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I first saw him at dusk with a group of armed men coming up to the
hut where I was waiting with my guide in Central Luzon in 1985. It
was the dry season but the paddies were green with growing palay,
thanks to irrigation managed by farmers tilling fields abandoned by
absentee landlords.
The leader of the “armed propaganda unit”
was a young man, former student leader in San Fernando. My guide, Ka
Mely, was a 29-year-old married woman with two children to a former
HMB fighter who joined the NPA upon his release from prison.
Following the young leader up the ladder was an
older man who went straight to the batalan to wash his face. He
looked familiar—from pictures I saw in Montreal—and I smiled at
him. He smiled too, his face still wet. Kumusta, we said almost at
the same time. Then he asked “How are our kasamas in Canada?” I
realized he was the head of the KMU whose secretary, a young lawyer,
came to Montreal and spoke to Quebec labor unionists a year before.
He gave a slide show of KMU in mass actions.
In 1982 Ka Bel was arrested but in 1984 he
escaped from detention and did organizing work in the countryside.
He was given a Thompson as an APU member. Ka Mely told me I could go
with the group in moving from barrio to barrio at night. My interest
in this “exposure” was cultural work and thereby life in a
“Red area.”
Ka Bel and I shared the same papag for several
nights when we could talk until drowsiness set in. He was interested
in solidarity work of Filipinos in North America. Since he joined
the group, he said, he no longer had to wake up several times at
night to relieve himself. His kidney condition had improved in the
countryside.
After EDSA I saw Ka Bel again at BAYAN mass
actions. In a rally at the Welcome Rotunda, a group of policemen led
by an officer whose shirt was left untucked closed in when Ka
Bel’s turn came to speak. The officer kept asking if the speaker
was Ka Bel. Nobody answered him; instead the rallyists closed ranks
and prevented the police from penetrating the tight cordon around Ka
Bel. Next thing I knew he was lost in the crowd.
Every time we saw each other in rallies he would
ask about our “kasamas” in Canada. I had to keep reminding him I
was already home for good. He attended the UP Press launching of my
book Diliman: Homage to the Fifties in 2003. As he presented his
copy for my autograph he pointed out to me a glaring error where I
wrote “he wasn’t of peasant stock but a labor leader from
Manila.” He made a sound of mock peevishness. And I was profuse
with apologies.
Indeed many urban workers have come from
impoverished rural areas. As his chief of staff Lu Roque wrote:
“Ka Bel worked as a farm hand and janitor to support his studies.
He then worked as a gasoline boy, messenger, bus driver, and later
on, taxi driver. At age 20, he joined his fellow drivers in a strike
against unfair labor practices. The police attacked their picket
line, injured many and claimed the lives of three protesting
workers. Since then, Ka Bel vowed to fight alongside the working
class.”
Thus did Ka Bel make his revolutionary leap, a
class stand that sustained him through the years as top labor leader
from 1955 to 1982, briefly as a Red fighter, as Partido ng Bayan
senatorial candidate in 1987 getting 1.52 million votes, as Bayan
Muna partylist elected representative from 2001 to 2003, and as
Anakpawis representative from 2004 to the time of his death.
He was harassed along with other progressive
party-list members with trumped up charges and arrests by a regime
that could not abide the presence of Left members in an
oligarch/warlord-controlled Congress. But now that Ka Bel is no more
the ruling class would pay tribute to him, as in the case of
revolutionary writer Ka Amado Hernandez who, then “safely dead,”
was posthumously named National Artist for Literature in 1973.
As parliamentarian Ka Bel lived simply with his
family in a one-story house in a low-cost subdivision. He used his
“pork barrel” (when not blocked by the Palace) for the benefit
of the poor. He did not enrich himself as many members of Congress
have done. He owned no car with plate no. 8. His assets amounted to
P50,000 including “two barongs, shirts, and eyeglasses.”
Paalam, Ka Bel, you truly lived the life of
service to the people.
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