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MEETING A GREAT GUERILLA LEADER

The following are excerpts from the book “A Liberal Journalist On the Air and On the Waterfront: Labor and Political Issues, 1932-1990” which featured interviews conducted by author Julie Shearer with Sidney Roger, a noted broadcaster and journalist during World War II.

 

ROGER:

I had heard a lot about Tomas Confesor. We had a lot of internal information at the Office of War Information. I had already interviewed a few Filipino guerrillas. Not members of the Hukbalahap. They had disappeared pretty much back to the land.

SHEARER:

What was his position?

ROGER:

He was the elected governor of the island of Panay. He also led guerrilla forces on this island against the Japanese. A good man.

SHEARER:

But he was not a member of the Hukbalahap?

ROGER:

No. He was a member of the ruling class. He had very strong feelings about the need to divide the land and distribute income and health and social well being. Most of the land in the Philippines, as is so often the case and still is the case, was in the hands of relatively few families. Many of them old families from the time Spain ruled. Most of the peasants working on the land had nothing.

It was the same in China where most of the people who fought the Japanese also wanted a piece of land of their own. This is a worldwide situation. In place of the Philippines or China, you could talk about San Salvador or Nicaragua, or all over Latin America, Asia, Africa, you name it; the same situation, this desire for land.

SHEARER:

What happened to Confesor during the war?

ROGER:

He was leading the guerrillas during the Japanese occupation. We knew about him because the word got out. Remember, a lot of Americans got into the Philippines during the Japanese occupation. Many Americans fought along with the guerrillas.

Confesor's name became famous when he was severely sick with typhoid and in hiding in a remote section of Panay island and got up off a sickbed to write a letter defying the invaders. That letter stirred the people and spurred the spirit of resistance. He was so sick that it took almost a month to write that letter.

In San Francisco at the United Nations Conference he phoned me. He said he'd heard me on the Voice of America broadcasts.

SHEARER:

How did he attend? In what position did he attend the conference?

ROGER:

I'm not too sure, that's my problem. I really don't remember specifically whether he was a delegate or not. He was a noted man. Everybody knew the name Confesor. He was staying somewhere in Oakland with some friends. I called and asked to interview him. We had a long meeting in which he spoke about what had happened. About Philippine political figures and landowners who had been there before MacArthur, before the Bataan death march and the fall of Corregidor, before the Americans were chased out...

...Some of these rich and influential political figures and landlords had become part of the Japanese-controlled Philippines government. A man named Manuel Roxas was one of them. He finally ended up as a brigadier general in the United States Army, a very close friend of MacArthur and the wealthy social groups who were there in the old days. They knew each other well. They invited each other to their places. They lived well. They owned the land. MacArthur, remember, had spent many years in the Philippines.

Tomas Confesor said that Roxas—a man who had collaborated with the Japanese government—the moment the Philippines were liberated walked into a tent at the U.S. Army base and walked out with an American officer's uniform. This was Confesor's story. Roxas was later elected president of the Philippines.

SHEARER:

It doesn't sound to me as though what he was telling you would be told by a man who had a position of power or maybe he did have visions of a great power. It sounds like someone on the outs.

ROGER:

Confesor?

SHEARER:

Yes.

ROGER:

Of course. He was on the outs because he wanted more for the country than just getting rid of the Japanese army. He wanted the people who had suffered so much to have a better life, as he told it to me. I honestly believe there was a tacit agreement between some powerful forces—maybe MacArthur, maybe the State Department, maybe the army. I mean an agreement to discourage the underground movement because these forces didn't want to lose their property. They wanted to stop the guerrillas before the Americans came back. Just get along as best they could. Tomas Confesor was on the outs because he refused to do that. He insisted on fighting with excellent guerrilla forces.

Confesor said that a great many of the people who had been leading figures in the Philippines—and became so again after the Japanese were defeated—worked in collaboration with the Japanese occupiers. I have somewhere a large file of newspapers published by the Japanese occupation forces in English that name many of these people, and there are pictures of them as well. A merchant seaman came back from Manila. He used to hear me on the air. He came to my office with a big brown paper bag full of these newspapers. He said, "Here, they're yours." And he left.

SHEARER:

The story that you wrote was an expose of the existing power structure in the Philippines? By this time General Roxas was in charge? He had run for president?

ROGER:

Later on he ran and won. Confesor, who could have been part of the ruling group in the Philippines, worked to raise the level of living of the Filipino peasants by increasing their income, by developing programs for better farming methods, by planning for good housing, medical centers and good education. He said, for example, that landlords were very opposed to education for the peasants because, as Confesor put it, "The landlords didn't want the boys to think too much. They wanted them just to have strong backs and weak minds."

SHEARER:

I'm trying to elicit from you who would be so upset to have read this article? Would it be Roxas, who was at that time another contender for power in opposition to Confesor?

ROGER:

Tomas Confesor, for a while, by the way, had been appointed Secretary of the Interior after the war when a new government was established. But he wanted things that would be anathema to these people who owned their plants and lands, the breweries and the sugar cane and pineapple plantations.

The answer to your question is the ruling class. Everything that finally developed and kept the guerrilla movements alive, as they still are, were demands for a different kind of land tenure. Confesor's ideas would be a threat to a whole ruling class.

The rulers, who usually control the police and the army, as well as the press and radio, and don't take kindly to any threat to its existence. They use all the force they command, including the force of the Army to put a stop to this nonsense.