Church in Middle of Polarized Society : Island of Negros Reflects Deep Philippine Turmoil

More than 5,000 Roman Catholics marched through the streets of this provincial capital last Thursday evening carrying giant gold crosses and signs proclaiming that their priests, like Jesus Christ, are not Communists.

The faithful then gathered in the town square, where they listened to a priest declare that “we feel the suffering and the anguish of the majority in Negros because of hunger, joblessness, sickness, subhuman wages and landlessness. We know that this is not the will of God, but the effect of social injustice.”

Then, a nun added, “The mission of Christ in spreading the good news to the poor and the oppressed will continue--despite threats and death.”

Finally, the island’s senior religious prelate, who just two weeks before had narrowly escaped death, pleaded the case for his embattled church, to which more than 85% of all Filipinos belong.

“Please understand the work of the church,” Bishop Antonio Y. Fortich urged the gathering. “To work for the poor is God’s command. That’s what the priests are doing every day. So why do they call the priests Communists? We are not doing this to expand the Communists’ ranks. You must understand that it is not wrong to help the poor.”

Thursday’s rally in the heart of Negros Island had been billed as a “Mass of Reconciliation.” But, beneath the surface, it was more an expression of defiance, solidarity and anger by one of the most powerful and increasingly threatened institutions in Philippine society: the Catholic Church. And it seemed to foreshadow more trouble, since that same mood of angry defiance has spread to virtually every institution on one of the nation’s most strategic and influential islands.

“It is a sort of protest,” said Father Rolex Nueva, a populist priest in one of Negros’ most troubled regions. “A protest, and also a thanksgiving that our bishop was not killed.

“The military is trying to deliberately divide the church here and throughout the Philippines. It has become systematic and programmed. And what we are saying here is simply that there are some issues that can unite us as well. This is a show of church solidarity.”

“It is a show of force by the church,” said respected local journalist Salvacion Verona.

The town square rally was also a sign of the deep turmoil that remains throughout the Philippines in the wake of the May 11 elections for a new national Senate and House of Representatives that brought to power a legislature overwhelmingly consisting of supporters of President Corazon Aquino.

The crucial poll was hailed as the most peaceful and fairest election in the nation’s history and its biggest single step toward full democracy since the February, 1986, revolt that overthrew Ferdinand E. Marcos after 20 years of authoritarian rule. But it did little or nothing to mitigate the powerful forces of the extreme political left and right that have kept the Philippines deeply divided.

Indeed, in many regions where the opposition alleges it was cheated by local leaders of Aquino’s “people power” coalition, and where the institutions of the church and the military became campaign issues, Filipinos are now more divided than ever.

Unity Pushed by Aquino

Few places provide a better example of those deepening rifts than Negros, an economically wounded island in the central Philippines of 2 million people, an island that has both extreme wealth and crushing poverty and whose symbol is the active volcano in its interior.

It was in the midst of an island-wide storm of Communist guerrilla raids, military strafings and aerial bombing runs, revenge slayings and vicious name-calling that President Aquino last April 25 sternly gave instructions to the province’s governor, Daniel Lacson, in a meeting he later described as “a spanking from the president.”

Aquino told the island’s top church leaders, businessmen, military commanders and human rights advocates last month to make Negros “the example for the rest of the country” of how the warring or polarized sectors of Philippine society can work together and solve their differences by talking.

The church’s rally Thursday had followed a week of fasting and prayer by the island’s priests, nuns and lay workers, all in response to the president’s appeal.

But two days after Aquino’s lecture, a fragmentation grenade was thrown at Bishop Fortich’s bedroom in what police now say was an assassination attempt, possibly by one of the fanatic right-wing vigilante groups that are forming against the growing Communist insurgency. Verona, for instance, is one of three Negros journalists who say they have received death threats from the military-backed vigilantes recently.

And even as the bishop spoke at Thursday’s rally, an anti-Communist citizens’ group circulated among the crowd handing out leaflets that called Fortich and his priests “a cancer” in Bacolod.

“You have run out of good will in Bacolod,” the open message to Fortich declared. “Your life is at stake from both the right and the left.”

In Negros today, the only point on which everyone agrees is how divided the island’s people have become. And from the verandas of the handful of super-rich to the dusty bamboo huts of tenant farmers, thoughts are now beginning to turn to what they call “total war.”

Church in the Middle

The Catholic Church finds itself at the center of the conflict. With a parish priest in every town, it is represented in remote areas untouched by the government. It is in such regions that the powerful forces of the Communist New People’s Army and the nation’s military, with its wealthy civilian supporters, have intensified their efforts to exploit that network of priests and nuns in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Filipino masses.

In recent months, the armed forces have been staging a series of lectures in remote towns throughout Negros, telling residents, in the words of one army major, about “the evils of communism” and condemning local left-leaning priests for supporting a “godless ideology.”

“The military is trying to alienate the priests from the people through scare tactics,” Father Rolex said.

However, priests and nuns on Negros have assisted left-leaning human rights organizations, several of which held a joint press conference in Bacolod on Thursday at which they “vehemently condemned abuses and atrocities committed against the innocent and defenseless of the poorest members of the society . . . by the military--the so-called defenders of the people.”

Other priests have been carefully courted by the military. One priest in northern Negros recently angered Bishop Fortich by releasing a list of 35 priests on the island whom he accused of secretly or openly preaching communism.

Fortich’s response, published nationally, branded the accusation a “malicious falsehood” and “the culmination of a concerted and very obviously orchestrated campaign to malign and discredit the Catholic Church and sow confusion in the ranks of the Catholic faithful.”

Fortich then lashed out at the military for “spreading bold lies and half truths.”

But it is not just the church and its so-called liberation theology that is beginning to crack under the weight of propaganda offensives by the military and the Communist Party. In interviews with more than a dozen businessmen, public officials, soldiers, priests and farmers throughout the island last week, it is clear that virtually every sector of Negros society is finding it increasingly difficult to remain neutral.

A classic confrontation is being played out in the northern city of Cadiz, where the mayor, a 29-year-old pro-Aquino moderate, has spent the last year trying to dismantle the empire of a so-called warlord.

“I’m a centrist--like Cory,” said Rowena Guanzon, a former Los Angeles resident who was appointed by Aquino to destroy the legacy of the late Armand Gustilo, a powerful supporter of deposed President Marcos. Gustilo’s private army and vast wealth made him one the most powerful forces on a still-feudal island.

“The other day, my vice mayor, Jane Benedicto, said to me, ‘Bing, you’ve got to choose--left or right,’ ” Guanzon said, referring to herself by her nickname. “Well, I don’t think I have to go left or right. . . . That’s dangerous. That’s crazy. What do they want, a total war?”

So far, it has been something just short of that for Guanzon, who has put up so tough a front that her opponents have accused her of crimes ranging from ordering her bodyguard to beat up and kill an opposition supporter to cheating in the recent congressional elections. The mayor denies all the charges.

Guanzon’s principal opponent is Joseph Maranon, who faced off against the mayor’s hand-picked, moderate candidate in the May 11 poll. Maranon has been called the heir apparent to Gustilo, who was often accused of fraud and intimidation during local elections.

Maranon, a wealthy, right-wing hacienda owner, and his supporters stop short of accusing Guanzon of being a Communist, but they have charged that she used the New People’s Army, a powerful and growing force in the region, to win the election.

In persuading the national election commission to delay proclaiming a winner in the local congressional race pending an investigation, Maranon contended that the rebels burned, stole or destroyed $30,000 worth of his personal property during the election campaign and strafed a voting center on election day, all to help Guanzon.

“During the campaign, Mayor Guanzon tried to identify me with the military and create the image that I am a monster,” Maranon said. “Now I’m getting threats to my life.”

Key Campaign Issue

Guanzon flatly denies the charge, but she conceded that she did make the insurgency a key campaign issue. Just days before the election, she went on the air from the local radio station and announced that Maranon’s military friends had slaughtered 13 peasants in a hinterland district of her town.

She also charged that a local military unit was overrun by rebels, with the loss of four soldiers, dozens of M-16 rifles and two mortars, because the soldiers were drunk from a party that Maranon threw for them at his hacienda that night.

Despite her occasional advocacy of the rebels’ cause, Guanzon laughs at the suggestion that she may be a Communist.

“I’ve gone to school in the United States,” she said. “I’ve lived in the States. I lived in Belmont Shores (Long Beach), and I liked living in Belmont Shores. I like those restaurants. I like those yacht clubs. Me, a Communist? Ha.”

Of the insurgents, Guanzon said: “I don’t like the Communists any more than they do, but it’s the method. I don’t think we can succeed in this struggle just by killing everybody.”

The mayor insisted that she can remain at the center simply by personally delivering the services of government to the most remote regions of her town.

Edgar Sarrosa, also a wealthy landowner who ranks among Maranon’s top supporters, disagreed.

“I don’t believe in the center,” the sugar planter said. “Either you are with me or you are against me.”

The indirect cause of the conflicts and crisis in Negros is sugar. More than 95% of the island’s residents were dependent on the crop when the bottom fell out of the market several years ago, in part because of a monopoly controlled by Marcos’ closest friends. At least 300,000 sugar cane workers, already living on the margin, were thrown out of work.

Soon, more than half of Negros’ wealthy planters defaulted on their loans. Banks began to go bust. Sugar mills closed. And, in the past three years, more than 1,000 children have died of malnutrition in Negros, many of them in the region around Cadiz, and still more in Bacolod itself.

Land Reform Urged

“The problem, of course, is how we use the land,” said Negros’ Gov. Lacson, also a self-described moderate appointed by Aquino last year.

Lacson’s vision for ending the Communist insurgency on Negros, where even the military concedes that the war has greatly intensified in the past year, is a voluntary land reform program that would require the owners of the island’s feudally structured haciendas to give up 10% of their land to the tenants. That is also a principal demand of the insurgents.

At the same time, Lacson is encouraging foreign investors to bring in job-intensive industries and coerce the hacienda owners to switch from sugar to other crops.

“The way I see it, any improvement in the people’s lives is a defeat for the left,” Lacson said in an interview. “The people will be less vulnerable to the argument of the left. Right now, they are very vulnerable. They are hungry.”

All-Out War Feared

If his plan works, Lacson said, he may be able to save Negros in five to 10 years.

But Lito Coscolluela, another wealthy sugar planter and one of Lacson’s behind-the-scenes advisers, is among the many who fear that the governor may not have all that time.

“The Communists are just taking advantage of the complexity of the problems that we have--they are trying to deprive us of this time,” said Coscolluela, whose family has formed a private, right-leaning foundation that is trying to avert what he calls “all-out war.”

As for his own politics, Coscolluela added, “We would like to call ourselves centrists, but we are feeling a very strong magnet to the right.”

Lito’s cousin, Estaban Coscolluela, took a far harder line, one that has led several church leaders to suggest that he is among the landed hacienderos who have established right-wing vigilante groups in Negros.

Increasing Armed Conflict

“If Cory Aquino doesn’t work out, the people will not permit another alternative,” he said. “It will be all-out war. That’s why we have to do something about this on our own right now.”

Already, Bishop Fortich and several priests charge that the “political war” with the insurgents is deteriorating into increasing armed conflict, with the military committing more human rights abuses now than it ever did under Marcos.

The monsignor blames, in part, a newly formed right-wing citizens vigilante group called El Tigre, one of dozens that have sprung up in the country in the past several months, for the attempted grenade bombing of his bedroom last April 28.

By chance, the grenade was deflected by a tree branch, and the only casualty was a sparrow whose tail was blown off.

Fortich had the small bird stuffed, and now he keeps it on his desk as a paperweight--”a reminder of the struggle that lies ahead,” he said.