THIRTY-THREE years ago today, a watershed event in the history of the New People’s Army took place. A young officer at the Philippine Military Academy timed his defection to the New People’s Army by leading a raid on the academy’s armory, delivering large quantities of weapons and ammunition to the rebel forces fighting the Marcos regime.
Little did I know that my life as a clandestine member of the movement seeking to overthrow the dictator-in-the-making would intersect with that momentous episode.
On New Year’s Eve, 1970, I had finished writing my stories at the Manila Chronicle when I decided to drop by the National Press Club where merrymaking was in high gear as the clock ticked on toward 12 midnight. But first, I wanted to greet Manuel Almario, editor of the Philippine News Service, whose office was on the second floor of the NPC building.
An excited Maning quickly led me to the teletype machine, which was furiously clacking out a story datelined Baguio City reporting an insurgent raid on the military academy. Liuetenant Victor Corpus, a PMA instructor, had taken advantage of his being duty officer of the day by carting away large quantities of the armory’s contents with the help of nine NPA fighters.
The raiders, sporting crew cuts, entered the camp aboard three cars led by the lieutenant’s army jeep. The timing couldn’t have been more auspicious as then president Ferdinand Marcos was vacationing in Baguio City at the time.
Joma
After a couple of beers at the NPC lounge, I went home to our apartment on 9th Avenue, Cubao, Quezon City. My wife Charito told me in hushed tones that we had some visitors. They turned out to be Jose Ma. Sison [Communist Party of the Philippines founding chairman] and his wife Juliet, who stood as one of our wedding sponsors.
The couple had requested to stay for two days to attend to some “important matters.” Joma, who had gone underground two years earlier to lead the guerrilla struggle, confirmed to me that the NPA raid, which he acknowledged to be “my baby,” went on without a hitch.
The convoy of raiders-carrying a total of 21 M-16s, 14 Carbines, six machine guns, one bazooka, a few grenade launchers and 5,000 rounds of ammunition-tooled down highways and byways before reaching an NPA base camp at the foothills of the Sierra Madre.
The following morning, I found Joma typing on his portable Olivetti the defection statement of Corpus. He asked me which was a better sentence, the one that began, “As an officer of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, it is below my dignity ... ’’ or”... it is beneath my dignity ... ." The former University of the Philippines’ English instructor agreed with me on the latter.
After dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, Joma relaxed and told me that the raid carried more political, than military, significance because the NPA marauders could have taken away a much larger inventory. But he said the purloined arms would spike the fighting capability of the fledgling people’s army as it expanded its forces. Before noon, a courier arrived to take Corpus’ statement to the newspapers.
Kumander Pusa
In the evening, I drove Joma to a Caloocan warehouse whose owner was a secret ally of the movement. There, he met Benjamin Sanguyo (Kumander Pusa), one of Corpus’ team members, who briefed him on the aspects of the operation. They talked for about an hour while I stood waiting from a distance.
The next day, the Sisons were fetched by car and taken to an underground destination. The defector’s statement made it to the front pages along with Joma’s companion press release announcing the birth of a “secret Victor Corpus Movement within the reactionary armed forces in order to disintegrate the principal component of reactionary state power.”
I continued pounding my Padre Faura beat, but after three months, I received instructions from Joma for another project. He had learned that my classmate in UP High, Rosauro Sibal, was an Air Force helicopter pilot, whose younger brother was a student activist.
To digress, Class 1960 of UP High produced a mixed bag. There were psychiatrist Ronnie Lesaca, chair of Bayan Muna; surgeon Frank Arcellana, head of the Physicians Against Nukes Movement; Helma Ver-Tuason, the favorite daughter of General Fabian Ver; Elinor Virata, younger sister of former prime minister Cesar E.A. Virata; Lourdes (Inday Badiday) Jimenez; Army vice chief General Victor Mayo; and Philippine National Police Director Enrique Bulan, who, as a young Constabulary officer, was assigned to keep tabs on me.
Sison suggested that I touch base with Sibal, a classmate of Corpus’ in PMA Class 1967, with the object of recruiting him into the movement. With another activist, I was to set up a Marxist study cell that included the Air Force pilot. When Ros had reached the stage of being politically developed, “we would ask him to drop bombs on Malacañang” to escalate the armed struggle, Joma said.
I paid a weekend visit on Sibal at his Quezon City home to size him up. He was assigned to Task Force Saranay, the counter-insurgency arm of the Armed Forces of the Philippines based in Northeastern Luzon. Ros, who held the rank of first lieutenant, said his duty was to transport the troops to contested territories in the region. When he mentioned that he would order returning soldiers who were carrying chickens seized from villagers not to board his helicopter, I thought he had the makings of a good recruit.
Corpus’ gift
Weeks after my encounter with Ros, Joma reappeared in my apartment one night. He was brought there by Fidel Agcaoili, one of his close aides, who was a teacher at the Don Bosco High School by day, and performed underground missions at night. The father of Fidel (Ka Peter/Ka Ompong, because of his resemblance to Dolphy) was president of Chrysler Philippines and member of Marcos’ UP Law Class of 1939.
Joma told me to scrub the project to recruit Sibal because a more important mission awaited me—to go to China to negotiate the delivery of war materiel for the NPA’s expansion and consolidation efforts. He showed off a brand new .357 Magnum, with a velcro ammunition belt—a gift, he said, from Corpus.
On his instruction, I burned the gun license which was issued in the name of Corpus’ uncle. He then turned over to me his .38 Astra revolver he acquired a year earlier after experiencing a holdup attempt on board a jeepney. I reluctantly accepted it, seeing no need to arm myself.
Joma proceeded to demonstrate the proper use of the powerful gun to me; I found it amusing that the Maoist theoretician from the Diliman academe was repackaging himself as a martial combatant.
China mission
In May 1971, Fidel began briefing me on my China mission. He said I was an ideal candidate for the job because of my experience as a diplomatic affairs reporter and my wife, with her English skills, would make a worthy secretary of the mission.
Initially, I resisted the idea, reluctant to leave my calling as a newspaper stiff. But Ka Peter said the word from Joma was final: no appeals. He consoled me with the prospect of being able to return after five years with the assured success of the arms transfer. With a hiccup here and a grumble there, I consented to go.
During the same month, we became parents of a second baby girl. I began having second thoughts about relocating to China because of the new addition to our family. Ka Peter was ticked off that I would welsh on my commitment, as he stressed that the armed struggle’s need for a quantum leap couldn’t be postponed any longer. His argument was so passionate and so compelling that I felt I had no choice but to heed the revolution’s clarion call.
On a windless July morning, with two-month-old Lisa and two-year-old Tina in our arms, Charito and I boarded a Thai International jetliner to Hong Kong, wearing shades to avoid recognition. I spotted Dave Baquirin of the Manila Times and Cris Martinez of the Evening News who were taking the same flight, but we managed to keep a respectable distance from my two colleagues and boarded the plane uneventfully.
After an hour-and-a-half flight, we reached the Crown Colony and checked in at the Golden Gate Hotel, owned by a businessman with Beijing connections. I contacted Thomas Pang, the Xinhua correspondent in Hong Kong who was born in Manila and served as China’s liaison man to Filipino visitors to the mainland. He tendered a lauriat for us before we slipped into China via Macao on board a Mercedes van.
After driving past the rarely traveled Macao-Kwangtung border, we stopped in front of a building where smiling Chinese officials with Mao badges stood in welcome. At a sumptuous lunch, they toasted us as the new emissaries of a flowering revolution in the gateway to the Far East.
It was the beginning of my China odyssey, my ritual passage as envoy of a misbegotten revolutionary mission.
(Agcaoili, now a resident of Spain, joins the NDF panel in its on-and-off peace negotiations with the GRP side. Kumander Pusa was killed in the early seventies. Sibal, a retired colonel, is a tenured professor at the Ateneo Graduate School of Business.)