A time to cut the speeches

From campus activism to a stint at peasant organizing and brief warfare in the hills (which we called then CS), to the feet-punishing marches in the streets of Metro Manila especially after the assassination of former Senator Benigno Aquino at the MIA tarmac in 1983, my journey wound up at the 12-lane highway that separated the two major apparatuses of military violence and instruments of political repression by the Ferdinand Marcos regime, Camp Aguinaldo and Camp Crame.

That was February 23, circa 1986. With a handful of kasama (comrades) from the transport sector, which I joined in organizing lately, I strove to satisfy curiosity by meeting the crowd at EDSA.

We saw the burgeoning affair there as just a military putsch by adventurist junior officers of the Armed Forces. When the preempted coup was starting to boomerang on the plotters, they would be saved from the deadly wrath of their former boss by a religious call from Cardinal Sin, and offered warm bodies for shield by numbers from the burgisya or middle class which would be romanticized to find also names from the wealthy elite coming to link arms. It was not trying to overthrow the dictator, much more change the prevailing social order. It was just trying to save the asses of the military mutineers from being incinerated by the howitzers of General Fabian Ver, and referee the emerging fight so that blood will not flow.

But as it did, the Edsa mass-up delivered a death blow to the savage reign of Marcos, paralyzed his capacity to repress (his soldiers could not have it in their conscience to shoot at the crowds and kill thousands), and sent his monolithic military machine unraveling. The guns of the major commands instead of firing fizzled, and the officers and rank-and-file personnel left their battle positions. The historical twist was totally unexpected and unplanned. Even the gathering of millions in an instant demonstration of resolve to defy the strongman was spontaneous. It was unimaginable.

Brought in as usual paraphernalia at first blush, our red banners and streamers were met with unwelcoming stares. So we got there stripped of any political-ideological allusion. We lost our hard-core thoughts and hard-line revolutionary theory in the crowd. For once, we were just citizens of the country, and part of that magical amalgam called the Filipino people out in their full moral force to topple with a mix of courageous involvement, prayers, flowers and festivity a very dangerous dictator. We shed off our being political forces with deep red color, and joined in as moral forces. But it felt good to be just a Filipino.

That was my brief engagement at EDSA. After spending hours at the highway where history was being made on February 23, 1986 we separated to rally our own ranks. We quickly mimeographed bundles of leaflets, and by morning of February 24 we were already distributing them along Aurora Avenue, Magsaysay Blvd., Espana, Quezon Avenue and other major thoroughfares, calling for Welgang Bayan (People's Strike).

I could sense what Lenin called "profound revolutionary crisis": the people no longer able to still live under the same political order. Where before, they won't even touch such same material that we leave on jeepneys, now out of the windows of running jeepneys their hands would reach out for it. In a brief moment, the Weba leaflets were gone, lopped up by an enthused Metro Manila citizenry. Drivers would intentionally stop to say: "Bakit hinde na ngayon?" (Why not now?) A strike was one that they would at the very least frown at, at the most vehemently resist. Now. they even did go on holiday, barricaded Aurora, and parked their jeepneys in the afternoon, two days ahead of the called Welgang Bayan.

In the evening of the 24th, in an observation post at Aurora Avenue in San Juan, I saw an armored personnel carrier being chased by a car down to Malacanang. Besides the laughable incident, the road was quiet. Our group slept at Cubao that night for a long day on the 25th. The whole of the next day, we massed up at an assembly point in Cubao and V. Mapa, gathered a few buses courtesy of trade union members, and by afternoon we proceeded to Espana. At the intersection of Gov. Forbes, we set up barricade with a cirle of commandeered buses and did some sorties to JP Laurel Street to reconnoiter.

When dark fell, we marched to the Mendiola Bridge with a 700-man tightly-knit contingent and hundreds more of folks tailing behind. We wound down Morayta, Lepanto, back of San Sebastian College and run smack into the phalanges of barbed wires coiling at the foot of the bridge. We folded banners and streamers and got ready for brawl. Others began cutting the wires. On balconies or windows of surrounding buildings, people were shouting: "Pasok! Pasok!" (Enter! Enter!) The crowds behind us, down the length of Recto were waving and heaving. We didn't mind losing our lives anymore. This was it!

I couldn't remember exactly what time it was, on the bright moonlit night of February 25, when we observed and heard helicopters hovering above the trees. During those days, we always remember to carry transistor radios in rallies. From one of them, carried by a comrade beside me, a station airing news feed guerilla-style shortly announced that Marcos, a sick man, has left Malacanang. I smiled, my thought was at once: too late for the gays who also joined the march shouting: "Pakurot ha! Pakurot!" (Let us pinch, referring to the moment we are able to reach Marcos.)

By that time, we had cut the barbed wires, giving way to a wide gaping breach. Before that, some of us had already slipped inside and planted our streamers across the bridge. When the breach materialized, the crowd could no longer be prevented from rushing in.

As the floodgates were finally thrown open, a deluge of thousands of people rolled all the way to the gates and up the gates of the presidential compound, to the Malacanang Palace. We shouted to stop the onrush, because there could yet be Marcos loyalist snipers around. But the flood could no longer be stemmed. The onrushing folks threw our caution to the wind.

Before midnight, the seat of power where the dictator had reigned for 20 years, was taken over by the common people. The ramparts of the brutal and rapacious regime fell into shreds. The strongman has fled. We retreated to our place at Espana, and got some needed breath. The tense atmosphere would be suddenly broken by dancing and singing in the streets as truckloads of civilian merrymakers swooped in.

I and a few straggling comrades managed to walk to a place at V. Mapa by past 1:00 AM already on the 26th, were we cramped ourselves in a room to try to get some sleep. But in an hour of trying to lapse into forgetfulness, what happened could not just let us sleep. I decided to stand up and go.

I walked at four in the morning to go back to my house at the nearby locality of San Juan for the first time in five days, after I left with a banner and two cans of sardines as food pack for some hectic political action. In the cold and dark of the wee hours of the morning, the still hard-to-believe reality was dawning. Yes, indeed, the dictator is gone, and I am once again a free man!

Still in the grip of Yolanda

The Red Cross distributes relief in Bgy. Hinulogan, Dagami, Leyte.

 It is made to sound like a magical period of time. But no miracle happened to the suffering victims of Yolanda 100 days after the calamity struck. They are still in the grip of disaster.

I recently visited some of the ravaged areas in Tanauan, Dagami, Burauen and Julita in Leyte. The people I talked to are one in saying that the situation in their barangays may not get better. It could get worse.

Local officials and ordinary citizens share the same observation. If relief by the government and other humanitarian organizations stop, hunger and terrible hardship will hit them. As a consequence, criminality will rise and chaos will be the order of the day.

“There is no problem with food as of now. We are supplied,” Ceasar Arguilles of Barangay San Miguel, Tanauan says. “But almost all of us have no livelihood anymore, if relief ends there will be big trouble,” he adds.

Immediately after the supertyphoon struck, various agencies swooped into their localities. Since then, they have constantly doled out food rations, hygiene kits, pails and construction materials.

The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has led in the effort. But other foreign and private aid organizations have also been helping. They are Oxfam, the Samaritan Purse, Red Cross, World Vision, Plan International and the Catholic Relief Service.

A Buddhist organization, the Tzu Chi Foundation, gave cash from P8,000 to P15,000 per recipient.

But still, 99 percent of the survivors have no means of earning to tide up each family in the near future. Agriculture is down. After Typhoon Pablo hit Mindanao, Leyte and Samar became the country’s biggest producer of copra with two thirds of their agricultural lands planted to coconuts. However, the trees have been decimated by Yolanda.

Folks waiting for relief  on  trees felled by Yolanda.

I came to Bgy. Hinulogan, Dagami in time to see the distribution of food and other relief items by the Red Cross. I took photos and asked around as almost the whole village queued alongside the vans. 

“We will survive while this goes on,” Francisco Crebillo, a resident, says. “But they are only up to March, the officials told us. Once the giving stops, our barangay will plunge into darkness.”

The whole village was flattened, with 90 percent of homes totally damaged. As early as two weeks after Yolanda devastated it, the residents began salvaging materials from their ruined houses and erecting makeshift shelters. But indeed, there seems to be no end to the need for outside help. Dependency on aid is the other tragedy that the local folks are now stuck on.

Most of the houses in Bgy. Balorinay, Burauen have been demolished by the supertyphoon. The folks are living under flimsy canopies from the canvasses or tarpaulins donated by the DSWD and other aid groups. Exposed to the extremes of weather, seemingly in a furnace during hot days, and in a freezer during cold nights, they have still to hear of any government move to help them out of these conditions.

Homes down to ground zero in Balorinay, Burauen, Leyte.

The main source of livelihood of the village was tuba and vinegar making from the coconut flower’s sap. This is gone, and will not be back for at least seven years.

The locals at Bgy. Cuyae, Julita were lucky to be reached by relief with an additional feature, cash for work. They have recently gone through a week-long cash-for-work assistance by the United Nations. But the one thing that happened under the local government unit of their municipality has not paid yet. They joke of it being instead credit-for-work.

Less than 10 percent of the houses here remained standing after Yolanda. The rest were all brought down into heaps of rubble and debris. The local folks struggled to get shelters up with tarpaulin and canvass from the aid agencies. But they could not get food production and income generation back, because their lands are still littered with fallen trees and could not be plowed.

The same dire situation goes on in most of the areas devastated by the supertyphoon in November, last year. The whole prescriptive period for them to recover and pick up the pieces seems to be getting long. But the act can be now or never.

More than three months since, lives, homes, economies and communities are yet far from the condition of really building back after the devastation wrought by Yolanda. Aside from getting desperate, folks are in a situation that can rapidly deteriorate to a point of no return. 

A social and economic collapse may be far off in the minds of government responders at the top. But to the folks on ground zero, the likelihood of this scenario has loomed even much larger than in the first weeks after the disaster.

In December, the government talked of a price tag for Recovery Assistance on Yolanda to the tune of PhP360.9 billion, out of which 50.79% or P183.3 billion was for the reconstruction of homes alone. I estimate that the 1,500 barangays in Leyte - granting that all of them have been razed to the ground, may need only around P4 billion to get more durable shelters up in due time.

First off, where are the talked about billions? The promise of assistance is urgently needed on ground zero to materialize. It must begin to roll now, before it becomes too late. Aanhin pa ang damo kung patay na ang kabayo? (What is the grass for if the horse is already dead?)