Lakbayan: A Lexicon of Underrated Terms

October 23 and 24, 2005.

I. Lakbayan

Because, strangely and sadly, news about landlessness and hunger travels so slowly in this archipelago, peasants, fisherfolk, and tribes have taken it upon themselves to bring their stories to us, first-hand.

Today, they are setting out on a journey to Manila from different points throughout Luzon. Their small pouches and ragged pockets are filled with memories of how they tilled and irrigated the land with sweat and blood. The few pots they lug along contain the fruits of their labor, riddled with soldiers' bullets. They bring indictments against the government’s big-time projects in the regions, with compelling testimonies of why progress and development, in its most tangible terms, should not come in the form of golf courses, mining operations, billion-dollar rail projects or build-operate-transfer technology parks.

There are accounts that can not be instantly sent through fax or email, because they are rooted in places where these devices do not even exist, where they do not have access to these staples of globalized information transfer. It takes a nanosecond to send gigabytes of data from one virtual site to another across the globe; but slow and painful decades for the anguished cries for genuine land reform and justice to reach the Palace door.

The cities are already full to the brim with grim tales of deprivation. Will they overflow once the testimonies from the provinces start pouring in?

II. Mass Transportation

I hurriedly entered the Ayala MRT Station. It was 6:30 in the evening, rush hour, and the entire madding Makati crowd was raring to get home. Everywhere along the stuffy station platform smelling of sweat, cheap cologne and fumes, people were rudely shoving, pushing, and slyly nudging each other in the hopes of being the first to get into the train and to their respective destinations. Nobody bothered to fall in line, in the weary way they require us to while buying those magnetic tickets stamped with the faces of a smirking, un-photogenic President. Nearly everybody seemed to outdo each other. The entire throng of commuters inched dangerously close to the edge of the platform, like a swarm of lemmings on the brink of a fatal precipice.

When the sleek train arrived and opened its doors, the entire mob barged in. The doorway was a bottleneck: clogged full of commuters pushing to get in, and commuters pushing to get out, with none wanting to give way to the other side. We were swept inside through a thick wave of yelps, pleas, glares, and snide remarks. Inside the MRT, commuters looked weary, numb, blank, anonymous. The train sped off, leaving another chaotic crowd jostling for space outside. It gathered speed. In just around 20 minutes, we traversed four cities, countless malls, dozens of giant billboards, and thousands of blinking lights. I extricated myself from the MRT as soon as it alighted at the Quezon Avenue Station, and tried to find the nearest route to the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), where a solidarity night for the Lakbayan was being held.

A few hours earlier, thousands of farmers passed through the same route underneath, traversing the entire highway on foot before reaching the DAR.

Unlike the thousands of MRT passengers, they didn’t have the luxury of convenience nor speed. No paper-thin magnetic tickets. No sickening chill of stale air-conditioning. In contrast to the MRT’s sleek, silver contours, the buses were dusty, archaic-looking containers, filled to the brim. Faded flags and streamers on poles jutted out from the vehicles. Names of unfamiliar and far-away towns and routes were painted on the jeepneys, crowded with people.

Everyone smelled of sweat, sun and fumes. None of them had money for bus or MRT fare, but that didn’t stop them from reaching Manila, whatever the costs were. They had feet and hearts.
The journey was protracted, each kilometre painstakingly won by sheer will, strength, and guts. Throughout the march, peasants, workers, and many other people marched in unison, looking out for each other and taking their time to unfold in undulating rows and columns. It took them days to traverse highways, entire cities, toll booths at the provincial boundaries, and traffic-jammed avenues all over Manila. Police and military blocked and flanked the indomitable moving mass of people during checkpoints, but bystanders cheered them on and handed out small foodstuffs and water for them to consume along the way.

The protestors were weary, but this wasn’t evident in the way they smiled at friends along the streets and how their eyes told of their determination to reach the destination. Their faces were different, but all familiar: facets of a disenfranchised people united and fighting under one cause.

On the night of October 22, the protesting peasants finally converged in front of the DAR using the best means of mass transportation ever conceived since the Spanish colonial era: a convoy of collective will that would steadily continue to advance, no matter how many mountains, road blocks and checkpoints along the way.

III. Bananacue

The sweet poor man's snack can make you weep.

It was easy to underestimate its worth before, when it was a treat prepared at home as merienda for languid afternoons, or seen along sidewalk stalls. When it was a humble foodstuff peddled by ambulant vendors along the University, its market value on the low end compared to the food sold in canteens, private concessionaires, and pricier establishments along Katipunan Avenue. A trifle, at a time when you weren't really aware that the aluminum tray filled with caramelized rootcrops and lumpia often also cradled the fortunes of a vendor's entire family. Or that boiled, unsweetened bananas were the only things that peasants and Mangyans subsisted on in interior villages, because there was not always enough rice to go around, because even the coarsest rice was a luxury for the same people who tilled it.

When TV stations today aired footage of a bystander-a woman street vendor in threadbare clothes-- crossing a busy street to donate five sticks full of her bananacues to a truck full of peasants who journeyed for miles, eyes brimmed with tears. She could have chosen not to do anything at all, to just watch from afar and earn a few more precious pesos for her kids. The march's leader gratefully acknowledged this small act of selflessness over the microphone, saying that this would be a big help to the fight.

Five bananacues, a big contribution to a thousands-strong, miles-long march? Yes, because this simple gesture humbles us in a way that no number of homilies or speeches can. Yes, because it attests to how the poorest among us are fervently capable of giving, without asking for anything in return except to see the entire struggle prevail.

A book tells of how, many years back, a bright, young woman named Lorena Barros often had nothing else but bananacue to eat for the whole day as a working student. But now, what people are more likely to remember about Barros was how the frail poet-scholar founded MAKIBAKA, the organization of revolutionary women, and died valiantly in the mountains during Martial Law.

III. Saboteurs

There are no murderous provocateurs among the 7,000 peasants and workers here today at Morayta, contrary to what the Palace propagandists and the police like to say. The real terrorists are from elsewhere.

They’re the ones with the camouflaged cameras and guns. They’re the ones milling in the rallies without having any legitimate cause to fight for.

Specimen # 1: a retired military officer caught at the Lakbayan’s Cultural Night in front of the DAR, milling around and armed with a .45 pistol. The alert peasants swiftly disarmed him, and turned him and the gun over to the police that same hour.

Specimen # 2, also from the military, was nabbed by wide-awake marshals this morning, just before leaving for the rally. The best excuse he could drum up for being caught with a gun in a rally he wasn’t obviously part of: he just happened to pass by, while trying to find some 24/7 load for his cell phone in the vicinity. That would have been vaguely believable, except for three things. One, there wasn’t any loading center within a 100-meter radius of the place. Two, the media quoted his colleagues at Crame, saying that he was on an undercover mission. And three, the Lakbayan marshals have seen him from as near as…the nearby province just a few days back.

What wit, that man. That’s the idiotic equivalent of secretly eloping for a couple of months, only to trudge back home to your momma saying that you went to the sari-sari store next door to buy suka.

Specimen # 3, suspiciously armed with a video cam, disrupted the peaceful program along Recto corner Morayta. Half of the 7,000-plus rallyists were already quietly sitting on the streets, intently listening to the speeches and watching the cultural presentations, when marshals suddenly caught hold of him, causing mayhem to ensue.

None of the protestors carried fire arms. As one farmer interviewed on TV pointed out, “Kahit pambili ng tubig at pagkain, wala. Papaano kaya kung armas pa?”

IV. Police Brutality

The rally is in full force. Tensions are high because police and fire trucks have barricaded Recto Avenue, barring the protestors from even catching a glimpse at Mendiola. I want to shout to those fully-equipped “law enforcers” other side of the barricade: Hindi ba kayo naaasiwa sa sarili ninyo?

The pulis, who are known for having caused a considerable number of human rights violations in this country, are also among the ones most deprived of human rights. There's something fundamentally dishonourable and dehumanizing when you become deprived of the right-by virtue of your occupation- to conceive change, instead of blindly replicating the status quo that GMA represents.

Something’s fundamentally wrong when you are forced to follow orders from a President who shamelessly invokes the rule of law and God to justify the state of disorder and hell she created. When you HAVE to follow her orders to maintain this “rule of law” or whatever animal this is, despite being grossly underpaid and mired in poverty like the protestors you have to disperse at any cost. It’s a human rights violation and an insult of the highest degree. Inaapi at niloloko ka na, ipinagtatanggol mo pa.

Every hurt they inflict on a rallyist is an unwitting and pitiful act of self-flagellation. The police can bar, maim, hit, slap, or even kill all the activists they want, but that does not lessen the protestors’ humanity or honor by even an iota.

The police are brutal to the protestors, true. But ultimately, they are most brutal to themselves, their children, and their sense of justice.

V. Hypocrisy

I will say this straightfowardly, in all undisguised spite and without literary pretense: There is nothing as sickeningly and irredeemably FAKE as seeing Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo pretending to be in deep pain, as she contorts her face while visiting a dozen police with minor injuries in Mendiola and proclaims them as “heroes”. She really gives the word ‘hypocrisy’ a whole new dimension!!!

Iyon din kaya ang kanyang sasambitin kung marsanasan ni GMA kung papaano ang ma-disperse ng kanyang mga pinupuri bilang ‘bayani’? Ma-deny ng ‘permit to rally’. Ma-bomba ng water cannon. Masugatan sa barbed wire na nakapalibot sa Mendiola. Mahagisan ng tear gas. Mapukpok ng truncheon at batuta sa ulo. Makaladkad sa kahabaan ng Recto na parang baboy na kakatayin. Masampal, itulak, at mahipo sa dibdib at puwet. I-detain sa kulungan kahit walang warrant, upang kasuhan ng robbery. Habang tuloy-tuloy na tumututog sa tabi ang brass band ng Philippine National Police ng “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”, katulad ng ginawa nila ngayong araw na ito.

VI. Bigo

Target: Mendiola.

The TV station came up with that sound byte at the start of the Lakbayan. On the morning of the 22nd of October, radio reporters would note how the protestors from Southern Tagalog had water and lugaw for breakfast, before preparing for the long and determined march to reclaim Mendiola. That same evening, after an entire tense day of inching towards Morayta, headlines and news reports blared:

Bigo ang mga raliyista dahil hindi nakarating ng Mendiola.

Phalanxes of riot police, SWAT, barbed wire and fire trucks barricaded the avenue that day, betraying the Palace’s rabid, salivating paranoia despite its press pronouncements that it was a usual working day for GMA.

They may have denied peasants-the poorest of the poor in this pauperized archipelago-who marched for miles even the symbolic victory of setting a single foot or flag upon Mendiola. But they failed to discredit the peoples’ march: failed to dampen the resolve of a movement united. They failed to silence the rising chants, the compelling speeches, and the songs. Failed to sow fear in the hundreds of communities who watched the farmers lay their lives on the line to assert their rights. The protesters lost on the ground today, but won the battle for the hearts and minds of the people instead.

We didn't lose. We'll come back again and again and finally reclaim Mendiola. We'll return for the big bulls' eye.