A portly, genial man with Spanish coloring and thick, salt and pepper hair sat back of the counter keeping an eye on his clerks. Luz ascertained that he was the name her friend had given us. “Looks like business is good today,” I remarked. “A holiday or something?”
“The government men came yesterday passing out money for the election and taking down Corazon Aquino’s signs,” he said. “Always good for business.”
“They do this for every election?”
“No, just for the Marcos ones. What can I do for you?” he asked. He looked eager to do whatever he could for Luz.
She deferred to me. “I need to talk to someone about the New People’s Army,” I said.
“Why would you want to do that? You’re an American. How come an American wants to talk to the NPA? Are you a reporter or something?”
“I’m interested to find out how they stand on the Marcos government.”
“Oh, I can tell you that,” he said. “They hate Ferdinand Marcos. Imelda, too. The whole government they hate.”
“Did they do anything to interfere with the government people yesterday?”
“No, they lined up for their money, like everybody else. Nobody turns down government money.”
“Are they actually an army?” I asked.
“Not really an army, but they are all around. They help people, that’s what they do. If some landowner or somebody in the government treats somebody here badly, or if something is stolen, like somebody’s water buffalo, maybe they’ll pay a visit and straighten things out. Last year they shot a police chief in a village because he was cheating the villagers. And there was that ambush of government troops, too. Got a bunch of them. Not an army, though, the NPA. More like guerillas, you know.”
“Are there a lot of them around here? How many, about?”
“Well … not easy to say. Sometimes more, sometimes not so many.”
“Is there somebody in the NPA here in the village I could to talk to?”
“They aren’t around much in the daytime. They do their business mostly at night. But I can tell you where to find someone, their chief, he lives down the first lane you come to on the right. It’s a white house, you can’t miss it. Ask for Bonofacio. Tell him Carlos said it was okay.”
“Oh, did we get your name wrong?” Luz said.
“No, you had the right name. ‘Carlos’, it’s sort of a code.”
We thanked him and had the cab driver take us down the lane. It was narrow and lined with bushes, stands of bamboos and trash. Teenybopper-aged kids hung out along the roadside. “Early warning system,” Luz remarked. We went by a hundred yards of hovels until we reached a larger one painted white.
“This must be the place,” I said. I told the cab driver to wait, we got out, and I rapped on the door. “Bonofacio in here?” I asked.
A voice inside said something I couldn’t understand, and Luz said something I couldn’t understand. The native language, Tagalog. “Tell him who we are,” she whispered. “He speaks English a little.”
“We’re visitors,” I said. “We want to talk to Bonofacio about the NPA. Carlos sent us.”
“What Carlos?” the voice asked.
“Carlos from the store in town,” I said.
There was a shuffling inside and the door opened. A small young man peered through the crack, looking us up and down with eyes a little woozy, at Luz more than me. His color and facial structure were more native than Spanish, and he wore a dirty singlet and droopy off-white shorts. “Okay, I’m Bonofacio,” he said. “Come in.”
We entered a living room of sorts, which also was a kitchen and dining room, possibly even a bedroom, but at least wasn’t a bathroom. Three similar young men squatted in a circle in the middle of the floor, with playing cards in their hands and a half empty bottle of Russian vodka and a scatter of small money on the floor before them.
“What about the NPA?” he said. “You’re not from the government, are you?”
“No, I’m a visitor to the Philippines. I want to find out something about NPA plans for the election.”
“Plans for an election?” He looked at his buddies for clarification. Shrugs and head shakes. “What election?” he asked me.
“Marcos is running for president. Corazon Aquino is running against him. Next month.”
Oh, that one,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“Can we sit down?” I asked, indicating some unoccupied chairs at the room’s table.
“Sure, yeah, sit.” We did. Luz spoke to him in Tagalog. “I get it,” he said. “I’m the local NPA leader, yeah. The New People’s Army is strong about that election. We’ll guard the ballot box. The government won’t try anything. They know better.”
“They were here yesterday, Carlos told us.”
“Yeah, the usual. They always give people money, say vote for Ferdinand. Promise things will be good if he wins, warn people not to vote for Aquino or they’ll find out.”
“You were there when they came?”
“Oh, sure. You never turn down government money. But that don’t mean anything. We’re against Marcos. We’ll be out there on voting day.”
“The NPA’s a battle-ready outfit, then?” I posed.
THE GUERILLA CHIEF’S ACCOUNT
The group on the ground looked at him expectantly. Apparently not all could speak English. He said a few words in Tagalog, waved them off and joined us at the table. They folded his hand and continued their card game. “We don’t do drills or have uniforms or that stuff, we’re irregulars. But yeah, we’re ready for anything. When something comes up we come together and do a raid—hit hard and run away, live to fight another day, like they say. When the government was pushing our farmers for bribes to let them cart their crops to market we set up a roadblock down the hill and chased them away. There’s an insurgent area further up the road, and when the troops try to stop food shipments from reaching the people, we ambush them, shoot them up, they go away. We raided their headquarters in Magpet Town and stole some of their weapons, grenades, other stuff…”
“Do you coordinate with NPA on the other islands?” I asked. If the NPA worked in concert across the islands, even on short notice maybe effective opposition could be mounted.
“Coordinate? What’s that?”
“It’s when you have joint operations. Say you want to attack government positions at the same time, or trade intelligence, or send some people to help out some NPA on another island.”
“Joint operations? Why we want to do that stuff, man? This here is our territory. Here, around this village, we take care of things. The other islands, that’s their territory.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, how many NPA do you have in this area?”
He looked at Luz quizzically. She nodded okay. “A couple dozen. More if we need them. Like I said, it’s not like the real army. Guys join us when they have a beef with the government, let it go when things are better. When something comes up, you can always count on enough showing up. They’re not afraid of Marcos.”
“How are things right now?”
“So-so …you know…“ He eyeballed me skeptically, puzzling out what was my angle. I was about to explain that I wanted to organize some resistance to stop Marcos election fraud when we heard a commotion outside, youthful yammering in the native language. “Oh shit,” he muttered. He barked something in Tagalog his buddies. They all lurched up and bustled to the back rooms of the shack. We heard our cab take off down the road in a gravel scrunching hurry.
“The children just warned them that a government truck with troops is headed this way,” Luz said.
“That’s all we need,” I said to Luz. “Let’s beat it. I thought I saw some trees behind the house. What do you think?”
“Plenty of places to hide in these villages,” she said. “We should go out the back.” Good ad
vice, but then the boys surged back into the room carrying an assortment of armament—a beat-up tommy gun, two old World War Two Garand rifles, a mismatched pair of revolvers. I heard a truck pull to a stop about 50 yards up the road. I peeped through a window to see men in brown uniforms spill out. They shouted something, then raised their rifles, and a fusillade of gunfire filled the silence. I pulled Luz to the floor as bullets ripped into the shack up at the roofline, sending dust and palm-frond thatch debris fluttering toward the floor through bars of sunlight. The boys fired some rounds out the windows, not in the direction of the truck. There was more shouting in Tagalog from the truck. “The soldier wants to know what the American is doing here,” Luz translated.
Bonofacio turned to me. “You an American?”
“Canadian,” I said.
Bonofacio yelled something back in Tagalog. “He said they didn’t see any Americans,” Luz relayed. Some more bullets from the truck perforated the wall, too high to hit anyone. The NPA shot some more bullets out the windows. Another shout in Tagalog from the truck. “He says there’s a big reward for the American, but he has to be alive. Won’t pay if he’s dead,” Luz said. That was reassuring, a little. Doors slammed. The truck revved its motor and from the window I watched it back and turn around. It left, and Bonofacio stepped outside to see it off.
“Why the truck follow you up here?” he asked, annoyed.
“I wasn’t aware that he did. I never saw him behind us. Somebody must have tipped him off.”
“They always leave us alone. You brought us trouble, man.”
The leader got the attention of his crew and said something to them. Luz and I got up from the floor, and the guy with the tommy gun covered us. “He said maybe they should turn you in for the ransom, maybe they’ll pay something for a Canadian,” Luz whispered.
“It’s time we left,” I whispered back. “Thank you for your hospitality, but it’s time we got going,” I said genially. “I’ll go out and find our taxi.” We made a move toward the door, and the two rifles came up in our direction.
“You should stick around a while,” said Bonofacio, motioning me back. “I’ll get you a beer. You too,” he said to Luz. He pulled a couple bottles of a local brew out of the top case of a fresh stack of them in the kitchen. Next to it on the floor sat a Russian vodka empty. He church-keyed the bottles and handed us warm beers, foam gushing out and dripping down over his hands.
Luz took hers with thanks and had a swig. After a moment she remarked, “My, it’s getting hot in here.” She parked her beer on the table, undid the top three buttons on her bodice and waved the lapels out back and forth from her chest. All attention in the room riveted on Luz. I edged nearer to the guy with the tommy gun. “I hope you don’t mind if I sit down,” she said. “I am really roasting.” She took one of the kitchen chairs. Facing the boys, she spread her knees wide apart and began flapping her dress up and down over her bare thighs. Nobody noticed until it was too late that I’d headlocked the tommy gun guy and wrested his piece away.
“If you men don’t mind, we’ll be going now,” I said, shoving him aside and pointing the tommy in the others’ direction. “Luz, could you get the pistols?” While she did that I collected the two rusty Garands. We backed out the front door, tossed their arms into the bushes and quickmarched down the lane toward the village. “I’ll leave your gun at the store,” I shouted back.
“I don’t think we can count on the New People’s Army for help,” I said as we walked along. “They’re Keystone Kommandos.”
“Keystone Kommandos? What is that?”
“Fuck-ups.”
“I could have told you that, but I didn’t know what you wanted from them. It’s better that you saw for yourself. And who knows, maybe you could have figured some way for them to help.”
“If they’re all like that, there’s no hope. Well, it was an idea. I’ll have to think of something else.”
It was getting late in the day, with long shadows stretching before us as we came to the paved road through town. Our cabbie from Davao had taken off for safer parts. Luz scanned around and pointed to a jeepney—one of those diner/jukeboxes on wheels—stopped by the general store. “It’s loading passengers. Let’s see where it’s going.” Just our luck, it was headed down the hill to Davao, and he threw two people off and made room for us when I said we had U.S. dollars. We stopped in to leave the gun with “Carlos.” He registered surprise at seeing us come in, but he thanked me for the gun and set it down behind the counter. None of the customers paid any attention to us.
So I endured a cramped ride back, serenaded by blaring Filipino rock music all the way. Going “to Davao” did not mean door-to-door service. It’s a sprawling collection of slum districts, and we were the only passengers headed downtown. The driver held out for extra bucks to deliver us to the hotel. We arrived after dark and well past dinnertime, famished after a discouraging day. The nearest chow available was Filipino food. It’s not that it’s inedible, just not very interesting. Afterwards I thought a stroll around town would be good for a leg stretch, but two blocks were plenty. It wasn’t that downtown Davao was totally terrible, just not very interesting. We retreated to our hotel without enthusiasm. It’s not that it was a shabby fleabag—it even had running hot water—just not very interesting.
I’d long since given up on the day. Luz had her arm linked with mine, and as we rode up in the elevator she snuggled closer. “I hope your trip wasn’t wasted, Jack,” she murmured.
“Well, at least it resolved one issue,” I said. “I’ve seen enough here. We’ll return to Manila first thing tomorrow. I’ll have to come up with another plan pretty quick.” We reached our floor and stepped out of the elevator.
“I will help you any way I can,” she whispered. After a pause, she said, “You haven’t forgotten, have you, that I still owe you some services from our first meeting?”
Now, that was interesting. A memory of Dana, so far away, passed through my mind. She’d told me, whatever I had to do to stay safe, to do it. And then the hotel lights blacked out, a power outage. Who knew what evils lurked in the darkness of sinister Davao? Luz said she’d help me. Better safe than sorry. We groped our way down the hall to my room.
*
We arrived back in Manila the next afternoon with nothing useful to show for the trip and plenty to discourage me. Hardly more than two weeks remained before the election. The city rattled with rallies, demonstrations, marches and speeches, with the audiences for Aquino’s campaign the more animated and vociferous, at least until Marcos’s goons showed up. Uniformed army and police deployed conspicuously. Marcos-blue signs, banners and posters four-walled the city, and Imelda sang her heart out. The media Marcos controlled—high-circulation newspapers and the TV stations—blared out endorsement. Cory didn’t have the media coverage, and her yellow signs and posters tended to disappear soon after they went up, but she personally was here, there and everywhere, rallying supporters not only on Luzon, but on the other major islands—Cebu, Panay, Bohol. She was staunchly Catholic, as were most Filipinos, so she didn’t spend a lot of energy on Mindanao with its heavy helping of Muslims.
Apparently with all the distractions it slipped Imelda’s mind to cancel her hospitality, for I still occupied my nice suite at the Manila Hotel and nobody pestered me about bills. I was straightening out matters of business in my room the day after we returned when my phone rang. “Mr. Philco? Johnny Enrile here. How are you today? Did you have a nice vacation on Mindanao?”
“I’ve been to worse places,” I said. How did he know about my trip?
“Then you have my sympathy,” he said, with mirth in his voice. “Listen, we have things to talk about. Could you spare a few minutes this afternoon? I’ll give you another tour of Manila.”
His Mercedes arrived at the hotel at 1500 hours. I got in and we rolled away. “So my guided tour of Metro Manila was not sufficient?” he re
marked once we got settled. “You took another tour shortly thereafter, and more lately one to Mindanao?”
“Investment bankers must check out every angle,“ I said. “So, you think I need another tour?”
He chuckled. “Yes, indeed. A visiting banker cannot see too much. So tell me, how are the deliberations over that formidable loan progressing?”
“Personally, I wouldn’t loan Marcos a dime,” I said.
“Yes, I sensed a lack of sympathy for our President from the outset. You are not alone in that, of course. May I ask what you really came to Manila for?”
“You can ask, but I’m not at leave to tell you. What I can tell you is that I have a good deal of sympathy for Mrs. Aquino. Does she have any chance of winning the election?”
‘I think it is a certainty that she will win the most votes cast. It is even more certain that she will not be our next president.”
“My impression, too. I’ve heard how Marcos conducts elections. And nothing can be done?”
“What is your interest in this? Are you acting on some U. S. government policy?”
“Purely personal,” I said. “The traditional American penchant for underdogs and righteous causes, plus also I hate phony war heroes and I’m not too fond of arrogant bitchy women.”
“Whomever can you mean?” he said with mock ignorance. “So, your trip to Mindanao had something to do with this sympathy?”
“I wanted to get a look at the New People’s Army out in the field, see if they could do Corazon Aquino any good.”
“Hopeless, aren’t they? Maybe as many as 10,000 of them across all the islands, a rabble of ragtag, disorganized dreamers and troublemakers.”
“Does Corazon have any organization behind her? Who are her supporters?”
“The university crowd—students and faculty. The uncorrupted portion of the business community. The international do-good crowd. The New York Times. Just about every Filipino not profiting from government corruption. They are devoted and enthusiastic, but they are Filipinos, and therefore not very organized. But Marcos is. If you’re really serious about this, I suggest you try Cardinal Sin.”
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 4, 5 & 6 Page 38