A Pullout From Fear in Philippines

The mayor of Aguinaldo, Ifugao, in the Philippines, proclaimed our attendance at last April’s town fiesta to be a defiant act of courage amid threats of armed assault by the Communist New People’s Army (NPA). Had we known the 45-minute trudge up the mountain to the fiesta grounds was so courageous, we would not have bothered.

We were not the defiant type.

The NPA never did charge over the hill, neither last April for the fiesta, nor this June when 261 Peace Corps volunteers were evacuated from the Philippines amid threats of assassination and the abduction of an American Peace Corps volunteer by the leftist guerrillas.

There never was a bang, and the whimper of our departure did not do justice to the mounting fear under which many of us lived.

The volunteers’ pullout and the NPA’s kidnaping of Tim Swanson, a 26-year-old Peace Corps forester from Cheyenne, Wyo., stunned and disoriented us.

But the sudden events also legitimized many of the distorted emotions that plagued us as we learned to live amid a deceptively low-intensity guerrilla war being waged between the NPA and the Philippine government.

My wife, Susan Lund, and I had been assigned to assist farmers in Aguinaldo, Ifugao, a remote municipality in the central Cordilliear mountains of Luzon. Barely a true municipality, it was more an arbitrary region drawn on a map, encompassing 14 villages scattered among rice terraces, peaks and rivers.

Our neighbors were Ifugaos, a tribe as notorious for the headhunting they once enthusiastically practiced, as the area’s rice terraces are famous (those terraces now are promoted by the Philippine department of tourism as the eighth wonder of the world).

Headhunting had become so fierce by the turn of the century that farmers could not go to their slash-and-burn sweet potato fields for fear of never returning. But after the lowland market town of Oscariz was all but wiped out by headhunting raids of our neighbor’s grandparents, the American governors decided to pacify eastern Ifugao.

By 1920, headhunting had been stopped.

But the violence of Ifugao society has remained.

Aguinaldo has been divided into three armed camps: the NPA; the regular forces of the Philippine military, known as the Philippine Constabulary (PC); and the armed civilian patrols, called the Civilian Armed Forces Geographical Unit (CAFGU).

This alphabet soup of armaments was and is constantly at war with each other; all three are at war with the wary unarmed civilian population.

When the PC arrived in the middle 1980s to establish government barracks, its lowland soldiers allegedly threatened the Ifugao highlanders. For centuries, Catholicized lowland Filipinos and tribal mountain dwellers have feared, ostracized and misunderstood each other.

The PC came to “liberate” the municipality from the NPA, which roamed freely through even the central villages. In the NPA ranks were Ifugaos, many of whom joined the guerrillas sincerely feeling that the NPA was “the poor man’s friend.”

After a few initial skirmishes between the PC and the NPA, the opposing forces found their own turf and generally left each other alone. The PC controlled the eight central villages along the deeply rutted, usually impassible dirt roads, while the NPA retreated to the remaining six far-flung villages.

Their few skirmishes, however, had left a lasting impact.

In 1987, the NPA stormed the house of Vice Mayor Federico Jugiad of Aguinaldo, Ifugao. They intended to extort 40,000 pesos, or roughly $2,000. If they did not get the money, they would kidnap him, a sort of ransom negotiated in advance.

The PC was notified. They came down from the barracks and opened fire into the house. Jugiad’s 3-year-old daughter was the only casualty.

In response, the vice mayor and Mayor Marcello Hemecgoy began building their own army of civilian CAFGU units. Armed only with ancient carbines and two weeks’ training, the CAFGUs were not terribly formidable but the civilians viewed them as their own, a protection, they said, against the foreign Philippine Constabulary or PC.

But in Aguinaldo, Ifugao, neighborly relations are no guarantee for safe passage, especially with a bottle of cheap gin selling for around 75 cents.

The United Nations Children’s Fund’s records show gunshot and stab wounds to be consistently among the top three causes of death in the province.

In the 14 months we lived in our village of 2,000, we know of three murders, two rapes and a near massacre. There were probably other incidents which we do not know about.

The massacre nearly came about when a deranged PC private from the southern island of Mindanao opened fire on a truckload of civilians heading toward the lowlands. Supposedly, he had overdosed on tuberculosis medicine.

Luckily, by the time he stopped firing into the air and began searching for human targets, the passengers had fled into the forest. Instead, he shot up the truck, passed out and died.

One murder was committed by a bandit and sometime NPA guerrilla looking for a CAFGU’s gun. Although everyone knew the bandit’s name and home village, he was never caught by the less-than-zealous police.

Their explanation: He was never home.

His brother, Robert, was not so fortunate. Caught and charged with NPA membership, three murders and several rapes, he was locked up in the municipal jail located in the broom closet under the stairs of City Hall. There, unbeknown to us, he was tortured by the PC, our neighbors said. Last April, he reportedly told his family he thought he would be killed.

One week later, the PC station commander announced he had escaped.

For the first time, there was a tangible fear in our village. Our friend Basilia Gamuang painted three scenarios: Robert could roust his NPA comrades from the neighboring village of Mahlong to attack his military jailers; he could fetch his bandit brother to terrorize the town; or he could be dead, killed by the PC and reported missing to avoid disciplinary action.

“We’re just praying that he’s dead,” she told us.

Suddenly, parents were rushing by our house asking where their usually undisciplined children were. An adolescent girl didn’t show up to her home one night, sending a shudder through the village.

When Robert’s wife and children moved into the empty house next to ours to await his return, we decided to take a two-week vacation at Peace Corps expense. We had not known that the house belonged to the broom-closet prisoner up the road.

Before we left, we asked a CAFGU why they were not watching the house. They were too scared, he replied.

When we returned, the house was vacant again and the children were as undisciplined as ever. The consensus was that Robert had been killed. But talk remained hushed, and only last month, a man was murdered in the village of Thallalo, about four hours’ walk from us, for bad-mouthing Robert.

By last June, we had been at our assignment for 14 months.

We had seen fire fights between the NPA and the military twice, but never in our municipality. The first time was from a distance in another town. Huey gunships from the Vietnam era pounded NPA positions in a heavily wooded mountainside a mile out of town while civilians gathered on a hill to watch.

“Boom, boom, it sounds so good,” a man said to me. “Just like in the movies, except it’s real.”

The other battle was a closer call. The NPA opened fire into the mountain town of Banaue. We watched as children at recess scattered, screaming and terrified. The next morning we caught a truck out of town. A few hours later, the NPA attacked, wounding three children before retreating.

The only time we actually saw the NPA was on a truck ride into the town, from which we walked four hours to our village. There were about eight of the soldiers, dripping with grenades and ammunition. Most of them couldn’t have been older than 17. The leader wore a floppy Chicago Cubs hat. He peered at us suspiciously while the driver explained who we were. They rode atop the truck for a few miles as we prayed they would not draw fire. Then, they got off and disappeared.

It was the mystery of these guerrillas that was most difficult to take. They were all around us but unseen. They killed American servicemen, American officers, even an American rancher while we lived among them.

Yet we were assured by the Peace Corps and by our community that they would never harm us.

On June 18, we walked the four hours to the nearest transportation and went to Manila to celebrate our second wedding anniversary. We told our friends and the people with whom we were working that we would be back in five days.

There were projects unfinished and unstarted. We had disbursed only $250 of a $4,000 grant for a swine and poultry project. We had citrus nurseries that were planned for the following months. We left with enough clothes for only five days.

Five days later, we were notified through another volunteer that we were all being called to Manila. Three days after that, we were on our way home.

We will never see our village again.

We will never say goodby.

It was a surprise, but only because we had grown so used to nights just on the edge of sleep, fiestas noted for their danger more than their music, escaped convicts and guerrillas on the other mountainside.

We left behind almost all we owned.

We also left behind friends and neighbors performing their defiant acts of courage amid threats of armed assault--not because they choose to, but because they have no other choice.