April 6, 1978: The April 6th Liberation Movement
What is so special about this date? Can anybody who was aware then and participated in the event ever forget?
The American-sponsored Marcos martial law regime was formally into its 6th year. It was deemed unshakeable. Documentations of prisoner tortures and killings vied for world news space with plunder and Imeldific ostentation. “Crony capitalism” had fast become part of the activists’ vocabulary; so did “salvaging” – a term synonymous with today’s “EJK’s” or extra-judicial killings. In sum, there was then, as probably there is now again, a new normal.
Abnormally, however, there was a growing number of people “underground” (u.g.) or in exile. And of so many thousand prisoners in the Philippine gulag archipelago, there was one man most of the nation tended to identify with – not necessarily in open pride but, more often than not, in fear and trepidation. Ninoy was his name. He had been mostly in solitary confinement since Day One of martial law. It should have been safe to assume that people had already forgotten him or could not care much about him. But not Marcos – he made no such assumption; he wanted to know for sure. So he allowed Ninoy on TV to see how people reacted. Well, people stopped everything they were doing. Manila came to a stand-still. They listened to the guy and found their better selves. Thus, Marcos decided it was not the time for true democracy. Constitutional authoritarianism was just fine.
The trappings of democracy, however, were another thing altogether. Marcos wanted to go ahead with the institutional deceptions. So, in this year 1978 he prepared for another mock election. One group this gardener belonged to debated “participation” or “boycott” or even, in typical Philippine escapist humor, “particicott.” Some said we should participate in an election, we should seize the chance and use it to scare Marcos. The objection was that we would be contradicting our own propaganda, which spurned the Marcos government as illegitimate. So, any election it called would be illegitimate too. And if we participated, would that not be a contradiction? But this gardener’s reaction to that was: so what? Contradictions are what propel history to action. It’s like violence and nonviolence. You can be for massive nonviolence and yet at certain times accept the fact that selective violence has to be used. Anyway, the group found a way to consult Ninoy in prison. Did he agree that participation could turn the election into a sounding of Vox Populi? Ninoy said: “I would like to hear the voice of the people, the power of the people…” And then suddenly he exclaimed: “Hey, that’s a good name for a party – ‘power of the people,’ ‘lakas ng bayan,’ ‘laban!” The guy was quick. He was a propagandist all right. Was this all he did in jail? Think of things like this?
Another one who was for participation was Don Chino Roces. When he heard there were going to be elections in ’78, he said to us: “We have to participate, win or lose. It’s our chance to make a noise.” Funny because the ’78 polls would be made famous by that Chino line – the noise barrage. As Gerry Esguerra said, “we were after more than votes or assembly seats; we wanted to speak out and get heard.”
In ’78 a collaboration was forged between many agents in the u.g. and the elder veterans of opposition. There was Nene Pimentel, with whom we had worked in Mindanao – a bit older than us, like Charito Planas. There were those a bit younger than us like Jerry Barican. The group usually assembled at Soc Rodrigo’s house in New Manila, or Tito Guingona’s place, or in the houses of Jerry Esguerra and Linggoy Alcuaz.
The gardener now had worldwide contacts in the media and kept updating them on happenings in the Philippines. Despite the Marcos censorship he was getting the news disseminated to the “information centers” – to Bert and Chit Pedrosa in the UK, to Cora Baron and Nilda Exmundo in Toronto, Johnny Mercado in Bangkok, Claro Monteclaro in Chicago, and Tomas Concepcion in Italy. In New York and Washington, D.C. – very sophisticated were our operations in the US Congress because we had organized the MFP there: the Movement for a Free Philippines’ Raul Manglapus, Sonny Alvarez and Boni Gillego were doing a good job of exposing Marcos and expressing popular discontent. We were feeding the international media with memos and the gardener’s job was to see to it that every memo was authentic and accurate, truly news, not sensationalism. For him, the climax of the campaign was its last day, April 6, 1978: the noise barrage.
In re-membering by himself and with others the April 6th event, the gardener now thinks the idea originated with Chino Roces and Jerry Esguerra. Chino was always for making an uproar and Jerry was ever the “espiritu maldito”. Jerry would say: “If only 5000 people would shout and shout for five minutes….” And of course he thought the effect would be even more overwhelming if those 5,000 shouted and shouted for, say, 50 minutes. We know now that not 5,000 but millions shouted and shouted, and not just for 50 minutes but for nine or ten hours – going out to the streets to make noise with anything they could get hold of. It was both organized and spontaneous – organized to the extent that organized groups triggered action after action, and spontaneous because the whole thing was a public expression of frustration and hope, a call for change in the existing political and social set-up, a demand for end to dictatorship – on the eve of the April 7th farcical election.
It was not an insurrectionary strike but a spontaneous mass action, an outburst of mass anger – but strong enough to make the world reassess the situation in the Philippines. Patient Marcos trusted things would go back to normal. He was not totally wrong.
But after two years things got moving again, more impatiently. The April 6th Liberation Movement (A6LM) was organized recalling the 1978 date and event as a source of inspiration. They hoped to recreate a similar event but of an insurrectionary nature, soon enough. The A6LM had a structure, a central committee. They limited their membership and action to a few because they would be doing things they could not ask everybody to do. In all honesty to themselves, they would be sacrificial lambs. They primarily wanted to create an atmosphere of daring ( vs. the accepted atmosphere of fear).
At the beginning of almost a hundred urban guerrilla operations and bombings they made their goals brief and clear enough.[1] On August 22, 1980, nine buildings in Metro Manila were bombed, with the A6LM claiming credit. No person was hurt. On October 19, 1980, the conference in Manila of the American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) was bombed, shortly after Marcos himself had delivered the welcome address. He had mocked in his speech the warnings issued by the A6LM to ASTA delegates bidding them to shun the conference. Marcos sneered at the warnings as “fantasy.” The bomb exploded just a few feet from where he was seated. His top police officer Ramon Montano later admitted (and Marcos got to know, in real fear this time) that had the explosive dosage been increased as originally urged on by some A6LM members, Marcos would have been a goner many long years before he died.
The A6LM was different. They would issue warnings beforehand (unlike any other urban guerrilla group anywhere else in the world), then they would plant the bomb, carry out the action, and finally take credit for it. To destabilize the Marcos despotism they had to shatter its artificial props: foreign assistance, foreign investments and the seeming confidence expressed by the holding here of international conventions. They had warned ASTA a month ahead not to come to the Philippines because it might get caught in the crossfire. They didn’t listen – and got bombed. Nobody was killed but many were wounded and they had to cancel the conference.
(To be continued: April 6, August 21-31, February 22-25)
[1] “We are fighting for our democratic rights and freedoms.
“We are fighting for a new social order which is equitable and just.”
“We are fighting for the realization of the dreams of our forebears for a proud and independent Philippines.”