Friday, July 18, 2008 Malilong: Rebellion in my home province By Frank Malilong The Other Side
MY home province is in the news again and still for the wrong reasons.
A consistent top ten entry in the list of the country’s poorest provinces during the last twenty years, Masbate has also become synonymous with political violence, a curse that generations of Masbateños have been born to and which has thrust us into the national consciousness every now and then.
The other day, we landed in the front pages of the country’s broadsheets again with reports of a bomb explosion and firefights occurring between soldiers and communist rebels on the day that President Arroyo was there.
I come from Pio V. Corpus, which is also the hometown of Rep. Rizalina Seachon Lanete. West of our town is Placer; south, Esperanza. A little farther to the north are the towns of Mobo and Uson.
It was in Placer, according to the Inquirer, where the roadside blast occurred, some 3.5 kilometers from a school house where President Arroyo was to preside over a Cabinet meeting 10 hours later. Within hours of each other on the same day, NPA rebels and soldiers fought in Mobo, Uson and Esperanza.
As far as I can remember, Mrs. Arroyo is the first sitting President to have set foot within 50 kilometers of our town. And what a jolting welcome she got. The papers reported that because of the violent incidents, the travel plans of the Cabinet members had to be altered; instead of traveling by land from the capital town of Masbate, they had to be flown by helicopters.
I wanted to say that it’s a shame that a historic visit such as that which Mrs. Arroyo made should be marred by violence. But she and other high public officials had it coming. Years of government neglect and injustice have made Masbate a fertile ground for dissidence and rebellion. Had I been born three decades later, I would probably have been doing something else instead of pounding the keys of an unbranded PC.
I had seen poverty at its worst in my childhood. I knew terror very early and how to deal with it when, as small boys, my cousins and I would sneak inside a cattle ranch to gather wild guavas to fill our stomachs and rush out through gaps in the barbed wire fence as quickly as we went in. We carry scars on our arms and legs as mementos of our early life of crime.
The ranch was and remains the symbol of inequity in our place. Its vast expanse spans through three towns. It was off limits to outsiders, even to small boys out to gather guavas for lunch because there was no food on the table. Tales were told about intruders being shot and although I didn’t see anyone die from gunshot, the stories made our hearts beat faster and our knees quiver every time we foraged in the ranch for lunch.
I haven’t been to my hometown since the mid-nineties. But I kept myself abreast with the latest news from interviews with relatives and friends. When I heard about armed strangers (mostly young and courteous, according to those who met them) being sighted in the mountain barangays, I had a premonition of what was to come.
In a sitio called Manaay, there used to live a toughie named Prangkit, who had killed a number of people, including a former mayor and a brother of my grandfather. He spent brief periods in jail but somehow always managed to get himself released. Then one day, he was shot dead while he was on top of a coconut tree. It was, many of my town mates said, the NPA announcing its presence.
As Mrs. Arroyo must have known by now, they have never left since then.
