Chapter 10: From Yago to Teresa - the unending saga of the wretched

At 47, Teresa Biradayon Y Maca-andog had survived every storm that could sink the mightiest of sea crafts. She was born on August 28, 1943, the death anniversary and feast day of St. Augustine, in Ilihan, a remote upland component barrio of Biringan in Ispratly.

Biringan happened to be one of the few places in the Philippines whose inhabitants defied the Spanish Governor General’s decree in 1849 that required the natives to adopt standard Spanish names as their family names.  

Teresa’s family, which included two older sisters and three younger brothers, struggled financially from day one. Her father, Paāg, now fifty-four, occasionally earned income for the family from various construction work contractors that employed manual laborers. Otherwise, he, along with his wife and children, were equally hard at work in a parcel of land on which they grew a variety of survival crops. Whenever the family had nothing with which to buy food, which was often, Paāg checked on their plants, like banana or gabi, to see if something could be harvested for their meal.

The land they tilled, which they inherited from the matriarch’s family, had in no small measure helped them get by. Then something happened to Minda, the matriarch. She experienced excruciating abdominal pain and had to be hand-carried, using a hammock and with the help of neighbors, to the nearest government community hospital. It turned out she had a ruptured appendix. She needed emergency surgery, or else she would soon die from complications resulting from infection of the blood or other vital parts of her body.

The government hospital could not perform the emergency procedure for many reasons: it had run out of surgical supplies; the power-generating set was not working and for a long time had needed repair; and, most critical of all, the surgeon was on leave.

Minda had to be bodily lifted again, this time to a private hospital. She survived. But the cost staggered the family. They could not pay the hospital bills unless they sold their only valuable possession: the farmland.

From their Ilihan home they had to move farther to the north, toward the interior of the vast forested areas of Ispratly Island, in search of a more stable supply of food that kaingin farming offered. Although technically squatting on government land, they were de facto owners of the land they tilled. It was a frontier for those who were willing to take risks and put in the work to survive.

The Biradayons lived abundantly in their new settlement. Fertile land allowed them to plant a variety of root crops (gabi, camote, cassava, among other staples), upland rice, vegetables, legumes, and fruit-bearing trees. They could harvest any kind of food they wanted at any given time. And they stocked up for the rainy days, as it were.

There were just a handful of households in the new settlement when the Biradayons arrived. Sometimes five, at most ten, depending on the fiesta calendar. Sometimes whole families would be away for weeks when dates of fiesta celebration in neighboring barrios were close to each other.

Nearby creeks teemed with wild shrimp, some variety of fish species, and eel. Wild pigs roamed the area; when somebody got to catch one, often with a trap, all households got a share of the bounty. All told, the community thrived. Its members benefited from a self-sustaining farm-based means of livelihood.

News of the relatively good life in the new settlement spread across Biringan, facilitated mostly by storytelling that was made lively during fiesta celebrations. The Biradayons were themselves messengers of hope as they made it a practice to share their food surplus with relatives in the lowlands.

It took less than a year for the new settlement to grow in terms of population. Somebody suggested a name by which the place might be called, and they eventually agreed on Bukāran. The word was in a dialect, which in English roughly meant “flowers in bloom.” By 1950, Bukāran already had almost a hundred inhabitants, consisting of twenty-two households.

Except for the difficult trail leading to the area, all elements of a good life could be found in Bukāran. People were short of luxury that was known to urban dwellers, but they were endowed with a clean environment. They led healthy, almost stress-free, lifestyles.

Staff members of Tangdayan Association, a nongovernment organization operating in the Eastern Visayas for the promotion of sustainable agriculture, visited Bukāran in 1960. They immersed themselves in the area for a couple of months. The Biradayons were not illiterate, as most of them had completed elementary education at Ilihan. But many community members were unlettered. So Tangdayan Association personnel had to start teaching literacy (basic language and communication) skills to both children and adults. When the adults gained some level of reading proficiency, they next went through lessons in agroforestry and watershed management, under an imposing balete three.

Three years later, in 1963, army troopers showed up in Bukāran. It seemed they had been scraping the forests for nearby settlements in search of something to eat. Men in full battle gear were starving, and the families in Bukāran were hospitable enough to feed them. A young lieutenant, fresh from the military academy, led the troopers. His name was Regidor Makatigbas. It seemed he requested his superiors to let him lead this mission. He was born and raised in Manila, but his paternal grandparents had their roots in Biringan.

It turned out the troopers were part of a reconnaissance team that surveyed the hinterlands for the construction of a feeder road that supposedly aimed to connect the interior barangays to the coastal barangays in Biringan. All Bukāran folks were excited to hear the troopers’ story.

Hospitality reached new levels when Makatigbas laid his eyes on, then flirted with, Osang, Teresa’s older sister, to which Osang responded with peeps of encouragement. Days later, Makatigbas and Osang could be found huddled together, sometimes inside vacant huts, sometimes in the open field.

Three months later, it was clear to all who were familiar in the ways of women that Osang was conceiving. To her grief, however, she never saw Makatigbas again. The troopers that replaced his team appeared to be imported from a neighboring region, judging from the dialect they spoke.     

Within weeks, heavy equipment was bulldozing the uneven terrain close to where Bukāran farmers tilled the fields. With a road barely opened, more heavy equipment followed, this time cutting the large trees left untouched by the kaingin farmers.     

More clearing of trees followed, and the road sliced deeper into the forestlands. Now the Bukāran folks understood that the feeder road was meant not so much to help them as to facilitate the transport of timber from their settlements to the ports in Biringan.

Controversy began to hound the farming communities not only in Bukāran but throughout Biringan. The Catholic dioceses in Ispratly warned against the heavy toll on the environment that the commercial logging operations would impose on the ability of the upcoming generations to make a living from farming. Priests preached to mobilize resistance against the assault on the forests. People responded by mounting protest actions against the logging company, which was owned by a powerful government official.

The government responded to the protests, which were sometimes violent, by sending more troops. The reinforcements were obviously poorly trained. They lacked discipline. Soon, when it became clear to them that the government had sacrificed the well-being of local communities to enrich favored cronies and the signs of forest degradation had started to manifest, such as topsoil erosion that led to recurring flash floods and diminished crop yields, some academicians, students, and even priests joined the local communist guerillas in the resistance movement.

The farmers of Bukāran initially did not find the logging operations to be in conflict with their livelihood. In fact, they felt indebted, regardless of how things unraveled to them, to the outsiders for the road the latter paved. It made their life easier as they moved around; the trek, which always used to be on foot, could now be done with the help of a carabao carriage.

Tensions started when visits by government soldiers to Bukāran became more frequent. They always demanded to be served food. From the troopers’ perspective, this was easy to understand. They hiked for hours as part of their duty to secure the logging operations. Because the troops were poorly paid, free meals always helped. But from the community members’ perspective, the army men had become parasites. They could not deny them, however; no one had to tell them that the firearms they carried eloquently spoke for the intruders with the message that refusal of the troopers’ demands would not be accepted.

More—and worse—sources of irritants and mistrust were yet to come. Whenever the platoons of army troopers decided to spend a night or two in the community, accommodation had to be provided. They disturbed what used to be a quiet Bukāran with their raucousness. Sometimes they brought liquor with them, which was always a recipe for unmitigated noise, followed by heated arguments. Instead of getting some restful sleep, local folks had to stay awake so they could flee at the first sign of violent hostility among the drunk guests.

In one such rowdy evening, the unhinged soldiers asked Paāg to have a hen cooked for them as pulutan. Paāg politely refused, saying the hen was about to incubate her eggs. Feeling scorned, one trooper aimed his Armalite at a rooster perched on a low branch of a nearby tree. He hit nothing but air. A few more chickens leaped from their favored branches, frantically flapping their wings in search of something to hop on to.

Embarrassed and enraged by the heckling he got from fellow troopers, he fired several shots at one of the chickens that flew over them and landed on the windowpane of Paag’s house. One bullet apparently hit the petrol-fueled lamp hoisted inside the house because everything suddenly turned dark. Complete silence followed, except for a gentle stomping of feet on the elevated wooden floor.

After a few more minutes, the soldiers with their flashlights on decided to leave. One of them was overheard suggesting looking for pulutan and more alcoholic drinks at the neighboring barrio.

Assured that the intruders had left for good, Paāg reignited the lamp and found to his horror that Osang was bleeding from her neck, her head bent forward and motionless. She was nursing her child; cries of unbearable pain reverberated from the Paāg household as the child could be seen sucking her mother’s milk mixed with blood.

Even when sober, the army men had many ways of offending their hosts. Their condescending disposition was a way to tell people that they got what they wanted. Time came when they did not bother to hide their sexual advances among the women and girls, including Teresa and her sisters. One fateful night, Teresa tried to resist an army man, and she got raped instead, in the sense that his testicle-fueled aggression, propped by a weapon that screamed implied threats without being pointed at her, overpowered her will.

Whatever prompted the people of Ayunguin, also in Ispratly, to resist their overbearing American annexation forces in 1901, the meek folks of Bukāran had about the same urge to complain against.

Paāg, among many others, did complain when the Tangdayan people came over for their regular quarterly follow-through visit. The latter compiled their report, produced several copies of it, then sent by registered mail one copy to each member of a network of international government organizations to which Tangdayan was affiliated.

Soon, military atrocities in Bukāran were quoted in global news dispatches. Embarrassed, the military hierarchy pulled out the assigned regimen in Biringan. Noisy members of the scattered political opposition wanted more corrective action; they demanded a congressional investigation.

Even as government officials, through state-controlled media, denied that abuses were being committed by the military in Bukāran, and instead blamed the local inhabitants for being either communists or sympathizers of communists, Paāg and his fellow Bukāranons felt immediate relief. For the next couple of months, they had nothing to worry about except addressing the urgent need for them to regroup. Platoons from the Biringan battalion continued to patrol the areas covered by the logging operation, which eventually encroached on territories that belonged to eastern Ispratly in the east and northern Ispratly in the north. But hardly did Paāg and his neighbors realize that over the longer term, the noise they generated created more problems for them.

Spotting opportunities to help the poor in distress, or to expand their constituency, whatever the agenda was, the communist guerillas were quick to touch base with Bukāran and its surrounding settlements, which had sprouted in recent years. 

The pioneering core of communist partisans that landed in Bukāran did not speak the dialect. They preached their view of the world mostly in Tagalog, sometimes in Ilonggo or Cubacabano. Their initial attempt at indoctrination took two days. It was enough to win Paāg and one of his sons, seventeen-year-old Tapiskig, over to the communists’ side. In Bukāran alone, at least nine males (seven grown-ups and two minors), and two females, had committed parts of their waking hours to the armed cause of the communists.

For the time being, the Bukāran partisans had to be organized as a “cell.” Each one had to adopt an alias which no one else knew except themselves and two to three “uplines” who would be the ones exclusively authorized to coordinate with them.

A raid of a police station in Bolibar and an ambush in Cubacabana yielded firearms and ordnance that soon found their way to the Bukāran cell. The new guerillas lost no time in getting their hands to try on the war equipment and in honing up their capacity to handle life-and-death situations.

Consumed by rage over what happened to his daughters, Paāg would soon lead half of his cell in an ambush, about four kilometers away from Bukāran, of what to them were randomly alternating platoons from the Biringan battalion. The government troopers suffered three casualties. One in Paāg’s ragtag team was wounded.

The Biringan battalion responded to the communist atrocity by sending troops, practically in full force, to the ambush site. Tracing a trail by the blood from the wounded rebel, the army men reached Bukāran. They demanded from the startled inhabitants, many of whom were not aware that an ambush had happened and therefore did not see the need to flee, to give the killers away.

Failure to comply within minutes meant ten innocent people, regardless of gender or age, would be sacrificed for each ranger that died in the ambush. At least thirty folks risked losing their lives on the spot.

No amount of begging for mercy, or of profession of innocence, could stop the infuriated military men. Soon, the commanding officer ordered his men to fire.

The soldiers shot everyone within their sight, starting with those who tried to escape. Then they strafed the houses without aiming at anything in particular. Birds that had settled at their favorite branches for their daybreak had to scamper back in the air, forming clouds of feathers and wings, frightened and disoriented, flapping furiously in random directions. Daylight was getting scarce, but there was still enough of it for those who were still alive to witness the bloodshed in Bukāran. What used to be quiet sunsets in this heavenly refuge had become moments of death, of anguish, and of horrible pain. The deafening, nonstop staccato noise generated by bursts of gunfire could not drown the cries of women and children.

When the massacre finally ended, the commanding officer counted the dead: thirty-six. At least five others were mortally wounded. None of the casualties knew anything about the ambush. But they had to perish anyway, in the name of justice known to the madness of anger and violence.

He gathered those who survived at the open field (which served as the barrio’s plaza) to deliver a stern message. He told his audience, a little over a dozen and still trembling with fear, that his troops would retaliate with greater force for any single death of his men.

“I will barbeque you alive and take your innards for pulutan!” he warned. 

When the soldiers left, the Bukāran survivors, after having buried their dead, hurriedly left for yet unknown places, braving the eerie darkness of the night.

On that day, September 28, 1963—exactly 63 years after the Ayunguin incident happened—Bukāran became a no-man’s land.

A week later, armed men which later were identified as members of the military raided the satellite office of Tangdayan in Biringan. They abducted two staff members who never came back, believed to be summarily executed.