Liberation Theology

in the Philippines
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 Liberation Theology
in the Philippines
Faith in a Revolution

Kathleen M. Nadeau

Foreword by John A. Larkin

Religion in the Age of Transformation

Anson Shupe, Series Adviser

Westport, Connecticut
PRAEGER London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nadeau, Kathleen M., 1952-

Liberation theology in the Philippines : faith in a revolution / Kathleen M. Nadeau ;
foreword by John A. Larkin.
p. cm.(Religion in the age of transformation, ISSN 1087-2388)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-275-97198-8 (alk. paper)
1. Liberation theologyPhilippines. I. Title. II. Series.
BR1260.N325 2002
261.8 / 09599dc21 00-052462
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright 2002 by Kathleen M. Nadeau
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-052462
ISBN: 0-275-97198-8
ISSN: 1087-2388
First published in 2002
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West. Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.praeger.com
Printed in the United States of America

@T
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright Acknowledgments
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint, in whole or in part, revi-
sions of the following articles by Kathleen M. Nadeau:
''Christianity and the Transformation of Philippine Lowland Life: A Critique of Rafael," Philippine
Quarterly of Culture and Society 21 (1993): 25-38.
With Vel J. Suminguit, "A Response to Timothy Austin's 'Filipino Self-Help and Peacekeeping
Strategies,'" Human Organization, Journal for the Society of Applied Anthropology 55, no. 2
(1996): 10-13.
"Cebu's Basic Christian Community Movement's Alternative Plan for Sustainable Development,"
Kasarinlan, A Philippine Quarterly of Third World Studies 12, no. 4 and 13, no. 1 (1997): 57-64.
"Ecclesial Community in Cebu," Philippine Studies 47 (1999): 77-99.
"'Beyond the Dumping Ground': A Critique of the Basic Ecclesial Community Model as a Strategy
for Development in an Urban Site," Human Organization, Journal for the Society of Applied An-
thropology 58, no. 2 (1999): 153-160.
"Asian Liberation Theology and Marxism: A Reconsideration," The Eastern Anthropologist 51, no.
3 (1998): 207-218.
 Contents

Foreword by John A. Larkin vii

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The People's Church xiii

PART I: ROOTS OF RESISTANCE THEOLOGY 1

1 Peasant Resistance and Religious Protests in Early Philippine Society:

Turning Friars against the Grain 3

2 American Colonization (1898-1946) and Repression of Organized

Movements: Continuing the Revolution 17

PART II: LIBERATION AND DEVELOPMENT 29

3 Cebu's Basic Ecclesial Community Movement's Alternative Plan for

Sustainable Development 31

4 The Illusion of "Catching-Up Development" in Cebu 37

5 Struggle in the Uplands: Christian Farmers in Cebu 45

6 Beyond the Dumping Ground: A Critique of the BEC Model as a

Strategy for Development in an Urban Site 61

PART III: REVOLUTIONARY THEOLOGY AND MARXISM 73

7 Rethinking Marxism and Philippine Theology of Struggle 75

VI CONTENTS

8 Conclusion: Participatory Development from the Grassroots 93

9 Epilogue: Human Rights for the Poor 101

Appendix A: "My Life Experiences and Story about Smokey Mountain"

by Dennis P. Constantino 105
Appendix B: Interviews with Christian Political Detainees in Cebu 111
Bibliography 117
Index 127
Photographic essay follows p. 72.
 Foreword
John A. Larkin

In recent years the Philippines has received international notoriety because of

corruption involving two of its presidents, Ferdinand Marcos and Joseph
Estrada. In each case, the scandals entailed the illegal acquisition of wealth and
an immoderate and immoral lifestyle. If uninformed foreigners know anything at
all about the beleaguered nation, it is most likely about "Imelda's shoes" or
Estrada's payoffs from gamblers.
Those with deeper knowledge of the country realize that the more damaging
crimes of Marcos and Estrada concern their failure to deal with problems of
grinding poverty, maldistribution of wealth, and ongoing oppression of the poor.
Despite their pledges to do something for the underprivileged, neither
accomplished anything of substance to ameliorate conditions for those who
constitute the vast majority of the population. Presidents from Manuel L.
Quezon on have vowed and failed to help the poor, but Marcos and Estrada may
have made their world appreciably worse.
By now poverty has become so ingrained and so widespread that probably
no president alone, even if she or he possessed good intentions, could improve
the situation. Self-serving local and national politicians and many members of
the social and economic elite hold back change; moreover, the poor have in
many cases lost hope and become immobilized in the struggle for a better life.
The problems of poverty are so deeply embedded in the social fabric that major
attitudinal as well as social, economic, political, and legal changes must occur to
relieve the situation.
It is about the issue of what must be done to alter the outlook of a nation that
Kathleen Nadeau writes in this book. She calls for a transformation from the
ground up in the attitude of the poor and the members of the country's leading
religious and secular institutions. Here, she focuses her attention on the Basic
Ecclesial Communities, a movement with roots in the liberation theology of
Pope John the 23rd and Vatican II. Such communities favor poor people by
providing an alternative method to structure local Philippine society and a new
Vlll FOREWORD

way of thinking about social solidarity. She wants the nation to accept the
communal spirit that motivates these religiously oriented groupings. Precedents
for this spirit can also be found in some of the millennial and socialist
movements of the past. In Central Luzon, for example, the ideas of a movement
for sharing among the poor and between the classes appeared in the vision of
Felipe Salvador (Apong Ipe) and his Santa Iglesia and the Socialist Party of
Pedro Abad Santos. Since early in the Spanish period, select members of the
Catholic clergy have called for better treatment of the poor and a better attitude
on the part of the privileged.
Kathleen Nadeau rightly asserts that only some form of communalism will
provide the tools and stimulus to confront oppression from above.
Communalism will, hopefully, supply the impetus to overcome the factionalism
and self-serving attitudes that hobble movements and organizations seeking to
promote progress and development for the poor. Such a commitment to joint
action will entail new attitudes towards the individual and society.
Modern notions of communal action have their roots in Marxist thought, but
the Philippines has such strong heritage in Catholicism that liberation theology
must also play a part in the thinking about communalism as a force for change.
Social thinkers as diverse as Kerkvliet and Sison have pointed to the efficacy of
Marxist thought in organizing movements, but Nadeau feels that without aid of
religion and the religious at large, an enduring transformation cannot occur.
Catholicism is too internalized for it to not be included in any formula for
widespread acceptance. Probably she is right. In earlier times, I personally had
the opportunity to observe the mission work of Father Brian Gore and other
Columban priests in Southern Negros, and I was impressed by the change in the
way their parishioners approached the world.
So here is a book with a message of hope. Kathleen Nadeau proposes a wide
postcolonial agenda that encompasses ecological as well as social and economic
issues. She is knowledgeable about the dilemmas facing the poor and sincere in
her commitment to finding solutions. She feels certain that, for Filipinos,
religion can and must play a role if the politically weak are to have a better life.
Those who have studied the country are quite aware that endemic social
problems will not be solved simply with the replacement of a president by
peaceful revolt or impeachment. Read this work carefully, for its subject will
remain salient in discussions of the Philippines for some time to come.
 Preface

These chapters give attention to understanding the secular basis for grassroots
activism as embodied in Basic Ecclesial Communities (BEC) and the emergence
of alternative models of association, political and economic practice, in a
country that is experiencing a precarious process of democratization. The BECs
are the context out of which emerged Liberation Theology, called Theology of
Struggle in the Philippines. Also known as Basic Christian Communities, BECs
are organized by nationalist intellectuals and Christian activists seeking to
develop a post-capitalist society based on sustainable production modes and new
social relationships. BECs with their multilevel focus on issues of class, gender,
culture, and ecology provide a more sustainable development model for
improving the social and economic conditions of the poor than Western-focused,
top-down and local elite-initiated models. Many BECs in Cebu are attempting to
develop self-reliant and ecologically sustainable neighborhoods for themselves.
Organizers and participants in these communities develop and adapt their skills
and ideas on the basis of newer experiences. Using creative, non-dogmatic,
Marxist social analytical techniques, they trace their history back to the earliest
resistance movements against the Spanish and late American colonization of the
Philippines, and to the time of Jesus Christ and the early church that stood
defiantly against social injustices.
The site of these chapters is broadly the Philippinesin particular, the island
of Cebu where I conducted fieldwork on the ecclesial community movement
from January 1993 to May 1994. I made use of historical documents and
materials housed at the University of San Carlos library, observed BEC
activities, and interviewed officials, community organizers, and active members
of the communities in which I was involved. Part I of this book opens with two
chapters on how colonialism and postcolonialism in their historic and
synchronic conjunctions have generated a long revolutionary tradition in the
Philippines to give a deeper understanding of the material and social conditions
to which BECs are responding. Part II addresses some of the most important and
X PREFACE

competing controversies on the alternative development paradigm of the BEC

model. Chapters three and four demonstrate some of the negative impacts of
international and national development policies on Cebu society and the BECs.
Chapters five and six document the challenges faced by two BECs in organizing
participants into self-conscious communities by using the experiences of upland
subsistence farmers and urban informal workers engaged in the recycling
industry as my starting point to understand the broader changes. Prior to
selecting these two studies, I traveled extensively around Cebu and Negros
Islands visiting BECs, including those connected with the Basic Christian
Community Organizer's regional head office, and chose the two Cebu locations
through serendipity. I examined how the participants in these communities
interpreted BEC social theory, and investigated its ideological impact on their
collective action. I wanted to determine the degree to which "simple
materialism," for example, "the desire to meet rising consumption expectations
of capitalism" motivates people to participate in BECs, or if alternatively
capitalist consumption goals are downplayed and social transformation and
spiritual values are emphasized.
My presentation of Cebu's underdevelopment and the BEC movement as a
grassroots alternative for sustainable development has been influenced in part by
Joel Kahn (1978), Ben Kerkvliet (1990), and James Scott (1985) who provided a
decentered and class-based model for the study of poor people in their everyday
lives. They provide a general theory of the formation of ideology to look at the
complexity of class struggle and social change in peasant societies and
economies that are being dominated by capitalist rationality. My approach also
has been influenced by Peter Worsley's (1984, 337) theoretical distinction that
class-based party politics substantially differ from new revolutionary
movements whose effective affinity is with various kinds of groups that struggle
against exploitation and domination. Since class and non-class forces become
socially meaningful only through discursive practices in the form of class-
consciousness and political mobilization, I conducted my research through the
starting point of the experiences of the poor mobilized in the BECs.
In Part III, I use a Marxist theoretical framework to examine the kind of
ideology at work in the organized activities of the BECs. Chapter seven
summarizes and compares the participatory development initiatives of the BECs
with other village self-help movements emerging out of the great religious
traditions of Asia. Chapter eight concludes that we can deliberately choose to
build a better future by working together with all these people who struggle for
social, cultural, economic, and environmental justice.
 Acknowledgment

The author is grateful to her friends and colleagues, not all of whom were entirely
in agreement with her perspective, who so graciously contributed to bringing this
manuscript to completion. She expresses her deepest gratitude to Father Joseph
Baumgartner, Father Ted Murnane, Father Max Abalos, Father Heinz Kuluke, Dr.
Cherry Ouano-Arco, Dr. Resil Mojares, Dr. Linda Alburo, Professor Fiscalina
Nolasio, Professor Jose Eleazar Bersales, and the University of San Carlos
community. Thanks also to the Sisters of Santo Rosario Ladies Home, especially
Sister Mercedes Barbasa, Sister Teresita Arado, and Mother Tofie, God rest her
loving soul. Many unnamed friends in the NGO community helped to inform this
manuscript, among whom Father Frank Connon and Gilda Reyes of the
Redemptorist Justice and Peace Desk, Dr. Aurora Parong and co-workers past and
present of Task Force Detainees, Jack Jacela and the Basic Christian Community-
Community Organizers, and Father Joseph Krahl of the Sacred Heart Church
Clinic, God rest his generous soul, deserve special mention. She acknowledges
with appreciation the gracious welcome and assistance she received from
unnamed, but not forgotten, colleagues and friends at the Institute of Philippine
Culture, Ateneo de Manila University, and the Third World Studies Center of the
University of the Philippines Diliman campus. Dr. Felisa Uy-Etemadi of the Data
Bank Office of the University of the Philippines Cebu read a draft of this text
when it was in its inception that benefited greatly from her scholarly comments. In
the United States, the author thanks Dr. Mark Woodward, Dr. Sally Ness, Dr.
Michael Cullinane, and Dr. Ligaya Lindio-McGovern among others not
mentioned but appreciated just the same, who read through various versions of this
text. She thanks Lynn Zelem and Suzanne Staszak-Silva of the Greenwood
Publishing Group and Dr. Anson Shupe, editor of the Religion in an Age of
Transformation series, for their editorial assistance. She is most grateful to Dr.
James Eder, Dr. John Chance, and Dr. Mark Woodward for their excellent
mentorship. At California State University San Bernardino, the author extends
special thanks to Robert Garcia and Denise Rautmann who provided outstanding
Xll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

technical support at a critical juncture. She thanks her colleagues, Dr. Peter
Robertshaw, Dr. Russell Barber, Dr. Frances Berdan, and Dr. James Pierson in the
Department of Anthropology for their strong support and cheerful spirits. The
Henry Luce Foundation and Program of Southeast Asian Studies at Arizona
State University provided her with a generous research grant for fieldwork.
Finally, this note of appreciation would be incomplete without acknowledging
the unselfish and wholehearted contributions of her partners in the study sites
who shared with this author their thoughts, laughter, and homes.
 Introduction: The People's Chur

The conditions of Martial Law (1972-1986) under the Marcos regime in the
Philippines made the political significance of the Catholic church more
apparent. Most other major institutionsthe congress, courts, political parties,
labor organizations, newspapers, and public broadcasting networkswere
severely repressed by the military under the Marcos dictatorship. As a result, the
Catholic church emerged as the major voice for the rights of the poor and
oppressed inside the nation. Church leaders referred to Vatican II (1962-1965)
social teachings to promote social justice, human dignity, and the rights of the
Filipino person. Prior to Vatican II, priests and missionaries in the Philippines
had long spoken out against tyranny, corruption, and injustice, but the political
presence of the church remained a conserving influence on the power structure.
Pope Leo XIII's encyclical, Rerum Novarum (Of New Things 1891), and Pope
Pius XFs Quadragesitno Anno (On the Occasion of the Fortieth Year 1931)
addressed issues of social justice with regard to Europe, and these social
teachings were promulgated by progressive bishops and used by reformer priests
working among the laboring poor in the Philippines in the 1930s and 1950s.
However, it was not until Vatican II that the social and political transformation
of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines began to occur.
Since Vatican II, more and more religious and lay leaders in the Philippines
have been working to organize and increase the class-consciousness of the poor
to improve their economic circumstances. Latin American liberation theologies
and variant forms of Marxist theory influenced these social action workers who
paved the way for the BEC movement. The Maryknolls initiated BECs in Davao
as early as 1967. The publicized experiences of the liberation church in Latin
America, mass social action such as Gandhi's peaceful protest movement in
India, the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war protests in the United
States, Maoism in mainland China, and Buddhism in Burma served to confirm
the struggle for poor people's rights already underway in the Philippines.
INTRODUCTION xv

The Filipino Basic Christian Community (BCC) movementthe early

forerunner of the BEC movementwas officially recognized at the Mindinao-
Sulu Pastoral Conference (MSPC in Davao City, Mindinao in 1971 after the
Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellin, Columbia in 1968. At that
time, more and more activist nuns and priests in the Philippines were helping to
organize the rural and urban poor into small Christian communities. Church
leaders viewed BCCs as an alternative to other People's Organizations
organized with the help of the church such as the Federation of Free Farmers
which had collaborated with the Marcos martial law regime in 1972 (Kroeger
1985, 123; Fabros 1988, 175). The Catholic Bishops Conference, the National
Secretariat for Social Action, and the United Church of Christ (a coalition of
Protestant churches) endorsed the BCC movement in 1977.
Warren Kinne (1990) documents the Mindanao-Sulu Pastoral meetings from
1971 to 1983on July 25, 1973, the Catholic Bishops Conference issued a
pastoral letter "Evangelization and Development" following Pope Paul VI's
encyclical Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples), which was
issued in 1967. In his encyclical Pope Paul declared:

Total human development does not come down to simple economic growth. It must
promote the whole person and every person. We [the Holy See] do not agree to a separation
between the economic and the human. To say "development" [progressio] is to be
concerned as much with social progress as with economic growth (no. 14).

He went on to say that "continuing development calls for bold innovations that
will work profound changes" (no. 32). Encouraged bPopulorumProgressio,
the bishops in their letter maintained that it was insufficient to solve Philippine
social problems by merely donating goods and services to the poor as the old
paternalistic approach of the institutional church had done. "Evangelization and
Development" asserted that the church has one single mission: to pour out God's
light and life on all the dimensions of personal and social existence and to offer
her assistance to further a fuller humanism. In reaffirming Vatican II's teaching
on justice and peace issues in the document entitled Gaudium et Specs (The
Church in the Modern World 1965), the Philippine bishops letter stated "In its
overview of development, Gaudium et Specs clearly insists upon the need for
thoroughgoing structural reforms and social changes. The present critical state
of affairs must be corrected for the better without delay" (532). The bishops
fully recognized that the structural roots of underdevelopment of the Philippines
linked to the First World and for the first time acknowledged the church's
complicity in encouraging "internal colonialism" and "the collective sin of
unjust and anachronistic structures." However, they did not address the
immediate issue of Marcos's rule by martial law (Bolasco and Yu 1981, 104).
The official position of the Filipino bishops regarding the martial law regime
remained that of "critical collaboration." This policy is clearly stated in the
conclusion of "Evangelization and Development."

In the Philippines today, especially under the rule of martial law and the avowed aim of
the government to create a "new society," our service as church, as community, must take
XVI INTRODUCTION

the form of support of all that is genuinely good in the new direction being taken. But this
service of ours, as we have time and again indicated in this letter, must always be in the
light of the gospel. Hence we must seriously ask, in view of recent events, whether
indeed development is taking place with justice, with truth, and above all with Christian
charity (545).

Some bishops suggested that their colleagues, while referring to ideas

derived from dependency theory and world system theory, which views colonial
and post-colonial subordination as the causes of poverty, still adhered to ideas
linked with unjust and anachronistic structures. Bishop Claver criticized the
church for "opting for a liaison rather than coming out publicly on the recent
events of the Marcos martial law dictatorship" which as Bolasco and Yu (1981,
104) pointed out would have surely triggered demonstrations (e.g., as that in
which the church hierarchy helped to trigger the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue
revolution when it took a strong stance against the Marcos dictatorship,
especially after the assassination of Aquino). This small number of dissenting
bishops opposed others siding with the martial law regime; and the repositioning
soon divided the bishops into progressive, moderate, and conservative camps. 1
In 1976, sixteen bishops issued a collective statement Ut Omnes Unum Sint
(That All May Be One) on the growing divisions then taking place within the
church:

Despite their words, the Bishops are deeply divided. And divided about the very things they
speak of in the statements and pronouncements they have been issuing. But what were not
too apparent to the public eye (at least until recently) were the seething contradictions
between official pronouncements and the lack of support of a good number of Bishops for
those pronouncements in their pastoral action. Also, the fact that episcopal statements are
the result of hard and long argumentations in which ideas are accepted on an intellectual
level in conference but rejected on the practical level outside of conference (quoted from
Fabros 1988, 173).

They traced out these divisions along the trajectories of two different
ecclesiological schools of thought adhered to by the bishops themselves. Some
bishops saw their primary responsibility to be preserving the church as an
establishment, others, to defend and protect the church as "the people of God."
The statement also claimed that some bishops and other ecclesiastical authorities
had collaborated with the Marcos regime in exchange for "monetary and other
patronage considerations" (Bolasco 1988, 59). These divisions notwithstanding,
the bishops stood united in their pastoral letters, which were largely drawn from
Vatican II social teachings.
In contrast, the Major Religious Superiors took a strong stance against the
Marcos dictatorship. As an international body of missionaries the Major
Religious Superiors were not solely dependent on local funds for their programs.
In 1973, they sponsored a study on land reform, labor, peace and order,
squatters, prices, conscientization, and the church, which was circulated as a
position paper throughout the Philippines (Bolasco and Yu 1981, 108). In
reaction against the deteriorating local situation where brutal slayings and
harassments by the Marcos military against civilians were becoming
INTRODUCTION xvn

widespread, the Major Religious Superiors with the support of the Christians for
National Liberation (the largest constituent organization of the National
Democratic Front, a coalition of the Left) established Task Force Detainees to
document human rights abuses and to help meet the needs of political prisoners
and the families of the disappeared (Clarke 1998, 161).
The annual Mindanao-Sulu Pastoral meeting provided a forum for bishops to
openly discuss their ideas with other clergy and lay participants involved in the
BCCs. They debated about controversial issues such as the question of the
degree of lay participation in the BCCs and in the organizational structure of the
church. Initially, the BCC model was introduced as a way to encourage the laity
to become more actively involved in the liturgy of the word, especially in
remote rural barrios where there were not enough priests to perform the
sacraments. The training of lay ministers was seen as a way to provide people in
peripheral areas with religious instruction and communion services when priests
were not available.
Later some bishops stressed the importance of lay leadership and
organization training programs directed at issues of social justice and liberation
of the poor. This became a subject of heated debate. The bishops raised
questions regarding the basic power structure of the church. Some bishops did
not trust the BCC board members, because they suspected that some of them
were involved with the Christians for National Liberation (Kinne 1990, 91).
They were also concerned about whether the church would be able to control the
BCCs. Others questioned the relinquishing of priestly roles to lay ministers.
Previously, only priests could perform baptisms, marriages, and extreme
unction. The handing over of these priestly functions to lay ministers in the
BCCs was perceived by some members of the hierarchy as an encroachment on
the power of the institutional church. However, other members stressed the
ecclesiality of the BCCs that led to the new use of the term Basic Ecclesial
Communities (BEC) in place of the word BCC. The term ecclesial derives from
the root word ecclesia, which refers to the people of God as the body of the
church. There was a threat of a division between a popular church and a
hierarchical church. This threat ended in the closing of the Mindanao-Sulu
Pastoral meetings in 1983 when the bishops met apart from the lay board.
Many progressive Philippine clergy involved in the earlier Mindanao Sulu
Pastoral Conference meetings were transferred to conservative parishes in the
Visayas and Luzon, while conservative bishops and clergy were transferred to
replace them and, in theory, their programs, a reshuffling which continued into
the 1990s. In this context, many Christians critical of the martial law regime and
involved in the BEC movement and its task forces for social justice were forced
undergroundmeaning that they were under surveillance and had reason to fear
for their lives. Many more joined the Christians for National Liberation, which
began to align itself with the umbrella organization of the National Democratic
Front in 1972.
The BEC movement, nonetheless, continued to thrive throughout the
Philippines and in 1991 at the Second Plenary Council held in Cebu City the
BEC model was officially decreed by the church hierarchy as "the new way of
XVI11 INTRODUCTION

being a church." The new model was added to diocesan management networks
throughout the nation but some conservative archdiocesan centers began to
stress the liturgical over the liberational aspect. While there are both kinds of
BECs in the Philippines, and all of them include a liturgical focus, this study
concerns the origins and contemporary expressions of the theoretically
integrated (social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental) and actively
participatory model.

NOTE
1. For a useful conceptual scheme of these divisions see Youngblood 1982; for a similar
classificatory scheme with reference to Brazilian hierarchy see Antoine 1973, 99.
PART I

ROOTS OF RESISTANCE
THEOLOGY

One of the most important contributions to the study of religious resistance and
revolution in the Philippines has come about from the works of nationalist
scholars. They have shown that popular revolts that have been widely studied
cannot be constructively understood without considering their precolonial origins.
This section examines the role of religion in revolution in terms of its broader
historical connections. The first chapter reviews some of the prehispanic
continuities in the selection of authentic leaders in the Philippines during the early
Spanish period. It concludes that Christianity was localized not simply because it
was imposed but because it was propagated by a small group of radicalized,
educated friars meeting some of the indigenous criteria for effective leadership.
These friars were some of the early ancestors of today's practitioners and
theologians of struggle. The second chapter looks at peasant movements against
exploitation and political repression under the American colonial regime, and
after.
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 1

Peasant Resistance and Religiou

Protests in Early Philippine Societ
Turning Friars against the Gra

One of the most significant advances to the study of peasant rebellion and
religious protest in the Philippines has come out of the works of nationalist
scholars (Constantino 1975, Ileto 1979, and Rafael 1988). In particular, Ileto and
Rafael have shown that peasant revolts that have been the object of much
research cannot be analyzed in isolation from their precolonial origins. By so
doing, they challenged evolutionary frameworks used to categorize different
kinds of peasant protest as either belonging to primary (precolonial), archaic
(postconquest), or nationalist movements. Ileto and Rafael have shown that local
elites and social organizations have persisted well into colonial, and neocolonial
times. Rural forms of religious protest variously construed as millenarian,
messianic, revivalistic, chiliastic, syncretistic, fanatic, cultic, and so on, that
marked the archaic stage have continued to present. As Ileto and Rafael suggest,
these provincial outbursts need to be freshly reconsidered in the light of their
broader historical connections, and from the vantage point of the lower classes.
In general, peasant rebellions in the Philippines as elsewhere in Southeast
Asia have been studied in terms of their disjunction from an historic past. Moral
economists have argued that the penetration of capitalism into rural villages
leads to widespread discord. Due to the closure of the frontier, peasants can no
longer resort to earlier forms of avoidance protest by moving as a group to
another area (Adas 1981). Consequently, new types of resistance develop
because traditional patron-client ties and earlier patterns of reciprocity no longer
structure the village economy (Scott 1973, 1985). Instrumental rationalists, on
the other hand, contend that peasant uprisings do not result from violating a code
of ethics that assures peasants of their basic subsistence "rights." Rather,
peasants seek out political leaders, and if they deem it profitable, they will rally
behind one in rebellion (Popkin 1979). While Marxists have similarly viewed
agrarian conflicts as transitional phases in the history of particular social
formations, they have disagreed over the issue of whether peasants are
reformists, or revolutionary (Kerkvliet 1977; Ong 1987; Stoler 1985). Except for
4 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

Ileto and Rafael, however, no student of the Philippines that I am aware of has
looked at the role of religion in rebellions in terms of its continuities with a
precolonial past.
Ileto aptly criticized a reductionist model of Philippine society that depicts it
in terms of patron-client relations for being guilty of the flaw of functionalism.
That is, such a model with its built-in mechanism of self-preservation does not
allow for other ways of looking at, or confronting, the established order (Ileto
1979, 11-12). Instead, Ileto proposed a model based on hegemony, wherein
marginal affronts to the prevailing social order can be taken into account.
Looking specifically at the role of Christianity in Filipino rebellions, he posits
that the Spanish missionaries taught a mystified and "other worldly" version of
Christianity to indoctrinate and subdue the Filipino masses for their Spanish
overlords. However, the early Filipinos (here forward read: Indios) interpreted
Christianity in terms of traditional Southeast Asian cultural practices and beliefs,
rather than from the Spanish perspective. It is for this reason that Filipinos early
were able to articulate in the language of Christianity a means for expressing
their own values, ideals, and hopes for liberation from their colonial oppressors
(Ileto 1979, 15). Their folk Catholicism according to this view emerged directly
out of prehispanic patterns of behavior.
For example, in contrast to the intentions of the friars, local people discerned
mundane meanings that were related to their daily lives from the indigenous
performance of the Passion Play during Holy Week. As Ileto (1979, 20)
explains, from the Spanish perspective Christ's Passion served "to discourage
the Indios from enriching and educating themselves to the point where they
would become a threat to colonial rule." Contrarily, from the indigenous
perspective "the identification of the wealthy, the educated pharisees, and local
leaders with Christ's tormentors could not fail to have radical implications in
actual life." This chapter suggests further that some out of the ordinary friars
used messages derived from the gospels as in the case of the Passion Play to
criticize social injustices and to aim to liberate the poor from their colonial
oppressors (De la Costa 1961; Fabros 1988; Schumacher 1979, 1981). These
rare and exceptional friars were shaped as they helped to shape indigenous
interpretations of Christianity. Some of the culprits these clerics singled out for
committing atrocities against Indios were fellow members of their own clergy
and class. In other words, the local people in their quest for liberation did not
come to interpret the gospel messages without influence from Catholic social
teachings.
Ileto and Rafael have not accounted for the complexity and interlocking
roots of the Indios struggle for liberation from colonial dominance. This chapter
explores this issue, and looks at some of the precolonial continuities in the
selection of authority figures in the Philippines during the early Spanish period.
Wherein, rare and exceptional friars who successfully met some of the
precolonial criteria for a qualified leader propagated Christianity. It is arranged
accordingly: the general situation and class structure of the prehispanic
Philippines and its subsequent transformation by the Spanish colonizers is
discussed. Then the development of Christianity and the conflict of motives
PEASANT RESISTANCE AND RELIGIOUS PROTESTS 5

debate is reviewed. Finally some precolonial structural similarities in the

relationship between friars and their constituents are put forward, and some
conclusions are drawn.

THE PRECOLONIAL PHILIPPINE SITUATION

The Philippines prior to the coming of Spain was involved in a maritime
trade economy. Its communities were dispersed along estuaries of rivers and
coastal shores, and each settlement was scattered to protect inhabitants from the
possibility of offshore marauders. Its history was made up of a complex of local
histories wherein leaders were legitimated by their followers. Chiefdoms existed
in that the office of chief was ordinarily inherited and there was a redistributive
economic system. But the office of chief was also achieved and the center of
redistribution shifted as new leaders emerged. That is, the prehispanic history of
the archipelago was intricately interlinked with the culture complex of Southeast
Asia, and it engaged in tribute and trade relations with such centers as India,
China, and Arabia. But each community made its own history because its inner
and outer relationships were variously construed (Anderson 1972; Rafael 1988,
133-137).
Kinship played an important role in the development of authority and social
hierarchy on the islands (Rafael 1988, 13; Wolters 1982). Unlike in Northeast
Asia (China, Korea, Japan), a large and impersonal state bureaucracy never
developed in the region. Instead, there were numerous competing centers of
power whose rulers strove not to colonize their neighbors but to include them in
their network of kith and kin. The boundaries marking communities were
constantly being redrawn as new alliances were created, histories merged, and
new leaders appeared.
Kinship networks, based on ambilineal descent, were traced bilaterally
through male and female lines. This diminished the importance of status based
on lineage connections to a single male or female ancestor. Instead, important
genealogical claims were based on achieving a founding line of descent and
establishing kinlike relations horizontally in the present. As Rafael (1988, 14)
expressed, "genealogy thus acted as a provisional, revisable marker rather than
an unassailable organizing principle of authority." There was a greater interest in
extending kin and kinlike networks horizontally in space rather than vertically
back in time. This emphasis on the present had an impact on how leaders
emerged in prehispanic Philippine society where social relations, rather than
private properties, were one's greatest resources.
Leaders emerged because they had an ability to entice followers who
cooperated in ritual, agricultural, commercial, and military matters. Such leaders
replaced or incorporated the previous ancestral line of the community into their
own by achieving the title of village ancestor. They were able to cultivate
followers by engaging in exchanges with them that were mutually beneficial.
They were believed to have special spiritual energy that enabled them to keep
social relations within and between communities, between the earth and the
cosmos, in balance. Social confusion resulting from a rupture in the network of
6 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

reciprocity and exchange, or chaos occurring in times of natural calamity, was

indicative of a leader's decline at which point people moved to follow a new
authority.
In the region, personal power was perceived by the local people differently
than in the Anglo-European and Anglo-American worldview. That is power was
not an abstraction as it is in Western European social thought, rather it was an
existential reality (Ileto 1979, 30-31; Anderson 1972; Wolters 1982). There
were indigenous signs that indicated a powerful leader. A powerful leader was
perceived to be pure "not in a moralistic sense but rather in terms of his or her
ability to concentrate and diffuse power." That is, there was a "direct relation
between a person's inner self and their capacity to control the environment"
(Ileto 1979, 31). Also, there were apparent signs of a leader: one had "radiance"
about them, one was sexually fertile, and one surrounded oneself with sacred
objects and people who held unusual power so as to absorb it vicariously.
Leaders wore and distributed "magic" amulets, uttered formulaic prayers, and
believed that their weapons, and personages, were invulnerable in times of battle
(Reid 1983, 7). Conversely, "military defeats and the diminution of a ruler's
wealth and following were regarded as mere manifestations of the deteriorating
state of the leaders' inner self (Ileto 1979, 31).
As Rafael (1988, 14-15) suggests, however, "in the absence of a centralized
bureaucracy, authority and hierarchy devolved upon the projection and
recognition of the potential for engaging in dyadic, reciprocal exchanges among
those within and outside the kinship network, and as politics was not centralized,
the representation of this potential varied from society to society." In other
words, although there were some common criteria that distinguished a leader
throughout Southeast Asia, the projection and recognition of leadership was
invariably a local matter. Social transformations occurred as foreign influences
were translated locally, and they were specific to the conventions of a particular
group.

THE PREHISPANIC CLASS STRUCTURE

The class structure of prehispanic Philippine society was diversified and
complex even in the absence of the development of a state bureaucracy. Among
the Moslem Tagalogs there were fundamentally three political classes (rulers,
commoners, and slaves) (Scott 1982). Rulers were the overseers of barangay
settlements (ummah, Islamic communities). They held and distributed
community property and passed down final judgments in legal proceedings.
Usually, datus were great warriors because their primary duty was to defend
their barangays from outsiders. The office was inherited and passed down
through the male line, but the power of office depended on the loyalty of both
commoners and slaves who could give their allegiance to the datu of their
choice.
The early Tagalogs' conceptions of a datu's power were informed by the
teachings of mystical Islam, which was underlain by Hindu and Shaman beliefs.
They carried their religion with them from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Borneo.
PEASANT RESISTANCE AND RELIGIOUS PROTESTS 7

Perhaps this is why the Spaniards who first encountered them considered the
Tagalogs only vaguely Moslem (Rafael 1988, 106). Nonetheless, their
understandings of a datus power was based on a servant-lord model which
Shamanism, Hinduism, and Islam held in common.
The Islamic origins of the servant-lord bond are based on the relationship
between God and wo/man that can be traced to the relation between
Mohammed, the perfect man, and a divine God with whom he united, and to the
relation of Mohammed and his disciples. As Arberry (1970, 12) put it, "Islam
recognizes no incarnate God, no savior. The matter lies between Allah and the
One Lord, and every (wo)man the One Lord's creature and servant." A datu
undertakes a path to the source of enlightenment (to God) by following the
example of Mohammed. The journey to God embarked upon by a lord is fraught
with danger that is why most wo/men become servants of a lord, for their
guidance. A lord can turn on their path to the Godhead, however, and mark their
descent by unleashing malevolent forces and this is why a servant's relation to
their lord is always ambiguous. This ambiguity in a datu's power is also rooted
in the Hindu conception of the coming of a "just king." In Hindu cosmology a
cyclical order gives rise to kings and queens who sojourn to God but may fail
and so they are tied to their servants indeterminately (Moertono 1968, 36, 54).
The dynamics of power in the relation between a Shaman and their constituents
is similarly delicate throughout Southeast Asia. To use Sally Falk Moore's
(1975) expression, there is an element of uncertainty in the relationship between
a lord and their followers.
Tagalog commoners, or timawa, were literally free persons. They were
usually prohibited from marrying into the datu class. The only possible
exceptions to this rule would be during periods of instability and political
realignment within a community that moved to anoint a new datu from outside
the village and/or datu class in which case their family was newly fitted into the
genealogy of the collective as ancestor. Many commoners were illegitimate
offspring of the aristocracy, while others were formerly slaves who had earned
their new status. Commoners entered into contractual relations with lords who
awarded them portions of barangay land to farm and bequeath without being
subject to tribute. In return, they joined their lords as partners on fishing and
raiding excursions, at harvest time, and in other enterprises. The commoners
could expect a generous share in their lord's bounty for exceptional
performance. Their free status depended on their ability to indebt others and to
avoid being indebted themselves.
Finally, there was the alipin class that included two categories of slaves
known as the namamahay and gigilid. Members of this class were commoners
who incurred a debt, offspring who inherited the debt of their parents, and
prisoners of captives of war. The namamahay were analogous to tribute payers.
They acquired a right to a piece of land and were obligated to return a portion of
the harvest to their masters. In addition, they worked as needed for their lord in
other capacities such as building houses or serving as oarsmen on expeditions.
They were often rewarded for their services, and they could use their savings to
purchase their freedom.
8 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

The gigilid were members of the slave class who lived under the same roof
as their lord, or in the home of a commoner to whom they were indebted. As
household helpers, they were commonly treated like members of their lord's
family. However, if they were captive slaves they could be treated like chattel.
Typically, gigilid acquired namamahay status once married as they were given a
separate house and a piece of land to work. Like the namamahay, they could
work off their debts and obtain status as free persons.
In practice, the precolonial class system of the Tagalogs, like those of other
peoples of the Philippines, had built-in opportunities for social mobility (Scott
1982). Members of the indigenous elite gained their enhanced statuses by
entering into a circle of relationships of varying degrees of reciprocity and
indebtedness, wherein rulers were the last to be indebted (Rafael 1988, 13-17).
Local leaders were intimately connected to their followers, and they were the
ones who made sure that surplus was recirculated back into the community,
even as it was exchanged in the wider spheres of the Asian maritime trade
economy. Leaders generally lost the allegiance of their followers if they were
unable to oversee the commonwealth, or if they betrayed public trust by
exacting an inordinate portion of the wealth for themselves. The human
community itself represented the greatest resource for local elites because it set
into motion both the products and protective measures they needed to maintain
their ascendancy. They were not protected by a large outside apparatus of state.

THE FIRST SHOCK OF SPANISH CONQUEST

Prior to the social, cultural, political, and economic transformation of Cebu
in central Philippines into the first colonial settlement in the nation by the
Spanish on May 8, 1565, Cebu was interlinked into a pan-Asian trade network.
Arabs, Indians, Siamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans traded with Cebu in
prehispanic times. Her position as a traditional center of trade is substantiated by
the large amounts of precious porcelainware uncovered on the island (Hutterer
1977; Baumgartner 1975; Scott 1984). Echevarria (1974) traces the route of
trade between Cebu and China, as far back as the T'ang and Sung dynasties in
the tenth and eleventh centuries. Fox (1967, 58) notes conservatively that,
although Cebu may have been one of the many coastal communities engaged in
trade with the Chinese in the T'ang and Sung dynasties, it was engaged with
other traders such as the Sumatrans and the Javanese in the Sri-Vijaya empire.
Only during the fifteenth century did Cebu become a focal point for the Chinese
traders. Mojares (1991, 288) finds that by the time the Spanish arrived in 1565,
Cebu Island was so prosperous that they decided to develop it into an
administrative, military, and religious hub for the Philippines. However, they
quickly abandoned their plans and transferred their base of operations to Panay
in 1569, and then Manila. They retracted their plans due to the rapid economic
decline on the island that resulted from the lack of any real economic
opportunities for Cebuanos under Spanish rule. For instance, the Spaniards were
not as interested as were prehispanic Chinese traders in purchasing Cebu's total
output of raw cotton but purchased only high priced specialty products such as
PEASANT RESISTANCE AND RELIGIOUS PROTESTS 9

lampotes, and only enough to fill a single galleon which made an annual voyage
between Cebu and Mexico (Baumgartner 1975,40). This change led Cebu's
southern farmers to shift to cultivating Indian corn, which continues to be the
main staple crop of these Cebuanos into the 1990s because it could be cultivated
in soil already infertile due to its having been planted in cotton. Cebu's economy
deteriorated from the development of the Manila-centered Galleon trade with
China and Mexico, which effectively blocked Cebu's commerce for almost 200
years. Its economy continued to change in relation to Spain and the incipient
world capitalist system.
The Spanish conquistadors, administrators, and missionaries represented an
unprecedented affront to the indigenous society. The colonizers came with
preconceptions of paganism, conquest, and mission based on unrealistic
Augustinian and Greco-Roman definitions of Barbarians, which were
reminiscent of the inaccurate notions of the Chinese who also sought, although
not with such arrogance and militaristic violence, to exhort tribute from these
islanders. Rafael (1988, xi) argues that it was for this reason that the Filipinos
sought to domesticate the shock of Spanish colonization. While the Filipinos had
many previous encounters with outside powers, and were conversant with
peaceful traders and aggressive marauders offering protection in return for
tribute, they could hardly gauge the abrupt and arbitrary appearance of the
conquistadors. Although the Muslims had penetrated the islands to such a degree
that the Tagalogs in the far north had been won for that faith, and as much as
Islam like colonial Christianity was an intolerant religion, it did not predispose
the Filipinos for the arrival of the Spaniards. Although the precepts of Islam are
fundamentally similar to those of Christianity, not the least of which is its belief
in one all-powerful and merciful God, there are major differences between them.
The Muslims were not able to exercise the same type of center to periphery
control that Spain could at least attempt. The Muslim world system of the day
was much more loose and multicentered. The Europeans only imagined that the
Ottomans exercised any influence in Asia. The spread of Islam depended on the
formation of many local states, not a single "World Empire" that Spain was
becomingthere were no "Meccan friars."
Before the colonial conquest, Filipinos were non-capitalist peasant
commodity producers involved in a tribute mode of production in the maritime
trade economy of Southeast Asia. Lowlanders were involved in mutually
beneficial trade relations with upland hunters and gatherers and horticulturalists
to obtain rare goods for home use, or trade in the wider economy. The
indigenous communities had their own structure of authority that differed from
that of the colonizers. Mostly traders, sea merchants, fish harvesters, cultivators,
and craftspeople lived in integrated communities with production based on use
value as opposed to exchange value, the latter of which marks the capitalist
mode of production. Surplus was produced, but only in the sense of an excess of
goods normally used for consumptions set aside for appropriation and
circulation; surplus circulated on the basis of its use value (e.g., tribute) rather
than exchange value (e.g., sale for profit); primary producers owned the
products of their labor. The economy of the early Filipinos thus negated
10 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

capitalism, which is grounded in exchange for profit. Prehispanic Filipinos made

their own histories because each community in the archipelago was organized in
a different way.
Spain's entry changed the indigenous social structure. They used the same
strategy to colonize the Philippines that they used to colonize the New World
(Phelan 1959). They preserved local leaders to convert their following.
However, typical authority positions in the New World (e.g., in the Aztec
civilization and the Maya kingdom) as part of a state apparatus were inherited.
By contrast, Filipino leadership positions were open and contestable because
they were part of autonomous communities. Leadership was inherited and
enforced in precolonial Philippines, but leaders were relatively easily
abandoned. The local follower leader economy waned under the new colonial
economy.
The Spaniards negotiated their terms of settlement predominantly through
the agency of male leaders, while female leaders, who held positions of high
esteem and authority in the bilateral contexts of precolonial Philippines, were
displaced. The follower system in Southeast Asia differed substantially from
that of Spain. Differences in gender roles were simply differences in work
patterns that complimented each other to form an undifferentiated whole.
Errington (1990) stresses that the early Filipino ideology of gender difference
was complementary. The opposite sexes complimented each other rather than
competed against each other. Reid (1983, 7) explains, "in Southeast Asia a
follower system (still) is the awareness that a relation of authority of high over
low exists, is accepted by the latter, and likewise the realization that high and
low need each other in their striving for high standing. This relation is based on
cooperation. On the other hand, the relation between equal groups (e.g., in the
United States) is best described as opposition." Spanish colonial policy
attempted to solidify local leadership and, in effect, transform local leaders into
permanent lower level authority figures buttressed by the Crown, so long as the
indigenous elite cooperated. As Rafael (1988, 13-17) put it, "the extension of
Spanish colonial rule into local communities generated a new division between
natives who paid tribute and natives who collected it." The indigenous elite now
sanctioned by outside military force could opportunistically shift between the
colonial overlords and their subjects. They could take surplus from a community
and keep part of it for themselves in the form of goods or indentured service.
Although local leaders were accorded land and freed from tribute and corvee
labor by the Spaniards, their prior wealth and power had derived less from the
land than from tribute and services collected from their followers. Such also was
the case in Mexico. The Spanish government undermined this indigenous
economic relation by exacting a head tax on all common Filipinos. They
accomplished this through warfare and Catholic indoctrination and conversion.
Subjects fled from both tax collectors and former rulers, or, when prevented
from doing so, rebelled. Uprisings were endemic (De la Costa 1961; McCoy
1982; Mananzan 1987).
Spanish colonizers systematically brought the indigenous peoples into
encomiendas. The Filipinos' precolonial conceptual framework was fragmented
PEASANT RESISTANCE AND RELIGIOUS PROTESTS 11

by this forced relocation process. The indigenous ideology reflected the

inhabitants' particular lifestyles as small traders, horticulturalists, and hunters
and gatherers. As the conquerors reduced them into fixed settlements, they had
to adopt European ways of seeing and dividing the world. Filipinos had to
grapple with the problem of losing their cultural identity and communal-
orientation due to the foreign nature of the Spanish language and its ways. They
were required to perform corvee labor and pay tribute. Fabros (1988, 5) states
that "dependency and indebtedness characterized this multifaceted relationship"
between the Spaniards and the Filipinos. "At best it gave way to a paternalistic
relationship, at worst it created an exploitative set up." This relationship would
intensify when the American colonizers brought their capitalist mode of
production at the turn of the century and transformed the local-instrumental
overlord to peasant relationship into an instrumental impersonal relationship
based on capital.
Rafael (1988, x) argues that the consciousness of Filipinos was reshaped
through "the dissemination of Christianity which was mediated by Spanish ideas
about signification and concomitant transformation of meaning from one
language to another." The Spanish who transmitted the Christian faith held in
common the otherworldly and future-oriented conceptions of the bible, while
their Filipino parishioners interpreted the scriptures in a contrary and present-
oriented way. My own position concurs with that of Rafael in that the Spanish
Crown attempted to reconstruct the foundations of Filipino social life. But, the
issue of conversion cannot be so neatly defined as to permit us to declare that
the motives of Filipinos were invariably at odds with those of the friars (155).
The Christian religion took root in part because select friars who successfully
met some of the precolonial criteria of a qualified leader spread it. This analysis
deals with a period in Philippine history where there were few original sources.
We now examine the roots of theology of struggle today by tracing them back to
early religious clerics and lay leaders who took the side of the poor and
oppressed.

EARLY ROOTS OF RESISTANCE THEOLOGY

Christianity took root in the Philippines not simply because it was imposed
but because it was propagated by a small group of radicalized, educated priests
meeting some of the indigenous criteria for effective leadership. In contrast,
authoritarian friars would lose the loyalty of parishioners who would merely
feign allegiance to the iron might of Spain. Early friars who worked to check the
widespread abuses of the Spanish government may have received impetus from
the early Christian church. The church at the time of Christ was a social
movement that emerged in reaction to a co-opted local elite and a ruling Roman
class, but it was no product of class conflict in a dogmatic Marxist sense. Jesus
did not organize an armed resistance movement of the lower classes to
overthrow and replace their rulers. However, he avidly criticized the dominant
authorities of his day, especially church authorities (Troeltsch 1931, 39) and
considered the struggle to be against the misuse of wealthin particular, a
12 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

struggle against avarice and the accumulation of human and material

possessions for the sake of self-aggrandizement and power. His is a message
contiguous with that of many indigenous Asian religions.
According to Ileto (1979), an effective leader in the precolonial Philippines
exhibited an integrated sense of "loob" (inside), which made their philosophy
and life transparent. They were connected to their community in such a way that
the best interest of the community was reflected in them. De la Costa (1961, 20,
22, 26, 535-538) wrote of friars who earned respect by their example of selfless
service to the sick and suffering of their parishes (see also Chirino 1969;
Schumacher 1981; Scott 1982). These were clergyman likely to have a faithful
following of believers who, in turn, incorporated Catholic notions into their own
worldviews. It is not surprising, from this perspective, that Filipinos early were
able to articulate in the Passion Play meanings related to their daily lives (c.f
Ileto 1979). The Passion Play became a means to express their resistance to the
colonial regime, given that the Spanish banned all other indigenous theater.
Also, popular rituals in prehispanic Philippines, as elsewhere in Asia (e.g.,
Javanese puppet plays in Indonesia, and masked dancers satirizing nobles in
Korea) were likely to have been theater productions based on ironic and subtle
critiques of local political authorities.
To extrapolate upon Levi-Strauss' (1963, 180) theory: some Catholic priests
acted out the structural idea of a religious leader in the indigenous culture. That
is, they fulfilled the cultural expectation of a religious leader. In Sahlin's (1981,
7) words, they were a "worldly token of a preconceived type." Like prior
Tantric, Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim holy men in the Philippines, such priests
(oriented by the ethos of the gospel and poverty of Christ, not mercantilism)
were believed to receive their power from some higher source and were not
supposed to seek monetary, material, or personal power, even though they could
receive tribute to acknowledge their status. In other words, the various world
religions in Asia that predate Christianity also claim to have a message that is
libratory of the poor in as much as these religions and ideologies claim to be
saviors of the common tao. Accordingly, voluntary poverty in Asia can be said
to be a potent spiritual weapon and political stratagem in the hands of adept
religious leaders to wield against the abuses and selfishness of dominant powers
and authorities, and this makes an authority crisis an ever-present possibility. In
contemporary terms, early friars lived and worked in a political church that was
not neutral. Each individual friar himself was personally engaged on a terrain in
which only the poor could decide who could liberate them. Individual
representative authority figures to be legitimate, not forcefully imposed, in the
eyes of local people came to be respected only "spontaneously as a
manifestation of their own competence to mediate liberation" for the vanquished
and poor (Pieris, 1988, 36-38). This at root is the basic contradiction in Catholic
social teaching until now between egalitarian and hierarchical structures (a good
case in point is the stark contrast between Benedictine and Franciscan orders,
not least the founders: see, Victor Turner on Francis 1969, 140-155).
On occasion, early friars were welcomed in Filipino communities (examples
in De la Costa 1961; Schumacher 1981; Scott 1982; Keesler 1989, 46). During
PEASANT RESISTANCE AND RELIGIOUS PROTESTS 13

the early colonial period, the government, typically, neglected communities in

Cebu. Scott (1982, 176) and De la Costa (1961) documented cases where local
people welcomed friars into their communities to ward off abuses by Spanish
soldiers and landed officials and attacks from marauding offshore Southeast
Asian slave raiders. The advent of a friar meant the development of a town
ringed by a small fortress, although such made formerly scattered communities
more vulnerable to offshore raiders. A few unusual friars sought to win converts
by way of example rather than force. This was apparently the case for the
student of medicinal plants, Father Padrino Chirino in Cebu as noted by De la
Costa (1961). This is not to say that they succeeded. Some entered into the local
scheme of things as allies in resistance. These friars, leaders, not just religious
but social leaders, were the predecessors of today's theologians of struggle.
Rafael emphasizes that because Spain's presence in the Philippines could
only be legitimated as a function of the Crown's Christianizing mission,
Filipinos were forced to orient themselves to a divine authority, an authority
whose directives were emanating from Spain. Instead of situating themselves in
relation to Southeast Asia and the natural world around them, Filipinos "were
constrained to negotiate with and around the totalitarian economy of divine
mercy" (109). That is, a prior system of relating to others in terms of mutual
indebtedness and exchange was replaced by one of divine patronage tied to the
bureaucracy of colonial Spain. Local autonomy was lost (145).
According to Rafael, Filipinos and friars indigenized Christianity for purely
economic and political reasons. The people of the Philippines looked at
Christianity as a quid pro quo in terms of reciprocity and varying degrees of
indebtedness (utang na loob), while the early friars used their role as priests "to
consolidate their position in the hierarchy of divine commerce" (98). Rafael's
interpretation of economic interest is similar to a capitalist, that is, individualist
one. For him, to be economic is to be interested in individual profit more than in
the welfare of the community as a whole. It is to promote one's status through a
system of indebting others unto oneself. In a word, it is "opportunist" (14, 35,
143, 164). Such a definition does not fit precolonial Philippine economy.
Rafael suggests that the priest used his role as Father confessor to force his
parishioners into debt and further dependence upon him (99). By such means,
the local workers were further goaded into obeying their Spanish overlords.
While religious clergy undoubtedly served to domesticate a potentially unruly
and landless labor force for Filipino and Spanish colonial officials (Troeltsch
1931, 138, 220), a rather different interpretation of confession is given by De la
Costa, namely, that this sacrament could also be used to oversee Spanish and
Filipino encomenderos (1961, 33-35). In fact, the early Spanish abuse of
Filipino rights was so offensive to some Catholic clergy that Bishop Salazar
called for a meeting of a Synod in Manila in 1581. Describing the times the
Spanish bishop thundered "it was absurd that a man of low degree, merely
because he immigrates to the colonies, should acquire the prerogatives of a
knight and lord of vassals, doing violence and a thousand injustices to the
miserable native who is unable to stand his ground against the arrogance of the
Spaniard and the tyranny of his own chiefdoms" (De la Costa 1961, 33). Under
14 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

the new Synod directives, absentee encomenderos, in particular, were found

guilty. Similarly, Spanish troops and other laymen who committed crimes
against Filipinos were ordered to compensate their victims. The proceedings
from this meeting were drawn up into a handbook for priests to use in the
confessional to oversee the encomenderos and conquistadors. The directives,
however, were not well received, and many offenders simply stopped going to
confession.
Constantino (1975, 22, 77, 78) notes that some friars accused the
"encomenderos" of "exorbitant exactions and other abuses"; some governors
complained that the friars had "exploited and reduced the natives to virtual
slavery." But if Filipinos wished to report the misdeeds of their friars and
overlords to civil authorities, they had to do so through the agency of another
friar. The system was corruptible. Only rare and outstanding clerics struggled
against the grain for the civil rights of parishioners. Until the latter part of the
nineteenth century when select members of the Chinese Meztizo and Filipino
illustrado class were for the first time admitted into the priesthood, the
indigenous indios could not represent themselves in Spanish courts because they
could not enter the priesthood, and this is in contrast to the Muslim and Buddhist
development of indigenous religious elites. The indigenous had little
parliamentary recourse other than to allow a Spanish friar to represent them.
Only the late Spanish period saw Filipino males ordained into the priesthood.
The first Council of Mexico (1555) forbade indios, mestizos, and mulattoes to
enter the priesthood because "they resembled the descendants of Moors and
persons who had been sentenced by the Inquisition as lacking in good repute
which those who bear the sacerdotal character ought to have," an indictment
repeated in milder form at the second Council of Mexico in 1585 (see De la
Costa 1961, 233-235). While no doubt Catholic clerics willingly allowed
themselves to be used by prominent Filipinos and colonial officials, some spoke
out against the widespread injustices wrought by government, church, and
landed aristocracy. These religious spokesmen persistently wrote and
sermonized against the authorities of the church and Crown as in 1768 when the
Pope at the behest of the king ordered the Jesuits to return to Spain (De la Costa
1961, 486; Schumacher 1981). Although some peasants grew attached to their
priests through rituals such as processions and novenas to petition for rain, or
cures that aimed to rectify worldly wrongs through other-worldly ways, the
localization of Christianity occurred in relation to precolonial Southeast Asian
history in a process multi-sided and complex.
On the one hand, many early missionaries taught a mystified and
otherworldly version of Christianity to indoctrinate and subdue the masses for
their conquerors. They misled Filipinos to redress through appeal to a higher and
all-knowing God rather than to social and economic conditions stemming from
the inequitable relationship between the imperialists and the colonized. Both
friars and collaborating local elites were accomplices in this coercive conversion
that rested on tenets more of Hispanization than of Christianization (Phelan
1959, 87; De la Costa 1961, 534; Rafael 1988). However, the indigenous
Filipinos interpreted Christianity in terms of traditional Southeast Asian cultural
PEASANT RESISTANCE AND RELIGIOUS PROTESTS 15

practices and beliefs. Many articulated the language of Christianity as a means

for expressing their own values, ideals, and hopes for liberation from their
colonial oppressors. In effect, Filipinos developed their own version of folk
Catholicism to contest and eventually transform Spanish rule. Folk Catholicism
was largely an indigenous resistance to Spanish Christian colonialism.
Concomitantly, select friars played a role in this Filipino resistance movement,
by shaping popular ideas and opinions opposing the prevailing social order (see
Gramsci 1988, 192-193). Their resistance transpired simultaneously in relation
to a parishioner and indigenous follower system in the history of Southeast Asia.

CONCLUSION
Summing up, the premises of Christian conversion are not the same as those
governing the logic of imperial Spain. Nor, does a reading of the works of De la
Costa, Phelan, and Schumacher render a view of Philippine history from the side
of the dominant colonial society to the exclusion of the history of the
subordinate classes. For it is in between the lines, and clearly also within them,
that I have found the history of the poor, the oppressed, and their defenders, the
latter of whom cut across class. I agree with De la Costa, Schumacher, and
Fabros that the traditional church, albeit closely identified with the state, played
a role in "checking" widespread government abuse of the local people (De la
Costa 1961, 534). Some friars interrogated and used the messages from the
gospels to criticize social injustices and colonial oppression. Some of the
culprits they singled out for blame were members of their own clergy, nation, or
class. Hence, the roots of the Filipino struggle for liberation from colonial (and,
neocolonial) dominance interlocked the cultures of the dominant and the
subordinated
Finally, the Spanish colonization (1521-1896) processes had a disintegrating
effect on the indigenous political economy. The Spanish disrupted traditional
values, communal practices, and social relations by instituting a new class
structure that served colonial interests and that undermined the pre-existing
leader-follower economy. They brought with them a feudalistic production
mode that activated the development of capitalism in the Philippines. Land that
was held in common was increasingly reduced to private property (Constantino
1975, 40). This instigated a process of eroding the traditional subsistence base,
and created a class of landless peasants. By the nineteenth century, cash-
cropping (sugar plantations, tobacco estates) by expropriating Filipino labor and
resources (McCoy 1993, 438) began to transform the productive base in such a
way as to allow the emergence of a small national elite class of landed and
entrepreneurial Filipino and Chinese Mestizo families from whom came
powerful religious and political leaders. Under these divergent conditions in the
relations of production, Filipino resistance theology as an integral part of the
struggle for national liberation emerged.
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Chapter 2

American Colonization (1898-1946)

and Repression of Organized
Movements: Continuing
the Revolution

Where the clergy gave their support and leadership, the masses remained faithful
to the revolution (Schumacher 1981, 1).
Local collective action against foreign rule was manifested in a wide variety of
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular and religious movements that
culminated in the Philippine Revolution of 1896. Led by radicalized priests like
Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora (Schumacher 1981) and nationalist
intellectuals like Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, and Emilio Aquinaldo, the
Filipino army defeated the Spanish in 1898. Although the U.S. Navy Admiral
George Dewey then sailed to Manila from Japan with a small army to help the
patriots take some 8,000 Spaniards held up in a garrison, his assistance was not
needed (Mark Twain 1901 in Zwick 1992, 31). The reason that the United States
sent the admiral and his crew in a show of support for the Filipino freedom
fighters was entirely duplicitous and self-interested anyway. The U.S.
government wanted to expand its foreign market and trade for its manufactured
goods, and it viewed the Philippines as a strategic gateway to the Chinese
markets (Schirmer and Shalom 1987, 6). Soon after the nationalist Philippine
victory over Spain, the archipelago was recolonized, this time by the United
States, which sought to legitimate its territorial claim by buying the islands from
Spain at the signing of the Treaty in Paris. The Filipino people fiercely resisted
the American onslaught and colonization was forced upon them in 1901,
although fighting continued intermittently, and the nationalist struggle for
independence persists.
American colonization further accelerated the capitalist penetration of the
Philippine political economy. The United States kept intact the landlord land
ownership system that allowed American corporations to acquire large tracks of
land. They developed plantations of coconuts, sugar, timber, rubber, abaca, and
pineapple, and expanded mining operations of copper, gold, and chromate for
U.S. industries, while landless peasants were forced to work for them at
18 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

subminimal wages. They sought to win over the Filipinos by promoting public
education but they used it as a tool to propagate American export-oriented
ideology and a colonial mentality (Wolff 1961, 336). They included some
Filipino illustrados in their administrative bureaucracy but they did so only after
they realized that they could not win the war (Cullinane 1971, 13). There was no
change in the working conditions on the American colonial estates. In other
words, there was not much difference between indentured and free wage labor;
U.S. colonialism did not entirely transform the pre-existing feudal agricultural
economy. Unlike under the Spanish, however, when the plantation system had to
ensure the reproduction of its laborers basic subsistence needs, the availability of
a large pool of surplus labor beyond that of a permanent work crew freed
American companies and wealthy Filipino landowners from providing their
workers with social security. Agribusiness did not penetrate into all areas of the
country, and subsistence villages around the peripheries of the plantations were
subsumed into the logic of the capitalist reproduction of the plantation economy.
The infiltration by the capitalist mode of production of the Philippine
economy has kept wages low, and the bargaining power of workers, weak.
Mojares (1986) states "economic changes have desacralized labor and we have
come a long way from the time when the exchange of goods among men (and
women) was a moral transaction positively animated by economic, religious,
political, and aesthetic notions" (187). McCoy (1982) described the tactics used
by the American colonial and Chinese Mestizo sugar barons on Negros (an
island that runs perpendicular to Cebu) to acquire their workers: "Forced
expropriation of peasant farms later legitimized by legal documentation; cash
purchase of small peasant farms to form a plantation; and high interest loans to
peasant proprietors with default provisions requiring forfeiture of the land and
years of debt bondage" (320-321). Once the land was cleared, sugar lords used
similar strategies to maintain their workforce: they imported migrant laborers
from Panay (e.g., dispossessed textile workers who lost their jobs when colonial
entrepreneurs flooded the local market with cheap cloth produced in Britain and
the American northeast, as a result of the industrial revolution) and bought off
permanent migrants with cash advances and indebted them with high interest
loans when they arrived. However, these tactics were not enough to keep their
workers intact. Plantation owners used violence, corporal punishment, and
military guards to prevent workers from escaping.
Plantation owners began to ship sugar off the coast of Negros only after
stevedores on the nearby island of Iloilo protested against them, and
demonstrated that they could no longer be repressed. The dockworkers
demanded better wages and working conditions from their employers, and were
defeated only after the steam engine, which permitted the shipment of sugar
from Negros, was invented.
The plantation workers on Negros also organized themselves to demonstrate
against their owners. Their efforts were less successful than the stevedores of
Iloilo because the workforces of Negros were stratified and divided among
themselves as a class by the conditions under which they labored. The
AMERICAN COLONIZATION AND REPRESSION 19

plantations of Negros were literally tightly run factories in the field. They were
administered by sugar lords who hired supervisors from their workers to coerce
"debt slaves who owned nothing more than their clothes and their cooking
utensils" to work for them (McCoy 1982, 325). Plantation owners in Negros did
not hesitate to crush emerging labor unions by using military force and
infiltrating them with their henchmen.
McCoy demonstrated that although the peasantry becomes stratified into
classes through its relation with capitalism, it remains a single class in relation to
other classes in the wider societya society where members of the peasantry
are promoted to supervise each other for a more dominant elite (320). This kind
of stratification in the peasantry is one reason why Ledesma (1982, 207)
suggested that peasants might benefit more if they were an integrated, rather
than stratified, class because stratification in effect leads to the marginalization
of segments of the peasantry. Marginalization gives rise to unemploymenta
rare phenomenon in precapitalist Philippines prior to its being dominated by the
capitalist mode of production. It starts a process of incomplete reproduction of
peasant family households through semiproletarianization, indebtedness, or
permanent migration.
Under these conditions of a disintegrated peasantry, rebellions and resistance
movements (e.g., Sakdalistas, Hukbalahap or People's Liberation Army) began
to be formed in the 1920s (Nemenzo 1984, 4). One of the largest occurrences of
tenant uprisings was the Huk rebellion in the Cagayan Valley of central Luzon,
Northern Philippines, which had some of the highest tenancy rates in the
country. In the next section, I discuss the suppression of this movement by the
U.S. colonial and neocolonial counterinsurgency because, in general, Basic
Ecclesial Communities (BEC) in modern Philippine society currently face the
same pattern of repression. Also, the experiences of the Huk provide an
historical background for understanding the present BEC movement. First, I set
forth a perspective explaining the probable causes of the Huk revolt that
culminated after World War II. My approach has been influenced by that of
Benedict Kerkvliet (1977) who argued that it was not entirely a communist
insurgence as it was depicted to be by the Americans in collusion with Filipino
elites and Christian reformers.
Ilocano homesteaders populated the scattered farm communities of Cagayan
Valley at the turn of the century as a result of the American colonial "land
reform" policy. At that time, Ilocano ancestral villages along the northern coast
were becoming overcrowded and increasingly impoverished. Hence, poor
Ilocanos, especially disinherited sons, were pushed from their home regions to
Cagayan valley, Mindinao, and the United States in search of economic
opportunities. Other landholders would sell, or mortgage, their land to send their
children to urban schools in hopes of launching them into politically powerful
careers. Cagayan valley was initially inhabited by the Ibanags who were the
original farmers along the estuaries of the Cagayan river and the "Kalingas,"
from surrounding mountains and plains, who were pushed out by the American
colonial regime to prepare the way for the coming of the Ilocanos (Nadeau 1980,
20 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

30). Initially, the American colonizers who, in turn, sold them again piecemeal
purchased large friar estates. Then, indigenous farms and swiddens not being
cultivated in Cagayan valley were taken from the Kalinga, Ibanag, and Gadang
by the Ilocanos who were granted, or sold, homesteads in the area by the
colonial government. In this manner, the American colonial regime helped to
initiate the production of crops for cash to promote agricultural development in
the valley (Takahashi 1969; Lewis 1971). However, unlike the U.S. expansion
project in the American Western "frontier" that wiped out American Indian
communities but did give homesteaders an opportunity for a new and brighter
future, Filipino agricultural expansion followed a different "mitotic pattern, a
cell-like division of old structures on new land" (Steinberg 1994, 24). That is,
capitalism was articulated together with pre-capitalist relations of production
and with force.
The American colonial process worked directly through local landed elites
and officials to promote the United States businesses' interests. The
empowerment of prominent Filipino collaborators and their contingent work
forces was shaped as much by colonial design as it was made in reaction to local
resistance movements. It provided economic and political elite families and
politicians with additional power and authority. Hence, landlords could change
the terms of agreement between themselves and their peasants, and they could
relinquish their pledge to provide social security to those who worked the land.
In time, peasants became transformed into tenants and wageworkers who shared
similar working conditions, and who began to organize to protect their own
interests. Kerkvliet argued that peasant unions were formed to reestablish
traditional patron-client bonds (1977, 255), but I suggest, peasants sought not to
return to the past, rather, they were proceeding forward: peasants reacted in the
context of capitalist relations of production by unionizing (much like socialist
and communist workers in America had done) to promote their own interests in
the face of their competition (property owners and connected officials). Their
efforts can be seen not so much as an attempt to re-align patron-client ties as to
contract better working conditions. However, unlike in the early days of
unionizing in the United Stateswherein laborers struggled for better working
conditions from owners of property who resorted to tactics within the strictures
of their culture to retaliate against or negotiate with themin Luzon, the landed
elite and connected officials were backed by a powerful American presence
even as the Philippines was formally given its independence, while the peasants
were struggling to create a wider support structure for themselves. Kerkvliet
suggests that the working class in Manila opposed joining together with the
peasants because they thought themselves to be the vanguard of the revolution
rather than the peasants (1977, 265). I think the earlier lack of unity between
working classes in the city and the countryside was a result of the labor divisions
taking place within the ranks of the working classes who contrary to their long-
term interests, competed among themselves for immediate and locally affiliated
gains.
After the Philippines became independent in 1946, the U.S. government
AMERICAN COLONIZATION AND REPRESSION 21

sought to ensure its economic control so as to protect its business interests, but
under the new neocolonial relationship it did so indirectly. In exchange for
rehabilitation aid to help rebuild the Philippines after the devastation caused by
World War II, the Americans manipulated the new republic into accepting the
Bell Trade Act of 1946, which gave full parity rights to U.S. citizens, businesses
and corporations. This act amended in 1955 as the Laurel-Langley Agreement
virtually assured U.S. control over the Philippine economy by making the
Philippines a supplier of cheap raw materials and human resources for U.S.
markets and a receiving ground for surplus U.S. manufactured goods (Schirmer
and Shalom 1987, 90). When the Laurel-Langley Agreement expired in 1974
under the Marcos dictatorship, the United States sought to protect its economic
interests mainly by an ideology of export-led growth through foreign
investments. The Marcos government adopted an open-door policy for foreign
investments and liberalized trade restrictions on transnational corporations in
exchange for loan packages from bilateral and multilateral development
agencies like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (Broad 1988).
Shortly before the martial law ruling in 1972, central Luzon was targeted by
the Marcos administration to be a development showcase for the Green
Revolution. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations pioneered the Green
Revolution in the Philippines. It was launched in 1960 with the establishment of
the International Rice Research Institute in Manila, whose research largely
benefits the interests of transnational corporations. After Marcos declared
Martial Law the World Bank and International Monetary Fund increased lending
to the Philippines, up $165.1 million in 1974 from an average of $30 million per
year for the previous five years (Bello, Kinley, and Elinsor 1982, 24). Instead of
emphasizing a more equitable distribution of land, income, and resources, the
technocratic model of the Green Revolution stressed only increasing production
of crops for sale in the market as a way to solve the poverty problem. The
tenants of Central Luzon received government incentives, new high yield
varieties of rice that produced more only if pesticides and fertilizers were used,
drawn from this funding to increase their farm production. However, the cost of
the new rice technology was high as compared to traditional forms. In times of
bad harvests, small farmers began to mortgage, and then lose, their land to repay
their loans. The high yielding rice varieties required costly chemical pesticides
and petroleum-based fertilizers that depleted soil fertility and ecological
diversity in agriculture. Although chemical inputs and artificial fertilizers may
be good for plants, they are unhealthy for human consumption. While the Green
Revolution benefited wealthy farmers, agribusiness, and large landowners who
grew richer from increasing production for sale, it had a negative impact on
small farmers and poor landless farmers.
Wolters (1983) questioned whether martial law was able to change the
pattern of politics in central Luzon, into class-based parties and organizations at
the local level, as it proposed to do? He argued that in contrast to those who
perceive the Philippines as a state structured along patron-client lines, such ties
have changed into new types of relationships that do not fit traditional patterns.
22 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

That is, there are patron-client relations between the president and the upper
class politicians, and between them and local brokers who bring in the votes, but
the relations between local elite and peasants has none of the security of
traditional reciprocity. Wolters states, "these new relations between politicians
and the electorate are short-term, instrumental, impersonal, and based on a
specific transaction if any. They are completely different from multi-faceted,
dyadic relations that link landlords and tenants in the good old days" (228). The
landlords tried only to outwit tenants, and to make a profit from them, while
tenant farmers were still thinking in terms of a subsistence economy. In fact,
patron-client relations do not form a unifying state structure in the Philippines;
rather they are a structure tied into wider processes of state development. Kahn
(1978) offers a similar analysis of patron-clientage in Indonesia.
By the time Corazon Aquino became president in 1987, after the murder of
her husband Ninoy Aquino by Marcos's military in 1983, which sparked the
People's Power Revolution that overthrew the dictator, the nation was
financially bankrupt. In exchange for restructuring the Philippine debt
repayments, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies
continued to exert a stranglehold over the political economy. In 1989, the
Aquino government was given a $1.3 billion loan from the IMF on the condition
that the liberalization (e.g., price decontrol, labor control, export-oriented
development) of the economy be continued, along with privatization of
government-owned industries and institutions. President Fidel Ramos (1992
1997) added another $650 million loan from the United States to the Philippine
foreign debt (A. de Guzman 1993 in Lindio-McGovern 1997, 35). The structural
adjustment measures in Ramos's Medium Term Development Plan likewise
reflected the economistic development policies of the IMF. The deployment of
overseas contract workers as a strategy for generating foreign currency to help to
repay the national debt intensified under Aquino, then Ramos, and continued
through the 1990s into the twenty-first century. As of 1995, there were
approximately 3.5 million Filipinos working overseas, and estimates of annual
remittances from overseas workers varied anywhere from US$800 million to
$2.5 billion (Law and Nadeau 1999).

THE ANTI-HUK CAMPAIGN (1948-1953) AND THE LOW-INTENSITY

CONFLICT (1988-1994)
The movement known as the Hukbo ng Bay on Laban sa Hapon or simply
Huk (People's Liberation Army) that was organized by the peasants of central
Luzon during World War II with the primary objective of fighting against the
Japanese Army, evolved out of the earlier uprisings and acts of resistance
against the unequal land owning system and repression of the U.S. colonial
government. In fact, when the Americans returned to the Philippines in 1945,
the Huk guerrillas had already liberated several provinces in Central Luzon from
the Japanese occupying army. At the final stage of the war against the Japanese,
the Huk guerillas fought along with the American forces until the Japanese were
AMERICAN COLONIZATION AND REPRESSION 23

completely defeated. But when the war was over, many Huks were arrested,
forcibly disarmed, and thrown into jail by the American military police without
formal charges (Agoncillo 1984, 525-526). The Americans justified their action
on the ground that the Huks were not members of the United States Armed
Forces in the Far East, and their leaders, as alleged by the United States military
intelligence officers, were communists and socialists (Kerkvliet 1977, 145, 47).
The Filipino Military Police and Civilian Guards massacred Huk members and
civilians believed to be supporters of the Huk movement often with the
knowledge of American military officers (Agoncillo 1984, 524, 525). Knowing
that their former allies were after them, the majority of the Huks went
underground waging a guerrilla war against the government, specifically against
the American Counter-intelligence Corps, the Filipino Military Police, and the
Civilian Guards. The Civilian Guards, composed mostly of U.S. Armed Forces
in the Far East guerrillas and private guards of wealthy landlords, were under the
discrete command of military commanders who provided them with guns to
fight the Huks (Agoncillo 1984; Kerkvliet 1977; Pablo et al., 1988).
In 1969 notorious for their human rights abuses and for acting as private
armies of wealthy landlords, the Civilian Guards were transformed into the
Barangay Self-Defense Unit. Marcos in 1972 replaced the Barangay Self-
Defense Unit with the Integrated Civilian Home Defense Force. The Civilian
Home Defense Force was responsible for many atrocities during the martial law
years and it was abolished in 1986 after Marcos was ousted from power. Losing
their official status, Civilian Home Defense Force members disbanded only to
regroup into vigilante units. In 1987, Civilian Armed Forces Geographical Unit
(CAFGU) was created as part of Aquino's "total war" policy against the
National Democratic Front, an umbrella organization of various underground
mass organizations of the Left including the Communist Party of the Philippines
and its military arm the New People's Army. Right after the creation of
CAFGU, former members of the disbanded Civilian Home Defense Force units
were integrated into CAFGUs. Thus CAFGU is no different from its
predecessor, except its name. As many critics of CAFGU would be apt to say,
"CAFGU is nothing but a new collar on the same dog."
CAFGU like most vigilante groups in the Philippines were organized by the
Armed Forces of the Philippines even before former President Corazon Aquino
issued Executive Order No. 262 for its official creation on July 25, 1987. The
legality of Executive Order No. 262 is questionable because paramilitary forces
were banned in the 1987 Constitution (see Sarmiento 1993, 13). In spite of this,
by 1992, there were 89,000 CAFGU forces nationwide (Carranza-Paraan 1993),
although this number was slightly reduced to 72,000 men in 1994 because of the
pressure to disband them (U.S. State Department 1994). The majority, if not all,
right-wing vigilante groups like Alsa Masa (lit. "Rise up, masses"), Nakasaka
(an acronym for Nagkahiusa Alang sa Kalinaw or "United People for Peace"),
and the religious cult Tadtad (lit. "Chop") were founded by military officials. As
of August 1987, there were more than 200 vigilante groups nationwide, some of
them were organized shortly after the end of the cease-fire between the military
24 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

and communist rebels in February 1987 (see Pablo et al, 1988). It is common
knowledge in the Philippines that military commanders would simply issue
orders to barrio captains to send able-bodied men including the barrio captain
himself (if the captain is a man) to the military camps for CAFGU training.
Barrios whose leaders failed to send representatives were labeled "communist"
territory and considered "no man's land." Barrios classified, as "no man's land"
are usually targets of military operations, including aerial bombings and
shellings that led to destruction of properties, and mass evacuation of residents,
thereby creating a phenomenon of "internal refugees" (see Villanueva 1990). In
the same fashion, individuals who refused CAFGU recruitment because of other
pressing needs in the family were also accused of being "communists."
Vigilante groups in their recruitment of new members used similar strategies.
Those who refused to join these groups were harassed, in some cases murdered
(see Alo, Craige, and Kuile 1990; Segaya 1994). Thus many rural people were
forced to join in the CAFGU forces or vigilante groups because of fear of being
accused as "communist" supporters. There are of course individuals who
voluntarily joined paramilitary forcessuch as the former members of the
notorious but now defunct Integrated Civilian Home Defense Force members of
anticommunist religious sects like Tadtad and Ilaga (lit. "Rats"), and some
jobless individuals, individuals who spend their days lingering at sari-sari stores,
accumulating debt drinking rum or beer. These individuals are not respectable
members of the community because, when drunk, they usually became unruly
and are known to cause trouble. In fact many murders committed by
paramilitary forces took place when they were drunk.
Like its predecessor, CAFGU has attained notoriety in a short period of time
because of numerous atrocities committed by its members against innocent
civilians. For example, in May 1989, the Justice and Peace Commission of the
Association of Major Religious Superiors in the Philippines conducted a fact-
finding mission in the Diocese of Pagadian, Mindanao, to document cases of
human rights abuses committed by both the rebels and military forces (see Alo,
Craige, and Kuile 1990, 28-30). They documented 41 cases of murder, 6 cases
of frustrated murder, 8 cases of assault, 4 cases of harassment, 4 cases of
property theft and destruction, and 9 cases of forced evacuation that occurred
between July 1987 and November 1989. Of the 41 cases of murder, 32% were
committed by CAFGU members, 22% by the vigilante group Tadtad, 22%) by
the Philippine Army and Philippine National Police, 17% by unidentified men,
and 7% by the New People's Army (NPA) rebels. Thus the government forces,
the people who were supposed to uphold the law, committed 76% of the
murders. Two of the murder victims were Catholic priests, murdered by
Philippine Army soldiers, and one Protestant pastor, murdered by a CAFGU
member. CAFGU and Tadtad members committed four of the six cases of
frustrated murder. Seven out of 8 cases of assault were committed by the
Philippine Army and one case committed by a Tadtad member. Both the army
and NPA committed harassments. The CAFGU and Tadtad members committed
the cases of theft and property destruction. Of the nine cases of villagers fleeing
AMERICAN COLONIZATION AND REPRESSION 25

from their homes, the government forces and one by the rebels caused 8 cases. A
dramatic example of this was the evacuation of 600 people from communities of
Dimataling, Zamboanga del Sur in January 1989 after Tadtad vigilantes killed,
strafed, and harassed community members. Additional refugees from nine other
communities also evacuated (Church Coalition for Human Rights in the
Philippines 1990, 3).
As of March 1993, the Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates
reported 553 cases of human rights violations between July 1988 and June 1992.
"The cases range from illegal arrest and detention, harassment, physical assault,
robbery, destruction of property, rape, extra-judicial killing, torture, massacre
and burning of people witnessed by families" (quoted in Carranza-Paraan 1993,
26-27). There are numerous examples of CAFGU excesses; one that attracted
the attention of mass media was the incidence in Davao, August 1989. Three
CAFGU members threw two grenades into a barrio crowd during a coronation
of a beauty queen, killing 10 people and wounding 57 (Manila Chronicle daily,
August 22, 1989). The CAFGU members are so prone to violence that it is not
uncommon to read newspaper headlines like "CAFGU Berserk," "Danger Signs
from the CAFGU," or "Get Rid of CAFGU Now." The abuses committed by
CAFGUs are so numerous that even the U.S. State Department made a comment
in February 1990 that "A number of human rights violations by the CAFGUs
have been reported and this has raised concern about the Government's ability to
control the units."
As of June 30, 1993, the first year of the Ramos administration, human rights
violations committed by the government forces continued unabated. Based on
the report of the Task Force Detainees of the Philippines an NGO monitoring
human rights abuses committed by the government forces, 703 persons were
arrested and jailed, only 18 of them were arrested with warrants, and 46 of them
were physically tortured. In addition, 57 individuals were "salvaged" (widely
used term in the Philippines for extra-judicial killing), 39 were killed and 49
were wounded in 23 cases of massacres (Carranza-Paraan 1993, 1-3). The
human rights situation in the Philippines is so grim that the U. S. Department in
its 1994 Country Report on Human Rights stated that "Human rights abuses
continued in 1994" and pointed out that CAFGU "also committed extra-judicial
killings. Organized by the police and the armed forces of the Philippines to
secure areas cleared of insurgents, the nonprofessional units are often
inadequately trained, poorly supervised, and prone to violence."
Philippine military intelligence officers and provincial commanders also
have implemented and directed a propaganda campaign which publicly
identifies legitimate cause-oriented organizations such as the Basic Christian
Community Organizers' Office, Ecumenical Movement for Justice and Peace,
Filipino Legal Assistance Group, and Task Force Detainees as communist
fronts. As a result of this deliberate and malicious propaganda campaign, many
cause-oriented non-profit organizations have fallen into financial difficulty;
foreign funding agencies have withdrawn their support after receiving the
fabricated reports from Philippine officials that such groups are communists. 1
26 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

For example, major funders of the ecumenical movement in Holland succumbed

to pressure from the Dutch government in 1993 who received reports from the
Philippine officials that the Ecumenical Justice and Peace Desk in Cebu was a
communist front, thus they closed the Cebu office. Such reports are blatantly
false, are part of an on-going propaganda campaign by the local government to
discredit those providing support for people who are victims of human rights
abuses who are mostly persecuted by the military and paramilitary units.
For example, the Redemptorist, Father Rudy Romano, first director of the
Cebu office, was abducted by the military and disappeared after being
summarily executed in July 1985. According to Father Rudy's successor, a
pastor of the United Church of Christ:

The movement can be likened to a dead seed that will bear another life, for other people will
continue its advocacy work. Our orientation is to be self-sufficient. There is no denying that
foreign funds have helped us in our struggle for they have helped us a lot, but our struggle
will go on even without the aid of foreign funds. Indeed, if we have used funds to help
internal refugees already being called communists then we'd rather be called communists
too. If in our act of helping the refugees we were called rebels, then we'd rather be called
rebels. We would rather help victims of human rights abuses who are most persecuted by
the government, especially military.

Nongovernmental and non-profit organizations have played an important

role in the Basic Ecclesial Community movement by providing free legal,
health, and educational services and a support network for the poor, many who
belong to the BECs. The way the government characterized the BEC movement
is best described in General Galileo Kintanar's dissertation, "Contemporary
Religious Radicalism in the Philippines," reprinted in the Quarterly National
Security Review in June 1979. Kintanar (1979, 9) stated, "The most dangerous
form of threat from the religious radicals was in their creation of the so-called
Basic Christian Communities in rural and urban areas." He recommended that
the government take "countermeasures against religious radicals through
persuasive and corrective measures and to isolate them from their followers,"
and that it "encourage the conservative mainstream of the church hierarchy and
clergy to stress the spiritual mission and to overwhelm the radicals in policy-
making bodies and social action programs."
In summary, the use of civilian militia is part of the U.S. colonial and
neocolonial indigenous psychological warfare doctrine known as Low Intensity
Conflict, which was first tested and developed in the Philippines during the
Philippine American War (1899-1903) and anti-Huk campaign (1945-1953)
(see especially Bello 1987; McCoy 1989). American military commanders
employed Low Intensity Conflict in South Vietnam starting in 1964 through the
1970s, as part of the American war effort to destroy the clandestine presence of
the enemy in villages (Andrade 1990, 3). Implemented through the Phoenix
Program, more than 30,000 civilians thought to be sympathetic to the enemy
were assassinated (Nelson-Pallmeyer 1989, 32). After the Vietnam debacle, Low
Intensity Conflict was refined in Central America in the early 1980s, and many
AMERICAN COLONIZATION AND REPRESSION 27

of the "lessons" learned there were transferred back to the Philippines in 1987.
At that time, local elites who could not resolve their differences with the newly
elected Aquino administration began to support the Philippine Armed Force's
counterinsurgency effort. The Philippine military headquarters in Manila and
military commanders in the provinces designed new strategies, some dating
back to the Huk campaign, to recruit members into the CAFGU and vigilante
groups (McCoy 1989, 38).

NOTES
1. For a critical discussion on the concerned foreign funding agencies see Gillies 1990,
4142; for specific details on the local NGO community see Constantino-David (1992);
Clarke (1993); and Etemadi (1993).
2. For details regarding a parallel paper, The Banzer Plan and Current Developments,
then publicized in Latin America: see Cacayan and Miclat 1991, 43; similar attempts by
other authoritarian regimes to silence Christian voices: see BonhoefFer's (1983) discussion
of the Nazi Third Reich's attempt to silence the Confessional church, and Antoine's (1973)
analysis of the Brazilian government-and conservative forces well-coordinated efforts to
discredit the liberational church.
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PART II

LIBERATION AND
DEVELOPMENT

Cebu has recently become one of the most booming growth centers in the
Philippines. However, these indicators are mere gauges of economic growth, not
development. Development pertains to a social and structural process of achieving
ecological sustainability and human well being within a community as a whole. In
Cebu, there may have been an economic boom that favors selected few
businessmen but, for most Cebuanos, there was none to speak of. Studies show
that the so-called "Ceboom" masks widespread environmental destruction caused
by real estate developers. The Philippine plan to be a newly industrialized country
by the year 2000 neglected to develop basic social services and agriculture in order
to alleviate poverty in the province. An alternative to this is a broader vision for
sustainable development of the Basic Ecclesial Community movement. Involving
a paradigm shift, BEC aims to develop a post-capitalist society that is based on
ecologically sustainable modes of production through the gradual reorganization
of communities on the peripheries. Through their training programs and
community organizing, the BEC movement in Cebu seeks to establish a self-
sustaining economy based on local agriculture and supported by local industry.
The following chapters suggest that adopting the participatory BEC model can
attain truly sustainable development.
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Chapter 3

Cebu's Basic Ecclesial Community

Movement's Alternative Plan for
Sustainable Development

The BEC works to convert the Philippines into a Newly Evangelized Country by the
year 2000. Newly Evangelized Country marks a new consciousness, a new punto de
vista [world view], which echoes the significant statement of the Second Plenary
Council of the Philippines declaring the Philippine church as the church of the Poor
(Bishop Julio Labayen 1993).
Beginning with the Aquino administration in 1987, Cebu has become one of the
leading growth centers of the Philippines, surpassing even Manila in the
capitalization of new businesses. During the period of recovery from the
dismantled Marcos dictatorship when the rest of the country openly sought debt
concessions, Cebu was being referred to as an economic miracle. In 1991, she
saw an avalanche of fresh capital worth $118 million, up by 300 percent from
1989. Fifty-five businesses registered a total project cost of $128.6 million with
the Board of Investments. To all accounts, there was a boom in Cebu. The
standard indicatorsgross national product, balance of payment, number of
tourists, construction, electricity consumption, and improvements in
communication and transportationmeasured a burst of economic growth
activities. However, these are only selected indicators related to export and
economic growth. These indicators are a measure of economic growth, not
development. It is well known today, at least in social science discourse, that
economic growth alone is not equivalent to development. Considerable evidence
in fact suggests that the so-called "Ceboom" masks widespread environmental
destruction caused by developers, and leads to unsustainable economic growth
(Juario, Avila, and Lastimosa 1992; Mercado 1992, 1993; Ballescas 1993;
Farmers Development Center 1993).
Historically, the use of the word "development" in Western discourses began
shortly after World War II. At that time, there was a widespread interest in
modernization, which led to numerous development projects in the Third World.
However, these development projects typically failed because they were often
based on models of modernization derived from neoclassical economic theories
32 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

that are static (functionalist) and not applicable to the Third World. Also, they
were often implemented without consulting the interdisciplinary team of
specialists, anthropologists included, or the local people, themselves. These
shortcomings led to the emergence of more indigenous approaches to the study
of economy, culture, and society, which culminated in the late 1980s in the
conceptualization of a non-essentialist mode of production bound to social
relations and their historical, cultural, religious, political, ethnic, gender,
ecological and environmental orientation in social formations (Nadeau 1994).
Barrameda (1993), who reviewed the theoretical explications of sustainable
development, said that development is a process that cannot be understood
outside an already existing mind-body-society-nature totality because everything
is interconnected. According to her, development refers to a social and structural
process for achieving ecological sustainability and human well being within a
community as a whole. It refers to the qualitative improvement of all groups and
individuals in a society.
In contrast, unsustainable development refers to a process of
underdevelopment wherein developed countries in the First World are
"condemning the rest of the world's countries to revolve around their [so-called]
superior economy, whether this be from the point of view of investment capital,
equipment, technicians, or through the consumer market with which the
underdeveloped countries are inundated from outside" (Laurentin 1972, 44). The
International Monetary Fund policy of insisting that the Philippines further open
its market to Western imports in order to reschedule its debts is an example of
this situation, in which riches tend to become concentrated in wealthy centers,
while areas on the peripheries become impoverished because the local people
are not allowed to use their resources to meet their needs first. Or to take another
well-known example, most small farmers in Cebu raise chickens, pigs, goats,
and other livestock which are typically not their own for sale through a
middleman in the market but not for home consumption because they need the
money to buy salted fish which, though less nutritious, lasts longer than a
chicken which a family consumes in one sitting.
Unsustainable development is produced by a process of disintegration of
modes of production in a social formation in its totality. For example, the
Spanish colonizers in Cebu caused the disintegration and destruction of
precolonial Cebuano society in terms of its social, economical, cultural,
religious, political, and ecological relationships regionally and abroad in the
maritime trade economy of South and Southeast Asia (Van Leur 1955; Hutterer
1973; Mojares 1986). The present polarization between countries in the
developed North and impoverished South that results from the organization and
expansion of the world capitalist system encourages unsustainable development.
Economic growth in Cebu's business sectors, in this instance, transforms modes
of production and the organization of economic activities in the rural uplands
resulting in the disorganization, and quite often dislocation, of social
relationships manifested in injustices and poverty.
In Cebu, there may have been an economic boom which favors a selected
CEBU'S BASIC ECCLESIAL COMMUNITY 33

few exporters and industries in the business sector but, for the majority of people
living in Cebu, there was no boom. In this sense, Cebu's so-called economic
boom is analogous to the regime of truth as defined by Foucault (1979) because
it has no reference to, and screens from view, the reality of the majority. The
Philippine 2000 technocrats and ideologues manipulate Cebu's regime of truth
to promote Cebu to outside investors. They manipulated facts to screen from
view the role-played by elite families in reclassifying agricultural lands into
industrial areas, which, in effect, means no land reform and higher prices for
their land.
In short, the government's plan fails to develop basic social services for the
poor. It neglects land reform and agriculture. Hence, the economy can be said to
be unsustainable. An alternative plan for the sustainable development of Cebu is
that offered by the BEC movement to which we now turn.
The development strategy of the BEC movement entails a slow and long
process of social and structural transformation that aims to transform the world
capitalist system by starting with changing communities on the peripheries. It
aims to develop a postcapitalist society that is based on ecologically sustainable
modes of production in connection with new forms of political and social
relationships. In order to achieve this aim, the BEC strategy in the Philippines
involves whistle blowing and the gradual work of reorganizing local
communities from their centers starting with communities on the peripheries. De
la Torre (1993) refers to this development process as a process of remembering
dismembered societies by remembering their communal identity and memory to
pave the way for wider change, or the revolution of Philippine society in all of
its (social, cultural, religious, political, economical, and environmental) aspects.
The plan of the BEC movement for sustainable development finds its
referents in creative Marxist theories of the environment and ecology, as well as
liberation theologies (which are dialectically-dynamically derived from biblical
hermeneutics, world system, dependency, and mode of production theories), not
capitalist modernization and development theories, which conversely provide a
basis for Philippine 2000. The BEC movement in the Philippines brings together
concerns of red and green movements as defined by Raskin and Bernow (1991,
18). Hence, it involves a paradigm shift from one where economic development
and environment were viewed as separate to a paradigm based on sustainable
development, which includes concerns of class, development, empowerment,
culture, and ecological sustainability.
It is for this reason that the BEC movement specifically in Cebu, is also
concentrating its nongovernmental organization workers, partners, and training
programs on transforming by recreating Cebu's large agricultural sector into an
ecology sector (Versola 1993, 12). In 1993, I did fieldwork in a rural mountain
BEC involved with a sustainable development NGO. Team members took an
interdisciplinary approach to develop organic farming techniques. They worked
together with the tenant farmers in alayon (teams) resurrected by the organizers
as a means to work cooperatively as a community. More particularly, the BEC-
NGO coalition movement's alternative development plan is to transform Cebu's
34 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

economy into a self-sustaining economy based on local agriculture and

supported by local industry:

We are trying to make an alternative plan to develop the agricultural sector because the
problem Filipinos need to solve first is the food problem. We also develop industry but
industry that is dependent on local needs. For example, our farmers need tools to work with,
so we make tools. What is the real hope of the Filipino? Is it only to compete with foreign
industrialized countries? We think not. We cannot depend on the industrialized countries, so
we will depend on the Filipinos. Our farmers are using tools that are backwards compared
to modern tools because today there are no industries being developed by the government
that are really concerned with developing tools for farmers. Secondly, if we want to mass
produce food, for example, the fish food industry, then, that industry will be related to how
to preserve fish that is more related to production for local consumption, not export. In
terms of a method, we work to attain our goals through collective labor. We emphasize the
communal aspect of production, not production that is dependent on individual
entrepreneurs. We are trying to revive the communitarian practices of our forefathers and
we choose first the poorest of the poor to work through because they are more willing to
share their talents and efforts than those people coming from the higher levels of society
because the better situated have their own wealth, and it is harder for them to share. In the
uplands, we visit house to house because these people cannot travel to attend church
activities in the town center because they are looking for food. Their attitudes are really very
different from those who haveif a family is very poor they typically welcome us but if the
family is a little better off and has a big house, land, and animals, their attitude is more
arrogant. Finally, our method is based on the Christian principle that we really need to be
saved and hear the good news. The poorest have an evangelizing power because the parish
staffs are not really poorthe poor strengthen our commitment and inspire us because we
witnessed their real situation. We realized that they shared their food with us even when
their own family had no viands, no livestock, no land and this realization changed our
organizing strategy. That is why we also bring higher ups to witness the situation of the
poor by visiting their areasthese better off Christians who have a Christian mentality have
something to share to set the captives free. Those well placed in the higher level of society
will play a major role in claiming the good news (1993, BCC-CO island-wide supervisor).
Most BEC workers are familiar with the problems of development, or
development aggression, to use the colloquial expression, as a result of their
ongoing organizing work in peasant and urban poor communities. Most of them
work in communities which have been disorganized and environmentally
damaged as a result of being further integrated into the capitalist economy, for
example, by means of the Green Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s and the
Philippine 2000 plan in the 1990s. Some of them work in communities (e.g.,
Pardo, Antique, and Tuburan on Cebu Island) that have been militarized and
placed under surveillance in pursuit of the so-called development goals. For
example, in 1993,1 witnessed a case of farmers who were falsely accused by the
government of being communist insurgents in Tuburan, Northern Cebu. These
poor uplanders were gathered together by military guards for a meeting with the
mayor who announced: "Who among you wants to continue the health services
in the area? Raise your hands." They all raised their hands for the camera. This
actually was the photo published in the Sun Star daily newspaper on April 20,
CEBU'S BASIC ECCLESIAL COMMUNITY 35

1993, in a feature article "70 of the New People's Army in Tuburan Turn
Themselves In to the Government."
At least since the mid-1960s in the Philippines, many Christian social action
workers have moved away from an orientation of the institutional church based
on donations of goods and services to the poor (which is equivalent to the mere
transfer of technology and ideas from the First World to the Third World),
toward an orientation based on changing social structures democratically and
indigenously through multi-disciplinary team work. The early social action
workers pioneered the way for the emergence of today's BEC-Community
Organizing teams whose organizing work is contextualized in the praxis of
BECs, which are grounded locally and indigenously in the political struggles of
the poor. Taking a sustainable approach to development, BEC workers today
aim to liberate people from untenable and non-life-sustaining situations in which
total integral human development becomes impossible. Many of them are
engaged in a gradual process of experimentation, learning, and discovery.
According to Cosmao (1985, 11), they seek to establish some of the
preconditions for sustainable development. Preconditions for sustainable
development are: first, the active participation and conscientization of people,
specifically in rural and urban poor communities; second, the restructuring of
society in its totality, which includes churches and the world capitalist system;
and third, the need to conscientize people in the center (including better-off
farmers in small rural communities, students, professionals, civil servants, local
and international hegemonic bourgeoisie as defined by Gramsci) of society
because, at present, they have access and control over the resources which gives
them the economic and political clout to make sustainable development
possible.
Finally, although the predominant economic model and viewpoint is that
Cebu is crossing the threshold of development, in another view, true
development will occur only if the broader model of the BEC is adopted.
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Chapter 4

The Illusion of "Catching-dp

Development" in Cebu

Not all that glitters is gold. The silhouette of high-rise buildings with golden
inscriptions on their facade does not always equate development. In the euphoria
of boasting Cebu's economic opulence, much has been said about enticing
foreign investors and tourists. Little is told about its dwindling agriculture, abject
poverty, and about the consequences of what it means for the provincial economy
to be perpetually a dependent satellite to foreign markets (Mercado 1992).
The illusion of "catching-up development" is based on the false belief that the
only appropriate model of the affluent society is that prevailing in the North
(e.g., the United States, Europe, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and the Republic of
Korea). It implies that poor countries that follow the same path to
industrialization and capital accumulation taken by the modern industrial
societies can achieve the same level of development. Yet who would argue that
even the richest nations of the world have attained a satisfactory level of
development? In the United States, for example, there are grounds to say that
real incomes and quality of life for ordinary people are going down steadily.
Poor neighborhoods in big U.S. cities are known to be dangerous places where
drugs, gangs, and violence rule. Also, there are many citizens living in seriously
deprived circumstances in the developed North, while the material conditions
for most citizens in the poorer countries of the South are getting increasingly
worse. What does it take to convince us that catching up development
approaches will not solve the poverty problem?
The illusion of catching-up development is based on evolutionary, linear
understandings of history. This concept in Western Europe and the United States
has been mistakenly used by early anthropologists such as James Steward and
Leslie White to categorize other societies and cultures according to their level of
technological development. Economic specialists made theories of development
as consisting of the transfer of technology from "richer" to "poorer" countries.
However, their projections, based on neoclassical economic theories that are
functionalist and not universally applicable, failed. Prior to the breakup of
38 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

socialism in Eastern Europe, orthodox Marxists also used the concept of

catching up development to depict world history as a series of stages (primitive
communist, ancient, Asiatic, feudal, capitalist, socialist, and advanced
communist). Each particular historical epoch was portrayed as being dominated
by a particular mode of production and evolved into a new type by revolution.
But, Althusser (1970), Godelier (1972), Wolf (1982) and Roseberry (1989),
among others, have argued that Marx never intended his theory to be
transformed into a supra historical theory to be imposed on other people.
Mechanistic interpretations of evolutionary development have been criticized by
non-dogmatic Marxists for being chauvinistic and ignoring the different cultural
proclivities. They have argued that the poverty of the underdeveloped countries
is not a result of some lag but the direct consequence of the overdevelopment of
rich industrial countries that exploit the so-called peripheries in Africa, Latin
America, and Asia.
In terms of theoretical considerations, my own understanding of
unsustainable development is greatly influenced by the work of Althusser
(1970), Godelier (1972), and Wolf (1982) and their culturally specific mode of
production approach, which during the 1970s and 1980s, supplanted the then
prevailing substantivist and formalist paradigms for modernization.
Development theorists had long debated the role of the economy in society.
While formalists (Cancian 1968; Cook 1968; LeClair 1968; Schneider 1974)
whose positivistic theories continue to-this-day to inform international and
national development policies, held that neoclassical economic theory could be
applied to noncapitalist societies, substantivists (Dalton 1968; Pearson 1968;
Polanyi 1968; Sahlins 1972) maintained that such theory of the economy was a
product of thinkers within the capitalist market, and thus remained largely
irrelevant to understanding non-capitalist, semi-capitalist, and alternative
societies and cultures. The mode of production proponents (Althusser and his
students), viewing the economy afresh as a Gestalten (social, cultural, political,
economic, and ecological whole), belittled the pertinence of pure formalist and
substantivist paradigms. These anthropologists also overlapped with, and
departed from, dependency (e.g., Frank) and world system theorists (e.g.,
Wallerstein) who subsumed precapitalist modes of production under the
capitalist mode, as expressed by Wolpe:

The appearance of capitalismwhether as the result of internal development as in Europe

or external imposition as in the case of the coloniessignaled the more or less immediate
and inevitable disintegration of the pre-capitalist modes of production and the subsumption
of the agents of these modes under the capitalist relations of production (Wolpe 1980, 2).
Marx had studied precapitalist societies in relation to the development of
capitalism but he also had alluded to a pre-capitalist tendency (e.g., the Asiatic
mode of production) to resist capitalism (Marx Vol. Ill, 1972, 328; Meillassoux
1972, 89). Furthermore, world system theorists reduce the relationship between
pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production to a general one-way process
that largely ignores local interactions. Other Marxists examining these local
THE ILLUSION OF "CATCHING-UP DEVELOPMENT" 39

interactions stipulate that pre-capitalist modes and capitalist intersections do not

always lead to capitalist relations, due to widespread resistance to the capitalist
mode. While such resistance sometimes occurs within the context of the
capitalist mode of production in terms of improving its very conditions, at other
times it represents a direct challenge to capitalism, and calls for its replacement
by another mode of production altogether.
For example, Cebu's liberational BECs reflect not only a struggle for land
and living conditions, but also a struggle against Western cultural imperialism.
Above all, they struggle against the ideological distortions, false consciousness,
and fetishisms of capitalism. A culturally specific mode of production model
provides one entry point for understanding the alternative development plan of
the BECs. As a non-essentialist model, a modes of production concept can look
at changes occurring from all sides, be it gender, history, environment, or
religion.
Beyond the neoMarxist explanatory frameworks, my presentation of Cebu's
underdevelopment is informed by Carol Smith's (1996, 25) argument that we
must understand the particular characteristics of the state in the poorer countries
of the Third World because state policies ultimately determine local
development priorities and practices. While Eric Wolf (1982) and Sidney Mintz
(1985) have looked at the rise of capitalism as a new social form, neither of
them has examined the nature of the capitalist state. Although Clifford Geertz
(1963) looked at the rise of the newly developed nation, he did so by using
modernization theory, and modernization theory was challenged by the
neoMarxist world system and mode of production theorists. Neither the local
government nor community can be understood without understanding how they
are mutually constituted. That is, ideological underpinnings of contemporary
development processes must be separated out for purposes of analysis, and they
need to be examined in conjunction with the role of the state and in relation to
international organizations and the global interstate system.
Up until the early 1980s, international organizations primarily saw Third
World development as a capital-intensive investment geared toward the
enhancement of the material conditions of the donor countries (e.g., the United
States and Britain), not the interests of the peoples of other countries (Escobar
1995). Thus, they poured a lot of money into developing countries like the
Philippines to build infrastructure like roads and bridges to speed up the flow of
produce for export. The result of this huge influx of capital into the developing
world was that the Third World states became incredibly indebted. Hence, today
the emphasis of the international organizations like the International Monetary
Fund and World Bank is on restructuring the Third World debts and grassroots
development through the nongovernmental organization community.
Poor states like the Philippines ordinarily are weak in comparison to those in
the North, which afford most of their citizens with basic social services and
wages sufficient to live on. Strong states receive ample support from taxpaying
citizens. In contrast, the Philippine government cannot provide a living wage for
the majority of its citizens whose taxes cannot support the state, although
40 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

remittances sent back home by overseas Filipino migrant workers (nurses, low-
paid domestic workers, construction workers, janitors, entertainers, prostitutes)
help to fund the state's external debt payments. Thus, the Philippine government
gains its legitimacy, power, and authority not from local constituents but from
outside supervisory powers like the United States and international
organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, who in
exchange for restructuring the Philippine debt by lowering interest rates and
providing a longer debt repayment schedule are allowed to intervene in planning
and managing the local economy through conditions attached to the new loan
package. Hence, it is the voluntary and non-profit-oriented (e.g., the Basic
Christian Community organizers, sustainable development agricultural teams,
mobile medical clinics, justice and peace desks, women's centers) that are
expected to provide basic human services in the Philippines that under ordinary
circumstances would have been the responsibility of the government. This
creates an untenable situation. On the one side, international lending
organizations prefer NGOs because they are cost efficient relying primarily on
volunteers and financial support from First World churches and human rights
organizations. On the other side, as Smith argues (1996), weak states like the
Philippine state do not really appreciate NGOs. NGOs and peoples' movements
like the Basic Ecclesial Communities commonly call for land reform and the
sustainable use of national resources to meet local needs first before producing
for outsiders, whereas the state in a complex relationship with supranational
powers is pushing with military force to create the circumstances for increasing
production for export and attracting multinational corporations to its shores.
A close look at the poverty profile of modern Cebu, is enough to show that
catching up development is a smoke screen analogous to media hype, what
Baudrillard (1975) terms simulacra, that screens out from view the realities of
the local majority.
Cebu, the metropolitan hub of the central Philippines, has one of the highest
population densities of the nation's 7000 islands, with a population of 2.6
million. Cebu City, the island's capital, has an international airport, well-
sheltered harbor, and a successful export processing zone on nearby Mactan
Island, which makes it an attractive site for local and international entrepreneurs.
It is home to 6 universities, 39 colleges, and 1,181 private and public elementary
schools, and a workforce that is generally well educated and English speaking.
Supported by a strong local business community, Cebu has been given a
preferential status by the national government, although support from the central
government was not forthcoming until after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in
1986. Since 1987, Cebu has outcompeted Manila and the rest of the country in
the capitalization of new businesses. The former Ramos administration in its
Medium Term Development Plan 1993-1996 singled Cebu as "one of the
leading growth centers in the South." Prepared under the supervision of the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the Ramos plan consisted of an
economic track of more structural adjustments and economic liberalization
policies designed to launch the Philippine economy even further into the world
THE ILLUSION OF "CATCHING-UP DEVELOPMENT" 41

capitalist market. In 1993, Cebu managed to attract 82% of the total investment
in the Visayan region and about 4% of the total national investment (Remedio
1993, 2). Standard accounts all saw a burst of economic activity. However,
looking at the underside of modern Cebu revealed a different picture of high
poverty incidence, inequitable income distribution, low agricultural productivity,
poor resource management, environmental degradation, high underemployment,
and inadequate provision of basic social services, which renders economic
growth unsustainable.
Cebu's economic boom may have favored a select few exporters and
industries, but the overwhelming majority of residents experienced no boom.
Technocrats manipulate Cebu's image to sell the island to outside investors.
Leading wealthy families manipulate and change land classifications as money
goes to urban or rural projects. Hence, anyone genuinely interested in land
reform or improving agriculture for farmers is being hampered from doing so.
Thirty-eight percent of the total land area in Cebu was classified as agricultural
land under the Marcos regime, but this land is being reclassified.1 Some real
estate agents, for example, former governor Lito Osmena, have so over
speculated that average income earners today cannot dream of owning land. For
example, in 1986, farmland located in what is now the vicinity of the Ayala's
Cebu Business Park commanded only a price of P400 to P500 per square meter.
By 1991, Ayala successfully pre-sold all of its lots at the Cebu Business Park at
the price of PI4, 000 per square meter for regular lots and PI6, 000 per square
meter for accent lots (Ong-Van 1991, 3). Another example, in 1989, after the
police and military forced thousands of poor peasants to flee their land, the
government constructed the transcentral highway, a road network from Cebu
City, crossing its mountain barangays to Balamban. Then, in 1990, prices of
land skyrocketed as the Cebu government launched the selling of Cebu land and
seas to tourists and foreign investors and multinational corporations. The main
recipients of these investment opportunities were foreign investors, especially
Japanese and Taiwanese investors, the Ayalas, Sys, Gokongweis, Gaisanos,
Lhuillers, and other Chinese and Filipino elite families (Dones 1992, 15).
Out of 49 enterprises registered at the Mactan Export Processing Zone only
eight were Filipino owned as of 1992 {List of Zone Enterprises 1992). There
were practically no unions allowed inside the Mactan Export Processing Zone.
Even requests for study tours inside its premises were generally not granted.
Industries move to Cebu not only because of its strategic location as a clearing-
house area and because of its large available labor pool, but because local wages
of skilled laborers are kept low. For example, November 30, 1993, laborers
across the nation demonstrated, threatened strikes, and asked for a 35 peso wage
increase across the board in their salaries. As a result, salaries of laborers
increased at an average of 25 to 27 pesos everywhere else in the nation except in
Cebu where salaries were increased a mere 5 to 10 pesos, and even then a
number of local businesses in Cebu applied for exemptions from this wage
increase (Villamor 1993). Meanwhile, factory workers and service industry
workers in Cebu, generally, are hired on a three-month contractual basis, rather
42 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

than on a permanent basis. Employers no doubt hire short-term workers to avoid

paying social security and other benefits. Workers often earn less than their
contracts state; yet must agree to sign as a condition of employment.
Likewise contributing to Cebu's underdevelopment is tourism. Local agents
tout Cebu's beautiful beaches and "hospitality girls." Many natural beaches are
vanishing into tourist resorts and fishponds, which ruin coral reefs and
mangroves (Juario, Avila, and Lastimosa 1992; and Broad and Cavanagh 1993,
77). There are no public beaches left on Mactan or Lapu Lapu, and there are
very few public beaches left in Argao and Moaboal. The entrance fee of almost
all of the beaches presently is too expensive for Filipino average income earners
to use them. Cebu's natural beaches are "beach lined" into neatly partitioned
resort areas. Beach lining involves blasting coral beds, bulldozing coastal
beaches flat, and then partitioning them by cement sea walls which serve as
catchments for privately owned resort sand beds, or beaches. Although, for
example, Governor De la Cerna has been trying to implement a law that
prohibits the fencing off of beach points in this manner, this law is still not
enforced, and most land titles go to the low tide mark anyway. Visitors arriving
from America, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, and Europe are
commonly sex tourists attracted to prostitutes and mail order brides who are
advertised in pen pal and erotic magazines and on the Internet (see Law 1993).
In 1992 (Women's Resource Center Cebu), some 1,500 commercial sex workers
were registered in Cebu City, and 2,678 in the province, not to mention
unregistered commercial sex workers. The city's streets abound with poor
vendors, homeless people, beggars, handicapped, mentally ill, elderly, and street
children. Badjaos (sea-gypsies) who dive alongside cruise ships for coins thrown
by passengers, now beg on the island's capital streets by silently dancing as if
swimming to tourists and other passerbys. Between 1978 and 1980, I personally
visited two Badjao communities around the port area that no longer existed in
1993. They then made their living traveling in outrigger canoes around the
Visayas and Mindanao, to dive for exotic shells and pearls that were sold to
jewelry manufacturers in Manila (see Neri 1979).
There are an estimated 5,000 street children in Cebu City alone. They are
malnourished, out of school due to a lack of funds, and vulnerable, for example,
to being victimized by pedophiles, slave traders, and abusive employers. Many
of them are vulnerable to becoming addicted to drugs such as glue inhalants.
There is an umbrella coalition of thirteen nongovernmental organizations for
street children, including one drop-in center. The drop-in center may be more
accurately called a holding center because the children are merely held there
after they are picked-up by the Task Force for Street Children, which is based in
the same center. Children are held in this center for approximately one month,
while they are awaiting placement in the other centers. There were no teachers,
doctors, nurses, or psychologists on the staff of the drop-in center in 1993,
although they are on call for emergency cases. This drop-in center is not a place
where street children can freely drop in for a free meal, educational or
recreational activities. If the children run away more than three times from this
THE ILLUSION OF "CATCHING-UP DEVELOPMENT" 43

Center or any of the other Centers, the next time the child is arrested by the Task
Force for Street Children she or he is brought to the Water Front Police Station
in Pier 1, where the child is imprisoned in a cell separate from the adult
prisoners.
The Department of Social Welfare also provides overnight shelter (a small
ward with one broken bed) for women and children but not men who must sleep
in the corridor. Technically, it provides shelter for only one night, though I
observed, this rule is not rigidly applied. Also, its orphanage was destroyed by
fire December 23, 1992. The Department of Social Welfare is undergoing
devolution, meaning that it is no longer under the central government in Manila
but local mayors. In 1991 the Local Government Code was implemented, which
decentralized government functions and control. Local governments were made
responsible for planning, funding, and budgeting their local government
agencies using locally generated revenues. Under the new devolution of the
government the Department of Social Welfare was placed under the jurisdiction
of the provincial and municipal governments. One social worker explained,
"They now even need to befriend local mayors to help the poor, and if the
mayors are not welfare oriented but infrastructure oriented what happens to the
people?" The social welfare department is understaffed, and its social workers
are underpaid and working overtime with limited facilities.
More generally, Cebu has one of the nation's highest incidences of
malnutrition and poverty. Data from the Department of Health in 1992 indicated
that out of 300,000 children under 7 years old weighed under the Operation
Timbang Program, nearly two-thirds suffered from malnutrition. Official
statistics of the Regional Development Council (Sun Star daily newspaper,
March 18, 1995) showed that 47% of the region's families fell below the
poverty line. The incidence of poverty increased two percentage points between
1989 and 1991 representing an increment of 3.7 poor families. The poverty
threshold (defined as the minimum average above-poverty monthly income for a
family of six) was estimated (1992) as P5, 831.49 ($208.27) for the National
Capital Region and P5, 496.70 ($196.31) for rest of the country ($1.00 U.S.
fluctuated around 28 pesos in 1994). In Cebu, the average monthly basic
minimum wage for 1992 stood at P2, 640.50 ($94.30).
Cebu's development boom has little room for health care. Although there are
a number of private hospitals in Cebu, there are only two public hospitals (Cebu
Medical Center and Vincente Sotto Memorial Medical Center), which are both
constantly overcrowded, yet they do provide service to the poor. Patients alone
or in collaboration with government social workers, NGOs and charitable
organizations, have to provide for their own medicines and surgical supplies or
go without them. Another example: although there is a pharmacy in Vincente
Sotto Memorial Medical Center which supplies poor patients with injectable
medicines when in stock, this stock of injectable medicines is provided to
patients who are requested by a social worker to make a donation. The donations
are used to help restock this pharmacy. Other medicines in the form of tablets or
ointments are the responsibility of the patient, whose relatives have to find their
44 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

way to the few available NGOs and charitable organizations which specialize in
providing free medicine for Cebu's poor. Cebu's public hospitals do not have
fully equipped laboratories, so most patients' lab tests have to be done at other
private hospitals for a fee. As one doctor described the public hospital, "All we
have is a big building in which we often have to watch patients die due to a lack
of medicines."
In short, the illusion of development is based on the false premise that
economic growth will someday trickle-down to diminish the differences in
living standards between the rich and poor. What constitutes satisfactory
development and how might we attain it are questions not adequately addressed
in formal economic theories. As illustrated, conventional economics usually
measures success by quantitative means such as a rise in the GNP but what does
a rise in GNP have to do with Cebu's development? Beneath Cebu's alleged
boom the economy is unsustainable and impoverished. The Philippine
government neglects to promote basic social services, land reform, and
agriculture to improve conditions of life for the vast majority of local people
who are poor. In the face of this threat to their lives and livelihoods, many of
Cebu's residents have combined their energies in BECs toward achieving a
more justice-oriented and liberating development.

NOTE
1. Regional Physical Framework Plan CY 1990-2020, National Economic Development
Agency Region VII 1993.
Chapter 5

Struggle in the Uplands:

Christian Farmers in Cebu

This chapter, first, comments on the theology of struggle behind Cebu's BEC
movement, and second, examines one upland corn-farming community with a
BEC. Third, it looks at some of the problems that community organizers and
farmers face in realizing their goals for sustainable agricultural development.
It's findings suggest that organizers and funding agencies need to be flexible
enough to change their plans mid-stream to meet farmers' real perceived needs.
In general, Philippine theology of struggle expressed through the agencies of
BECs embraces two different ideological approaches. Those associated with the
Socialist Democrats differ from those linked to the National Democrats and
Popular Democrats. These liberational BECs, more political in practice than in
the literature, are not only Bible sharing groups but also political groups
organized under distinctly different political and ideological orientations. For
example, BEC organizers with the Socialist Democrats assume that the
Philippines is on the threshold of capitalism and address problems within this
framework. By contrast, BEC practitioners with the National Democrats see the
Philippines as semi-colonial and semi-feudal, and operate within this
framework. Yet, on the ground, such political affiliations are often ill-defined.
BECs are as variable as the parishes, priests, religious, and lay participants who
form them.
Philippine theology of struggle in the first place, is rooted in faith of a God
who acts in history. As in Latin America and Africa, Asian theologians of
struggle may use Marxist concepts, but they employ them in a non-dogmatic,
indigenous, and contextual manner. Theology of struggle of this sort, is
allegedly more of a methodology than a theology: local practitioners develop
their theology by learning dialectically from the situation of the poor, by
"getting in touch with the God in their history," and then Scripture. During the
course of my fieldwork (1993-1994) I distinguished between liberational BECs
and liturgical and developmental BECs in Cebu. A liberational BEC derives
from indigenous models of social and structural change, while liturgical and
46 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

developmental BECs stem from Western and local elite models of top-down
development (see Boff 1986). These three types of models overlap in an actual
BEC with one being dominant. Cebu's Archdiocesan BEC office organized
liturgical BECs (Bible Study groups). In contrast, the Basic Christian
Community Organizer's office organized liberational BECs. Although some
Bishops and priests unofficially approved it, the Basic Christian Community
office did not then have the insignia of the local archbishop, although I
understand that it later gained his favor. The remainder of this essay concerns
one such liberational model in an upland farm community in Cebu.

ETHNOGRAPHY OF AN UPLAND CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY

From 1993 to 1994, I lived one-half of each week, over a one-year period,
with my farmer hosts in "Kabukiran" (pseudonym). I chose this community,
which is distant from the center of Cebu City, for reasons of personal safety:
while some upland communities (e.g., Tuburan) were under military
surveillance and subject to human rights violations carried out by military
personnel under local government officials, Kabukiran was not highly
militarized. Its mayor, vice mayor, monsignor, barrio captain, church leaders,
and citizens appreciated my interest, although, aware of the mayor's staunch
anti-communism, I avoided sensitive discussions with all except the monsignor
and outside ecclesial organizers.
Kabukiran had been targeted by the central government for future
development; hence, the BEC organizers worked to prepare the farmers to resist
agents who may attempt to eject them from their land. They coordinated with
other NGOs like the Redemptorist Justice and Peace Desk and Task Force
Detainees to document any human rights abuses that may occur. BEC
participants also worked with the Visayan Integrated Community Assistance
Program (VICAP), which provided them with free training in organic farming
and sustainable agriculture. They chose VICAP because it does not use
capitalist-oriented development packages, even those that offer discounted seeds
and tools because it rejects packages that view agriculture fragmentally and
ignore indigenous values. VICAP also declines programs that reduce local
biodiversity (e.g., programs that intensify production through pesticides,
chemical fertilizers, and industrial technologies) and views bio and cultural
diversity as essentials of economic self-sufficiency. During seasonal activities
(Easter, Lent, and Advent) the BEC assisted the parish in preparing
presentations which touched on local life experiences such as issues of poverty,
political suppression, the dislocation of farmers from their land, and ecology.
Almost at the moment I met the BEC farmers, I decided to focus on this
community because of its comprehensive program, which included activities
ranging from social analysis and creative theater to health care and sustainable
agricultural development. I first contextualized the BEC by looking at some
geographic, socioeconomic, and historic data, collected in part by farmers and
NGO organizers as part of their labor apostolate. Their data combined with my
STRUGGLE IN THE UPLANDS 47

own presents their situation from their own point of view. I analyzed these
findings as an outside observer.
Kabukiran is located on a mountaintop some 100 kilometers from Cebu City.
With only one unpaved road leading to this barrio, travel is difficult. The road is
narrow and steep; during the rainy season parts are washed out completely. One
passenger jeep makes two trips daily to Kabukiran; several motorcycles are
available for hire. Because they cannot afford to pay for transportation, most
farmers walk to and from the town center to the public market and parish center.
The farmers are mostly tenants who cultivate corn and raise chickens, goats,
pigs, cows, and carabaos. Their homes are spread over hills with wide spaces
between them and constructed of light materials: cogon grass or coconut leaves
for roofs and bamboo (and, in some cases, hardwood lumber) for floors and
walls. Only the barrio captain and three landed families have homes partially of
concrete. There are 143 extended nuclear households, or 700 residents in
Kabukiran, divided into three neighborhoods, each with its small chapel. In
1993, only 200 people, representing thirty-nine households, participated in BEC
activities, apparently due to two factors: the main factor was that they have
small children at home and were too busy caring for their farms; they simply
lacked the time and freedom of movement for BEC work. Additionally, in 1987
the military and leading anti-Communist propagandists such as Jun Alcover of
BYLA radio visited this barrio and others to warn the farmers not to attend the
BEC because it was a "Communist front." Since that time, one paramilitary
informer reports BEC activities to police and military officials and the mayor.
According to a survey conducted by VICAP (1993), the average household
consists of five members. Those over sixty-five years old live in separate houses
adjacent to one of their married children, or with them. Male household heads
and single men and women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five often
migrate to neighboring towns or Cebu City, sometimes as students, though more
commonly as domestic servants, store employees, hotel employees, factory
workers, truck drivers, or construction workers. Farmers over forty tend to
remain in the barrio. Seventy-six percent of the farmers are tenants who
cultivate an average farm of 0.78 hectares. The other twenty-four percent are
owner-cultivators, with an average farm of 2.3 hectares. The most common
arrangement is one-third of the harvest goes to the landowner and two-thirds of
the harvest to the tenant. A few flatland tenants surrender fully one-half of their
harvest. Tenants are pressured to pay landowners cash, at the rate of twenty-five
centavos per harvested ear of corn. Absentee landlords (the local mayor, lawyers
and other professionals) live in the town center or Cebu City, while one retired
landlord resides in the barrio.
Local farmers recommenced to cultivate their traditional variety of white
corn in 1991 when the BEC introduced organic contour corn-farming
techniques. As one woman explained, "during the 1970s and 1980s, we had
cultivated a new variety of hybrid yellow corn but it attracted insects and
required costly chemical inputs and [petroleum-based] fertilizers. All of the
farmers now prefer traditional white corn to yellow corn because it can be stored
48 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

and used for a longer time." That same year, farmers were encouraged by
organizers to work cooperatively with alayon, traditional groups of farmers who
help each other in cultivation on a rotation basis. Although they once worked in
alayon by hiring each other for wages, they had little incentive to increase
production on their own plots due to landlords exacting an exorbitant proportion
of the harvest, and a large portion of the remaining harvest in payment for debts.
Thereafter, tenants depended on each other for cash income for their subsistence
and increased the quantities of rice that could be circulated in the village, rather
than leaving it for the landlord to claim. However, this proletarianization process
only increased their poverty. They now are combining their efforts to alleviate
their situation by working for each other in groups on an exchange basis, not for
wages. The decision of the farmers to adopt the BEC program and maintain their
livelihood in terms of use-value as opposed to an exchange-value orientation
also can be seen as a form of resistance based on cultural differences. As
elsewhere in Asia, South America, and Africa, Filipino peasant cultures differ
from the dominant cultures of European origin regarding land, food, and the
economy.
Some farmers have been tenants for less than twenty years. They became
tenants by mortgaging their land to other farmers or usurer-traders through a
mortgage arrangement known as prenda. As Cynthia Hallare-Lara (1992, 20)
explained, prenda compels farmers to surrender their land title, and in some
cases tilling rights, to other farmers or usurer-traders for cash over time. They
usually work the land as farm workers while it is mortgaged, which takes an
average of two to five years. Such a condition occurs when farmers are deeply
indebted or lack capital for production. In the case of Kabukiran, many tenant
farmers became indebted during the 1970s and 1980s when they borrowed
money to buy fertilizers to cultivate new high yielding varieties of corn in vogue
due to the Green Revolution. These farmers could not repay the loan balances in
times of drought or poor harvest, and mortgaged and subsequently lost their land
due to modernization.
The average yield of corn per household in Kabukiran is 210 kilograms per
hectare as of 1993. According to the BEC supervisor, the integrated organic
farming program of the BEC aims to increase production to 400 kilograms per
hectare. Given present farm sizes, the average yield of 210 kilos per hectare
cannot meet a typical family's daily subsistence. The farmers usually raise and
sell poultry and livestock to purchase dried fish. In times of drought or poor
harvest, their diet consists of dried fish and root crops like camote and cassava,
high in carbohydrates and low in protein. Besides corn, farmers cultivate
peanuts, cassava, ipil-ipil, madre de cacao, peppers, papaya, tomatoes, and
bananas. Except for ipil-ipil and cassava, these crops are scarce and marginal to
corn due to the dry soil conditions and lack of forest cover and water. Some
farmers walk to the seashore evenings during low tide to collect and gather shell
fish to supplement their family's diet.
Due to the steep and bare terrain, soil erosion constantly concerns the
farmers. As part of their BEC work, some have started to raise earthworms and
STRUGGLE IN THE UPLANDS 49

make organic compost from local products (manure, cacao leaves, corn cobs,
and banana stems) to improve soil fertility. The topsoil, which ranges between
ten to zero centimeters, is heavily mixed with rock. There are so many rocks in
the cornfields that farmers often dig knee-deep in stones before they reached a
viable layer of soil. They commonly borrow money from usurer-traders to raise
poultry and livestock for trade or sale, and sell their produce to these traders for
low prices because of their earlier loans. Farmers typically sell their poultry and
livestock at a local rotating market on Saturdays, or to traders who go directly to
their homes. The typical farmer's net income per month is 100 pesos ($4.00) or
less, excluding his/her share of the harvest used for food. The range of the net
income of corn farmers across the nation for a hectare per cropping year for crop
year 1990-1991, ranged between 368 pesos and 5,000 pesos per year, as
calculated by the Philippine Peasant Institute. The monthly income of the
farmers in Kabukiran, not unlike that of most corn farmers in the Philippines,
falls substantially below the poverty threshold level of 3,864 pesos per month or
122 pesos per day (Hallare-Lara 1992, 25, 27).
Bypassing usurer-traders and creditor-landlords, which offer high-interest
loans (twenty to thirty percent interest per month), BEC participants recently
secured a low-interest loan through the parish monsignor in the town center. The
monsignor borrowed the loan (at 1.5 percent interest per month from a Cebu
Archdiocesan church foundation for the indigent) on behalf of the farmers who
used it to buy cows, goats, and chickens. After about four months they were to
divide the profit of the sale of the original cow, goat, or chicken between
themselves and the parish. Accordingly, two-thirds of the profit went to the
caretaker, one-sixth to the BEC, and one-sixth to the BEC parish fund, which
serves as a revolving community fund for emergenciesfor example, when a
goat dies or fails to gain weight or produce offspring. This loan program enables
farmers to avoid high-interest loans and other disproportionate sharing
arrangements from local creditors to start their income-generating projects. Yet
many BEC farmers cannot sell their chickens locally because they are branded
"Communist chickens" by some non-BEC neighbors. Members continue to be
(mis) labeled "Communists" due to a ten-year propaganda campaign waged
presently by a local paramilitary informant, a resident landlord, and others who
report to landlord-politicians in the town center. In emergencies, death or serious
illness, BEC farmers must sell their produce to usurer-traders for quick cash.
The primary tools of the corn farmers are a pick mattock for land
preparation, and a bolo for weeding. Repairs and sharpening are done in the
town center because there is no local blacksmith. Plowing is possible only in the
foothills; in 1993 two farmers owned a carabao. Most upland farmers have their
own handcrafted stone grinders, which they share with neighbors. Only rarely,
when a harvest is large, will a farmer go to the town center for milling.
Except for an elementary school with nine teachers, no other government
facilities or services exist in this mountain barrio. Most are barely literate, have
only an elementary school education at best, and often cannot afford to send
their children to school beyond the elementary level. Although a health clinic
50 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

stood in the barrio next to the school, it was vacant in 1993: the Department of
Social Welfare midwife never came. One nurse, one social worker, and one
midwife are on duty daily in the clinic at the town center to serve 22,000 people.
Although uplanders usually treat illnesses with home remedies, they sometimes
travel to the clinic for diagnosis or referral. When hospitalization is necessary,
they need a written referral, or proof of their indigent status, from town health
workers to be admitted for treatment at the public hospital in Cebu City.
According to the BEC volunteer health worker, most adult farmers are
anemic. Children have diarrhea due to unsanitary water. Respiratory illnesses
like asthma, coughs, colds, and pneumonia are common. A few children suffer
such ailments as hydrocephalus and deafness; adults with leprosy live in the
peripheries of Kabukiran.
Many local farmers own radios. Postal services reach the barrio through the
barrio captain's residence. Only one family, that of the schoolteacher whose
husband works at an international hotel in Cebu City, owns a TV and stereo,
having installed a generator and purchased a small TV and stereo at the end of
1993. Not even the barrio captain or the resident landlord has a TV or stereo,
although one family has a Karaoke, connected to a motorcycle battery for use on
special occasions such as birthdays. Light posts are set up at the periphery of
Kabukiran, but there is no electricity. As one farmer explained, "Everything is
political around here. We were supposed to have electricitylook, the light
posts are all set upbut we didn't vote for the mayor, so the electricity was
never extended to our barrio. They have ways of knowing who votes for who."
Residents use kerosene to cook and to light their homes. Instead of a kerosene
lamp or flashlight, they light the ends of banana palms to illuminate their way
during evening walks. They bathe and obtain drinking water at natural running
springs and artisan wells in the foothills, which usually dry up in the summer.

COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT AND COLLECTIVE ACTION

In 1986, the Redemptorist mission team (a newly ordained priest and several
seminarians and lay workers) established the BEC in Kabukiran, and until 1988
lived with the uplanders, organizing the predominantly Catholic community into
committeesworship committee, education committee, service committee,
temporality committee, and youth committee (WESTY)to involve the
community in the liturgy.
Prior to the BEC, a priest from the town visited Kabukiran to say Mass on
special occasions such as barrio feast days or weddings. He brought his sacristan
and choir, and the resident landlord, whose great-grandparents donated the land
on which the first chapel was built in 1881, paid him, usually. According to this
landlord, the chapel was constructed when eight persons carried the parish priest
up the mountain with a covered hardwood chair; no road existed until 1957. The
portable chair served a dual purpose: it also was a confessional box. "The priest
in those days was very strict, not like the priests today. In those days, he was
like a saint carried like a god to the people. When he was being carried he didn't
STRUGGLE IN THE UPLANDS 51

want to be stared at, so he peeked out of the curtain and when people stared, he
closed the curtain quickly making a face," the landlord said. His wife organized
the Legion of Mary during World War II, and the couple has been in charge of
the chapel organization since. Only when the BEC was established did the
routine operation of the chapel change:

When the Redemptorists came, the priest asked us to turn the chapel over to the farmers.
But, my mother and father told us not to let someone else take charge of the chapel. I'm the
one who built the building. That priest is not even a priest. He has a wife. He's a
Communist. He's not devoted to his career as a priest because he has a wife. (Adto na lang
dito na kanya communista siya.) I don't want my special visitors mingling with those people
[the tenant farmers] not using spoons. He [the priest] had the wrong idea. He would not let
us serve our special guests in the chapel. Many of our guests come from as far as Cebu City.
So, we told the farmers they would no longer get the chapel. We would donate another
portion of the lot to build them a chapel because that is a private chapel, that's our building
and lot.

So, the farmers built a small chapel by the barrio captain's house but it's a failure. I would
not turn over a place that has already been made sacred by a Mass. We would not have any
entertainment for our guests from the town. We prefer to invite the priest and our visitors
only. I'm not entertaining all those people who eat with their hands. That's why we rejected
the priest's proposal, because we have visitors from the city and I will not let them squat on
the floor. I will not accept that my visitors be brought to the chapel to mingle with all those
people there from low classes. No, I have built the chapel and paid all the obligations of the
priest.

According to the Redemptorist team leader who later helped establish the
BCC-CO office in Cebu City, the mission team changed its organizing strategy
on arrival in Kabukiran: at their previous mission areas, where they focused on
social problems by asking uncomfortable questions, they had been labeled as
Communists. As he explained:

So, we zeroed-in on the chapel as a point of entry to organize a BEC in Kabukiran. By

zeroing-in on the chapel, we asked several questions which led to the same kinds of
uncomfortable questions we asked in our earlier mission areas. For example, we asked:
Who owns the land where the chapel stands? How is the chapel run? Who runs it? What
happens during fiestas? The parish priest was reacting, he said when out of season we only
find goats in the chapel (meaning that the chapel was hardly used at all), but later he
realized that this was important.

In effect, the team assessed the barrio's socio-economic, political, cultural,

ecological, and historical plight through the perspective of religion. In other
words, the BEC accounted for the economic infrastructure through the point of
the religious-ideological and political superstructure because the farmers'
collective position as a class in relation to other more dominant classes is a
product of these combined forces. The team organized traditional religious
activities such as a dawn rosary in which processioners stopped to call out
petitions for victims of militarization. The goal was to make faith integral, not
52 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

dichotomized (a faith in which spirituality is limited to the sacristy). The team

organized BECs by providing seminars in Kabukiran and five neighboring
barriosfor example, daily seminars five days a week for six months, each in a
different barrio. They organized the people at the chapel level into committees
(WESTY). For example, when the priest arrived, a worship committee operated.
For a baptism, the committee on education worked. When the chapel needed
repair, the service committee worked and kept the funds. The team formed the
youth committee that participated in such events as cultural presentations and
theatrical social satires on religious holidays or BEC solidarity nights.
In 1987, led by a resident Civilian Armed Forces Government Units
(CAFGU) member, a military troop with armored tanks and guns arrived in
Kabukiran. To intimidate, they nailed a dog to the parish church door. They
threatened several farmers with death for participating in the BEC. At a forum
they warned residents that "rebels" were starting to operate in the area, a
Communist group of two women and one man going from house to house. One
of the women was a Sister, and the man was a Father. They distributed a list of
forty so-called "red" priests. The new monsignor from the town center who
brought a dozen diocesan seminarians recorded these announcements. He had
recently helped establish the BEC fellowship of priests. Some farmers stated that
the BEC was performing a service for the community. The military accused the
BEC of forcing farmers to join. But farmers stated that it was the military, not
the BEC, who threatened them if they continued their Bible meetings. Finally,
the mayor announced "there were no Communists in his barrio. The BEC was
welcome as long as it provided a service for the community." But he stipulated
that he would "get them if any monkey business was going on." In 1993, the
mayor repeated his warning to me when he allowed me to conduct fieldwork in
Kabukiran. He also cited an ordinance requiring all outsiders to register at his
office. This ordinance was a cause of consternation among BEC personnel who
frequently brought in church groups, student interns, and NGO personnel from
Cebu City, Europe, and Japan.
The next year, 1988, the mission team was called back by their religious
superiors to the main seminary in Cebu City. In the words of one Redemptorist
authority on the subject:

They over-politicized the BEC and got us a bad name for being a provocateur and that
eventually excluded us. In the eyes of the establishment, for example, the Rotary Club and
the Lions Club, the Redemptorist were already considered subversive. When the poor begin
to organize they are called subversive. Our own Fathers [superiors] were not being very
strong about it, but our mission team read and reflected on the Bible and brought people
together. They really stay in the barrios. Our lay missionaries are criticized but they really
have merit.

The team's leader resigned from the priesthood, and continued his work at
the BCC-CO office. In 1989, community organizers from this office were
assigned to Kabukiran. Four joined the staff of the monsignor in the town center;
one became the province's ecclesial community supervisor.
STRUGGLE IN THE UPLANDS 53

According to the monsignor, the ecclesial community in Kabukiran seeks

self-reliance, with local resources. While the BEC laity had spearheaded the
movement on Leyte and Samar Islands, it was difficult for lay people to work
for the BEC. In Negros, however, they worked within the hierarchy and
transformed both church and hierarchy. In the late 1980s, BEC organizers in
Cebu decided to use this experience to start BECs through priests. Organizers
assist local (diocesan) priests in planning, conceptualizing, and training BEC
participants. They stay until participants can stand on their own, and then
transfer to another community.
The supervisor clarified that from 1987 to 1988 the monsignor could not
implement the BEC because of anti-communist propaganda:

The Redemptorist mission team started the BEC program but there was lots of trouble.
[Kabukiran] was placed under military surveillance. One project leader was threatened with
death. Military trucks with guns were in the area. We were not able to start work.
Monsignor was still at the integration level [learning about the local situation]. He was a
new parish priest then. We only started our work in 1989.

At that time, the BEC offered leadership seminars endorsed by the Synod of
Cebu. According to parish staff, farmers from the mountain barrios were active
and dedicated participants in the BEC leadership training seminars. One farmer
from Kabukiran was later elected as the local Vice Mayor because he was so
popular in the BEC formation team.
In 1990, the BEC staff introduced WESTY committees at the parish level
but the Pastoral Council (of professors, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and business
professionals) would not allow farmers to chair committees. So as not to
antagonize the professionals, the BEC implemented a parallel organization for
the farmers, the Structure of Care, which served the same functions as WESTY.
According to the BEC supervisor, "there were then so many committees that
they no longer functioned." The parish staff met with the Parish Council once a
month, but the agenda invariably concerned matters of finance and construction
of projects, like renovating the plaza or the church.
Also in 1990, the parish staff and the coordinator of an agricultural NGO
conducted a preliminary socio-economic survey in the upland Kabukiran, but
results were never taken seriously by the Parish Council, nor would the Council
agree to meet with the Executive Board of the Structure of Care for discussions.
The BEC participants reformulated their vision. They decided not to limit their
work to the parish center but to facilitate organization in the mountain barrios.
Their preliminary survey and experience of the Redemptorist mission in
Kabukiran told them that the poor couldn't be organized through the liturgical
aspect alone, because of their economic situation. They concentrated on upland
socioeconomic projects.
Since 1991 to present, the BEC farmers have worked with an agricultural
extension NGO (VICAP) to improve their circumstances. First, the parish
organizers invited VICAP to conduct a seminar on sustainable agricultural
development in Kabukiran. The multidisciplinary agricultural team provided
54 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

workshops on organic farming, contour farming, reforestation, vermiculture,

herbal gardening and health care, and provided some of the farmer
representatives with earthworms and seedlings. The team selected topics on
sustainable agricultural development; their 1990 preliminary survey had
demonstrated a need for such. According to the former coordinator:

The most appropriate and immediate response the BEC program had to implement, at that
time, was contour farming because it offered the most effective and immediate means to
control soil erosion. If the farmers did not solve the immediate problem in soil erosion, they
could not expect to have food sufficiency in agriculture. There are other components of
contour farming, livestock raising, tree planting, and organic compost production. We did
not encourage synthetic fertilizers because it destroys the nitrogen content of the soil. But
organic compost restores soil nutrients, and it is not ecologically hazardous.

In 1992, the VICAP selected Kabukiran as their number one pilot area on
Cebu Island. At the same time, a new coordinator brought a different strategy
for implementing the BEC program. Administrators had retired the previous
coordinator that same year due to his misuse of funds (e.g., he embezzled a
substantial amount of money that was supposed to be used to purchase a jeep,
and he sent grant proposals in VICAP's name to foreign donors without
VICAP's knowledge). But, perhaps due to his retirement from office having
been handled internally in private, the decision of the administrators was not
understood locally and was a cause of friction between BEC members and
VICAP agricultural specialists in Kabukiran. The former coordinator with the
assistance of both the monsignor and BEC supervisor, the latter who actually
acted on her own without consulting her head office, responded to the
administrators' decision by establishing a second, competing NGO in the area
but, this newly emerging NGO was still in the planning stages and although
operating, it was not an officially recognized NGO. In 1993, this group working
with the BEC implemented a communal farm. As one farmer involved
commented:

This [communal farming] movement came into existence after we [local farmers and BEC
organizers] met together as a group and reflected that it is futile to work while our
individual families are hungry and dying. So, we decided to put together our goats and
chickens. One tenant farmer offered his land area so that we would have a place for our
animals and farms. I hope that through our united forces and binding interest that we could
be an example of our barangay that some of us may open their eyes that this BEC gives us a
road of freedom.

In my analysis of this activity, I found the communal farmers to be

supportive of each other and aware of their own circumstances. They understood
that they participated in both the capitalist market system and their own
subsistence economy, and that they were being further impoverished by those
who controlled commercial transactions. Hence, the farmers attempted to lessen
their contact with the marketplace by pooling their resources for themselves. In
contrast to the acquisitive market model, the local communal model, an
STRUGGLE IN THE UPLANDS 55

extension of the BEC, was based on use-value: the everyday use of local
resources in their surrounding natural environment.
That same year in 1993, three BEC members who were being trained as local
leaders with a BEC organizer who was being similarly trained were required to
go to the neighboring mountain to collect basic demographic and household
data. This is not an easy task, and in this way they are vulnerable to being used
to collect data for interested third parties and to pioneer in certain areas. Also,
the BEC field representatives are vulnerable to being used by bogus
nongovernmental organizers to introduce them to an area. A lot of manipulation
is going on beside some altruism. Local residents can gain from their
relationship with BEC community organizers and NGOs who steadfastly bring
innovations, funds, and connections to new social networks. They can also loose
valuable time and resources by accommodating organizers who "come and go."
Perhaps as one facilitator said, local leaders who learn to collect
socioeconomic data by practicing on their neighbors are also learning to
organize and fend for themselves against manipulation by outsiders. They are
learning, for example, to analyze and to select what they need from different
NGOs for their communities, rather than to see their community as a mere
"pilot" area of a particular NGO in competition with other NGOs. These local
leaders are also being groomed to evangelize their neighbors who are as
impoverished as themselves and who are most likely to believe them first before
any outside parish worker.
Meanwhile, VICAP conducted a Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) of
Kabukiran's socio-economic conditions. According to the director, they adopted
the PRA strategy "to involve the farmers as equal partners in defining local
problems." Their aim was to eradicate the outmoded idea by which farmers saw
themselves as beneficiaries of an agricultural program: "We are trying to erase
this idea because it encourages them [the farmers] to depend on us for doleouts."
The NGO also wanted "to make the farmers' alayon more participatory, to make
alayon include the community by training the farmers to work collectively, in
larger numbers." Another aim was to encourage farmers in their traditional pre-
capitalist practices, such as "not counting the hours they work." As the director
stated:

They [the farmers] are not yet business people. We're trying to retain the attitude that they
don't have to count. Their only capital is their labor and time. So, we try to encourage them
to work cooperatively because one way of getting enough or producing more resources is to
multiply their labor. We also do not have any alternatives because they do not have any
finances.

VICAP professionals met with BEC members to plan out a course of action
for the coming year. They spent seventeen days over five months listing and
prioritizing problems. With a nudge from the team, local farmers, composed
fairly equally of men and women drew a large map locating water sources and
types of farmlands, crops, and soils. They walked together with facilitators over
the terrain to crosscheck the map. They also listed their local problems in order
56 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

of priority. The whole process looked impressive from my outside perspective.

However, in reality it was the farmers who were teaching team members,
and not the reverse. They were frustrated because the same NGO under the old
director had already collected the same data by means of a rapid rural appraisal
method the previous year. The farmers wanted to move on to the next step and
began to complain openly at the meetings. I was told by one woman, "we
already discussed our socioeconomic problems last year with the former NGO
coordinator." 1 Another farmer surmised:

Agricultural trainings were provided for us [between 1991 and 1992] like the techniques of
composting and livestock raising. But, now VICAP has decided that those programs are not
ready to be launched. So, they gave us another training in looking at the real problems of
Kabukiran, and at what we want to obtain. In the beginning, the members were interesting
but they urged us to walk and look around the mountains. Afterwards, they asked us the
same questions again. At this point I felt bored and tired. So, I started complaining until the
time of evaluation. They evaluated me. They said that I destroyed the purpose of the PRA.
So, I decided to stop attending their meetings. Now almost all of us here in my sitio
[neighborhood], especially my neighbors do not attend the NGO meetings or seminars.

To make matters worse, the former coordinator began spreading rumors after
his dismissal locally by misleading the farmers into believing that VICAP was
withholding funds designated for the livestock-raising project that he had
scheduled for 1993. While some farmers viewed the open forum of debate and
discussion to be healthy, others simply walked away from the meetings. One
male elder who left in frustration described their general discontent:

At the general assembly there were seven projects presented [by the NGO staff] but only the
multipurpose center won as the first project. Most of the people preferred the livestock-
raising project to be first [for reasons of convenience, not individualism] because livestock
can be raised in our backyards and it is tied-up with our daily needs. As for myself it would
be better if livestock raising were the first project because it would have encouraged the
[farmer] participants. But the NGO heads indirectly manipulated the selection of projects.
The reaction I obseived from my colleagues was that they felt dry, discouraged, and some
of them stopped attending the meetings because the NGO heads did not launch the
livestock-raising project. The problem of the multipurpose center is that there is no budget,
and we have to solicit materials for this project and spend days in building it.

A female leader rejoined:

The NGO taught us how to reconstruct our barren land. They encouraged us to plant a
variety of trees in our farm lots. They gave us earthworms to improve our soil's fertility. As
a whole the NGO is good and it helps us to know about our basic problems. It helps us to
know the causes of our problems such as poverty and inequality of distribution of wealth
among the Filipino community. The NGO also helped us establish our integrated BEC.

The problems of development in rural communities are complex, but different

seemingly contradictory views often do make sense depending upon the direction
from which one is looking at them.
STRUGGLE IN THE UPLANDS 57

The NGO team working with the mountain BEC has its own story as well, and
it is easy to believe in their good intentions; they are sincerely and genuinely
working and living with the farmers. Most important, they are working out their
problems and misunderstandings. No sooner had the controversy begun than it
subsided, the BEC members and VICAP literally agreed, "to let go of the past and
work for a new tomorrow" (local catechist).
Members of the mountain BEC who are formed in alayon meet collectively to
read and reflect upon the Bible regularlyfor example, on birthdays and special
occasions that occur once or twice a month. These Bible sharing activities
motivate, validate, and solidify the BEC community for cooperation and economic
and political action. Participants view Bible sharing as a time of interaction and
learning from one another's interpretations, rather than as a form of reflection and
prayer (e.g., novenas and rosaries). They see Christ's faith-life experiences as an
expression of their own community values and faith. The message of Christ to
help one another and love one another serves to encourage families to help
neighbors by working (effectively with limited resources financially) for each
other without pay in an alayon. Males and females participate equally in reading
Scripture; their sharings may be called genuine. There is an element of spontaneity
in their reflections, absent from BECs under the guidance of religious and lay
leaders in town centers. For example, one member compared the resurrection of
Lazarus to the life of a caterpillar transformed into a butterfly, and so too can a
farmer's life become transformed, for example, by turning the sale of a cow into
land.
Yet I suspect that there is an element of compulsion in the farmers'
relationship with community organizers and the local church in the town center.
On the one hand, the church is in the midst of transition between the old ways
(fall/redemption spiritualities) and new (creation-centered) ways of being a
church, the latter of which BECs are the concrete expression. The mountain
farmers are now, unlike before, involved in the church. They read and share the
Bible together in their homes. Their religiosity binds them together in community.
The monsignor in the parish center recognizes them. On the other hand, however,
their religiosity continues to utilize Spanish colonial forms of piety and pre-
Vatican II religiosity, the invocation of saints, wearing of sacred amulets, novenas
for rain, grace, recovery, good health, and "good luck." They are expected to take
part in many religious observances and activities, including being pulled into
participation in the activities of the parish, where they now do most of the
volunteer work. Besides this, they are pulled into the BEC activities organized by
the facilitators.
Would not a humble BEC facilitator-priest in tune with the life of the
farmers reveal in his sermons that the heart of Christ, the church, is in the hearts
of the parish farmers? During the rainy season, which is the time for planting
corn, would not such a priest encourage the farmers to plant, rather than to
solicit their labor, food, and firewood for a lavish town fiesta? Farming is a
priority, more important than expensive, showy church activities and
celebrations in barrios and town centers. Or, is it as one priest explained, that
58 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

town fiestas and celebrations are a time for enjoyment for farmers who are
bonded together in a spirit of community during the busy period of land
preparation? As he interpreted it, any reason, for example, preparing children to
receive the sacrament of communion or for confirmation is reason enough to
organize them into community. Is the content less important than the
opportunity to keep parishioners ready to come together in community?
If this is so, is not this more in keeping with an underlying framework of
Christianity that is passive and hierarchical, rather than liberating and
democratic? That is, isn't this more in keeping with a Christianity that is
grounded in habit and routine, rather than in BECs that are aware of themselves
as mobile forces for liberation and social transformation?
So this chapter is brought to an end with more questions than it began. BECs
are not, as some critics claim them to be, "trouble-shooters." Rather, they are
steeped in theology of liberation. They are mediating and negotiating in the
field. They are unabashedly making errors and learning while they are
developing and changing their organizing skills and ideas on the basis of newer
experiences and realities. How is it that the BEC was not promoted by the local
archbishop who professed liberation theology to such an extent that he declared
1993 the official year of the BEC in Cebu? Could it be that the conservative
faction of the church hierarchy attempted to co-opt this liberational movement
by channeling donations to a parallel office that merely provided seminars on
how to start an evangelical Bible study group? Could it be that the conservative
faction tried to co-opt the liberational BEC movement to protect their own
interest in the prevailing sociopolitical and economic system? What are the
lessons to be learned from the human context of the BECs?
Finally, although the predominant economic model and viewpoint is that
Cebu is crossing the threshold of development, in another view, true
development will occur only if the broader model of the BEC as envisioned by
the Basic Christian Community Organizer's office is adopted. The bottom-up
approach of the BEC provides a more holistic development framework than
capitalist-oriented technological packages that may emphasize increasing
agricultural production for the market but diminish environmental productivity.
This has been illustrated here with a discussion of the Green Revolution's
effects on the ecology of Kabukirin. The example given also demonstrated that
there is a direct relationship between unsustainable development and the present
world capitalist system. This explains, in part, why the BEC farmers are
experimenting with organic farming techniques and more communally oriented
forms of agricultural production. A finding relevant to practitioners is that
farmers can get caught up in struggles internal to the NGO community. NGOs,
in turn, often work under pressure from funders who may expect them to
implement projects proposed on paper even when deemed inappropriate in
practice. An implication is that today's international funding agencies need to
create an inside dynamic that gives practitioners the freedom of integrity they
need to focus more on meeting the real needs of the farmers than their own.
STRUGGLE IN THE UPLANDS 59

NOTE
1. Readers interested in a review of Participatory Rural Appraisal and Rapid Rural
Appraisal methods are referred to Chambers (1991).
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Chapter 6

Beyond the Dumping Ground:

A Critique of the BEC Model
as a Strategy for Development
in an Urban Site

In the Philippines today the vast majority of the people live in a situation of
dehumanizing poverty and insecurity. This can be seen in the deprivation of land
and shelter, over-crowded urban squatters, forced mass migration, unavailability
of health and sanitary facilities, malnutrition, high infant mortality rate, lack of
education, starvation wages, unemployment. To these added the scandal that
stems from the luxurious way of living of the wealthy few and the concentration
of power in their hands (Redemptorist Mission Statement quoted in K. Caspar
1985,3).

This essay looks at a community of informal workers living and working in the
Cebu City dumpsite. The untenable conditions of the site work against the
organizers' intention to develop a more equitable and community-oriented
society. Hence, they over-emphasize income-generating strategies, instead of
social transformation, because they must help meet the basic needs of the
residents. Unlike rural BECs that may opt to lessen their contact with the
capitalist marketplace to develop more communal agrarian modes of practice,
urban BECs may not so easily meet their daily subsistence needs outside of the
market economy. This hypothesis raises other questions: Are church-led and
bottom-up initiatives enough without material support from the government? Is
there a point at which capitalism becomes a sufficiently dominant ideology to
render ineffective alternative courses of action, hence BECs become inadequate
modes of intervention on behalf of the oppressed?
In the following discussion, I examine the development dilemma of an
organized ecclesial community located in the Cebu City dumpsite: The
untenable situation in which this neighborhood is situated makes it really
impossible for the BEC to develop into a self-reliant and self-sufficient
community. Organizers promote the development of income-generating projects
and (saving) techniques that are directed toward meeting short-term goals
because they must help to meet the residents' daily needs for food, medicine,
and other necessities. Residents, in turn, seem to have bought into the worldview
62 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

and values of competitive individualism and capitalist rationality. Hence, the

BEC does not appear to be incorporating the holistic and integral development
approach of theologies of struggle. This essay, first, situates and examines the
development strategies of the BEC located in the Cebu City dumpsite. Then, it
suggests that the capitalist urban society "over-determines" the situation of the
scavenger community to such an extent that the BEC approach is ineffective in
promoting real social, cultural, and structural change, which raises other
interesting hypotheses.
In contrast to some of Cebu's other BECs that are located predominantly in
the rural uplands such as the one discussed in the previous chapter, and that can
be said to be more successfully incorporating theologies of struggle in practice,
the urban scavenger community discussed here illustrates some of the major
obstacles to local equitable development. It demonstrates how a religious and
political movement that is sound theoretically according to the criteria of a
liberational theology that emphasizes integral and holistic development can be
hindered by external forces linked to the larger capitalist structure. As well, the
government's plan discussed in the previous essays for developing Cebu into a
modern industrial estate and tourist resort blocks the initiative of the BEC
because it fails to implement the infrastructure (e.g., social services, affordable
housing in a clean and safe environment, job training, and employment) needed
to sustain local development initiatives.
The following case study is as self-explanatory as it is transparent: The
untenable environment and living conditions of the dumpsite controverts the
BECs intention to develop a self-reliant and self-sufficient community. The
priest and lay workers are concentrating on the day-to-day operation of income-
generating projects and the savings and loan cooperative because they must help
to meet the immediate survival needs of the residents in a capitalist urban
milieu. The residents are divided because their relationship to the capitalist
structure makes them individually competitive, not community oriented. Many
of them once were farmers engaged in subsistence agricultural communities
before they came to the city. Some were forced by military men to move off
their land to make way for the government's projects. Others migrated to the
city of their own volition to search for better economic opportunities. However,
they could not find decent paying jobs, or affordable housing, and turned to
scavenging to survive. As part of Cebu City's working poor, the residents have
introjected the worldview and values of economic rationalism and competitive
individualism instead of those of solidarity, resistance, and collective
organization of theologies of struggle. The fragmentation of their community is
related to the residents' tenuous and insecure relationship to the dominant
society.
Other researchers working in scavenger communities and squatter
settlements in Latin America and Manila have emphasized the notion of human
agency. They suggest that people actively participate in shaping their worlds,
rather than their actions being wholly dependent on capital or the intervention of
the state (see Long and Long 1992, 33, in Gardner and Lewis, 1996, 59). Lloyd
BEYOND THE DUMPING GROUND 63

(1979) referred to squatter settlements in Latin America as "slums of hope"

instead of "slums of despair." He looked at how squatters worked together to
obtain water, gain electricity, and roads to their settlements. In Manila, Abad
(1991) too focused on the adaptive strategies of scavengers at the Smokey
Mountain dumpsite, who worked hard to transform their economic and social
circumstances. However, the outcome of their concerted efforts depended
largely on the government's policies toward squatting. For example, the people
about whom Abad wrote were evicted with only a token few being relocated by
the government in 1997. As Perlman (1976) argued for the poor in Rio de
Janeiro, in my own work I have found that Cebu's informal workers engaged in
the recycling industry are being pushed to the margins of their society, even
while they work hard to improve themselves.
I first visited the Cebu site in 1979, and returned to do dissertation research
in 1993. At that time, I gained entrance into the community through the kind
assistance of Father Max Abalos, SVD, "Manny" Gorgonio, and other caring
friends and colleagues at the University of San Carlos, Cebu City. I visited the
community on a weekly basis for about twelve hours per week, for a total of
about 600 hours to conduct interviews and participant observations. While I
alone am responsible for the analysis and limitations expressed here, my
fieldwork benefited from the constant feedback made available to me through
friends both on and off the site. More of the voices of the residents need to be
heard as demonstrated in the appendix in an essay by a youth leader of this
community who gives testimony to the BEC as a positive force for hope. Also,
so many of my findings were discovered in the course of testing my own
understandings against that of individual residents and organizers that an
acknowledgment of their contribution as translators and guides is in order.

OVERDETERMINED INDIFFERENCE TO THE RECYCLERS'

PLIGHT
In the late 1970s, the Philippine government transferred the dumpsite from
Pasil to its present location on White Road, some twenty kilometers south of
Cebu City. Much as they had in the case of a similar site near Manila (Abad
1991, 278-280), the military had relocated Pasil residentsin this case, to a
steep, barren mountainside in Consolation, twenty kilometers north, as part of a
federal Slum Improvement and Resettlement Project (SIR). This resettlement,
like others during the Marcos years, took place not to make better lives for
citizens but to hide the filth of the slums from tourists, businesspeople,
diplomats, and journalists. Slums had come to betoken government inefficiency
and neglect. Slums were not to be eradicated but hidden. The new site offered
former Pasil inhabitants no employmentnot even basic facilities (running
water, electricity, toilets)and expected repayment for the government's
construction of a few small cement foundations (Fernandez and de la Torre
1986; see Abad 1991).
Not surprisingly, most of these recyclers found their way to the new White
64 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

Road location. They constructed up to fifty makeshift shelters along the

seashore. They routinely scavenged through the huge mounds of trash and dove
into the sea for submerged refuse and shellfish sometimes, finding sunken
"treasures" of jewelry and coins. At this time, 1979,1 first accompanied a group
of college-educated activists as they regularly and surreptitiously visited this
community to teach "underground" literacy classes. The Marcos government
considered these people no less than subversives, especially in how they were
experimenting with a literacy model for "conscientization" developed by the
Brazilian Paulo Freire (1973). One of these idealists later became so
disillusioned with the government's repressive practices toward the poor, that
she joined the New People's Army, the armed wing of the Communists, and died
a heroine's death at the hands of the military. Another teacher, now in faraway
political asylum, was for many years violently harassed by the military for her
actively non-violent and peaceful volunteer work among the poor. In 1987
another young man who had joined a radical theater group that periodically
visited the site, was arrested for organizing, though framed for a common crime
that he did not commit, and was severely tortured by the Integrated National
Police. He only recently (December 1997) received political amnesty by former
President Ramos. Nor do I see today any real rupture in this pattern of
excruciating harassment of "leftists" who work for social change outside of the
hegemonic power structures of the state and church. The government has
apparently discouraged such activists from mobilizing the citizens of the
dumpsite and, during the tenure of my fieldwork in 1993, a paramilitary resident
still reported on any such activities.
When I returned in 1993, so much had changed; it was no longer possible to
swim in the sea. The trash had become pervasive, the bay polluted. Even fish
could no longer survive. Yet over a hundred shanties and two warehouses stood
nestled in what had become the core of the site. Occupying the outer rim were
some forty additional shanties. Six hundred men, women, and children earned
their subsistence from scavenging.
Some women worked part-time as food vendors; four managed "sari-sari"
stores (small general stores) within the community. Twelve men worked for
Cebu Cityeleven are garbage collectors and the other operates the bulldozer in
the dumpsite. The scavengers, including children, earn their livelihood by
recycling reusable wares. They earn an average of 50.00 pesos to 80.00 pesos
per day; some earn as much as 150.00 to 200.00 pesos daily by selling reusable
goods (e.g., metal, scrap plastic, and glass) to buyers who operate on-site
warehouses. The buyers sell the reusables to corporations like Philippine Steel in
Manila, Philippine Steel in Iligan, and San Miguel Corporation in Cebu City or
to individual buyersfor example, vendors who frequent the warehouses to buy
glasses and bottles for resale in Carbon Market in Cebu City. Many of the
scavengers work on credit arrangements to pay off high-interest loans. The
couples that own and operate the local warehouses and the owner of the nearby
piggery provide cash advances and goods (e.g., food, cigarettes, medicine, and
alcohol) in exchange for work or resalables. They offer loans with 20% to 30%
BEYOND THE DUMPING GROUND 65

interest per month. Sari-sari storeowners and food vendors allow regular
customers to purchase food items and merchandise on interest free credit.
The scavengers work seven days a week, fourteen hours a day. Some of
them, even children, work after midnight until dawn. In December 1993, one
six-year-old boy and his companions worked from 8:00 PM until dawn and
returned home to rest. The boy covered himself with a piece of cardboard and
went to sleep on the ground alongside a bamboo bed in front of the warehouse.
Around 7:00 AM on the same morning, a bulldozer, the operator unaware of his
presence, crushed him. The local newspaper reported that the boy had been
sleeping under a piece of cardboard in the middle of a trash heap; the local
government banned recyclers from bulldozed areas (see Sun Star daily
newspaper, December 19, 1993).
The city garbage is collected and dumped every day from 7:00 AM until
midnight. The busiest hours for dumping are from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM, 1:00
PM to 2:00 PM, and 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM. The scavengers work with their
immediate families. Groups arrive early to wait for the dump trucks and
compete with each other to collect the available scraps once the trucks arrive.
They work quickly, with their hands, collecting indiscriminately and then sort
through at home. They also work individually, digging through leftovers strewn
across the dumpsite long after the trucks have departed. Their only tools are a
basket, steel hook, and kerosene lantern. Some customary agreements regulate
the process. Scavengers can sort through the trash only within their normal work
areas, and must not intrude on persons working near them. If they punch another
person, and cause an injury, they are responsible for the medical bill and
medicines until the injury heals. If the injured person is incapacitated, the
perpetrator must provide for that person until she or he can work again.
A scavenger's income exceeds that of most other unskilled laborers in
Cebueven those of construction and factory workers, who earn on average
about 85.00 pesos per day (see Sun Star daily newspaper, December 19, 1993;
Ballescas 1993; Bucoy 1993; Mercado 1993)an amount, as one scavenger told
me, "difficult to live on because it is payable every two weeks, instead of daily."
Meanwhile, scavenging "is easier [than other types of employment] to manage
because you are your own boss, and you can make your own hours. If you want
to rest you have no one to be afraid of because you are working for yourself."
Abad, too, has remarked how Smokey Mountain inhabitants much prefer dump-
to street-scavenging in Manila; in the latter case they can be physically attacked,
flogged, and publicly humiliated (1991, 272). Thus, people scavenge simply
because no other jobs offer as much pay or security. Lacking all educational or
referential qualifications, residents find it nearly impossible to secure work in
government and private institutions, service and manufacturing industries, or
even as private domestics.
What of the district official charged with monitoring the area? Simply, he
entertained the hope for personal riches that has marked myopic landlord
officials since the years of the Spanish and American colonialists. As he put it:
66 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

This area was a large swamp before because of the river. Every time the river flooded my
father and uncle would make a dike to catch sediments from the mountains, which caused
the water to become more and more shallow until it could be used to grow grass for horse
fodder. Later on my father converted the area into rice fields, which I later continued to fill
in with soils, or convert into fishponds. However beginning in early 1979, the fish could no
longer survive as a result of the garbage dump nearby, so I converted the area into a garbage
dump. I also "had pity" on the scavengers squatting near the seashore, so I invited them to
build their homes over the fish ponds, which were filled in with garbage in exchange for a
small amount of rent. Now, I have the advantage because I won't spend any money to
convert the area into land. The City government recently secured a loan of 200 million
pesos from the Japanese government to buy this area and convert it into a solid waste
reprocessing and recycling zone. The government has offered to buy my land, and if we
cannot agree on a price, the government will appropriate 300 to 400 square meters at 1000
pesos per square meter, out of which I will receive between 37 to 70 million pesos. I'll be a
millionaire.

An acquaintance of this landlord had mortgaged some land to erect a "buy

and sell" warehouse. Later he had converted the warehouse into a piggery and
had recruited residents to construct a chapel, financed in part from donations
collected by his son, a parish priest. Although residents had built the structure,
the owner's name is engraved into the chapel wall for donating the chapel to the
community. At first, he also assumed the presidency of the neighborhood and
chapel organization, although he lost this position when the BEC was founded.
Today, youths frequently borrow money from him at high interest to support
their drug habits. This enterprising official also owns the local water pump and
sells water to his customers.
Meanwhile, even today federal technocrats use the garbage dump as a catch
basin to reclaim land from the sea. With neither sanitary landfill nor leachate
lining, the noxious substances and toxins seep freely into the air, ground, and
water (Mercado 1993, 6-7). Before the 1991 elections, the city government
acquired a loan from Japan to convert the dumpsite into a modern recycling
plant, but the project "has yet to materialize." During elections, Mayor Tomas
Osmena promised the scavengers low-interest loans for housing and even
employment in the proposed plant, but the next year in 1992, when the local
community leader visited his office with a written reminder, he denied having
made the promise. It is neither the mayor nor the government but this local
leader whom neighbors blamed for hoodwinking them about the plan to
modernize. The upshot: according to the local Cardinal Archbishop, community
organizers, and the Cebu Commission on the Urban Poor staff members, the
proposed sanitary landfill and recycling project is not soon to be. Addressing the
case of "Smokey Mountain," the similar dumpsite of Manila, Abad cited two
chief origins of such as "the increasing concentration of land ownership in the
hands of a few families and institutions" and "the uneven development of the
Philippine economy" (1991, 263). Both these causes are of such magnitude that
only a strong and compassionate government genuinely concerned to provide
decent jobs and affordable housing for all of its citizens can control them.
Indeed, one journalist visiting Smokey Mountain labeled the site "a monument
BEYOND THE DUMPING GROUND 67

to government inefficiency and neglect" (in Abad 1991, 267-268). In her

campaign for a governorship, Imelda Marcos managed to have electrical posts
put up in the area, and later then American Vice-President Quayle's wife
Marilyn made a private donation to sanitize and modernize the site (Abad 1991,
276), but these gestures were cosmetic.

THE BASIC ECCLESIAL COMMUNITY AS A SITE OF BICKERING

AND ACTIVISM
In 1989, one outside missionary priest had begun the process of building a
BEC on White Road, replete with a loan and consumer cooperative, scholarship
program, free health clinic, and full-time lay-minister assistant. He had worked
with several outside organizations (Cebu Archdiocesan Prison Apostolates,
Cebu City Commission on Urban Poor, and a Catholic Charismatic Prayer
Group) until December 1992, when superiors requested he return to Rome for
doctoral studies (which he completed, returning to his work in Cebu in 1995).
His temporary replacement, a full-time priest administrator at a local university,
could not work daily for the BEC, but he did regularly hold meetings on
Sundays after Mass and seminars. This change coincided with my arrival, and I
found the BEC and the dumpsite community virtually synonymous: almost all
residents were registered in the homeowner's association, formed in 1991 when
the BEC community petitioned the government not to evict them. The high
membership rate was presumably because rumor held that, once the dumpsite
would be transformed into a modern reprocessing plant, only members of the
association would be eligible for government-provided low-income housing and
jobs, and only households actively participating in Bible-study meetings could
partake of the BEC income-generating opportunities.
In 1993, only women attended Bible sharing groups in White Road, which
incidentally was not the case in other rural BECs that I had visited that year in
Cebu. When I asked why, a male ex-member told me he had stopped
participating because members were gossiping, and he did not want to be the
subject. Other males echoed this view. John Burdick (1990) writing about urban
BECs in Brazil, noted a similar widespread sentiment among local Catholics that
these neighborhood meetings "could easily become centers of gossip" (159).
Also, citizens did not want their children in the scholarship program because
they did not want them to become the subjects of gossip or for the BEC to make
inordinate demands on their own time. On the other hand, some parents
participated in the BEC to acquire scholarships for sons or daughters. In 1993
twenty-four elementary school, fourteen high school, and two college students
participated in the scholarship program. When one college student dropped out
due to a lack of funds, the campus minister urged parents to transfer two
students to the university where their new priest was working, and suggested
that their children could apply for a university scholarship instead of the BEC
tuition scholarship; the money saved would be given to pay for their clothes and
other needs. However, these two students in 1993 were given only 300 pesos
68 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

($11) a monthnot even enough for transportation to the university.

Meanwhile, parents were expected to compensate in kind by bookkeeping,
accounting, and serving in welcoming and clean-up committees for visitors.
Organizers created this requirement for parents to work as an attempt to get
away from the "dole-out" mentality, but at the same time, it raises other
problems. Parents must sacrifice valuable earnings that could be made otherwise
that day in their scavenging work. Also, scholarships cannot be so simply
defined as "hand-outs" because students must earn them by doing well in
school.
The BEC participants appeared to be gambling on which group's income-
generating project would be more economically successful: these Bible sharing
groups were economic groups as well. Each group was given a loan to start an
income-generating projectfor example, soap making, paper recycling, wax
making, and livestock and poultry raising projects. The livestock and poultry
projects appeared unhealthy for both animals and future consumers due to the
unsanitary conditions at the dumpsite. In addition, BEC participants in Bible
sharing groups appeared to gossip about each other when discussing their
community problemsfor example, gambling, drinking, drug abuse, loan
sharks, marital conflicts. This resulted in constant discord and infighting.
Gamblers, drunkards, addicts, and loan sharks were prohibited from
membership, but some BEC members worked for or were in charge of gambling
and loan-sharking syndicates. These members were anonymously singled out for
criticism by a local BEC leader who constantly alluded to their activities, while
they in turn began to direct their criticisms at her because she was operating a
gambling business (e.g., computer games and card games) for children in her
home. She responded to these criticisms by threatening to resign from office
rather than give up her business: she needed the extra income for her family. Her
husband earns a salary of only 90.00 pesos (S3.50) a day working as a city
garbage collector. They have nine children, including one in college under the
auspices of the BEC, although the revised scholarship budget provides him only
partial support.
This leader also confided that she took a high-interest loan from an outside
moneylender because last summer her children and husband were sick with
dengue fever (transmitted from mosquitoes). Why didn't she borrow from the
BEC savings and loan program? Everyone in the community was afflicted with
dengue fever, and it would have been unfair if she as a leader had borrowed
most of their savings and loan program, so her husband borrowed 3,000 pesos at
30%o interest per month from an outside source. They are now deep in debt and
must pay 300 pesos a month for interest alone, or face harassment by the
collector. Her threatened resignation burgeoned into a crisis, because BEC
community organizers knew of her integrity as a leader, although they continued
to insist that she give up her games.
In my fieldwork I found that members of the BEC Bible sharing groups
repeatedly informed on one another to the BEC priest whom more than once
reprimanded the group on the dangers of gossip. He simultaneously reminded
BEYOND THE DUMPING GROUND 69

the leaders of the rules and regulations against gambling, excessive drinking,
and loan sharking, which they were supposed to enforce because "it was their
organization." His lectures (by placing the total responsibility on the leaders)
only resulted in more backbiting and bickering.
Six non-local church groups (the University of San Carlos Basic Ecclesial
Community Program, University of San Jose-Recolectos Community Outreach
Program, Cebu Archdiocesan Prison Apostolates, Cebu City Commission on
Urban Poor, Missionaries of Charity, a Catholic Charismatic Prayer Group, a
Protestant evangelical Charismatic Prayer Group) apparently vied to influence
the BEC. Facilitators fetched a steady stream of "exposurists" to highlight the
conditions, but for varied reasons: the BEC brought in those attending
university-sponsored training seminars in order to raise their awareness, while
Charismatics invited visitors primarily, if not exclusively, to encourage
monetary and material support. Semester after semester students from a
university outreach program have come into the area to conduct the same
surveys and training programs (e.g., mother-child care program, soap making
program), until the local people have lost interest in "constantly repeating the
same class." Other groups brought in witnesses just to observe. There also are
fabricated organizations (fraudulent NGOs) like the David Livingston
Foundation, which comes into the area once a year to gather a group of children
together to take photographs of them to send to their donor agencies abroad.
The BEC priest provided the following view of the BECs conundrum:

The BEC [in the dumpsite] is practically liturgical, not like the other [liberational] BECs.
Although it has some income-generating projects and cooperatives, it uses an approach to
development based on the assumption that the causes of underdevelopment are based on a
lack of capital, meaning that underdevelopment is caused because people do not have
capital in the capitalist economic system. This approach is being used here now. The BEC
sponsored development projects are based on the assumption that what we need is capital
and technology. So the solution is to get capitalfromthe outside. So, that practically is what
is going on here. But the BEC [on White Road] is not addressing the problem of the system
and structures; it presupposes that the system is basically OK.
In other words, the BEC in the dumpsite is not successfully incorporating
theologies of struggle in practice. Other more successful liberational BECs
happen to be located in Cebu's rural uplands; they seek to develop a post-
capitalist society based on sustainable production modes. As defined by the
World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), sustainable
development is concerned with the reorganization of production to meet the
prevailing needs and conditions of the majority of local people, not only wealthy
people, and for export. These ecclesial communities aim to develop self-
sufficient neighborhoods in which the residents using local resources can meet
local needs. They network with each other to build mutually interdependent
communities. The holistic guidelines of the movement include a reciprocal-
educational relationship between organizers and local people who may
creatively innovate new terms of political and cultural analysis that potentially
70 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

could instigate a corresponding change in the ideology of the dominant group.

However, BECs are human processes engaged in a struggle in the problems
of real social life: Local people in our case study join BEC activities for reasons
that are as contradictory and as complex as they are transparent. They attend
Bible meetings for seemingly materialistic reasons. Active participation in Bible
sharing groups by a representative family member is a prerequisite for
membership in BEC income-generating projects, the scholarship program, or
credit cooperative. In a sense, their participation in BEC activities can be said to
be another form of scavenging for "treasure," in this instance for money.
However, the BECs ongoing income-generating projects (making soap and
floor wax, raising pigs and other livestock) have made a difference in the lives
of its members. For example, BEC members can avail themselves of material
benefits provided by their own projects such as taking out low interest loans
through their credit cooperative, which makes it possible for them to by-pass
local loan-sharks who offer them excessively high interest loans.
In 1991, the scavengers successfully persuaded the government not to evict
them from their land. Under the guidance of priests and lay organizers from a
nearby university, they established a savings and loan cooperative, homeowner's
association, medical clinic, numerous income-generating projects, and a
scholarship program for their children. In 1993, they convinced the local
government to assign a bus to transport children to a day care center at the
parish center, though not without pressure from an outside community organizer
and the members "en force." The government also promised to help relocate
residents in a nearby location with both an option to buy their homes and
guarantee of employment in the dumpsite, which was supposed to be developed
into a modern recycling zone in the near future. By 1995, residents already made
their first down payment for a piece of land adjacent to the dumpsite. Priests and
lay organizers were instrumental in helping residents to realize their plan; they
constantly called on the mayor's office and served in key negotiations for a
satisfactory land deal.
The BEC in theory is part of a multiple class struggle supported by an
alliance involved in the Philippine human rights movement against social
injustice. It potentially can engage in a situational class struggle to ensure the
residents the political means to secure the products of their labor. The priest and
lay facilitators are mobilizing and gathering the participants into a community.
They are educating them to become aware of "the power of their numbers" as
voters in a capitalist democracy, but their struggle is a long and difficult process
in a country where elections are notoriously fraudulent (e.g., vote buying, ballot
box stuffing) and violent (e.g., murder of political opponents). Also, in a
capitalist democracy the rules of social conflict are already structured in such a
way that class struggle is directed toward short-term gains and material interests,
not social transformation.
Like the garbage all around them, scavengers can come to see themselves as
social outcasts. They are effectively cast out of their society, have no real power,
and are denied access to resources. They easily may be led to believe the image
BEYOND THE DUMPING GROUND 71

that authorities have of them. They may come to think that if they are hungry it
is because they didn't work hard, or save, or vote intelligently enough to elect a
person into office to represent them and their interests. The dump represents for
them a rare enclave of economic opportunity. Such a circumstance before the
arrival of the BEC, had come to pervade not only the exterior environment but
also the mindsets of the local people. Has the BEC movement made a difference
in their lives? There are no easy answers. Unlike rural BECs that may decide to
meet their daily subsistence needs by developing diversified organic farming
techniques and practices that require little capital input, urban BECs cannot so
easily maintain themselves physically outside of the fragmented market
economy. Is the ideal-typical BEC fundamentally a non-capitalist approach that
can work effectively only in semi-capitalist "peasant" communities? Is social
life in large metropolitan centers overdetermined by capitalism to such a degree
that the BECs become inadequate modes of intervention on behalf of the
oppressed?

CONCLUSION
The dumpsite is situated in an environment ill suited for healthy social life
and in relation to a dominant society that hinders the full implementation of its
program. The impoverishment of the site is structurally linked to the uneven
development of the wider society and the increasing concentration of capital in
the hands of Cebu's few leading families. As Cebu's leading families grow
richer, more and more small farmers and fishers are being dislocated. They
migrate first to town centers then to Cebu City, and if they fail to find paying
jobs and housing they work informally or become homeless. Some of them turn
to scavenging to survive. I have suggested that Cebu's larger problem of poverty
is likely to persist until those in power begin to think in more holistic terms of
meeting the basic needs of all people for affordable housing, nutritional food,
clean air and water, and a safe and healthy environment. This is one of the
systemic reasons why people empowerment movements like the BEC in the
dumpsite are not enough to resolve the reoccurring domestic problems of
poverty in environments overdetermined by capitalism; they need infrastructure
and input from the government.
This page intentionally left blank
Demonstration against Philippine 2000 (the government's plan to rapidly
modernize the Philippines by the year 2000).
Farmers being dislodged from their land.

Tenant farmer shot by the caretaker after refusing to vacate his land.
Sister dressing her brother in the Cebu City dumpsite.

Father and apprenticing sons.

Removing any remaining recyclable goods from the trash.

Carrying in the recyclable goods.

 Sorting goods in the warehouse.

Upland farmer playing a leaf harmonica at a Basic Christian Community meeting

of prayer and celebration.
Organic farming: earthworm cultivation.

Upland farmers using an A-frame to contour the slopes into corn terraces.
Mass baptism.

Parish meal.
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PART III

REVOLUTIONARY
THEOLOGY AND MARXISM

Marxism may have failed, as much because of its rejection of religions as because
of the tendency of Marxist regimes to "misinterpret Marx" in an attempt to
establish totalitarian states. Or rather religion, as a transformative force establishes
a connection between worldly and otherworldly justice. This ennobles religiously
motivated movements such as the small Christian communities and engaged-
Buddhists to build communities that transcend, rather than sharpen social classes
based on class, ethnicity, and gender. Until recently, there have been attempts by
ruling elites to characterize village-self help movements in Asian religious
traditions such as the small Filipino Christian communities as "communist" or
"leftist" because they, like Marxist movements, seek to ameliorate the suffering of
the poor. The collapse of Marxist regimes has made this critique increasingly
untenable. Ruling elites can no longer use the charge of "godless communism" to
vilify those who would challenge them from below. It is, in a sense, ironic that the
collapse of Marxism has perhaps enhanced the ability of the poor, the weak and
oppressed to challenge the structures of domination that have so adversely
influenced their lives. Whether the political space opened by that failure of
Marxism to effect basic change will allow religious movements to succeed
remains to be seen. But this is clear that they will play an increasingly significant
role in the discourse and praxis of development for a long time to come. The
concluding chapters counter Marx's view of religion by confronting it with the
contemporary emergence of the BECs and related human rights movements
around South and Southeast Asia.
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 7

Rethinking Marxism and Philippine

Theology of Struggle

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the
protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the heart of the
heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions (Karl Marx and
Engels 1984)

The whole community of believers was one in heart and mind. No one claimed
any of their possessions as their own; but rather they shared all things in common
(Acts of the Apostles, 4:32).

The concept of religion used in relation to the BECs is not an abstract category
of meaning existing at some universal level but one discursively, practically, and
materially grounded. Asad (1983) explored this way of looking at religion by
explaining how power constitutes the conditions that formulate religious
ideology, distinctive personalities, religious discourses, practices, and
knowledge (1983, 237). Asad proposed that the primary question that needs to
be addressed by students of religion is not the question of religious meaning;
rather it is the political question of how certain symbols become established and
how they are changed. His point is that the dominant symbols and classifications
accepted in society are part of the ideology of the leading classes or leading
fraction of a class in a classless society, as is the case in some hunting and
gathering societies. In Crick's words, "they are constructions which are imposed
and pass as knowledge only because the symbolic imposition is accepted as an
act of power" (1982, 303).
Asad examined the history of western Christianity because it provides a rich
store of documented sources from which to formulate questions for religious
inquiry. Asad's theory is that the many varied denominations and assemblies
that Christianity takes today are quite different from the form it took in medieval
times. In those days, power was defined differently and it had different results.
Religiosity worked its way through different human institutions and notions of
76 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

self that constructed, legitimated, and distributed different categories of

knowledge. One of the effects of this variable distribution of power is that
religion is a result, not cause, of the historical processes which shape,
perpetuate, and transform it, so there can be no universal definition of religion
applicable to the study of religion everywhere (1983, 238). In other words,
religion needs to be investigated in all of its historical specificity that is an often-
repeated theme in Marxist anthropology. Not surprisingly, Asad noted that there
were no serious attempts to systematize a universal definition of religion until
the seventeenth century precisely because the attempt was an expression of the
expansion of repressive and ideological conceptions of specific relations of
power and knowledge. Religion then came to be abstracted from its context and
universalized with subtle and explicit force. But, in actuality the definition of
religion was merely a reference to established rules and practices that were
developed to screen, oversee, and authorize specific relationships of power and
knowledge from a singular papal source (1983).
Feuchtwang called for a Marxist theory of social practice to research religion
because it is a theory from which all other forms in a society are derived in a
given social and economic formation. Such an analytical technique can readily
differentiate between one social and economic formation which is a distinct
social totality consisting of a set of specific conditions and any other
socioeconomic formation. That is, practices are repeatable, and so too are
societies in all of their detailed variations. Since Marxist analysis neither seeks
nor starts from the basis of some universal categories or "unities of meaning"
existing at some supreme level, it can explore different sociocultural and
economic systems to produce the knowledge needed to understand them in a
constructive manner (Feuchtwang 1984, 67, 68).
This chapter begins by looking at how liberation theology situates itself
within Marxism and Catholicism, in both general and the Philippine contexts,
where I examine Cebu's Basic Ecclesial Community movement. It employs a
cultural mode of production perspective to examine the underlying conditions
and assumptions that make subjective religious expressions like the BECs
possible. To start, this approach calls into question many of the categorical
assumptions born of western science. Like many of the traditional units of study
in anthropology (e.g., ethnicity, kinship, and individual), supernatural categories
that exist at a superhuman level are not empirically given (see Schneider 1984).
For example, the official hierarchical church in Cebu established its own BEC
organizing office in the face of an already on-going Basic Christian Community-
Organizer office. In this instance, the hierarchical church asserted its position of
authority and domination symbolically and materially over the earlier BEC
movement by using the BEC name for its end. Before illustrating this case of a
movement divided, a discussion of Marx's concept of ideology is in order.

RELIGION AND IDEOLOGY

The concept ideology was coined in 1769 by the French philosophers
RETHINKING MARXISM AND PHILIPPINE THEOLOGY 77

Cabinis and Destutt de Tracy, who used it, in a literal sense, as the "science of
ideas" as opposed to "metaphysics." They articulated the concept during the
French Revolution, which occurred during much disillusion with religious and
political leaders using an elaborate otherworldly religion to justify and
legitimize their authority and power. The Revolution set in motion a movement
to secularize politics by looking for a worldly basis to solve problems in a
worldly way. The concept of ideology served in epistemological and linguistic
theories since, until used in a pejorative sense by Marx and Engels, who
employed the concept to critique ideologies used to rationalize, justify, and
legitimate the Industrial Revolution still in motion at the turn of the nineteenth
century (Marx and Engels [1847] 1984).
Among others (e.g., Boggs, Carlsnaes, Jay, Larrain, and Williams),
Bottomore (1983) pointed out that Marx and Engels were reacting critically to
two divergent philosophical lines spearheaded by Feuerbach and Hegel. Unlike
Feuerbach and Hegel, who did not refer religious and metaphysical distortions
back to their material and discursive practices, Marx and Engels referred them
back to their concrete referents. They looked specifically at the relationships
between human misapprehensions and their material and discursive practices,
and argued that social problems do not stem from ideological distortions but
from social contradictions.
In other words, subjective and objective realities indeed interpenetrate.
Distortions (false consciousness as opposed to class consciousness;
mystificationse.g., cultural and social spheres considered natural and
inevitable; fetishismse.g., merchandise and capital) are a problema cause of
sufferingbut are, in turn, caused by material conditions. Bottomore (1983,
219) alleged, "It is this relationship (between thought and material social reality)
that the concept of ideology expresses by referring to a distortion of thought
which stems from, and conceals, social contradictions." The concept of ideology
has been employed since, primarily by Marxists to refer to distortions of thought
that obscure the social contradictions in which they are founded (Bottomore
1983).
Marx criticized Hegel's and Feuerbach's thesis that thought determines the
course of social change. As Murphy (1971, 98) put it, Marx turned around the
theoretical perspective of Hegel and Feuerbach by proposing that "history was
not the history of the mind but the history of man and his institutions, begotten
by labor upon nature," that is, thought does not exist apart from objective social
life but works dialectically through human institutions changing them as they, in
turn, change it. Marx made this point in his critique of Feuerbach:

The chief defect of all materialism up to now (including Feuerbach's) is, that the object,
reality, what we apprehend through our senses, is understood only in the form of the object
of contemplation; but not as sensuous human activity, as practice; not subjectively. Hence in
opposition to materialism the active side was developed abstractly by idealismwhich of
course does not know real sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects,
really distinguished from objects of thought: but he does not understand human activity
itself as objective activity (Marx 1972, 197).
78 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

Marx showed how human beings misapprehended their discursive practices

and material conditions while thinking about them. He defined his concept of
ideology from the starting point of misapprehensions:

Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of
men is their actual life-processes. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear
upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomena arises just as much from their
historical life-processes as the inversions of objects on the retina does from their physical
life-process (Marx 1972, 14).
In other words, humans think about their practices and circumstances, and
their thoughts spur action. In this sense, Marx used ideology to study the content
and structure of the thinking of the ruling classes. He showed how these classes
used ideology in such a way to persuade the other classes to provide them
services. But Murphy (1971, 99) suggested, "This is not the only genesis of its
[ideology's] inversions and illusions. This seems to arise in the first instance
from the finite, limited, and restricted character of man's relationship to nature
and to other men" (see also Marx 1972, 16-21). Bottomore points out that the
word "ideology" does not appear in Marx's early writings. However, Marx
alludes to it in his critique of religion and of Hegel's conception of the state,
which he describes as "inversions concealing the real character of things"
(Bottomore 1983, 219), alludes to ideology similar to how Machiavelli discusses
the strategies of princes who used brute force and corruption to obtain their
ends. In contradistinction to Hegel who proposed that the idea of a political state
caused its appearance in the empirical world as an absolute universal that
determined society, Marx proposed that ideas were distorted to conceal events.
He also called into question Feuerbach's thesis: Although Marx agreed that
religion was made by men and women and that the idea of God as creator was
really an inversion of the facts, he did not agree with Feuerbach that religion
was therefore an illusion, an imagined grandiose directive, but showed that
religion appeared through actual material and discursive practices.
Later Marx in Capital ([1867] 1972), refined his concept of ideology,
concluding that the relationship between "inverted consciousness and inverted
reality is mediated by a level of appearances that is constitutive of reality itself"
(Bottomore 1983, 220). This level of appearances is the economic infrastructure
that determines a society's logic and motion or its sphere of social and
ideological relations. In a society dominated by the capitalist mode of
production, for example, competition and the market constitute the level of
appearances. That is, the sphere of circulation and exchange in the market
generate the economic and political ideologies of the ruling classes in Western
capitalist societies. However, Marx did not mean that all societies contain
separate functioning parts whereby the economy becomes clearly visible, as in
Western capitalist societies. Under European or American capitalism societal
and economic unity manifests increasingly through bureaucratic means,
whereby society becomes differentiated into discrete and functional institutions
(economy, family, politics, religion, education). Hence, relations of production
RETHINKING MARXISM AND PHILIPPINE THEOLOGY 79

are enacted and it is easy to see how the economic instance becomes the basis
upon which all other spheres of social life are grounded. But in other societies,
especially precapitalist societies, relations of production and the corresponding
forces of production that give direction to distribution and exchange are
typically manifested through interpersonal relations enmeshed and
contextualized in organizations other than the economic. As in capitalist
societies, however, ideology works to conceal the underlying contradictions of
social life by focusing on how economic relations appear on the surface
(Godelier 1972).
Marx stressed that the word "ideology" works to conceal the hidden reasons
why economic relations appear in diverse cultures and societies. For example, if
in precapitalist societies kinship or religion dominates social life, then
productive and redistributive networks are founded in kinship or religious
systems, not the capitalist market system (Godelier 1972). The external forms
that the relations and forces of production take themselves comprise the sphere
of circulation and exchange that perpetuates ideological forms. Economic,
political, legal, educational, familial, and religious ideologies interconnect in
different ways and are reproduced within a total social and economic formation,
ideologies which cannot be studied apart from their particular societies. Marx's
conceptualization of ideology provides a wide range of entry points for inquiry.
Althusser showed that he did not approach the study of ideology in abstraction
but at the concrete level.
By so doing, Althusser challenged scholars who would use Marx' theory
dogmatically. He pointed out that previously students (Lenin, Gramsci, and
Lukacs) defined the term ideology in two ways, first, to refer to the ideological
superstructure of a society, and second, to refer to the political ideas of
particular classes. But, Althusser (1977, 170) argued that both these ways of
looking at ideology could be misappropriated by Communist hardliners to
falsely refer to ideology in abstraction, without an empirical basis, and he
provided the following alternative definition:

Ideology is the "lived" relation between men and their world, or a reflected form of this
unconscious relation, for instance a "philosophy," etc. It is distinguished from a science not
by its falsity, for it can be coherent and logical (for instance, theology), but by the fact that
the practico-social predominates in it over the theoretical, over knowledge. Historically, it
proceeds the science that is produced by making an epistemological break with it, but it
survives along side science as an essential element of every social formation including a
socialist and even a communist society (Althusser 1977, 252).

Althusser (1977, 169) is exceptional. He recognized "that a Theory is

essential for the transformation of domains in which a Marxist theoretical
practice does not yet really exist." In other words, in the study of cultures and
societies outside of Marx's Capital the Marxist theoretical practice of
epistemology (e.g., of the histories of science, ideology, philosophy, and art) for
the most part remains unconstituted. Marxist anthropologists of other societies
are not lacking, but Althusser pointed out that they did not have the
80 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

revolutionary practice of Capital behind themthat is, their practice "had to be

set [sic] on correct theoretical basis so that it corresponds to a real object, not a
presumed or ideological object, and so that it is a truly theoretical practice, not a
technical practice [ethnocentric formulas]" (Althusser 1977, 169, 170).
Althusser insisted that the theory of dialectical materialism was appropriate for
drawing up the conditions of a theoretical practice. He argued:

A real understanding of materialism reveals that (the researcher's) labor is not a labor of the
universal, but a labor on a pre-existing universal, a labor whose aim and achievement is
precisely to refuse this universal the abstractions or the temptations of "philosophy"
(ideology), and to bring it back to its condition by force; to the condition of a scientifically
specified universality (Althusser 1977, 183).
The utilization of dialectical materialism is not a matter of applying its
formula to pre-existing content; rather the method clarifies aims as it guides the
researcher's analysis of a particular subject (Althusser 1977, 169, 170).
Although Althusser's methodological distinction between science and ideology
is still controversial in Marxist thought, he clearly distinguishes between them
(see, Bottomore 1983, 223). Moreover, since the anthropologist of non-Western
societies and cultures is essentially moving into uncharted territory in Marx's
dialectics, the primary research instrument is not theory but the dialectically and
actively engaged anthropologist.
Althusser pointed out that Marx's theory was not fully developed in his
youthful work when he was concerned mainly with questions of alienation in an
industrializing and dehumanizing world. Although he criticized Hegel's ideas,
his split from Hegel's thought was incomplete. Marx charged Hegel with the
fallacy of abstraction. He argued that the egocentric individualism existing in
European bureaucratic structures diametrically opposed the Hegelian notion that
the bureaucracy of a modern state was a universal class whose purpose was to
realize the universal interest (Jessop 1982, 4). However, Marx's basic
proposition that human beings created their own history was still very similar to
Hegel's fundamental thesis that the world created itself according to some
universal spirit (Bottomore 1983).
Later, however, Marx (1964, 1972, 1982) cut his roots from Hegelian
epistemology (which Althusser would call his ideological prehistory) to develop
a science of dialectical materialism (Bottomore 1983, 13-15). The mature Marx
addressed the theory of social formations and their histories in all of their
conceptual and structural variations. From this time on, Marx viewed history no
longer as a series of stages unfolding along some linear evolutionary path but as
everywhere variable and subject to tireless investigation. To his credit Althusser
(1977) was one of the first Marxists who emphasized the importance of this
epistemological break with Hegel. Even Boggs (1984) in his review of
Gramsci's two Marxist revolutions (scientific and revolutionary) does not
mention Marx's departure from Hegel. Nor does Jay (1984, 413) in his exegesis
on the concept of totality in Marxist theories adequately differentiate Althusser's
concept of the social whole from that of his predecessors Gramsci and Lukacs.
RETHINKING MARXISM AND PHILIPPINE THEOLOGY 81

Jay concentrates only on Althusser's aversion to "genetic meta subjects"

(collective notions of the social whole), an aversion shared by Gramsci and
Lukacs, rather than on the differences in their practical theories of social change.
However, Althusser argued that Gramsci and Lukacs were Hegelian Marxists
precisely because they sought to recenter humankind (Humanism). In contrast,
Althusser emphasized that the social whole was actually decentered, even under
the ruling class of communism. Althusser was more concerned to use Marx's
theory as an impetus to research new possibilities for social change and action
than to use it as a political weapon in the hands of a class or a coalition of
classes to forge another society along rigid communist party lines. Marx's
concept of the social whole broke with Hegel's. Hegel's dialectic presupposed
an original unity that emanated outward by virtue of its own negativity to realize
its original unity in an ever-expanding material social world. But, as Althusser
put it, Marx insisted that the simple could only exist within a complex structure
of dominance:

The universal existence of the simple category is never original, it only appears as the end-
result of a long historical process, as the product of highly differentiated social structure; so,
where reality is concerned, we are never dealing with the pure existence of simplicity, be it
essence or category, but with the existence of "concretes" of complex and structured beings
and processes. This is the basic principle that eternally rejects the Hegelian womb of
contradiction (Althusser 1977, 197).
For Althusser (1971), "ideology summons individuals as subjects" because
individuals are socialized by their societies and cultures, are "called" out of an
amorphous group to become a separate person distinct from others, a process
which begins in childhood and continues as long as one continues to hear the
"call." The "call" turns individuals into subjects by telling them ways that they
can be the subjects or authors of their actions and can assume social roles even
change society, and that they are dominated subjects who need to obey to
occupy certain positions without complaint. According to this framework,
individuals become qualified as change agents or disqualified as subjugated
subjects.
The term "subject" is paradoxical, containing within itself the dialectical
dimension of author as change-agent and subject as a dominated client. With
this, social change becomes possible because it is always possible that someone
will resist subjugation by acting differently (although this can be risky, for they
can be silenced in various ways and for reasons that are political). Herein,
however, resides the possibility for what Gramsci has defined as
counterhegemony, the awareness that there are possibilities for social life other
than the dominant one, but this is a long difficult group process in which each
move forward on behalf of the underclasses is met by an opposite move from the
dominant classes.
Althusser considers that these processes of hegemony and counter-hegemony
exist simultaneously, with one dominant, neither taking center stage; these
processes occur even in existing socialist societies that have come about through
82 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

revolution: societies which, also, exist in relation to other societies in a global

capitalist system. In other words, dominators attempt to manipulate according to
an ideology or image that they have of the dominated. But if the dominated
reject the dominant ideology by asserting their own values (e.g., values of
community and collective organization as opposed to values of competition and
individualism) they are asserting their own alternative ideology.
In Marx's model society is made up of two levels: the economic base (the
productive forces and the relations of production) and the ideological
superstructure (different ideologies, religious, ethical, political, legal). The
metaphor of an edifice shows how the economic base finally determines the
superstructure. Althusser states expressly that he does not reject Marx's
metaphor but is clarifyingnamely, the classical metaphor of an edifice
represents only Marx's descriptive model, which is subject to change. Althusser
(1971, 131) insists that it is necessary to go beyond Marx's description "to think
what characterizes the essential of the existence and nature of the superstructure
on the basis of reproduction." Then it becomes clear that Marx's model is not
reductionist in regards to the relationship between the economic base and the
superstructure. For example, the indigenous system of agriculture in the upland
corn farming community of Chapter 5 has food consumption and nutrition
patterns community and collectively organized, which exist in contradistinction
to those of capitalist industrial societies, which are individualistically and
competitively organized. Nor are the former relations of production reducible to
an economic base as are the capitalist relations of production.
Althusser's "ideology" cannot be conceived apart from its positive and
negative relationships to a dominant mode of production (e.g., capitalist
relations of production) in relation to other modes of production (e.g.,
indigenous systems of agriculture) in an actually existing social and economic
formation (e.g., the Philippines). Marx looked at the inner connections of
economic phenomena in a historic totality. The concept mode of production and
the changing ways in which one mode of production interacts with other modes
to achieve its dominance is constructed and deconstructed in relation to a
particular society as a whole (Wolf 1982, 76). Althusser (1970, 177) explained,
"The relations of production cannot be thought of in their concept while
abstracting them from their superstructural conditions of existence." Relations of
production, including class relations, cannot be abstracted from their concrete
conditions, because certain relations of production presuppose their own
political, juridical, and ideological superstructure. Relations of production are
socioculturally specific, not mere reflections of an economic base. As Lukacs
(1968, 50) suggests: "For only when this relation is established (the relation of
society as a whole) does the consciousness of their existence that men (and
women) have at any given time emerge in all its essential characteristics."
Althusser defines a social and economic formation as a decentered totality
made up of the forces and relations of production, the economy, superstructure,
state, and ideology. Althusser sees ideology as the imaginary relationship men
and women have to their conditions of existence; ideology is enmeshed and
RETHINKING MARXISM AND PHILIPPINE THEOLOGY 83

contextualized in practices, discursive, nondiscursive, and material. Even when

a person's ideas do not refer back to his or her actions, they appear so to others.
In Althusser's (1971, 150) words, "ideology has no history" because particular
ideologies (religious, ethical, legal, political) express class, gender, and regional
positions which always pertain to particular histories. For Althusser
contemporary ideology results from sustained struggle between classes with the
ideology of the hegemonic class working in and over the repressive
(government, administration, military, police, courts, prisons) and ideological
(churches, schools, family system, laws, political system including parties,
trade-unions, communications, cultural, literary, and recreational arts)
apparatuses of the state (Althusser 1971, 150).
Many anthropologists and social theorists have assailed Althusser for being
functionalist and outdated; interested readers are referred to them (Baudrillard
1975; Williams 1977; Rapp 1978; Thompson 1978, 68; Thompson 1984, 94;
Roseberry 1989; Assiter 1990; Hartsock 1991). Althusser's concept of
ideological hegemony lacks an entry point for understanding the complexities of
multiclass and intraclass struggles for hegemony, although he has left some
hints. I have culled his theory for open-ended concepts as I have culled concepts
from other related theories to use in fieldwork. I do not, however, completely
agree with those who dismiss his theory. If Althusser's critics fault him for over
rigidity in viewing a social formation as an economic infrastructure and a
political, cultural, and ideological superstructure, Althusser's theory is anything
but economistic and iconoclastic. Althusser does not eliminate men and women
from his theory and he aptly, in my opinion, defends himself in his Essays in
Self Criticism (1976). Moreover, he paved the way for the emergence of Cultural
Marxism by studying culture in specific institutions (e.g. in European mental
asylums, hospitals, and prisons); even the culture theories of critics became
clearer in their debates with him.
Thus, Marx tried to show that religion as ideology was a tool in the hands of
leading economic and political elites to cover-up irrationalities of the system of
production, and he prophesied that it would decline when men and women
started to think and relate to each other clearly. He called religion the "opiate for
the masses" because it masked the contradictions: sources of human sufferings,
unintelligible life circumstances, and natural calamities of various kinds in
social life (Marx 1972, Ch.l; 1964, 41, 42; see also, Miguez 1976, 49, 50).
However, evidence also indicates that people can use religion to "see, judge, and
act" on problems clearly and collectively.
Pieris (1988) has written extensively about epistemological traditions in
Christianity and Buddhism that have produced methods for liberating the mind
of selfish desires and ideological projectionsnotably, monks who renounce the
world to practice meditation techniques to clarify thinking (seeing) (1988).
Evidence also indicates world religions have been challenged from within the
context of their own faith by theologians who call for both a cultural revolution
(e.g., attitudinal changes) and a structural revolution (e.g., systemic
socioeconomic and ecological changes). These liberation theologians encourage
84 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

people to think clearly and confront their problems collectively as exemplified

in Asian people's movements influenced by ethical liberation doctrines in Islam,
Buddhism, and Christianity.
One example of Asian liberation theologies surging up from below is the
BEC movement in the Philippines. On the one hand, participants in this
movement seek solutions to problems through community worship and Bible
reflection. On the other hand, they address problems through issue analysis,
collective planning, decision-making, and pressure techniques in negotiations
with employers, government officials, and landlords. McCoy (1984), for
example, has conducted a case study on a Filipino BEC movement that acted in
accordance with Marx's criteria for a self-conscious social movement (for
similar kinds of study see also De la Torre 1986; Gaspar 1990; and Cacayan and
Miclat 1991).
Marx stipulated that men and women who do not actively work together to
solve problems practically would imagine solutions in the form of ideological
distortions that conceal those contradictions. These distortions over time
promote the interests of the dominant classes, unless they form the ideological
basis for rebellion. For Marx, the conscious act of bringing problems into
awareness through rational discussion and criticism, however, is not sufficient to
solve them. It is only through persevering in solidarity that men and women
reach solutions. As the BEC movement is a step in this direction, a few words
are now in order.

RENEWED MARXIST CURRENTS

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union (1989-1991), nationalist scholars and
practitioners of liberation theology publicly were debating and redefining
Marxist concepts in the Philippines. Until then, the heated debates of the 1970s
between theoretical Marxists in places where academic freedom prevailed were
not widely publicized in the popular presses, and these debates anyway largely
were suppressed in the Philippines until after the fall of Marcos dictatorship in
1986. This is one possible reason why Marxist liberation theologians had been
warned then by other Catholic theologians not to confuse the poor of the
Scripture with the proletariat of Marx (Galilea 1984; Ratzinger 1984 in Haight
1985; Second Plenary Council of the Philippines 1991, 97, 127).
Critics warned liberation theologians against using Marxist dogma, but they
have not recognized that liberation theologians have criticized dogmatic Marxist
theory in their own works. Even Pope John Paul II in his seminal Laborem
Exercems (On Human Work) written in 1981 criticized liberation theology
because of its Marxist tendencies, although like the liberation theologians he
also criticized capitalism and state technocratic socialism in his encyclical.
Some inside critics (Galilea, Marins, Ratzinger) of liberation theology seem to
be "lumping" various Marxist social teachings into one dogmatic strain of
thought as if there were no multitude of strands in Marxism, and all of them
consisted of "mechanistic models" of class struggle and revolution.
RETHINKING MARXISM AND PHILIPPINE THEOLOGY 85

"Mechanistic" evolutionary models of modes of production (e.g., feudalism,

capitalism, socialism, and communism) have long been criticized, specifically
by neoMarxist scholars working in areas where, at least, academic openness
prevailed prior to the break-up of the Soviet Union. These scholars have
criticized such mechanistic models for being dogmatic and ethnocentric (Nadeau
1994). They have also criticized mechanistic mode of production models for
omitting considerations of gender, ethnicity, ecology, and local history in all its
variations, most significantly culture (e.g., Lukacs 1968; Bloch 1984; Godelier
1972; Wolf 1982).
Most neoMarxists would agree with liberation theologians that preconceived
totalitarian visions of the economy and society have to be abandoned because
they fail to address the democratic aspirations of common people. The impact of
this progressive stream of thought on the Philippines, for example, provides a
partial explanation for why allies and party members of the Communist Party of
the Philippines were at loggerheads in the early 1990s, over the hard line taken
by Armando Liwanag in his paper "Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Rectify
Errors" (1992; Rocamora 1993a, 1993b; Pomeroy 1993; Jalandoni 1993;
National Democratic Front Council 1993; Pollard 1992). Globally, neoMarxists
and liberation theologians were arguing that culture, human agents, and ideology
have a relative autonomy in social life and for this reason they need to be
included in models of the economy, society, and social change. Among them
were also neoMarxist anthropologists and historians who agreed that local
interactions needed to be considered into frameworks of large scale models of
the relationship between capitalists and non-capitalists, and that indigenous
context and history matter (e.g., Stoler 1985; Scott 1985; McCoy 1982;
Kerkvliet 1990; and Mojares 1986).
NeoMarxists scholars like De la Torre, Nemenzo, and David, at least as
early as the mid-1960s, made their criticisms of dogmatic leaders of the former
Soviet Union and other dogmatic communist movements and regimes. They
opposed those who would dogmatically apply Marx's ideas as politics, rather
than as an impetus for coming up with some new and creative ideas to solve
practical social problems on local ground.
Marx's concepts, like any other concepts or theories, are best seen as entry
points for social analysis. Take for example his concept of a mode of
production, that is, at best, a nonessentialist concept. A mode of production can
only be understood in terms of the particular social formation and of the other
modes of production that orient it. A mode of production is therefore, open to
analysis and change from any point on a wide spectrum of possibilities, for
example, from the point of gender, history, environment, work or religion.
It can be said that the fall of the Soviet Union has not marked the death of
Marxism, rather it has opened-up a wellspring of creative possibilities. This is
one explanation for why so many environmentalists, feminists, liberation
theologians, and social scientists of every sort are using Marxism as a way of
dialectically and democratically looking at social life. It provides one possible
venue for coming up with some new terms of agreement that are open to
86 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

developing an ecologically sustainable and more humane planet earth.

These newer directions in Marxist thought are especially relevant to the
evolution of Philippine theology of struggle. The "People's Power" revolution
opened new space for rethinking Marxism in the context of these newer
experiences and realities. For example, after 1986, some communist party cadres
began to question the ideological basis of the Jose Sison group's decision to
boycott the elections in a series of articles published in the clandestine network
of the National Democratic Front. This led to a major rift in the party between
those who adhered to Sison's strategy for armed struggle and those who wanted
to re-write the program to make it more inclusive of other possibly more viable
strategies as they arise.
Liberation theology like all theology is talk about God. It is an inductive
methodology and process that discerns God in the life of the people by taking
into consideration their aspirations and then looking to see what the Bible has to
say about that. Liberation theology is biased for the poor and oppressed because
the God of the Bible is on the side of the poor who comes down to live with
them. Liberation theology does not begin through the entry point of any absolute
perspective, rather it goes back to the people to think and reflect upon their
experiences and realities, to better understand and identify their problems in
solidarity with the people concerned. Liberation theology is "God talk" and its
tools are Marxist analysis. In the words of one cadre priest, "unless you have the
tools of analysis your consciousness is zero because conscientization is some
sort of realizationa kind of thinkingit is a moment of ecstasy when people
see the world differently. Then, they will become liberated and will identify with
a class or group of people; this makes liberation theology a class struggle."
In contrast the dogmatic structures of the Catholic church are closer to the
structures of scientific atheism. The Catholic church and Marxist dogma are like
two absolutes. Two absolutes clash, neither will give way. What they believe is
what is right. But, there are no absolutes when it comes to facts. Facts are
fallible and relative like morals, abortion, mortal sin, and a woman's right to her
own body. Like thunder and storm, heat and cold, unless both sides understand
the parameters of the debate neither will go very far in understanding each other.
Both the church and party are authoritative in nature, and have messianic and
eschatological visions. Both call for justice, peace, equity, land reform, and
citizen participation. For the Party, the new world of a classless society will
come about through class struggle, will unfold according to global historical
forces when peasants and laboring classes overthrow the ruling classes by
surrounding them from the countryside. For the church, the new world of
promised land will result from the ongoing human struggle to build up God's
kingdom on earth, men and women will discern this historical plan as it unfolds
in historywhen the whole nation is remodeled as a liturgical BEC. But these
overlapping tendencies between the Catholic church and Marxist dogma remain
at the level of structure, not content. They do not overlap in any other sense,
except as they have met challenge from within by liberation theologians and
neoMarxists.
RETHINKING MARXISM AND PHILIPPINE THEOLOGY 87

The theology of struggle in the Philippines stands in a complex relationship

to Marxism. It is more political in practice than in the literature. Like in Latin
America and Africa, however, practicing liberation theology in the Philippines is
a risky endeavor. Lives are at stake. BECs are subject to militarization and
hameletting, which not coincidentally, was done to the Vietnamese farmers by
the Americans during the Vietnam War period. BEC workers and members are
also open to salvagings (summary executions), and BEC priests risk being
censored and ostracized.

BASIC ECCLESIAL COMMUNITIES

Welch who scrutinized liberation theology in relation to her own work in
feminist theology, looked at the literature on liberational BECs through the lens
of Foucault's genealogy and archaeology of knowledge. She pointed out that
liberation theologies are not merely variant strains of thought within a traditional
theology, for example, progressive theologies versus conservative theologies
within an overriding Catholic theology, rather they can be said to represent a
new episteme of knowledge: a break from traditional theology. They are
continuous with one tradition, among other traditions, within Christianity as a
whole, namely, with a tradition that is critical of society and the institutional
church (1985, 24, 34).
Welch points out that Biblical texts and scriptures are important in
theologies of liberation, but the formative basis of liberation faith is oriented in
the present communities of readers who are doing the interpreting. For liberation
theology like neoMarxism is not based on some abstract category of knowledge
that exist at the level of the supernatural. Rather it is based in a concrete
category of knowledge that exists practically and historically in the present.
Liberation theology is based on a relationship between God and God's people in
history. It is lived and reflected theologically as it is practiced. It is based in
BECs that strategically and politically side with the poor and oppressed.
Liberation theology, like neoMarxist theories, is concerned with the concrete
social structure and situation of the poor. It is concerned with the consciousness
that the poor have regarding their own situation, and it seeks to empower the
poor by involving them in their own development process, especially in
decision-making. It does not overlook the indigenous consciousness, for
example, the religiosity of the poor, rather it expands upon it to enable the poor
to become more aware of local possibilities for social change, some of which
may entail compromising and negotiating, rather than class conflict. It enables
the poor, many of whom are religious believers, to see their church's teachings
in a new light by depicting a God who is not only with them, but, above all, for
them. Liberation theology is informed by on-going struggles of the poor in the
history of the Third World, and in this respect it is closer to neoMarxism, not
orthodox Marxism.
88 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

AN OUTSIDER'S VIEW IN CEBU

However, theologies of struggle in the Philippines work differently on the
ground than envisioned in the theories of the community organizers who use
them, and in the writings of the theologians who reflect on them, such as in the
writings of De la Torre (1986), Cosmao (1985), Lovett (1986), Gaspar (1990),
and Pernia (1990). For example, I did fieldwork in 1993 on two principal and
opposing BEC models operating in Cebu. On one side, the Archdiocesan BEC
office organized liturgical BECs. On the other side, the Basic Christian
Community office organized liberational BECs. Although some bishops and
priests unofficially approved of it, the Basic Christian Community office at that
time did not have the insignia of the church hierarchy. The two organizing
offices could be said to be similar because both were building BECs based on
small, Bible-oriented groups. They differed because of their approaches to and
interpretations of human and economic development. In the words of one Basic
Christian Community officer:

The primary target of the BCC-CO (Basic Christian Community office) is the poor masses.
We speak about the problems of the poor. The local bishops have not implemented the BEC
model envisioned by Second Plenary Council of the Philippines: a model that theoretically
includes the same threefold (liturgical, developmental, and liberational) focus as the BCC-
CO's model. In reality, the bishops seldom speak about the problems of the people; they are
only concerned to establish the liturgical aspect of the BEC model. The worst is that they
are attacking liberational BECs for reasons that they say the Left is using them. So,
presently there are still parishes [in the Visayan region] that accept us, also priests who
understand us but who are not implementing the BEC program. In reality, there is an anti-
BCC-CO faction within the church hierarchy that started in 1988, when the Visayan bishops
released an official statement denouncing the BECs [organized by the BCC-CO] for their
Marxist interpretation of the Bible. In the past, BCC-CO priests were wiped out, especially
in Samar and Leyte, and some went underground. How can you deny the truth? We are just
afraid that the church in itself is capitalist. They [the conservative faction of the church
hierarchy] don't want the resources of the church to be shared with the people, mostly with
the poor, exploited and oppressed. So, all they have to do is defend their status quo.

Although there were other BECs in Cebu independent of these leading offices,
they resembled one or the other and could have a double-edged effect.
The official archdiocesan office in Cebu City seemed to be drawing on an
approach to economic and human development based more on modernization
theory than on liberation theology. The approach of modernization theory differs
from the more indigenous approach of liberation theology in that it assumes that
capitalist rational behavior theories developed in the West can be transferred to
develop other societies and cultures (Schneider 1974 and LeClair 1968). As one
priest explained:

The funding agency (behind the archdiocesan BEC office) was looking for an expert in the
area of developing cooperatives. The Scarborough Fathers are really master builders of
cooperatives; they really invested a lot of money in them. They are master builders but their
cooperatives never worked because they were meant for the poor but became more of a
RETHINKING MARXISM AND PHILIPPINE THEOLOGY 89

banking system catering to the middle classes. The director they hired was a former
Scarborough priest (now married) who worked in this area and there were so many things
going on. The funding agency trusted him, and like a good businessman, the man looks after
himself. He excels in the management and bureaucratic side but the real question is what
has he done in the field? He is more value oriented, a real functionalist, he wouldn't align
with any of the left groups really. He takes a tunnel approach to reality as if (people's)
values change and the whole thing changes. But, the world out there really doesn't fit this
mode thinking. It is a capitalist way of thinking. His approach to building cooperatives is to
go where the power ishe has a very political and judiciary naturethey control the
projects. It is as if our problems are all caused by the way we think and people are like rats
in a cage to be experimented with, but when will the rats ever get out?

For example, the archdiocesan office seemed to promote the idea of

reforming the Philippines from within by developing "good" Christian values of
saving. Once this occurs they encourage saving in small credit coops, although
seed money is not given since it supposedly encourages dependency, for the
sake of supporting one's brothers and sisters in community, rather than for
individual profit. They promoted a view of Philippine culture "as a damaged
culture, as a culture poorly adapted to American culture as can be seen in the
way Filipinos are paying for foreign debt and for imports." Accordingly, the
solution was one of merely changing the value system of the Filipinos to
promote positive values such as love of country and Filipino products. However,
is not this view of Filipino society and culture a way of making Filipinos think
that it is totally their own fault that they are poor?
The archdiocesan BEC office in 1993 was funded generously by donations
from German Catholics1 under the name of Misereor. The project director's
salary was $1000 US dollars, or approximately 27,500 pesos per month, the
assistant director earned 10,000 pesos per month; and the other two senior staff
members received 7,000 to 8,000 pesos, monthly, as compared to the average
salary of 2,500 to 3,000 pesos for full-time labor apostolate workers in Cebu.2
Also, they had two new vehicles and a substantial bank account to work with.
Staff members trained leaders who, in turn, continued to develop Bible study
groups located primarily in urban centers, while the Basic Christian Community
Organizer's office and the Redemptorist mission teams served rural liberational
BECs. The strategy of the Archdiocesan staff was to train BEC leaders from the
different parish councils who would continue to develop BECs by way of giving
additional seminars and forming Bible study groups. Similar in design to
Catholic Bible sharing groups in the United States, the Archdiocesan BECs met
weekly in small groups in members' homes, or sometimes in parish halls or
classrooms, to study passages from the Bible that was to be read in the following
Sunday's liturgy. They typically kept a record of attendance that was turned in to
their local parish church office for forwarding to the Archdiocesan BEC office
files. These BECs typically were composed of seven to eight members, mostly
women. When I asked why more men were not present, invariably I was told
that it is partially because of the machismo of Filipino men and the view in the
Philippines that religion is only for women. However, I learned from members
90 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

that they feel that the BEC has made a difference in their lives, especially at the
level of the family. For example, one member told me that since she started
attending the weekly BEC Bible study group she has been able to get along
better with her teenage children and her husband. Before that she used to swear
and curse and say unkind things to people, but now she has more understanding
regarding the failings of her husband and others. Since she changed her own
attitude and behavior, her husband has also mellowed. Now, she says he comes
home in the evenings and sleeps early. Members in her BEC group were
discussing a well-known scripture reading in Matthew 13 when this writer
visited them.
The Bible reading that they were discussing concerned the parable of the
poor farmer who threw his seeds on stony, thorny, dry, and fertile grounds. They
compared it to their own lives and involvement in the 24 required BEC
leadership training sessions, which were being conducted by one of the local
leaders in their parish council. Several members said that the seeds that were
planted in fertile ground were like the seeds that were planted in them by the
priest who challenged them to attend all 24 BEC sessions, because they have
attended these sessions even when they were very tired. In contrast, they likened
the dead seed planted in thistles and thorns to those times when they have
church activities to attend to, but go out to dinner or a party instead.
In contrast, the "unofficial" office seemed to draw on a holistic (not only
liturgical, but social, cultural, political, economic, environmental) approach to
development based on recent theories in neoMarxism and liberation theology.
The director and staff emphasized transforming the capitalist system by resisting
its repressive structures (e.g., by preparing farmers and fishers to act together to
resist developers who hope to eject them from their land in order to convert their
land into an industrial and tourist zone as is happening in Cebu). In 1993, 200
liberational BECs, or 26,389 families, participated in Bible sharing groups and
ecologically oriented economic projects (e.g., ecological agriculture, livestock
raising, seed nurseries; BCC-CO Visayas Updates 1993). This was a minute
percentage of Cebu's total population of 2,646 million, although it did not
account for all other farmer organizations in the BEC network, or the
unregistered BECs; also, the Basic Christian Community-Organizer's office had
been labeled as a communist front, thus, it called for a certain amount of
personal courage to remain faithful for the long-term. Organizers encouraged
farmers to resurrect and maintain traditional Filipino values and customs geared
toward sustainable agriculture. They promoted practices that historically have
borne religious significancea closeness of spirit to natureespecially when
these practices made good ecological sense. Moreover, traditional practices
neighbors who farm together and organic farming with the use of natural
fertilizers, medicinal and insect repellent plantsrequired little capital input.
The Basic Christian Community Organizer's office has built up over the
years, a support network of friends locally, and abroad, for example, by hosting
groups of young Christian scholars and lay church workers from Europe and
Japan who wish to learn about the life of BEC farmers. Unlike the Archdiocesan
RETHINKING MARXISM AND PHILIPPINE THEOLOGY 91

BEC office, they have no vehicles and rely on public transportation. Staff
members also are not highly paid; salaries range between 2,500 and 3,000 pesos
per month, salaries comparable to most Philippine civil servantsfor example,
teachers and post office personnel. The BEC supervisors manage local parish-
based pastoral workers and guide and empower workers with basic organizing
skills. Supervisors, once upland parish workers, transfer their skills to parish
worker-apprentices by working alongside them in the field. Because the
principle behind BEC formation is participation, parish workers are trained to
develop and spot potential leaders in the barrios. They promote lay participation
in the local community because these pastoral workers and staff are only
facilitators. As one local BEC priest expressed it, "Without the active
involvement of the communities the BEC program cannot be actualized."
The Basic Christian Community organizers may well have been conflict and
issue-oriented in the past, as many outside commentators (e.g., the staff of the
Archdiocesan BEC office) have claimed. They organized numerous teach-ins
and mass demonstrations against the Marcos Martial Law regime. However,
even then, they considered conflict analysis alone to be inappropriate for the
Philippines, because it was too issue-oriented and insensitive to cultural
nuances. Karl Gaspar says (1985, 4) that BEC views, ideologies, and strategies
"closely reflect the local situation of dehumanization that comes about from
impoverishment and exploitation." This situation is further aggravated by the
ongoing militarization of the Philippines. I did not find conflict analysis in
vogue in their upland rural communities; organizers enabled BEC members to
address their own problems by listening to and guiding them. These liberational
BECs also were supported by a fellowship of fifteen priests who visited
regularly. BECs from all over Cebu came together for worship, reflection, and
celebration. The priest fellowship, an advocacy group for the liberational BECs
with the local church hierarchy, was formed in 1988 when many of the Visayan
bishops and diocesan priests threatened to disband the organizers' office. As one
area supervisor expressed it:

At that time [1987-1988] we were so depressed because we were always under attack. We
were threatened, and we have facts on that, so at that time we were in a dilemma. So we
came up with a wild idea to organize a fellowship of BEC priests who could support and
stand-up for us [within the hierarchy]. Also, we knew that some priests and a few of the
bishops were sympathetic. We decided to convince these priests who really believed in the
BEC program to form a fellowship.

Finally, the liberational BEC model of the Basic Christian Community-

Organizers, not the liturgical model of the Archdiocesan office, can be seen as
an example of a global trend toward the development of grassroots alternatives
to the hegemonic discourse, symbol, and economic structures of modern
capitalism. They seek to establish a necessary connection between religious
truths and, social and economic justice.
In summary, religion is mixed up with ideology. Marx defined ideology as
the corruption of reason by interest, and analyzed the false consciousness of
92 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

both the victims and creators of unjust social structures, that is, the unconscious
rationalization by which both parties accept an inequitable and unjust social
order as necessary because it is ordained by God, or destined by nature, or
sanctioned by religion. Hence what Marx saw as operative in society was
ideology as a rationalization for the status quo. But, a great oversight of Marx
was his underestimation of the need for personal spiritual growth in a world of
collectivism. Marx's statement that religion is the opiate of the people was
insightful in that it emphasized the relationship between three core components
of religiondominance, theodicy, and soteriology. Mutual self-help movements
like the BECs are, or at least hope to become, not another opiate, but rather an
antibiotic for what their members clearly perceive as the social and economic
pathologies of the contemporary world.

NOTES
1. The author does not know why German Catholics fund BECs in Cebu, although a
prestigious Catholic university established by German missionaries in Cebu may have been
instrumental in establishing an early link between German Catholics and the Philippines.
2. Salary information of the Archdiocesan BEC staff is publicly available knowledge
contained in their monthly report to MISEREOR.
Chapter 8

Conclusion: Participatory
Developmentfrom the Grassroots

In summary, this study has examined the interrelationship of hegemonic

development policies and indigenous social and economic structures on the
island of Cebu. Previous chapters have placed events in Cebu in three broad
perspectives. First, we have seen Cebu as a crucible, in which multiple and
conflicting political influences surround the ideology and practice of
development. Second, we have examined the nature and efficacy of certain local
movements to promote traditional values and practices in the face of unwelcome
forms of development. Third, the Cebu case has provided a valuable opportunity
to explore the efficacy of broad sociopolitical and economic models when
applied to a specific Third World situation.
Cebu, both historically and currently, serves as an example of how colonial
and neocolonial development discourses served as mechanisms of control over
the non-Western world. The history of pre-modern and modern colonization
under the Spanish and then the Americans, and more recently Filipino elites
schooled in Western values, exhibits a metropolitan elite intervention into this
arena. At the same time, the survival of indigenous practices that have existed
for thousands of years attests to Cebu as a center where even today national and
international influences are felt locally. In this respectboth in past and present,
oppressor and oppressedthe situation in Cebu provides an instance in which
the First World interpolates the Third World. Yet, this perspective regarding
Cebu's history of colonization does not adequately account for the displacement
and suffering endemic to such a process.
But, how effective have local, bottom-up efforts to protect the indigenous
life ways of Cebu proven to be? Clearly, grassroots efforts like the BECs are
more effective than abstract theories. Religion as an aspect of ideology calls for
examination of its historic and structural relations to indigenous social life.
Otherwise, students of anthropology run the risk of losing contact with their
subjects, by creating theories with no concrete relation to them. We have also
examined the alternative thrust of Cebu's BECs in relation to the whole arena,
94 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

its roots and origins, of development presently occurring in the Philippines. Part
1 relates the BEC movement to the Filipino struggle for liberation from colonial
and neocolonial dominance during the Spanish colonization (1565-1898), the
United States colonial period (1898-1946), and subsequent domination by the
Filipino elite.
There is a long history in the Philippines of religious clergy and Christians
who have joined the revolutionary struggle. For example, the Christians for
National Liberation, which consists of an ecumenical and mass base of
Christians, was established to support the revolutionary struggle against Martial
Law. However, the question of armed struggle currently is at issue among
members and allies of the National Democratic Front in the Philippines.
Nationalist Christians and their allies have long opted for the parliamentary road
to struggle and active non-violence (Part II). Theologians of struggle (e.g., De la
Torre, Gaspar, Pieres) and BEC organizers agree that they are indebted to
nondogmatic and creative Marxism rather than to the more dogmatic orthodox
Marxism because the former provides a fresh way to analyze and redress social
problems. Theologians of struggle have modified Marxist tendencies in BEC
praxis because they see dogmatic Marxism as more of a hindrance than an aid to
improving people's everyday lives. Meanwhile, BECs favor poor people by
providing an alternate method to restructure Philippine society. This research
suggests that the primary objectives of participants in this movement are
instrumental not ideological, aiming, first, to improve socioeconomic and
cultural circumstances in the face of poverty, and second, to defend and protect
basic human rights in the face of violence from a multiplicity of government
forces and real estate and development agents.
On the one side, Cebu's landlords and elite officials continue to use the
military and their government connections to keep poor farmers and laborers
under control and surveillance. On the other side, many of the island's poor have
turned to churches to redress felt wrongs. In response, local churches in the
ecumenical movement have polarized into a conservative faction of religious
leaders largely concerned with preserving the status quo and a justice-oriented
faction of leaders directly involved in the liberational BEC movement to
improve the conditions of the impoverished majority. The poor have mostly
been with the institutional church, but BECs have become more or less a
metaphor for the unrest of church leaders themselves. Moreover, although the
local government provides financial incentives to areas where internationally
tradable goods can be produced in exchange for foreign currency, it has
neglected spending on social services and agriculture. This policy affected
adversely both Cebu's poor and the natural environment. By contrast, the local
BEC movement offers an alternative, bottom-up development strategy attractive
to the poor because their way of life is under siege.
Clearly my findings, as well as those of others, point to the need to look at
BECs in the wider contexts in which they are grounded, to distinguish
differences between them. Some BECs may innovate fresh ideas and cultural
productions in praxis (e.g., engage BEC theory in practice as in the upland corn
CONCLUSION 95

farming community described in Chapter 5). Others are best seen as Bible
sharing groups (Chapter 7). My micro-ethnographies show that there is much
more on-the-ground variation between BECs than is currently acknowledged.
Ideally, BECs encourage the poor to rely on their own authority and cognitional
autonomy to solve their problems free of outside theories that have no concrete
basis, although they do not always do so. These communities, like many small
communities, are vulnerable to counterproductive tendencies such as gossip,
backbiting, suspicion, and envy. Some of the BECs are subject to manipulation
by conservative clerics and lay workers who may use concepts from liberation
theology to assert the church's institutional authority symbolically and
materiallyas when the conservative hierarchy attempted to co-opt and thereby
insert the local BEC movement into the hegemonic development paradigm of
the Philippine government, the World Bank, and the International Monetary
Fund.
Results from my fieldwork also suggest that foreign funding agencies need
to become more aware of the differences between BEC models and more wary
of government and church officials' assessments of them. Liturgical and
developmental BECs may emphasize economic development but not social,
cultural, and ecological development. By contrast, liberational BECs are more
effective modelers of sustainable development with their multi-level focus on
issues of class, gender, culture, and ecology. These communities aim to effect
changes in people's everyday lives (better health, satisfying work, a safe
environment), although they are still young and it is inappropriate to quantify
and measure their accomplishments in terms like improved incomes and diets.
Some liberational BECs in Cebu have partially opted out of the dominant
international and local economic system to develop self-reliant and ecologically
sustainable communities for themselves. These modelers of resistance are not
totally dependent on the axioms of capitalism but have opted out because lack of
financial resources leaves them no alternative. Organizers in these communities
develop and adapt their organizing skills and ideas on the basis of fresher
experiences and realities. However, liberational BECs are vulnerable to internal
divisions connected to divisions between NGOs (Chapter 5), which implies that
organizers need to focus more on farmers' agendas than their own. While
outside observers have reported on the Philippine government's efforts to
control such movements as the BECs, few have sufficiently addressed the gross
violations of human rights that currently occur there.
How, then, has the example of Cebu shed light on the viability of current and
popular anthropological paradigms (e.g., neoMarxist theories) applied to Third
World circumstances?
To begin with, this study contributes to the task of conceptualizing
sustainable development alternatives by documenting at first hand local
communities that are developing new and innovative models. There is no single
development model that can be applied cross-culturally, rather a multiplicity of
experimental models exist locally. As Fabian (1983 cited in Escobar 1995)
insists, it is important to look coevally at these development alternatives in
96 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

relation to the whole arena of development as it is presently occurring. A mode

of production perspective helped to examine Cebu's BEC alternatives for
sustainable development; such a hybrid perspective contributes significantly to
ethnographical practice because it avoids some of the pitfalls of generalizing
from preconceived models that do not fully account for particular on-going
processes of continuity and social change. Religion does not always serve as a
tool of the ruling classes or as an instrument of exploitation, as orthodox Marxist
frameworks would have it. This hypothesis that religion can aim to liberate has
been substantiated by way of Althusser's theory that practice needs to connect to
real indigenous social structure rife with counterproductive tendencies and not to
an abstract ideological object on some universal level. A social structure is not
some amorphous category existing outside of the minds of the people who live
within it. Rather, it exists in the cognitive structures of these same men and
women. BECs are practically oriented to people aware of some of the dilemmas
(poverty, dislocations, violence) that modernity can bring and who are
consequently potent modelers from whom fresh ideas and cultural productions
might emerge. As with the history of Cebu under the colonialists and the more
modern repression of the BEC movements, the application of conventional
development paradigms to the situation on the ground grossly overlooks the
human suffering and displacement the situation currently promotes.
More broadly, this study shares much in common with other recent inquiries
along these lines and suggests possibilities for further research. In light of so
much recent rejection since the break up of the Soviet Union, of Marxian
concepts and arguments as rigid and "dead," it is not surprising that some
authors (Hart 1989; Aguilar 1989; Turton 1989; and White 1989) have criticized
the use of Marxist mode-of-production studies in Southeast Asia as outmoded.
In particular, Hart and Aguilar have criticized studies that address the
relationship between capitalist and pre-capitalist relations of production for their
preoccupation with rigid categorization rather than with facts. They conclude
that studies which focus on the relationship between modes of production and
collective social movements as forms of resistance against hegemonic
development policies in Southeast Asian societies are no longer relevant to
changes taking place both locally and in the larger world (Hart 1989, 1; Aguilar
1989, ad passim). Aguilar pronounces studies of modes of production guilty of a
teleological assumption about the end result of capitalism (1989, 41, 47,
passim). He contends that these studies in the Philippines are still laden with a
rigid ethnocentric model (1989, 47). Similarly, Hart criticizes modes of
production studies in Thailand "for having generally been far more concerned
with what is, and is not, capitalist (and/or functional to it) than with
understanding the dynamic processes at work in particular settings" (1989, 1).
Both Hart and Aguilar call for more flexible theories and concepts which study
real people in specific nation states that have their own unique histories and
structures of economic and political power (Aguilar 1989, Hart 1989; supported
by Turton 1989 and White 1989).
These chapters began from a standpoint different from those of Hart or
CONCLUSION 97

Aguilar in regards to their appraisal of prevailing trends in modes of production

studies in Southeast Asia. In particular, studies concerned with determining the
type of mode of production in noncapitalist and semicapitalist societies are
generally not only open to considering local specificity and difference but can
place these considerations into the contexts of broader international tendencies
and influences. My work shows that studies dealing with issues of modes of
production can constructively address dynamic issues of the modes of
production. They are open to debate, and can be used by other scholars to obtain
a picture of the larger developments taking place within the field. Studies of
modes of production are equal to the task of looking at economic and social
changes occurring in real-life communities with their own unique configurations
and cultures resulting from interactions taking place both locally and beyond. In
fact, many Southeast Asian scholars engaged in the articulation of modes of
production disputes have engaged these issues and improved their studies
accordingly (e.g., McCoy 1982; Wolf 1982; Scott 1985; Stoler 1985; and Ong
1987). It is not that Aguilar and Hart are incorrect in their call for more local
studies to account for the element of human agency in processes of political and
social change at the regional and national level, but that they fail to see the
importance of looking at social relationships against the backdrop of the
different modes of production which orient them.
Indeed, a modified rendition of a mode of production method provided this
researcher an entry point to understand the case studies side by side with the
(under) development of Cebu. From such a perspective, the BEC in the dumpsite
community was analyzed not in terms of some amorphous "culture of poverty"
theory or some rural-to-urban/backward-to-modern continuum, but was
investigated in relation to the dominant urban system (or the processes of
proletarianization and separation of peasants from their land) and the
surrounding superordinate culture of the metropolis. More studies are needed on
the emerging non-capitalist mode of production in many of Cebu's farm
communities with its emphasis on use value, not exchange value with its drive
for profit and quantitative rationality in which the farmers attempt to keep
resources under communal, not market, control. The farmers in the case of the
BEC in the upland corn-farming community are renovating traditional cultural
practices (e.g., collective farming practices, organic farming techniques, and the
planting of traditional crops) to counteract some of the effects of the Green
Revolution (e.g., decreasing soil fertility, increasing dependence on the market,
increasing indebtedness, and semi-proletarianization). They also are part of a
larger farmer ecology movement against poverty, exploitation, and the
capitalization of nature on the island.
Moreover, this study suggests new research possibilities. Although I went to
the Philippines with notions about the BEC movement, my findings proved my
study plan to be irrelevant. I found it necessary to substantially redefine the
liberational BECs from the ground of fieldwork and theory because members of
these communities had been violently translated as leftists, to be rooted out by
people at the top of the local government (e.g., see McCoy 1982; Youngblood
98 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

1990; Putzel 1992). Future researchers might take this study as a point of
departure to investigate liberational BECs as socioeconomic experiments in the
Philippines and encourage them by including them in political strategies for
sustainable development. My findings also suggest that other social and
religious movements that resemble the BEC movement need to be carefully
examined.
South and Southeast Asia currently are seeing numerous religious
movements similar to the BEC movement in the Philippines. Some Buddhist
monks in Thailand, for example, are involved in ecology and development
activities that coincide with an emphasis on Buddhism's this-world teachings
(Lakanavichian 1994). Such is also the case for some Buddhist monks in Sri
Lanka (Pieris 1988). Islamic intellectuals are similarly contextualizing Koranic
teachings in today's Indonesia (Woodward 1993). Cultural tolerance, religious
pluralism, and the practical concern for equity and social justice are synthesized
into a unifying theme in these movements that seek to develop peripheral
communities into self-reliant communities of interpretation and action. These
movements typically lack substantial financial resources and are hesitant to
impose top-down development schemes. To constructively understand them,
such movements need to be studied specifically in relation to the wider societies
in which they are grounded.
The various Asian religious movements that resemble the BEC movement
have emerged in reaction to a type of development ideology associated with
authoritarian state technocratic socialism and capitalist technocracy. I have
argued that this type of development ideology is also present in the Filipino
Christian churches, which reflect the conflicts of the West. But the justice-
oriented and environmentally concerned side of these Christian churches
represented in the BEC coalition are closer to the more indigenous Asian
religions than to Christian fundamentalism when viewed from the theological
standpoint that creation is an open process for which we share responsibility for
the future (Lovett 1986; Pieres 1988; Gosling 1990).
According to Pieres (1988, 32) the anti-religious roots of capitalism and
authoritarian state technocratic socialism hinder advocates of these ideologies
from seeing into the (religious) depths of human nature. Hence, an Asian
method of development and liberation relies on tools of social analysis in
conjunction with psychological introspection suited to integral (social, cultural,
political, economic, ecological) Asian traditions. Not coincidentally, this is the
method used by liberational BEC practitioners in the Philippines. Both
Buddhists and Christians adhering to this method reject the class mores of feudal
societies and capitalist societies in favor of the communitarian mores of the
democratic socialist experiments in Asia. Some Thai Buddhist monks, for
example, have long been involved in ecology and development activities. By the
1970s, some of them were already being labeled Communist insurgents for their
reforestation and agricultural-development work, by government officials and
other leading elites with an interest in local logging and associated industries.
Pongsak, the abbot of Wat Palad near Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, is one
CONCLUSION 99

example of such a monk who has continued to work with villagers to reforest
and irrigate rapidly desertifying land in the face of obstacles such as police raids
(Brown 1992, Ch. 8). Many Thai Buddhist monks who engage in social work
originally come from poor rural families. They avail themselves of a monastic
education to obtain degrees at large urban Buddhist universities. As part of their
degree program, they are expected to participate in development projects in rural
communities. Some of these projects were financed in the 1970s and 1980s by
the Thai government, in an effort to help counter insurgency efforts along the
Kampuchean and Laos borders and to provide alternatives to opium production
in the north. But many monks remained in the villages long after graduation,
because they became increasingly immersed in the social, cultural, political,
economic, environmental, and ecological aspects of sustainable rural
development (Gosling 1990, 105; Brown 1992, Ch. 8).
Similarly, some Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka have participated in a village
self-help movement referred to as the Sarvodaya. This Gandhi-inspired
development movement provides an indigenous alternative to the top-down
development program of the local government. Since 1958, the Sarvodaya
movement has grown from a small group of pioneers working alongside the
outcast poor to a people's self-help movement that by 1992 included over 4000
towns and villages operating programs for health, education, agriculture, and
local industry. Its program emphasizes the full range of human well-being: the
needs of the whole person must be met, needs that include satisfying work,
harmonious relationships, a safe and beautiful environment, a life of the mind
and spirit, and food, clothing, and shelter. The economic aspect of development
cannot be separated from social, cultural, political, and ecological aspects of
development. Capitalist and technocratic socialist models of development that
solely emphasize production and exchange of goods are inadequate models
when looked at from the Sarvodaya perspective (Ariyaratne and Macy 1992).
Finally, the alternative perspectives of village self-help movements in
Thailand and Sri Lanka correspond to the liberational BEC perspective in the
Philippines. Some of the conjunctural possibilities for the investigation of such
alternatives from an anthropological perspective have been cited, while, Cultural
Marxist and mode-of-production frameworks provide room for alternative
researches that can guide social policy. For this reason, church workers involved
in social justice and sustainable ecology movements, like Cebu's liberational
BEC movement and village self-help movements in Thailand and Sri Lanka,
have found it useful to employ selective NeoMarxist concepts in their analyses.
They have selectively combined schools of thought in a distinctively indigenous
fashion. The liberational BEC movement is an instance of this kind of new
social movement that is grounded in theory and practice.
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Chapter 9

Epilogue: Human Rights for the Poor

Since its inception, the United Nations has worked to develop a comprehensive
set of international rights through a varied set of conventions: for example, the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the United Nations Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1951), the United
Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the United
Nations International Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights
(1976), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women (1979), the United Nations' Declaration of the Right of
People's to Peace (1984), United Nations' Declaration on the Right to
Development (1986), and the African (Banju) Charter on Human and Peoples'
Rights (1986).1 During this time period, three generations of human rights have
come into being (Van Ness 1999). The first generation is civil and political
rights intended to protect the individual from the state. These rights are rooted in
the individualistic traditions of Western Europe and North America. The second
generation of rights are economic, social, and cultural rights that reflect the
priorities of socialist countries and Marxist philosophical traditions, that seek to
address the problems of the poor (starvation, illiteracy, disease) and that have
the objective to improve their material standard of living. The third generation
of rights refers to collectivist rights and responds to the local priorities and
realities of formerly colonized countries and their emphasis on the right to self-
determination (e.g., Cuba) and development (e.g., the Philippines).
Of particular importance to macro-economic development are (1) the
International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (1966), and (2) International
Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1976). By 1995, 127 states
ratified the covenant of civil and political rights, and 129 nations ratified the
covenant for economic, social, and cultural rights. The Philippine government
ratified both covenants: the covenant on civil and political rights, which was
signed December 19, 1966, ratified, February 28, 1986, and implemented on
102 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

January 23, 1987; and, the covenant on economic, social, and cultural rights,
which was signed December 19, 1966, ratified, May 17, 1974, and took effect
on January 3, 1976. Although the Philippines has signed and ratified these
covenants, it has failed to incorporate them into national policy and practice.
We have seen in previous chapters how the Philippine state has violated the
rights of its own citizens, especially poor citizens. This chapter looks at the issue
of development aggression and the corresponding response of people's
movements and the nongovernmental organizations that support them in their
call for a new alternative, sustainable development paradigm. Development
aggression can be defined as the process of displacing people from their land
and homes to make way for development schemes that are being imposed from
above without consent or public debate. It is contrary to the 1986 United Nations
Declaration of the Right to Development which "recognizes that development is
a comprehensive economic, social, cultural, and political process, which aims at
the constant improvement of the well-being of the entire population and of all
individuals on the basis of their active, free and meaningful participation in
development and in the fair distribution of benefits resulting there from."1
In its malignant form, development aggression can be characterized as a
political process wherein police and military forces work in cooperation with
local governments to dislodge thousands of poor farmers from their land, while
depriving the urban poor of homes and jobs, all under the banner of
development. In it's benign, and arguably less destructive form, development
aggression co-opts local symbols, gives them new meaning, and implants
inappropriate macro-economic technology (e.g., genetic seeds that disappear).
For example, sustainable development agriculture once referred to organic
farming but now refers to agro-capitalist industrial complexes too. Even the
concept of traditional Asian values has been used to prop up authoritarian
dictatorships; Marcos used Filipino values (e.g., respect for elders and authority
figures) as a pretext for declaring martial law. There are many more examples.
Either way, malignant or benign, aggressive development is in violation of
international human rights conventions such as the 1966 International Covenant
on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which states that "all peoples have a
right to freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic,
social, and cultural development."
An example of development aggression on a macro-level is the United States
interventions into the internal operations of other nation states as, among other
examples, in the case of the illicit and covert activities of the CIA abroad. This
is violative of the Helsinki Agreement (1975) that states, "Participating states
will refrain from intervention, direct or indirect, individual or collective, in the
internal or external affairs falling within the domestic jurisdiction of another
participating state, regardless of their mutual relations."3
Countering development aggression are grassroots peoples' organizations
supported by non-government organizations and organic intellectuals who are
researching and reporting on human-and environmental rights violations that
occur as a result of inappropriate development schemes. Inappropriate
EPILOGUE 103

development can be defined as a globalizing economic and political process

coming from outside, that severely damages a community's culture, social
organization, and environment. An example would be a community (e.g., Pardo,
Antique, and Tuburan in Cebu) placed under military surveillance to allow the
government free reign in pursuit of its so-called development. By contrast,
appropriate development can be defined in accordance with the International
Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights as a process for achieving
ecological sustainability and human well being within a community as a whole.
It refers to a holistic (social, cultural, political, and economic) process that leads
to the qualitative improvement of all individuals and groups in a society.4
Social justice and environmental movements that concern issues of class,
gender, culture, indigenous knowledge systems, and literacy provide a model for
appropriate development. They share a common perspective that is critical of
top-down development and counterpoise bottom-up alternatives that boldly
identify the interdependent relationship between culture and nature. These
communities work to effect changes in people's lives (better health, satisfying
work, a safe environment), although they are still young and it is inappropriate
to quantify and measure their accomplishments in terms like improved incomes
and diets. They are grounded on the idea of the growing economic disparity
between the rich and poor and the absence of real economic and political power.
These kinds of movements grounded in real social life are indicative of an
international trend toward the development of social and cultural alternatives to
the hegemonic discourses, symbols, and economic structures of modern
capitalism (and authoritarian bureaucratic socialism).
Subsequent chapters have shown that poor people's movements for social
and environmental rights reflect not only a struggle for better living conditions,
but also a deep-rooted resistance against global cultural imperialism. These
movements (e.g., the Basic Ecclesial Communities) resist the ideological
distortions, false consciousness, and fetishisms of world capitalism. It is for this
reason that they concentrate their training programs not only on increasing
people's awareness about their basic rights and on providing support for those
whose fundamental rights have been violated, but also on raising people's
consciousness about the inequitable origins of their social and economic
circumstances as a way to move them to act as a class-focused movement on
their own behalf. Their training programs, at the same time, aim to develop
sustainable farming techniques in agriculture (Versola 1993, 12). This was
illustrated in Chapter five in the case of uplanders who worked to transform
Philippine society by first transforming their own community into a more
cooperative economy.
Sustainable development movements like organized farmer movements
intersect with indigenous struggles for the right of tribal societies to live in their
natural habitats. Tribal communities, for example the Higaonon tribe of
Mindanao, largely seek to protect their environments from being irreparably
damaged by the influx of unwanted forms of development such as mining
operations and logging concessions that pollute and denude forested areas.
104 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES

Tribal people are cultural bearers of indigenous knowledge systems that offer
important models for sustainable forestry and agro-forestry practices. The 1993
United Nations Vienna Declaration recognizes the "inherent dignity and the
unique contribution of indigenous peoples to the development and plurality of
society and strongly reaffirms the commitment of the international community
to their economic, social, and cultural well-being and their enjoyment of the
fruits of sustainable development. States should ensure the full and free
participation of indigenous people in all aspects of society, in particular in
matters of concern to them." 5
In the Philippines, social justice workers and sustainable development
practitioners have turned away from an orientation based on merely transferring
technology and services to the poor, toward an orientation based on changing
social structures democratically from within. They are steeped in the political
struggles of indigenous peoples and the poor. Their goals are, first, to involve
the people in their own decision-making processes, second, to restructure
society; and third, to infiltrate, cultivate and influence allies, who are well-
placed, because they have access to and control over key resources which gives
them the political and economic clout to make greater social transformation
possible.
In conclusion, Filipino justice movements work in ways that are meaningful
to real people's lives. They are part of a worldwide trend that opposes poverty,
exploitation, and the capitalization of nature. Since the United Nations' attempts
to protect economic, social, and cultural rights compete with matters of
sovereignty, these movements provide one venue for an alternative forum for
human rights to emerge. Instead of labeling them communists, or divesting them
of their land to make way for inappropriate development schemes, like golf
courses which are absurd in an agricultural land where water would be better
spent to irrigate rice fields and farms, why not, as a matter of domestic and
international policy, financially support local initiatives already in place?

NOTES
Paper presented at the American Anthropology Association annual meeting in San
Francisco, November 15-19, 2000.
l.The content of these conventions can be found in The Human Rights Reader, edited by
Micheline R. Ishay and published by Routledge Press in 1997.
2. In Ishay 1997,469.
3. In Ishay 1997,433.
4. In Ishay 1997,452.
5. In Ishay 1997,485.
Appendix A:

"My Life Experiences and Story

about Smokey Mountain"
Dennis P. Constantino

Since I was a child I have experienced this extreme poverty together with my
family. I can say extreme because if we didn't workI mean, if we didn't go
out to the garbage in order to scavenge or dig up some waste or junk materials
such as empty cans, empty bottles, plastic, iron, aluminum, and other materials
we found in the garbage to sell to the junk dealer or buyer of scrap materials
we did not have anything to satisfy our everyday needs such as food to eat, etc.,
because how are we going to buy food if we have no income?
Almost all of the people who live here in Smokey Mountain [Cebu City
dumpsite] depend on the garbage for their way of life. Maybe this is our
livelihood because we have no choice in searching for some other job that is
better than a scavenger. They really don't want to leave this kind of work
because, according to them, "Working in the garbage is quite easy to manage
and not difficult to do. You have no boss. You have your freedom to work, or
not. You can stop working, or rest, when you're tired. You have no supervisor to
be afraid of because you are working for yourself." These are the common and
basic reasons why some people continue to work as scavengers, rather than
finding alternative ways to make a living or creating innovative techniques so
that they can have a convenient and comfortable life. Their concept about their
work is so fundamental; they always look at the advantages of their work
regardless of its disadvantages.
Almost all of the people here have no plan for the future, what is important
for them is today, never mind tomorrow. If they have money from selling their
waste materials, they spend it so savagely by drinking, gambling, and so on,
without giving any importance to the money they have wasted, that is, the
capital of their own efforts of working in the garbage day and night. In the
daytime they suffer from the extreme heat of the sun; their skin burns. They also
suffer from the very thick and dirty wind dust in the garbage field. They also
experience sleeplessness from working so hard, and they suffer from the cold
weather at night. They never think this way. Sometimes, because they are
106 APPENDIX A

working so hard in the garbage they become sick. I tried to ask some people here
and some parents why they are spending their money so abusively by spending
it not in a right way and on nonsense things, instead of saving it so that they
have something to use for tomorrow and so that they can sustain their children's
needs? Unfortunately, they talked back to me and said, "Why should I worry
and who am I to give them advice? In the first place, I am not a member of their
family, and in the second place, I am not a relative. So, whatever happens to
them is their own risk." Lastly they say, "Mind your own business kid!" So, I
stopped asking them questions and am trying to keep quiet because they have a
concrete point. But as a member of a society you must be concerned about what
is happening in your environment, especially in the society in which you are
involved.
Some people here have no concern about the educational affairs of their
children. They don't even give any parental guidance to their children. They
don't mind whether their children are going to school or not. They don't give
any encouragement to their children so that the child will have enthusiasm to go
to school and study well. But, they are the ones who give discouragement to
their own child and they tell their children as long as you know how to read and
write that is enough. They also poisoned the minds of their children saying "why
should you go to school instead of working in the garbage, you can't earn
money by going to school, while if you are working in the garbage you are
earning money. Nobody becomes rich by going to school, you are only wasting
your time, efforts, and, most of all, money." This is common to people who live
here, they don't give any importance and value to education.
Sometimes, I have to pity them, not because they are an object of poverty
because I also am one of them and suffer from this kind of situation, but because
of their poor insight and concept about the meaning of life. The idea that comes
out of their mind about the meaning of life is so very shallow. They seem to be
hopeless, and don't think about the consequences of all the things that they have
done. They are frivolous in doing something for their society as I have said, they
are only interested in their own satisfaction and by doing things that they desire,
they act so selfishly.
I'm also thinking, what will happen when their children grow up and start to
realize what life really is all about and what their duties and responsibilities are
toward their own self, fellow human beings, society, and most of all, God?
Maybe once they know this, I am 100% sure that they will blame their parents
and say "what kind of parents are you, so irresponsible that you allowed us to
atrophy, become idle and uninterested in the good things of life?" I have
observed that even when the parents see their children gambling, drinking, doing
indecent acts, and taking bad medicine or drugs, they don't give any advice or
guidance, and they don't discipline their children who commit bad acts. In other
words, they tolerate the faults of their children. So it happens that when their
children grow up and become young adults they still continue their bad habits
because they inherit their attitude from their parents. This young adult becomes
a bad boy or girl that we can view in general as a cancer of the society
APPENDIX A 107

(including their parents as the root cause).

Sometimes I can say that people (mentioned above) no longer have any
financial problem because I have my consciousness in this life and this area, I
always notice them (old persons, parents, youths, adults) drinking and gambling,
everyday, and almost all the youth are involved with drugs. That is why I am
analyzing how I can get out of this abstruse and crazy society so that I am not
able to witness these social diseases, it can really infect me and get me irritated
with them.
In this situation, the life of the people here becomes conflicted because of
troubles, arguing, gossips, adultery, robbery, defamation, and sometimes
slayings are inevitable. Maybe they lack patience and cannot psychologically
control their reactions because of the way the system causes them to treat each
other, and because almost all of them are uneducated and illiterate?
But, since the BEC and the SVD priests came here, especially Father Heinz,
Father Max Abalos, and the charismatic groups, I have noticed and observed
that some changes have occurred. The people who participate in the BEC and
charismatic group have minimized their vices. So I am very thankful to God that
He sent these people as an instrument in order to take this people out of the dark
and put them back in the light with the Lord. As for myself, how do I look at
these people who help us, I look at them as a lamp or like a torch that gives light
to the people in Smokey Mountain who lived their whole lives almost in the
dark. Through the help of these people, I can see a big behavior change in the
people of Smokey Mountain. Although I cannot say that they have totally
changed, I am certain that little by little they will make it better than ever.
Talking about the life of the youth here, as I have said, almost all of them are
drug dependent. We can say that they are "living in a drug world." But, some
youth are not involved in drugs. For me to deal with this situation of the young
adults is really difficult because of their different characteristics.
As [the democratically elected] president of the youth sector for the last 3
years, I do my best in order to convince and inform them that drugs and other
vices are really bad for our health and that you really gain nothing from using
drugs; your only benefit from using drugs is that you become insane, ill, or else
die! But since the young adults here are hardheaded, they don't listen to me and
say "who am I to give them advice? I am not their parent, and even their parents
don't give them annoying advice! I am not worthy to counsel them and I have
no right to control their lives! Finally, they say that I act like an authoritarian
dictator!" It is really hard for me to change them but I don't feel disappointed
anyway because I am trying my best to facilitate them in a righteous manner. As
for how I responded, I said "I asked for a little favor that you may listen to me,
even give me a tiny bit of your attention, so that I can explain it all to you
deeply. I am not dictating, I am only guiding and helping you so please listen to
me as your president, as your friend, please." At this time, they listened but
unfortunately I could not really get their loyalty, another youth replied, "It is
easy to bring a horse to the bank of a river but you cannot force that horse to
drink from that river." Just like them! They actually referred to that saying!
108 APPENDIX A

They are the horse and I am the horseman. As an answer to this saying I replied
in this way, "Yes, obviously, maybe at that time the horse is not thirsty, but time
will come when thirstiness is felt by the horse, the horse itself will drink the
water from the river without your consent." Furthermore, I added, "If you are
invited by someone to eat or if you are in your home and it is mealtime, are you
going to eat if you are not hungry? But, when you are in great hunger even if it
is not mealtime you will look for food to satisfy your hunger."
Even though they seemed to be stupid, I was able to enlighten the minds of
some of the young adults but others remained stubborn. As for myself, I was
very happy if I noticed someone changing their disgusting life into a new life
open to change. The happiness that I felt when somebody really changed cannot
be defined by money.
Some of these youths are not close friends of mine but I also have special
and best friends here who do not have vices and bad habits. Actually, some of
my best friends are former drug addicts who totally changed their lives.
Many times I felt so angry and hurt after a general meeting for the young
adults was held because, even though I called and asked everyone to come, no
one showed up. Even when some attended the meetings only few participated,
while most were physically present but mentally absent because they neither
reacted nor responded but just sat there like dummies. Before holding a meeting
I called them 3 to 4 days in advance to let them know that the meeting was
coming. I really felt hurt if only a few attended, especially if it was a general
meeting. I was led to believe that all of the youth would attend when a general
meeting was called but sad to say that my expectation was like myth. How a
leader can be held back from making progress in his society without the
cooperation of his officers and members. Thus, only two or three officers
attended every meeting and, as it turned out, they became dissatisfied with this
kind of conference.
Accidentally and unexpectedly one day almost all of the youth were asking
for a meeting! I was amazed at their enthusiasm. I started to think why are they
forcing me to hold a general meeting when in the past they rejected me and
refused to attend my meetings? I guessed why! Because our fiesta was coming
up, they forced me to hold a meeting so that we could have a disco party during
our fiesta days. It came to my mind that this is a golden opportunity to
communicate with them formally. During our meeting, I told them candidly that
even if they are sometimes so stupid and viscous; please try to eliminate your
bad habits gradually so that your lives will not be ruined. In this meeting, we
discussed our activities for the coming fiesta, for example, financial funding for
the games, the banquet, the Mass, decoration of the chapel, the disco, and so on.
But, I had a good idea to use this meeting as an opportunity to talk about how to
get rid of drugs in our community. However, as soon as I talked about that
subject I noticed that some of them began to lose interest. Still I continued to
talk so that this meeting could include something important and they could
become erudite on the subject. I continued without interruption because it was
the only opportunity I would have to gather the majority of them together and
APPENDIX A 109

speak to them as a group.

I made a short speech in preparation for this meeting that mainly dealt with
subject of what is important in the life of the youth because the youth are the
great hope of our nation. I began the speech in this way:
Youth is a wonderful thing: it is so full of anguish and magic and we never
come to know it as it is, until it has gone from us forever. It is the thing we
cannot bear to lose, it is the thing whose passing we watch with infinite sorrow
and regrets, it is the thing in whose loss we must lament forever, and it is the
thing whose loss we really welcome with a sad and secret joy, the thing we
would never willingly re-live again could it be restored to us by any magic. Why
is this? The reason is that the strange and bitter miracle of life is nowhere else so
evident as in our youth, and what is the essence of that strange and bitter miracle
of life which we feel so poignantly, so utterly with such a bitter pain and joy,
when we are young? It is this, that being rich, we are so poor, that being mighty,
we can yet have nothing, and that seeing, breathing, smelling, tasting all around
us impossible wealth and glory of this earth, feeling with an intolerable certitude
that the whole structure of the enchanted life, the most fortunate, wealthy, good,
and happy life than any man has ever knownis ours at once, immediately and
forever, the moment that we choose to take a step, or stretch a hand, or say
words, we yet know that we can really keep hold, take, and possess forever
nothing. All passes; nothing lasts; the moment that we put our hand upon it
melts away like smoke, is gone forever, and the feeling of greed or guilt is
torturing us again; we see then what war is and what our lives must come to.
Young men (and women) like us are so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost.
We hurl the great shoulder of our strength forever against imaginary obstacles;
we are like the waves whose power explodes in lost mid-oceans under timeless
skies; we want all, feel the thirst and power for everything, and finally get
nothing. In the end, we are destroyed by our own strength, devoured by our own
hunger, impoverished by our own wealth. Thoughtless of money or the
accumulations of material possessions, we are, nonetheless defeated in the end
by our own greed. And that is the reason why, when youth is gone, every one of
us will look back upon that period of our life with infinite sorrow and regret. It
is the bitter sorrow and regret of a man who knows once he had a great treasure
and got nothing from it, of a man who knows that he had strength enough for
everything and never used it. Are we going to spend our life hopeless, aimless,
and doing nothing good? So if you don't want to have a sorrowful and regretful
life when you grow old just prepare for today, make some changes, don't allow
that in the end you are blamed by your own conscience. If that happens you are
just like a farmer, an idle farmer, who allows his land to become sterile, and in
result, he suffered great famine.
But, all my efforts and voice seemed to be useless. I thought that they were
listening and understanding what I said during the meeting but afterwards it was
like nothing happened, they all went back to their usual habits. So on reflection I
thought, if there is a meeting they use this kind of a style that, what you hear,
what you see, what you say, what you know, when you go just leave it here. The
110 APPENDIX A

meeting in this way had no function at all; in this case they offended me, and I
felt really hurt. Now I am trying to let go of my responsibilities as a leader, I just
leave them alone and offer them no advice. Sometimes I wonder why they
elected me as their leader? They accepted none of my ideas, advice, or
proposals. I governed them in a proper way and manner but their responses were
negative; there is an inequality of communication or negative balance of
communication between them and myself. What is the root cause of this
phenomenal situation? It is really hard for me to cure the problems, how can I do
it solely?
Since I started studying in high school and this college, I really managed it
very well. Even though there are lots of problems and barriers I try to adjust.
Everytime I go to school, I always had a shortage of allowance but for me this
cannot bother my desire to study. I realized that it was not good for me
especially when I am studying because how can I study very well if I am always
feeling hungry? How can I concentrate on my studies if my head always is
visited by a headache due to not eating regular meals? I eat my meal in the
morning, but sometimes I couldn't even eat then because I am always in a hurry.
I always go to school rushing from my house because when traveling by jeep
(public transportation) you almost always have to wait 1 to 1 Vi hours before yo
can ride. That is why I am always coming in late to my early morning class.
When I go home, it is the same thing all over again; I have to wait about 1 to 1XA
hours to get a ride because the jeepneys are always full of passengers so I have
to wait for an available jeep. Usually I arrive home about 10 PM, my last class
ends at 7:30 PM. By that time, I am very hungry and feel physical and mental
fatigue, and that is why after eating I feel sleepy. Then, I fall asleep instead of
studying, and that is why now I have to decide whether to quit my studies, or
not. But because I am always thinking about my family, I cannot have any fixed
decision. I realize that I must sacrifice so that I can have a brighter future and I
can help my family and other people. My experience of poverty can help me a
lot; it can challenge me to struggle in this lifeless world. How can I own and
hold the victory of my life without any sacrifice, how can a soldier have victory
if he doesn't fight. That's it, I am a soldier who is struggling and fighting in this
world to become victorious. For, yes, I accept that. I am not strong enough but I
have my dreams and I have strong determination to make it. My situation now,
can help me a lot to define the meaning of life and to define what is the taste of
the world. I thank God for what I am now because of the experiences in my life I
feel more than a man. I feel that I am different from other people because of the
experiences I encountered. Talking about material wealth like money, yes I have
nothing, but I am full of love and spiritual wealth that none of the money can
buy.
Appendix B:

Interviews with Christian Political

Detainees in Cebu

I have interviewed at length fifteen political detainees whose dates of arrest

range from 1987 to March of 1993; most are church workers in the BEC
movement. Some of them are languishing in congested, unsanitary, and unsafe
jails around Cebu in the company of fellow detainees; others are in the company
of dangerous criminals. These detainees, including Christian students and
innocent farmers, represent only a small number of political detainees locally
and nationally.
Each detainee has his or her story repeated and multiplied in many variations
in the stories of other detainees. Each story or "voice" is not isolated: the stories
reflect a wider pattern of political detention and torture. I excerpt here two
anonymous political detainees' stories of illegal arrest and torture, echoing other
political detainee's stories, though no two stories are the same. My first
interview is with a 33 year-old man (as of 1993); he was 27 at the time of his
arrest. He was formerly an active volunteer in the BEC movement as a liturgical
lay worker (Eucharistic minister and Bible leader), member of the choir,
member of a young adult prayer group (PRAYER), and worker for the
Community Based Health Program (the health care arm of the BEC movement).

I was with PRAYER for 4 years. During this period of service I was suspected of being a
subversive, so after 3 years I quit as a liturgical lay worker to work full-time with PRAYER.
During my 4 years of service with PRAYER, I also performed in cultural shows during
mass actions [e.g., during strikes, pickets, and demonstrations], and during my free time
from working with PRAYER I also did odd jobs for survival [to make a living].
I worked part-time in a rattan factory from 1986 to 1987. In 1987, there was a labor
strike; while the strike was going on work was paralyzed. So, the management began
sending the furniture outside to contract workers, instead. It was during that time that I was
arrested. There was a shooting during the incident. An alleged triggerman ran toward the
factory where the workers were staging their strike. So, the military searched all the houses
in the vicinity of the factory. I had taken a rest after lunch, and it so happened that some
112 APPENDIX B

military elements searched the area, and they went into the house where I was resting. They
searched the house, and they found nothing, no firearms. They had no search warrant and no
arrest warrant. It was an arbitrary form of search and arrest. I was arrested around 3:00 PM
March 1987.
I was brought to the Integrated National Police headquarters at Mandawe City Hall
building. I was interrogated and during the interrogation, I was beaten. They used pliers on
my toes and my toenails were pulled to force me to admit to the allegation. Since they got
nothing, no information about the shooting incident from me, around 7:00 PM I was hogtied
and herded aboard a red car with tinted glass to Ramos Police Station, Cebu City. In this
police station, they applied the Water Cure. I was made to lie on my back on a bench, and
they poured water on my facemy eyes were blind foldedthey poured water in my
nostrils. So, while I was being tortured, I was handcuffed and lying on my back on the
bench. They sat on my legs during the time when they were pouring water in my nostrils. I
was gasping for breath. I felt like my lungs were bursting. So, while they were pouring
water on my face, sitting on my knees, the police also hit me with an Ml6 rifle on various
parts of my body with the butt of the gun.
I fell off the bench three times during the beating and Water Cure. I fell three times on
the floor. Since they got no information from me, they took off my blindfold, and they took
my wristwatch and wallet with cash. After taking off my blindfold, they gave me a glass of
spirit wine (cane spirit), and forced me to drink it. It was already 1:00 AM when we left
Ramos Police Station. So, we left the station and proceeded to the Philippine Constabulary
headquarters on Gorordo Avenue in Cebu City. They conducted a powder-bum test on me.
The results were negative. I was blindfolded again when we left Ramos Police Station.
During the powder-bum test, a policeman of the criminal investigation service told me that
if the test had been positive I'd be summarily executed. Afterwards, we proceeded to the
headquarters of the Regular Security Unit along Jones Avenue. I was blindfolded again, and
I underwent interrogation again. I was beaten, boxed, and struck with the butt of an Ml6
rifle. Then, they inserted a wire in my mouth and it was some sort of electrocution. I was
then placed in Solitary Confinement for 4 days, and I was not given any food. My relatives,
friends, and family did not know about my plight then.
After 4 days, I was blindfolded again and brought on a police operation to hunt for my
alleged comrades. Since their operation was negative (they got nothing from me), they
brought me back to the headquarters of the regional security unit. After one hour, we passed
by Osmena Military Camp headquarters, and General Abenina asked for my custody. But
the arresting team, or arresting officer [Col. Nicolas Kiamko] who is the present
administrator of the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology refused him. Then, I was
remanded to Cebu Rehabilitation Detention Center, Cebu City. On August 21, 1982,1 was
transferred to Mandawe City jail.
My first court hearing was not held until 1987, and has continued to present [1994]. I
was framed-up, there is no other suspect being apprehended with regard to the shooting
incident. The shooting victim was a police patrolman. There is no evidence, and the result
of the powder test was negative. So, the military looked for other crimes to frame me up as
a subversive. Technical sergeant Ramon Mondares was shot to death, and the military
accused me of being a suspect. The trial is dragging because there was a witness but this
witness is afraid to come out in the open because she is frequently harassed by the military.
She saw the triggerman but since she was harassed she cannot come out in the open. In
connection with my case, one of my relatives found one witness who is an elderly woman.
But she [the witness] is constantly being threatened by the military that told her that if she
ever testifies, one of her family members would be liquidated or killed. So, one of this
woman's sons who is also a factory worker was shot to death. So, this is the reason why she
APPENDIX B 113

wouldn't dare testify in court.

In 1991, my relative and two other friends went to Tuburan in order to get some other
witnesses for me. As soon as they arrived in Tuburan, the police questioned them as to what
they were doing there, and when they told the police their purpose the three elders (two
women and one man) were harassed. The old man was threatened with summary execution.
The lawyer handling my case before was put under surveillance by the military and
harassed. My former lawyer was Attorney Alfonso Surigao, who was killed in June of 1988
by a Vigilante allegedly on order of a military official (case of a political detainee in Cebu,
personal interview 1993).

My second interview is with a Basic Christian Community organizer active in

the movement since 1977; he was arrested when he was 20 years old and detained
for three years. Here is his story:

I worked for the Basic Christian Community (BCC) movement in my home parish from
1977 to 1980 between the ages of twenty and twenty-three. I was a core member and
founder of our BCC chapter. I became involved after a theology student from the University
of San Carlos told me about the BCC. We began by organizing a BCC in our sitio
[neighborhood] then moved from sitio to sitio to start new chapters. We saw a need for a
youth organization and organized the Young Christian Community. We also helped a friend
to organize a peasant organization called United Farmers Organization.
In 1978, we coordinated our actions with the Sisters of Good Shepherd from the
Banawa convent. In 1979, the BCC movement was blooming but some people were saying
that it was a subversive organization because at that time we changed the gospel to
dramatize the real life experiences of the people living in our parish (e.g., vendors and
fishing folks). We changed the Pastoral Council, which originally came from the higher
sectors of our community to make it reflective of the poorer sectors of Guadalupe. So the
people told me, "Oh! You are very subversive!" and the military also suspected that I was a
subversive. So, they blacklisted me. So, that is why I evacuated [ran] to Alegria parish
where I worked closely with the priest. After that, the military tailed me to Alegria. I
escaped to Tuburan to hide from the military. That was in 1987, in our place many people
were shot dead.
In 1987,1 went to Turburan to hide and to see firsthand the situation of farmers living in
the hinterlands. When we arrived, military operations were already in the area. So, they
made me sit on the grass. The military looked at my ID. I gave them my wallet. When they
looked at my ID they said, "You are long wanted, and your name is there in our records."
They boxed me, punched me, put a pistol in my mouth. I'm shocked and they are punching
me. At 7:00 PM, after they had taken me to the Tuburan jail without a warrant of arrest,
they brought me to the Toledo 347 PC Company and began a tactical interrogation. During
the tatactical interrogation one of them continuously punched me until they undressed me
and made me lay flat on a stone slab hitting my body and fingers with the butt of the gun.
At the time, my wife and relatives knew about my capture. They went to Tuburan to the
Police but the military denied that I had been captured. One time I heard one of their voices
and the military denying that I was there. So I climbed to a small window and stretched my
hand out through the window. My wife saw my arm and said "He's there" but the guard
warned my wife that I was incommunicado.
After that they brought me to the Toledo for two weeks of tactical interrogation and at
the same time torture, two weeks of continuous torture. Electric wires were plugged into an
outlet and clipped to my organ [penis]; it was very painful. After that the military forced me
to talk, saying, "Where are your other companions? I know that you are a district leader and
114 APPENDIX B

communist member of the Marxist party." I said, no, I do not admit that. The interrogators
continued, "You go to Guadalupe to organize the people there." So, the people of
Guadalupe did not inform them that I am a bad person, I imagined.
One time at 12:00 midnight, they blindfolded me and brought me to a silent place
saying "You cooperate" and they pointed a 45 pistol at my head"Who are your
companions? Who are you?" I am a BCC organizer in Guadalupe, I went into hiding
because the military wanted to kill me. I learned so because a military man warned me,
"You better go into hiding because Viscom [Visayan Command Forces] wants to kill you."
Many times the military wanted me to admit that I was a communist but I denied it saying
that I know nothing about that. They said, "Do you want to die like Father Romano?" No,
sir, I have a family. "Do you know him?" No, I heard his name but we never met. "I know
that you are a church organizer." No, sir. They called out the names of all the progressive
priests and nuns. I denied knowing any of them and that is why my torture lasted for two
weeks. During the last week, the National Bureau of Intelligence officer who targeted me
told me that he believed me and said that I was a strong person and that he respected me.
Then he went on to say, "I know that you are a communist." I said, I don't know sir. "I will
give you one last chance to cooperate: I'll give you and your family a house and lot." No,
sir. There was one condition attached to his offer: they would give me a house and lot in
exchange for information. I said, I work as an organizer. We wake up the people by letting
them know what their rights are. The military officer said, "What is the purpose of the
BCC?" The BCC is a religious movement but we also focus on the social, cultural, political,
and economic aspects of community development work. "That is why you are a
subversive." No, sirJesus Christ was here and that was Jesus Christ's mission so I follow
Jesus Christ. No, sir, I didn't.
In detention in 1987, I begged for some help from my first priest and he helped me to
make a certification. The priest now is at Santo Rosario Church. At that time, I always
accompanied him to Chapel and helped him to prepare the Mass schedule. I also served as
the choir organizer. So during my detention, he together with the priest at Alegria and a
Good Shepherd sister made a certification that I worked with them for some years and even
that I was put on the Order of Battle. But, in Alegria my work was limited because I was
wanted at that time.
The military said, "Why were you hiding when we found you?" Because you have
threatened my life, my close military friend told me that the military intelligence had a plan
to kill me, I have a family and two kids wherever I go, the family goes with me, it's hard.
My family, and my wife's grandmother visited me in jail once a week.
Now as I reflect back on my story I feel proud because even if my life had many
difficulties until now I have walked the road related to my old work. I serve the people,
particularly now that I am working with political detainees. I survived in the face of threats
to my life. For me, my family is the most difficult test. I am very proud to be a Filipino. It is
better to struggle even to die for the cause of the Filipino people than not to do so.
Jesus Christ was here and had many sufferings, he was even crucified. When I think of
that I become very strong.
I spent three years in the Cebu detention center. It is cold there in the evenings, and on
sunny days it is very hot because the jail has large walls painted white and the sun reflects
off the walls. When I was there I helped to organize the political prisoners to help each
other. We also went to the common criminals who together with us went to the jail warden
to ask that every prisoner be provided with a private sleeping space, especially the married
prisoners. So, we made partitions between bed spaces. The food during my time was very
difficult to eat. We had rice once every meal, a vegetable side dish in the morning with
coffee and powdered milk. At lunch, we had one slice of meat, very hard meat, sometimes
APPENDIX B 115

the meat and vegetables smelled rancid. In the late afternoon, we had one dried fish each
and water. Our principle problem was food. Our privilege was to struggle for the rights of
the prisoners. There was Open House once a week and my family and relatives visited.
During the tactical interrogation before I was put in detention, I went through two
straight weeks of torture. In the morning, the military would come to my jail cell and pick
me up to go with them. I was blindfolded until sunset. At 7 PM, I was very tired and would
fall asleep but at 10 PM they would ransack my cell shooting with an Armalite gun. I'd be
shocked and they would be coming in saying "I have questions for you." I was tired; they
would point an electric fan at me from 7 PM to 5 AM. I'd be tied, blindfolded, undressed,
and they always asked me questions; they wanted to get some information from me but I
didn't respond. The electric fan was very irritating. My head ached from 7 PM to 5 AM.
What I kept thinking was that I am strong. They gave me the Water Cure treatment called
the balloon treatment. They filled the balloon with water and always boxed me in the
forehead. At first there was no aching but after thirty minutes my head ached, after one hour
my head was very painful. I had such an ache in my head. They always interrogated me.
They made me undress and inserted small needles in my penis; it was very painful.
For me the military is very Satanic that is why whenever I remember my experience I
realize so strongly that the military is not really a military for the people. Rather, it is an
instrument of the rich, the landlords and high sectors of the society. That is my feeling now.
My story is the jewel of my life. But, now whenever I see the arresting officer he says,
"How are you?" and I reply, I am fine! Sir, I am with Task Force Detainees of the
Philippines. The military may be OK sometimes but in my heart I know that they are
grubby.
There was a time when they put me through many kinds of tortures. I can't remember
them all at once, which is why I am telling you in pieces. The first time that they tortured
me they put me out in a small room. The officers were drunk, they got me and pointed an
Ml6 at me, they put on a silencer"Do you want to die, what is your name, where do you
come from?" Pow! They punched me and told me to undress so I undressed. Also, the
Cafgu (Civilian Home Defense Unit) in Toledo tortured me. There were 18 or 20 of them
who helped to box me. One day I didn't eat because my larynx [vocal cord] was swollen
with irritation; it was very large. The military tortured me but the worst torturer was the
military intelligence officer. I had to try to constantly remember to balance the situation and
where they were taking me; I had a terrible headache. I had a constant headache and my
urine was always red like blood until they transferred me to the detention center. I told
myself that it was the effect of torture. The right side of my body was aching especially my
head. In detention, I requested a medical exam but it is very expensive. The doctor told me
that I could have an x-ray but that it would cost me 5000 pesos. So, I couldn't do anything
because I have a wife and children to take care of and no money. Since my release, I still
sometimes have aches and pains. When they first captured me they used a gun and pointed
the barrel into my chest, stomach, and body; it was very painful. After two days, there were
marks on my body and chest; I had one rib displaced. They tied my hands behind my back
from 7 PM to 5 AM the next day. When they untied my hands it was very painful. I was
tortured for two weeks straight; they got permanent. They always made me go to the
detention cell every night blindfolded at 2 AM. At dawn, the only thing I could do was to
make myself determined saying to myself, I am willing to die. I admit if they killed me, I
was willing to die. I did not cooperate, didn't give in because I wasn't afraid of whatever
they did even if they killed me. Jesus Christ was not afraid. I am a man, I serve the people,
and for me my work is the jewel of my life. Now I am very proud of my experience even
when I am very old my children will say papa is pro-people minded for the workers and
peasants. This is why my daughter is named Prol. The military asked me "What is the name
116 APPENDIX B

of your daughter?" My two daughters names are Prol and Sica; Prol for proletariat and Sica
for the slogan of the BCC: Social Investigation and Class Analysis. Even though my wife
and I were still very young, we had a family.
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African Charter on Peoples' Rights
(1986), 101
Alayon (mutual-self help), 33, 48, 55
alipin (slave), 7
Althusser, Louis, 38, 79-83, 96. See also
mode of production approach
ambilineal descent, 5
American colonization (1901-1946),
17-20
anti-Huk campaign (1945-1953), 22
Aquino, Corazon, 22-23, 27, 31
Aquino, Ninoy, xvi, 22
Archdiocesan BEC Office, 46, 88-92
authority figures: indigenous selection
of, 4-7, 12; Spanish selection of,
10
Badjaos (sea gypsies), 42
barangay (settlements), 6
Basic Christian Community. See Basic
Ecclesial Community
Basic Christian Community Organizers'
Office (BCC-CO), 25, 52, 58, 90
Basic Ecclesial Community (BEC):
development model of, 33, 35;
farm program of, 48; history of,
v-xvii. See also Cebu City
dumpsite
Bell Trade Act (1946), 21
Index
Buddhism, and social work, 98-99;
epistemology of, 83
capitalist state, 39
Catholic Bishops Conference, xv
Catholicism, folk, 4
Cebu: Chinese trade with, 8; economic
growth of, 32, 41; modem city of,
40; poverty profile of, 40-44;
Spanish colonization of, 8-11;
uplands of, 46
Cebu City dumpsite, 61
Christianity, colonial, 9
Christians for National Liberation
(CNL), xvii, 94
Civilian Armed Forces Government
Units (CAFGU), 23-27, 52
Communist Party of the Philippines
(CPP), 23, 85
conflict of motives debate, 4
Constantino, Renalto, 14
Council of Mexico (1555), 14
counterhegemony, 81
Country Report on Human Rights
(1994), 25
datus (social and religious leaders). See
authority figures
128
Department of Social Welfare, 43
development, 31-32, 37-38, 44. See
also sustainable development
dialectical materialism, 80
disintegrated peasantry, 15
Ecumenical Justice and Peace Desk, 26
Federation of Free Farmers, xv
formalists, 38
Free Legal Assistance Group, 25
Galleon Trade, 9
gigilid (household slave). See alipin
Green Revolution 21, 34; hybrid yellow
com, 47
Guadium et Specs (The Church of the
Modem World [1965]), xv
hegemony, definition of, 4
Helsinki Agreement, 102
Hukbalahap (People's Liberation
Army), 19,22
ideology: American colonial, 18, 21;
definition of, 76-79, 81
Ileto, Reynaldo, 4, 12
Indios (indigenous Filipinos), 4
instrumental rationalists, 3
intellectual elite, 15
International Covenant of Economic,
Social, and Cultural Rights, 101
International Monetary Fund (IMF), 22,
39
International Rice Research Institute, 21
Laborem Exercems (On Human Work
[1981]), 84
Latin American Bishops Conference
(1968), xv
Laurel-Langley Agreement (1955), 21
leader-follower economy, 12, 14;
disintegration of, 15
Liberation Theology, 45, 84, 86-88
INDEX
Local Government Code, 43
Low Intensity Conflict: propaganda
campaign, 49, 52; psychological
warfare doctrine, 22-27
Luzon, central, 19-22
Mactan Export Processing Zone, 41
Major Religious Superiors, xvi
maritime trade economy, precolonial, 5
Martial Law (1972-1986), xiii, 21
Marxism: agrarian theory of, 3;
environmental theory of, 33
Maryknoll missionaries, xiii
Medium Term Development Plan, 22,
40. See also Philippine 2000 Plan.
Mindanao Sulu Pastoral Conference
(1971-1983), xv-xvii
mode of production approach, 38, 85,
97. See also Althusser, Louis
moral economists, 3. See also
substantivists
namamahay (tribute payers), 7
National Democratic Front (NDF), xvii
National Secretariate for Social Action,
xv
Negros, 18
New Peoples Army (NPA), 24. See also
Hukbalahap
Operation Timbang Program:
malnutrition study, 43
overseas contract workers, 22
paramilitary, 23-25
Participatory Rural Appraisal, 55
Passion Play, indigenous performance
of, 4, 12
patron-clientage, 20-21
peasant rebellions, 2
People's Liberation Army. See
Hukbalahap
Peoples' Power Revolution, xvii, 22
Philippine American War (1899-1903),
17
Philippine Independence (1946), 20
INDEX
Philippine Peasant Institute, 49
Philippine Revolution (1896), 19
Philippine 2000 Plan, 34. See also
Medium Term Development Plan
Phoenix Program, 26
plantation system, capitalist penetration
of, 11, 17-20
popular church, xvii
Popular Democrats, 45
Populorum Progressio (On the
Development of Peoples [1967]),
xv
prenda (mortgage arrangement), 48
prostitution, and tourism, 42
Quadragesimo Anno (On the Occasion
of the Fortieth Year [1931]), xiii
Rafael, Vincente, 4, 11-13
Ramos, Fidel, (1992-1997), 22
recycling industry workers, informal, 64
Redemptorist Mission Team, 50
Rerum Novarum (Of New Things
[1891]), xiii
Romano, Rudy, 26
Sarvodaya (village self-help movement),
99
Second Plenary Council, xvii
simulacra, media hype, 40
Slum Improvement and Resettlement
Project, 63
Smith, Carol, 39
Smokey Mountain (Manila dumpsite),
65,66
socialism, technocratic, 98
Socialist Democrats, 45
Spanish colonization (1521-1896), 15
Sri-Vijaya empire, 8
street children, 42
Structure of Care, 53
substantivists, 38. See also moral
economists
sustainable development: definitions of,
32, 35, 69; organic farming, 33,
47,48,58
Synod in Manila (1581), 13
129
Tagalogs, prehispanic society of, 6-8
tao, commoners, 12
Task Force Detainees, xvii
Theology of Struggle, 45, 88. See also
Liberation Theology
timawa (free persons), 7
tribute mode of production, 9
United Church of Christ, xv, 26
United Nations Convention on the
Prevention of the Crime of
Genocide (1951), 101
United Nations' Declaration on the
Right to Development (1986),
102
United Nations' Declaration on the
Right of People to Peace (1984),
101
United Nations International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights
(1966), 101
United Nations Vienna Declaration
(1993), 104
Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
101
usurer-traders, 49, 64
Ut Omnes Unum Sint (That All May Be
One[ 1976]), xvi
utang na hob (indebtedness), 13
Vatican II (1962-1965), xiii
Visayan Integrated Community
Assistance Program (VICAP), 46,
54
Westy committees: worship, education,
service, temporality, youth, 50, 53
World Bank. See International Monetary
Fund
World Commission on Environment and
Development, 69
About the Author

KATHLEEN M. NADEAU is an assistant professor and applied anthropology

coordinator at California State University in San Bernardino. She earned her
Ph.D. in anthropology at Arizona State University.