By Elmer A. Ordoñez

The Maguindanao massacre reveals the depths of savagery in traditional politics. It is the patronage politics of the ruling elites in this country controlled by dynasties, feudal relations and a neocolonial state.
An independent fact-finding commission should not find it difficult to get at the roots of this plague masquerading as an electoral system with the trappings of a democratic exercise including automated balloting. But the net result has always been the transfer of power from one set of oligarchs to another. The poor are given crumbs but still margina-lized and subject to the will of the newly elected elites.
The feudal politics in Maguin-danao is replicated in other provinces where there are 300 or so political clans. Two extended families controlling the whole of the province and with clout in the Palace contest the governorship, this time the Ampatuans resorting to unprecedented butchery and mayhem using state coercive forces to eliminate the Manguda-datus—to the utter shock of the country and the world.

The violence was premeditated complete with military/police troopers and auxiliary forces—part of the private army of the ruling Ampatuans—in carrying out the slaughter and mutilation of victims many of them women, media people, and some passing motorists. Include a backhoe of the provincial government—that had already dug the mass grave for the victims and their vehicles.

The Maguindanao massacre could only evoke memories of Nazi and Japanese atrocities—the horrors of Babi Yar, Auswitzch, the rape of Nanking and Manila in World II—and later Bosnia, Kosovo, Sudan, Congo, and countless others. It is indeed a crime against humanity—whose perpetrators deserve trial in an international tribunal.

Kurtz, the European ivory trader, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, saw the evil done to the Congo natives and uttered before he died, “the horror, the horror,” complicit as he was.

For now, 12 days after the monstrous crime, we can only rely on existing law enforcement agencies, the Commission on Human Rights, concerned local and international NGOs, a vigilant media and citizenry to ensure that the mastermind(s) and killers are brought to justice.

The Center for People’s Empowerment in Governance notes that powerful dynasties and warlords perpetuate deeply entrenched poverty and social injustice—as in the case of Maguin-danao (the second poorest province and ARMM the poorest region) while the Ampatuans live in luxury and keep caches of firearms for their private army.

The end to warlordism and oligarchic politics is a priority in the people’s agenda for social change. It is a long arduous struggle. Will the aspiring leaders have the will to shed vested interests and pick up this agenda if they get elected?

The Great Plebian and KM remembered

On November 30, the Left celebrated the birthday of Andres Bonifacio who founded the Katipunan and sparked the 1896 revolution, and the founding of the militant youth organization, Kabataang Makabayan (KM), founded by Jose Maria Sison in 1964, with a rousing musical play called Makata’y Mandirigma/Mandirigma’y Makata (The Poet’s a Warrior/the Warrior’s a Poet).

Inspired by Sison’s poem The Guerilla is Like a Poet, the musical play weaves together National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera’s Dalit, a long poem and the libretto of Palanca awardee Edward Perez’s Shrapnel sa Pluma ng Makata for a history of the national democratic movement.

My wife and I saw the first performance at the UP Theater and were treated to a feast of activist songs, some vintage and many new ones, modern choreography with a hint of the revolutionary Peking opera style popular during FQS days, and a play with a central character, Ador—poet, political detainee, husband and father—whose struggles the audience could readily identify with those of the author of “The Guerrilla is Like a Poet.” Romel Linatoc, church worker/stage artist, did an excellent job directing the musical play performed by a dynamic youth cast.

Bonifacio’s legacy of armed struggle against tyranny and oppression may well have been the inspiration for the Kabataang Makabayan, whose original membership provided many leaders of the Left movement. Sison himself became the founding chair of the reestablished Communist Party in 1968, was arrested in 1976 and jailed, released during the 1986 EDSA uprising. He is now the chief political consultant of the Utrecht-based National Democratic Movement’s negotiating panel for the peace talks—and an icon to the militant youth and organized masses. The musical play is a tribute to him.

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