes.
US Army intelligence sought to “decipher the complicated relations” between the PKP and other elements but didn’t achieve much clarity. It did register the fact that Huk leaders “preferred legitimate political activity to violence”.76 With a large Communist Party in the field and a broader front embracing the non-communist left and other progressive sectors, we might think that the key initiatives came from those structures. According to Kerkvliet, however, connections with these political currents were weak. “The PKP did not…control the peasant movement in central Luzon during the 1930s and 1940s, the Hukbalahap, or the Huk rebellion itself”, he wrote.77 Untangling the alliances is difficult. The PKP didn’t want to go it alone and focused on keeping the United Front together. According to Saulo, the party kept a low profile so as not to alienate the non-communist sections of the resistance movement.78 Jesus Lava, along with William Pomeroy, a communist who fought in the US Army and the post-war Huk resistance (see below), maintained, “All leaders of significance in the rebellion were party members”.79
An ex-member of the 1970s party, Francisco Nemenzo, convincingly explained away the contradictions between Kerkvliet’s and Lava and Pomeroy’s accounts. The Socialist Party, and the unified PKP, he argued:
derived its strength from the fact that it was integrated in the indigenous revolutionary tradition, but its chief weakness lay in the failure to transcend that tradition, to set the movement on a genuine Marxist footing. In the course of armed struggle, the PKP nurtured a millenarian-populist outlook because that was the easiest way to rally the peasants.80
The error wasn’t simply due to the mitigating circumstances of war, but rooted, Nemenzo argued, in the modus operandi of the SP, which built the largest mass organisation (the AMT) but was hostile to theoretical work. The organisation adapted itself to and even encouraged the prevailing superstitions and prejudices of the peasantry. Part confirmation of this can be found in Taruc’s testimony that in the party “all of us… were free to follow our own methods and our own ideas”.81 Of Abad Santos he also wrote: “He knew people better than he knew economics, so there was more psychology than theory in his approach to the movement. He had an immense bag of tricks…which he used to prod the peasants into action”.82 Taruc was a talented protégé, but even after three years in the group—during which time he had risen to the post of national secretary—he clearly found it difficult to communicate in secular socialist language. Of party organising in 1938, he related:
At demonstrations I got up and spoke to the people… I had not read Marx, or anything about Marxism, so I used quotations from the Bible to defend my arguments. Strip from the ideas and preachings of Christ the cloak of mysticism placed over them by the Church, and you really have many of the ideas of socialism. “We cannot sit back and wait for God to feed the mouths of our hungry children”, I said. “We must realise that God is within ourselves, and that when we act to provide for our own welfare and to stop injustice we are doing the work of God”.83
The approach was born of Taruc’s limitations and far removed from that of a theoretically adept agitator. There seems more to the low political level of the PKP than the Socialist Party simply diluting the unified party, however; the socialists numbered just 300 members at the time of the merger. The communists had their own theoretical shortcomings.84 Jose Lava, an elder brother of Jesus and also for a time PKP general secretary, admitted that, in the early 1930s at least, the party’s organisational and propaganda drive in central Luzon was “guided more by determination and enthusiasm rather than solid Marxist knowledge”.85 The 1938 unity convention had passed a resolution on educational work, which proposed weekly classes:
The convention places before the whole party the problem of the education, selection and promotion of the leading personnel in all the party organisations. Great attention should be placed upon the Marxist-Leninist training of the leaders of basic organisations of the party, as well as the training of party members who are carrying on work inside the mass organisations.86
Yet there were obvious limitations to carrying out such an undertaking. First, the PKP had only 196 members several months before the merger.87 James Allen, a CPUSA envoy offering significant guidance to the party during this period, estimated that the core of the organisation numbered “some 40 or 50 comrades”—a minuscule number. Second, the organisation was still developing and was devoid of both the history and the theorists of the European workers’ movement. And the Filipino working class was relatively tiny and fragmented; by 1940 still almost half of the labour force was employed in domestic and personal service.88 That was not the most conducive environment for the development of organic intellectuals. Third, while the PKP grew rapidly in the lead-up to the merger, its base was shifting from Manila and the working class to the countryside, where the land question rather than the labour question was often central and the fundamental principles of Marxism were less relevant. Urban party membership further declined with the advent of war because worker members were instructed to leave and give support to the guerrilla struggle; the membership of the party was almost totally recast by an influx of peasants.89 Fourth, the tension between leading the mass work, keeping together a variety of anti-Japanese fronts and working through revolutionary theory would have been substantial. Finally, the Japanese occupation again pushed the communists underground.
Most likely is that, while the Huk leadership were in the PKP and the PKP was directing the struggle in a number of ways, the rank and file Huk and even many PKP cadre had not been trained in revolutionary politics. The mass base from the AMT and KPMP were organisationally aligned to the party, but the allegiance seems to have been born primarily from the struggle. Kerkvliet mustered plenty of evidence that backs this interpretation. One tenant farmer told him: “The government said [PKP politburo member and KPMP leader Juan] Feleo was a communist. Maybe he was. But if he was so were I and lots of others here in San Ricardo, because he was telling the landlords and the government the things we wanted”.90 There is also support from other sources. For example San Padreo, a wiry old peasant, told historian Stanley Karnow:
Nobody would give us our rights or hear our demands. They said we were Communists. I didn’t know what Communism was, and I still don’t. But they called you a Communist, that was that. It made no sense to deny it, because they wouldn’t believe you.91
Added to this, the structures of one organisation overlapped with the next. One PKP member, a provincial secretary of the large post-war peasant union, complained in 1946, in the words of Kerkvliet, that “only some of those in the party’s central committee knew Marxist political theory”.92 Nemenzo mustered an extreme example to force the point:
The group of Teodoro Asedillo [a KPMP organiser] of Laguna, for instance, acquired all the characteristics of a millenarian movement… [involving] the use of amulets and the celebration of rituals. They even linked up with another millenarian leader called Encaldo. It was a rather good version of a primitive rebellion. But it was staged by “communists”.93
The party’s political orientation to the anti-Japanese struggle also had ramifications. “All aspects of the agrarian struggle in central Luzon merged into or were shaped by the needs of the national liberation struggle”, wrote Pomeroy. “The KPMP and AMT were dissolved; the attitude towards landlords was determined by the slogan ‘Anti-Japanese above all’.”94 As Nemenzo later pointedly said of the slogan, “Nobody becomes a Marxist with that”.95 A united front, in the classic sense, is about joint action to defeat a common enemy; its principal method also involves proving that communist strategy is superior and politically winning over the ranks of non-communists to the party. The PKP, by contrast, was searching for allies to wage a patriotic cross-class war. The movement’s leaders carried out, through Huk publications, relentless pro-US propaganda and pledged allegiance to the US government.96
One can imagine that, in the context of a full-blown invasion, options were dramatically limited to those calculated to ensure survival. Yet while the objective situation surely lowered the horizon of what was possible, making alliances with landlords and a major imperial power, subordinating the class struggle entirely to the military campaign and limiting propaganda to democratic and nationalist slogans (even if various instances could be justified on tactical grounds) could only result in political confusion. The peasant base of the Huk may at times have been clearer than the leadership. “It was difficult during the Japanese occupation”, said Peregrino Taruc (brother of Luis), “to convince peasants of the necessity that the United Front could include landlords who were sometimes their enemies”.97
While there were debates and disagreements among the leadership about the strategy that should be followed, particularly as the war drew to a conclusion, the orientation was not simply a result of domestic considerations.98 The party’s broader political course was derived from the Comintern via the CPUSA. The Popular (or People’s) Front had shifted the international communist movement sharply to the right. Globally the main enemy was now fascism, and alliances were being sought with the “liberal” bourgeoisie. A variant of this reasoning was at work in the Philippines. The party was also for a period strongly influenced by Chinese communist advisers.
A people’s war differs from most wars because from it the people as a whole have something to gain. That makes it a just war… We fought a just war against Japan; we had an unjust peace forced upon us…[which] sought to rob the people of their victory. The people did not submit… The armed struggle merely became for a time an economic and political one. —Luis Taruc 99
People met peace with immense relief. By war’s end more than 1 million had been killed throughout the archipelago. The economy was devastated. Huk fighters were helping the US take control. But for some there were nagging worries: why had the US begun to exclude Huks from sensitive positions while accepting elements who had collaborated with the Japanese? These worries were well founded. The US forces cooperated with the Huks for a month or so after they returned. Then they turned. Said one villager: “At first, the end of the Japanese occupation was like a sunrise on a clear warm morning. It felt good. It promised things would get better. But the sun wasn’t coming up after all. It was going down”.100
In February 1945 the leading Huks were arrested and jailed by the US military. “For 22 days we sat in an imperialist prison in our own country, which we had fought for three years to free”, remembered Taruc. “Outside the ‘liberation’ was in progress”.101 The returning administration, headed by Sergio Osmeña of the Nationalist Party, refused to recognise the provisional governments of central and southern Luzon. Democratically elected officials were removed from office and replaced by anti-Huk elites appointed by the US Army. Nevertheless, with the Japanese defeated, the Hukbalahap mostly disbanded—although many fighters buried their weapons or fled to the hills. The Huk leadership naively continued to assist the US and the administration, issuing leaflets with the slogans “Long live our American allies!” and “Long live the Osmeña government!” They even went so far as to hand over Huk membership lists to US Army intelligence.102
US officers had been welcoming the collaborators back and befriending the landlords. Many of the latter had fled to Manila during the war. Now the landlords were returning and the old antagonisms were back. Some even demanded back rents for the time of their absence. But the peasants were more organised than ever after the experiences of the war. “There is a feeling here more than any other place in the Philippines”, noted the US Army’s Daily Pacifican about one of the regions where fighting had not ceased, “that the Filipinos are not glad to be ‘liberated’.”103
The PKP called for an end to armed struggle to focus on a programme of legal and electoral work in anticipation of the establishment of an independent republic—something that had already been promised by the US prior to the war and would be granted in July the following year. The communists constituted the Committee of Labour Organisations (CLO), which comprised 76 Manila trade unions with a combined affiliation of some 100,000 workers, around 20 percent of the total labour force.104 PKP members also took leadership positions in the new National Peasants’ Union (PKM), which was strongest in the provinces of Pampanga, Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, and Tarlac and claimed up to 500,000 members.
In July the Democratic Alliance (DA) was formed. It aimed to be an electoral bloc that would give due political representation in a new republic to the labouring classes and oust the wartime collaborators from government. Elections took place in April 1946. The DA, against the opinion of the majority of the PKP, allied with the Nationalist Party against the Liberal Party of Manuel Roxas (a breakaway from the Nationalists). In part this was because Roxas, a long-time friend of General MacArthur, had been a senior official in the wartime collaborationist government. It also was because Osmeña’s Nacionalistas had promised a new law giving tenants 60 percent of the harvest, rather than the 50 percent or less that had been customary.
The results were a source of pride, but also of bitter disappointment. The left dearly hoped to defeat Roxas. In this it failed. On the other hand, the DA won all the congressional seats in Central Luzon. The mood must have been euphoric, but the DA subsequently was denied the right to take the seats. The new Roxas government unleashed new rounds of violence and pardoned those who had collaborated with the Japanese. All of this rocked the peasantry. Central Luzon already resembled a military occupation; it was about to become a war zone once again. The landlords wanted to crush the mass organisations and impose subservience. Private paramilitary organisations appeared, often drawn out of the ranks of the anti-Huk Philippine Constabulary. These thugs acted in concert with government forces and the US military to intimidate and murder peasant or leftist leaders.
Independence, symbolically granted on 4 July 1946, reinforced these developments. Philippine political sovereignty was predicated on deepening economic subordination. The Bell Trade Act, passed by the US Congress just days prior to independence, gave US citizens and corporations equal rights to Filipinos in exploiting natural resources. Even Osmeña described it as a “virtual nullification of Philippine independence”. The wartime devastation of the Philippine economy was just another opportunity to make a buck. As US Army major Andrew Lembke writes:
[Independence] should have represented empowerment, acknowledging the status quo change in Central Luzon induced by the occupation’s effects. Instead it reinforced a return to the status quo ante, and a return to power of the same men the Huks fought during the occupation. Thus, for the Huks and their supporters, independence signalled a continuation of the struggle against a government that looked strikingly similar to the collaborationist government. Independence also provided the elites a mandate to destroy the peasant movement in Central Luzon, ensuring the perpetuation of the old social system.105
The widespread, if not majority, view was that there was no alternative to resistance. Although the US press carried stories of looming revolution, official US opinion was somewhat blasé. The Huk movement, according to the new ambassador to Manila, “was essentially socio-economic not political, numbering not more than 2,500”.106 The State Department and the Philippine authorities, who were presumably providing such Pollyanna tones, would soon be taught a lesson in the links between socio-economic and political factors. Taruc recalled:
Although the Japanese had been driven off the plains long before, central Luzon now echoed with the indiscriminate gunfire of “liberation”… The rumble of American tanks sounded no different than the rumble of Japanese tanks on our streets. Dodging their new persecutors in the barrios, our comrades looked back on forest life under the Japanese with nostalgia, because there we had at least been able to practise democracy and live as free men.107
A symbolic event stirring the mood was the murder of Juan Feleo in late August 1946. This was followed by a huge military campaign by the state, which dwarfed any operation carried out by the Japanese. Taruc wrote to President Roxas to say he was joining the new mobilisation of armed peasants: “I will be more service to our country and to our people and their government if I stay now with the peasants. In spite of every harm and provocation done to them I am still confident I can help guide them in their struggle for democracy”.108
There was a hardening of attitudes on both sides. Leading some government forces was Carlos Nocum, one-time rebel who had later served as a USAFFE guerrilla. As Huk veteran Robert Aspia described him, Nocum wanted to trample the Huk forces “like you’d stomp on a cockroach”.109 Violence escalated dramatically. The Huk and the PKP were outlawed by Roxas in 1948, but upon his death his successor Elpidio Quirino attempted negotiations. These broke down when it became clear that the Huk leaders’ lives were under threat.
The PKP leadership was divided. The majority were in Manila and oriented to rebuilding in the labour movement and focusing on legal work. Those stationed in Central Luzon were closer to the farmers and joined the rebellion, despite the fact that the party officially opposed it. In mid-1948 the party endorsed the armed struggle as its main area of work, after an ideological struggle in the leadership, which resulted in suspensions and later expulsions.110 It was clear that the structure of Philippine society was a serious barrier to democratic change. Genuine democracy was a direct threat to the economic interests both of the country’s rulers and of US interests. This was confirmed in the eyes of many by the 1949 election, which was marred by violence and corruption. Private paramilitaries and local police were mustered for rival candidates. The Nationalist Party launched an uprising in Batangas province following the result. “There is no more democracy in the Philippines”, said a senior member of the Philippine Electoral Commission.111
The Huk was growing and taking more territory. After 1946 the movement sent units far beyond the Central Luzon area. Taruc explained: “We wanted to be on the offensive politically, but also have a military defence in order to protect ourselves while doing political organising.” A further goal of the expansion was to build relationships and a base among a wide range of local groups and ethnicities.112 Out of the growing spontaneous rebellion, and against persistent attacks from government forces, the Huk was reorganised as the People’s Liberation Army (HMB) and further expansion drives were undertaken, now under the leadership of PKP leader Casto Alejandrino.
Its forces grew to perhaps 15,000, drawn from up to 50,000 part-time fighters. “In numbers, organisation and small arms the Huk fighting units were comparable to the government forces”, wrote historian Alvin Scaff. “In terms of morale and civilian support in the areas of their operations, they had a decided advantage”.113 The government by this stage seemed in a parlous state, the economy was in ruins and the Chinese revolution had been victorious. The PKP declared a revolutionary situation in 1950. It was an unfortunate miscalculation, both regarding the scale of the revolt, the strongholds of which were confined to Central Luzon, the political development of the mass base of the HMB and the strength of the PKP. However heroic and selfless, PKP cadre were limited both in number and in political education. The masses overwhelmingly were not won to revolutionary conclusions. This was in part the historical legacy of the PKP, now exacerbated again by conditions of war. A party discussion document lamented:
We tried to step up education to the maximum, but after a time we couldn’t hold schools because we were continually on the move to evade enemy military operations… We turned out masses of propaganda materials, but very little of this reached the lower organs, let alone the masses.114
Yet even if there had been a greater layer of educated cadre, communist forces, numbering perhaps 7,500, were like a drop in a bucket in a country of more than 16 million people. Working class urban insurrection and mass rural revolt might have stood a chance of creating a genuinely independent republic—if the mood had existed, if a general crisis of the Philippine state had come about and if there had been a mass and coherent revolutionary organisation available to lead it. Of those “ifs”, only the second seems arguable—but the support of US imperialism for the new government was always a given. Somewhere in an isolated forest HMB camp in August 1950 Pomeroy, cut off from general developments, remained optimistic:
The revolutionary situation is flowing toward a revolutionary crisis, which is the eve of the transfer of power. We are in the period of preparation for the strategic aim of seizing power. Our tactical aims are all those steps that can effectively mobilise the allies and the reserves of the revolution into an increasing assault on the main enemy and their allies.115
By late 1951 there was increasing war weariness among the people. US concern about the depth of the rebellion led President Truman to intervene with financial and military aid. This proved decisive, with 100,000 or more armed soldiers and others now directed against the rebels and the state’s integrity strengthened. The PKP Politburo had been captured in Manila in late 1950; many would spend the next two decades behind bars. Prominent Huk leaders were killed and the losses mounted. Those remaining were pursued by the army even into the mountains. Villagers became weary of lending support or just viewed the guerrillas as irrelevant as conditions changed. Fresh national elections turned out to be peaceful and the Nationalist Party victorious. This stoked hope that tangible reforms could be gained through legal means. Police reduced their abuses of the peasants, so the latter were less likely to feel the need for “Huk justice”. Pomeroy’s enthusiasm by now was sapped. He described the darkening mood in guerrilla ranks:
Fear is beginning to replace daring in many places. Enemy agents swarm everywhere and have arrested some distributors. Why do they surrender? Because many have joined in the hope of quick victories and they have lost their taste for it. Because…more Huks are dying now than ever before… Because they worry about family back in a barrio without a breadwinner… We had thought that by the leaders setting a high tempo we could set high the tempo of revolution. We have been living in a fool’s paradise… It is no longer victory that preoccupies us. It is survival.116
By 1955 the HMB was disbanded and the PKP in tatters; almost all surviving leaders were now in prison. Here the party nucleus at least was maintained. Three years later the membership was estimated to be just 700.117 The coming of the dusk over this remarkable movement, however, would not put the aspirations and grievances of the labouring classes to bed. The defeat of the resistance would prove only an extended interlude to the rising of another rebellious sun.
1 The Huk nickname is widely used for both the People’s anti-Japanese Army and its post-war successor the People’s Liberation Army. The name stems from the Tagalog: Hukbalahap Hukbo ng Bayan Labon sa Hapun (People’s Anti-Japanese Army) and Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (People’s Liberation Army).
2 An estimated 260,000 guerrilla fighters in 277 units were engaged throughout the country. These numbers include US troops, and a range of organisations with various alliances. See L Schmidt, American Involvement in the Filipino Resistance Movement on Mindanao During the Japanese Occupation, 1942-1945, Master of Military Art and Science thesis (US Army Command and General Staff College, 1982), p2; H Crippen, “American imperialism and Philippine independence”, Science and Society, vol 11 (2), 1947, pp104-108.
3 L Taruc, Born of the People (International Publishers, New York, 1953), p56.
4 Taruc, 1953, p212.
5 J V Ocay, “Domination and resistance in the Philippines: from the pre-Hispanic to the Spanish and American period”, Lumina, vol 21 (1), 2010, pp3-10.
6 Ocay, 2010, pp10-11.
7 W L Schurz, Manila Galleon, p127. Referenced in R Constantino, A History of the Philippines (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1975), p74.
8 D Sturtevant, Popular Uprisings in the Philippines 1840-1940 (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1976), fn11, p26.
9 R Constantino, Neocolonial Identity and Counter-Consciousness (Merlin Press, London, 1978), p30.
10 N Cushner and J Larkin, “Royal Land Grants in the Colonial Philippines (1571-1626): implications for the formation of a social elite”, Philippine Studies, vol 26 (1/2), 1978, pp102-111.
11 According to Phelan, the peasantry was neither destroyed nor greatly transformed. “In the provinces…no numerous class of wage earners emerged.” The indigenous population engaged in agriculture “under a complex system of debt peonage and sharecropping” that lasted through the 20th century. See J L Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1959), pp98, 116. According to Ocay, drawing on the more recent scholarship of Corpuz, “the old right of the native people to ownership of land was extinguished. The native people were only assigned a piece of land to cultivate and these were not titled under their names. As a result, the families in the pueblo were reduced to a single class of farmers who were obliged to work their assigned land. In this new system…there were no longer sharecroppers because everybody became a farm worker.” See Ocay, 2010, p12.
12 “Some of the most famous revolts during the early phase of Spanish occupation were the Dagami Revolt in Cebu in 1567, the Manila Revolt (also known as Lakandula and Sulayman Revolts) in 1574, the Pampanga Revolt in 1585, Magat Salamat Revolt in 1587-88 in Manila, Magalat Revolt in Cagayan in 1596, Tamblot Revolt in Bohol in 1621-1622, Bankaw Revolt in Leyte in 1621-22, Maniago Revolt in Pampanga in 1660, Sumuroy Revolt in Samar in 1649-50, and many others. Most of these early revolts were directly caused by the exaction of tributes and forced and corvée labour and other forms of abuses by the Spanish colonialists”—Ocay, 2010, p14.
13 J L Phelan, “Some Ideological Aspects of the Conquest of the Philippines”, The Americas, vol 13 (3), January 1957, p225.
14 Phelan, 1959, p103.
15 J Le Roy, “The Friars in the Philippines”, Political Science Quarterly, vol 18 (4), December 1903, p662.
16 Until “the very end of the Spanish regime no more than 5 percent of the local population had any facility with the colonial language”—B Anderson, “Manila’s Cacique Democracy”, New Left Review, no 169, May/June 1988, p6.
17 P W Stanley, A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States 1899-1921 (Harvard, Cambridge, 1974), p43.
18 Feodor Jagor quoted in J Le Roy, Philippine Life in Town and Country (GP Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1905), p151.
19 J Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002), p3.
20 R Constantino, A History of the Philippines (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1975), pp147-148.
21 Carlos María de la Torre, letter of 4 January 1870, quoted in J N Schumacher, Revolutionary Clergy (Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, 1981), pp18-19.
22 Constantino, 1978, p123.
23 Schumacher, 1981, p269.
24 Tagalog: Kataastaasang Kagalanggalang na Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan—Highest and Most Respectable Society for the Sons of the People, founded in 1892.
25 Constantino, 1975, pp161-163.
26 L Fernăndez, The Philippine Republic (Columbia University, New York, 1926), p22.
27 And by 1898 the friars controlled fewer than 50 percent of the colony’s parishes—M Martinez, The Philippine Revolution (International Academy of Management and Economics, Makati City, 2002), p164.
28 Schumacher, 1981, pp81-112.
29 Fernăndez, 1926, p45.
30 Emilio Aguinaldo, “Filipinos, beloved brothers”, proclamation issued 6 December 1898, quoted in J Richardson, Komunista (Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, 2011), p9.
31 S Karnow, In our Image (Random House, New York, 1989), pp111-115.
32 Karnow, 1989, p124.
33 Schumacher considers this a biased exaggeration, but not without truth. See Schumacher, 1981, p275.
34 This was not the case everywhere. In some places, such as the island of Negros, the US was welcomed. In Cebu some clergy took a neutral position, both in the initial revolution against Spain—because many parishes were already under secular Filipino control with the blessing of the local friar—and subsequently in the war against the US.
35 Schumacher, 1981, p155.
36 Schumacher, 1981, p144.
37 Richardson, 2011, p13.
38 Anderson, 1988, p11.
39 Sturtevant, 1976, p204.
40 Quoted in B Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion (Rowman and Littlefield, Oxford, 1977), p6.
41 Taruc, 1953, pp13-15.
42 Constantino, 1978, p70.
43 Richardson, 2011, pp10, 30-31.
44 Tagalog: Katipunan ng mga Anakpawis sa Pilipinas.
45 Richardson, 2011, p195.
46 See A Tan, “The ideology of Pedro Abad Santos’ Socialist Party”, Asian Center Occasional Papers, series ii, no 3 (University of the Philippines, Quezon City, 1984), p2.
47 The article was penned by A V H Hartendorp. Quoted in Sturtevant, 1976, p212.
48 See Richardson, 2011, pp172-179, 197, 211.
49 “Commentaries and prescriptions emanating from the Comintern, respected as embodying the accumulated experience of communists throughout the world, were beyond question the decisive determinants of the PKP’s own overall line. Statements issued by the International were frequently echoed and occasionally quoted directly in party documents and were never subjected to open critical appraisal, let alone challenged”—Richardson, 2011, p217.
50 Quoted in K Fuller, Forcing the Pace (University of the Philippines Press, Quezon City, 2007), p121. See also A Saulo, Communism in the Philippines (Ateneo Publications Office, Philippines, 1969), pp32-33.
51 E Lachica, Huk (Solidaridad Publishing House, Manila, 1971), p89.
52 L Taruc, He Who Rides the Tiger (Geoffrey Chapman Ltd, 1967), p17.
53 Richardson, 2011, p252.
54 M Bolasco, “Marxism and Christianity in the Philippines 1930-1983”, in Third World Studies (ed), Marxism in the Philippines (Third World Studies Center, Quezon, 1984), p106.
55 Crippen, 1947, p99.
56 Richardson, 2011, p164, and fn 155, pp312-313.
57 PKP, “An appeal to our Catholic brothers”, 1938. Quoted in Fuller, 2007, p125.
58 M R Henson, Comfort Woman (Rowman & Littlefield, New York, 1999), pp28, 30-31.
59 Kerkvliet, 1977, p66.
60 This is apparent in early Huk propaganda and song. Maria Rosa Henson related: “The Huk explained that the Japanese…wanted to free us from American colonialism… But the Japanese failed to do good things in the occupied countries. They were oppressive and abusive.” And the final lines of a famous Huk song read: “They blighted our people with misfortune, they killed those who opposed them, yet they say they are not our enemy because we belong to one race.” See Henson, 1999, p28.
61 M Thompson, The Anti-Marcos Struggle (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995), p177.
62 W Pomeroy, “The Philippine peasantry and the Huk revolt”, The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol 5 (4), 1978, p505.
63 Taruc, 1967, p22.
64 Lachica, 1971, p107.
65 For this paragraph and more, see V Lanzona, Amazons of the Huk Rebellion (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2009).
66 Taruc, 1953, pp102-103. Liwayway became known as the “Joan of Arc of the Philippines”. See Lanzona, 2009, pp151-156
67 L Greenberg, The Hukbalahap Insurrection (US Army Center of Military History, Washington DC, 1987), pp18-19.
68 Lachica, 1971, p104.
69 T Agoncillo, A Short History of the Philippines (New American Library, New York, 1969), p237, quoted in Fuller, Forcing the Pace, pp181-182.
70 Quoted in Fuller, 2007, p169.
71 Taruc, 1953, p117.
72 Taruc, 1953, p127.
73 The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia, pwencycl.kgbudge.com/H/u/Hukbalahap.htm
74 Quoted in Fuller, 2007, p184.
75 Taruc, 1953, p155.
76 N Cullather, Illusions of Influence (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1994), p65.
77 Kerkvliet, 1977, p264.
78 Saulo, 1969, p36.
79 The quote is Lava’s. See J Lava, “Reviews”, Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol 9 (1), 1979, pp75-93; see also Pomeroy, 1978, pp497-517.
80 F Nemenzo, “The millenarian-populist aspects of Filipino Marxism”, in Third World Studies (ed), Marxism in the Philippines (Third World Studies Center, Quezon, 1984), p9.
81 Taruc, 1953, p105.
82 Taruc, 1953, p33. See also Tan, 1984.
83 Taruc, 1953, p29.
84 Fuller, 2007, p141.
85 Quoted in Saulo, 1969, p24.
86 Quoted in Fuller, 2007, p134.
87 Fuller, 2007, pp141-142.
88 The figures, although not terribly accurate, are at least indicative of the situation. See Richardson, 2011, pp68-72, 220.
89 Fuller, 2007, p177.
90 Quoted in Kerkvliet, 1977, p52; see also pp181-182.
91 Quoted in Karnow, 1989, p42.
92 Kerkvliet, 1977, p182.
93 Nemenzo, 1984, p19.
94 Pomeroy, 1978, p505. See also Taruc, 1953, p61.
95 Nemenzo, 1984, p19.
96 “Our entire propaganda during the war, our leaflets, newspapers, and appeals for action, are testimony to the high regard in which we held our American allies against Japanese fascism”—Taruc, 1953, p194.
97 Quoted in Kerkvliet, 1977, p102.
98 For a useful overview, see Fuller, 2007, ch 6.
99 Taruc, 1953, p212.
100 Tenant farmer, quoted in Kerkvliet, 1977, p110.
101 Taruc, 1953, p196.
102 Luis Taruc admitted this to Kerkvliet. See Kerkvliet, 1977, p114.
103 Quoted in Crippen, 1947, p117.
104 Lachica, 1971, p119.
105 A Lembke, Lansdale, Magsaysay, America, and the Philippines (Combat Studies Institute Press, Kansas, 2013), p5.
106 Cullather, 1994, pp64-65.
107 Taruc, 1953, p201.
108 Quoted in Taruc, 1953, p239.
109 Quoted in Kerkvliet, 1977, p160.
110 See Kerkvliet, 1977, pp178-188; Fuller, 2007, pp269-274.
111 Lembke, 2013, p25.
112 Quoted in Kerkvliet, 1977, p161. See W Pomeroy, The Forest (University of the Philippines Press, Quezon City, 1963), pp34-35, and Fuller, 2007, pp268-269, for portrayals of the expansion.
113 Quoted in Walter Ladwig, “When the police are the problem”, in C Christine Fair and S Ganguly (eds), Policing Insurgencies (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014), p22.
114 Quoted in Fuller, 2007, p282.
115 Pomeroy, 1963, p62.
116 Pomeroy, 1963, pp152-153.
117 J Vargas and T Rizal, Communism in Decline (SEATO, Bangkok, 1957/8).