Fighting on all Fronts (60 page)

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”.
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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.
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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”.
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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”.
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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’.”
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As Nemenzo later pointedly said of the slogan, “Nobody becomes a Marxist with that”.
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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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
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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”.
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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”.
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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.
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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’.”
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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.
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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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”.
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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”.
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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: