When he came to Manila in search of his Ligaya, Jose, because he had a goal, wasn’t distracted so much by the city. He wanted to finish his education, and he preferred studying to playing politics. He wouldn’t have entered politics at all had he not come from Central Luzon and hadn’t gone to China. Jose Mariano dedicated himself to searching for his Ligaya during a time while China was Red and the world was divided. Mariano, accustomed to the simplifications of this divided world, obviously hadn’t become indignant over communism nor was he one of those enterprising activists who would one day suddenly discover a cause.
The defining moment for him occurred before it occurred for most of his radical students, when an American GI raped and murdered a young Filipina and he was tried by general court-martial rather than in a Filipino court. On R&R, this American GI approached a beautiful, young Filipina standing on the corner of Ongpin and Misericordia. Her soft features masked crudeness that happily surprised the drunken soldier. He didn’t know a word of Tagalog, but he understood what she meant when she offered him a blow job at an inflated price. They crossed the street, entered a building and wound up on the third floor where the GI with the young woman stumbled into a brothel. What happened after that doesn’t need to be spelled out.
Later that night an American military judge and an American Embassy representative headed for the scene of the crime. To get his side of the story they had already talked to the GI, who was arrested on the spot. By the time they arrived at the brothel, the rose-colored walls had been painted over and the mattresses that had been on the floor had been removed and only Mrs. Cruz was still tidying up. The dead woman’s body had also been removed. She was a probinciana, someone’s Ligaya, who had been promised a great opportunity and a very high salary if she’d come to work in Manila, which she accepted in order to help her family live a better life. (Though tragic, nothing about her death seemed extraordinary to the Americans except that a GI had committed the crime and that meant it was their problem, which they didn’t look forward to facing.) They could already see the headlines:
AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE TRUMPS PHILIPPINE LEAGAL SYSTEM
The second incident that led to Jose’s radicalization occurred on the island of Corregidor. A sole survivor by the name of Jubin Arula told the story of the massacre. Marcos tried to cover it up; he wanted to wash his hands of it, but how could he, when there was a survivor and a free press? When the story broke it caught the president unprepared. He never expected the counterblast (albeit delayed), a discordant reaction that drowned out his denial (with repercussions that continue to this day). That was when the demonstrations started in earnest. Without them rejecting the possibility of a hoax (after all there was only one survivor), a group of Moro students held a week-long vigil in front of the presidential palace. They had with them an empty coffin marked “Jabidah”. This certainly caught Jose’s attention. “Jabidah” (a name of a beautiful Moro woman) was the name given to the unit of trainees. Members of this elite unit (a recruitment of nearly 200 Tausug and Sama Muslims aged 18 to 30 from Sulu and Tawi-Tawi in the Sulus) were initially trained in Sulu and 14 days later were brought to Corregidor. Part of their training consisted of studying maps of Sabah and all of Malaysia. They however weren’t told that they would be taking part in a government clandestine mission called Oplan Merdeka (Bahasa for “freedom”), so when they found out that they would be fighting their Muslim brothers, and possibly killing their own relatives in Sabah, they turned mutinous. Arula later said, “If Malaysia filed a formal complaint before the United Nations, the government was to deny us. It (government) would claim that we were members of the private army of Sultan Kiram (of the Sultanate of Sulu).” Before then the trainees were already complaining about the food and the women their officers brought to camp. “We were promised P50 allowance per month, but we received not a centavo. We were fed dried fish, and for coffee, we would use rice leftovers. The commanders were living in luxury while we were living with almost nothing.” Arula also related the following: on the night in question: around 4:00 am, a truck took him and 11 others, including his uncle to Malinta Tunnel. There he heard the magazine of a Carbine fall. Arula even helped a soldier look for it. And his uncle told him in Tausug that maybe the soldiers were really up to something because the soldier “accidentally pulled the safety pin instead of the trigger.” Arula remembered that they had already been disarmed. When they arrived at Kindley airstrip, that was when the massacre began.
Randy Ford
