Andres Bonifacio is hands down my favorite national hero. Every time his national day comes around (that’s tomorrow although the holiday was last Monday), I cannot help but rue again the way he died, assassinated by fellow revolutionaries. It is also a time for me to ask the same questions that have no answers because the answers died with him.
I like him even better than Rizal because he was a commoner while Rizal was upper class, an Ilustrado. Rizal and the Ilustrados, that included Emilio Aguinaldo, wanted no change in the colonial power structure. They simply wanted the Philippines to be a province of Spain, for the country to be on equal footing with Spain’s constitutional peninsular provinces.
Bonifacio, on the other hand and as a plebeian, could not have wanted anything less than full independence. This was necessary so Philippine society could be restructured to give poor and powerless Indios, as Spanish masters called them, systemic access to a fair share of their country’s resources that at the time exclusively benefitted the foreign colonial masters.
Bonifacio, however, did not survive the revolution. He was not executed by the colonizers but assassinated by a rival Ilustrado-led faction of the Katipunan. His death and the manner of his dying bring up for me some soul-stirring questions even if, as I have said earlier, the answers died with him.
If he were still head of the revolution when Americans came into the picture, would he have surrendered and entered into an alliance with the new colonizers? And if his faction had won the revolution, would he have kept the political system that gave voice only to owners of land and big business? Would he have kept the economic system that gave all profits of land and capital to owners and starvation wages to workers?
Arguably, our political, economic and cultural systems and the resulting socio-economic situation would have been different. Not necessarily but most probably better because then we would be completely independent, free to decide on our destiny as a nation and not tied to the apron strings, and used to promote the interests, of former masters and their allies, the local oligarchy that inherited the country from them.
I ask questions that have no answers to challenge all forward-looking Filipinos into critically asking how our society should be set up so mass poverty is done with and what immediate steps to take to get us moving in that direction.
Bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador was assassinated and declared a saint for living his talk: “For poverty to be done with it is necessary to change the system at its roots.” This, I believe, is what Bonifacio’s faction of the Katipunan fought for… “changing the system at its roots.”
We have to finish his revolution… look where we are with our unchanged-at-its-roots socio-economic system. But, this time without firing a shot… look where the world is at with all the violence around.