The Left should inhabit the space offered by Mr. Duterte

MANY Central Luzon families, my family included, had gone Left at some point in their ordinary, humdrum lives. In a sense, that was a historical imperative. Agrarian unrest was the original driving force of the Movement, not labor and trade union issues, and the indentured, landless tenants of the Central Plains formed the core of the original mass base.

One of the brothers of my maternal grandmother was an early disciple of Pedro Abad Santos, a brave foot soldier who would follow the ascetic, selfless Perico (Abad Santos) into the ends of the earth. In the early attacks of the Sosyalistas on the haciendas of Lubao, Pampanga, the brother of my grandmother, an unlettered peasant, was always at the lead.