A Requiem To Andres Bonifacio Incarnate

By Jose Sison Luzadas, KGOR
Scarborough Chapter
CANADA

The peasant farmer depends on the fruit of his labor to the land he toils to support a family. But even when fertile fields become fertile grounds for discontent, there is incongruity between the basic needs he yearns and the impossible demands from the landlord. Pity the poor abused sharecroppers for they shall inherit bloody agrarian revolution.

One man understood the plight of hapless farmers. He witnessed the abuses of absent landlords and was incensed on the inept and often biased government army soldiers who were supposed to protect them. He saw the birth and demise of the Sakdalista movement and its peasant origin. He also witnessed the litany of abuses temporarily halted during the Japanese occupation but not the occupiers’ brutal treatment to the citizens deserted by MacArthur. That man’s vision started an effective answer to oppressive regimes of what that spawned other violent groups popularly known by their acronyms, HUKBALAHAP, primarly against the Japanese, HUK (urban and rural guerillas during Roxas, Quirino and Magsaysay) and HMB Hukbong Magpalaya ng Bayan of the Garcia and early Marcos administration. Now Joma Sison and his NPA are getting a share in the struggle.

Like Andres Bonifacio of the 1896 revolution, this man can also speak the language of the masses. He even adopted the title “Supremo”. While the first Supremo has a meager education, the equivalent of second grade elementary education, this late Supremo attended few years at the University of Manila. Furthermore, while the first Supremo has a brother named Procopio, this Huk chieftain has a sibling named Peregrino. Call him “Bonifacio incarnate”!

During those years of Huk insurgency, whenever he showed up in countryside of partisan crowd he likened the gathering like those eager ears and eyes of farmer depends oppressed Filipinos in Balintawak or Pugad Lawin to address their concerns, dispensing PILLS of hopes for better tomorrow. He tried to represent their interest in the halls of congress. Elected in 1946 but unseated year after that ushered a long civil war known as the Huk Insurgency and again democratically elected to take their cause in the new society era under Marcos.

In the pantheon of deserving Filipino Heroes idolized by the masses, mostly the poor farmers, Ka LUIS TARUC was an AUTHENTIC NATIONALIST, a national folk hero of peasant origin who understood, cared and worked for the abused, dispossessed and neglected peasants, an ordinary man with an extraordinary heart.