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How does
one write about a man whom one hardly knew beyond the
official and professional? How does one tell his story
especially to a generation 20 years removed from the time
he walked this earth? How does one even venture to share
what and how he thought of a world that changes so much
and yet remains ever so the same?
I had
worked with Lean Alejandro in Bayan (Bagong Alyansang
Makabayan), the organization that he was leading at the
time he was assassinated at the young age of 27 on
September 19, 1987, as part of the national secretariat
staff handling media and public relations. I never really
worked that closely with him nor was I ever as close to
him as he was with people who he came into Bayan with from
the University of the Philippines. But on the rare
occasions that I was able to talk to the man at the
personal level, I always walked away with the impression
of someone who did not allow the important work that he
was doing and the important people whom he was dealing
with, inside and outside Bayan, to get in the way of his
being himself: a regular self-effacing guy who never
really lost the small-town ways of Malabon, his
birthplace.
I remember
first meeting Alejandro at 5 Rosal Street in New Manila,
Quezon City. At the time, this was still the office of the
Nationalist Alliance for Justice, Freedom and Democracy, a
progressive cause-oriented group that predated Bayan. I
was then still doing human-rights-related research and
publication work and Alejandro had just become the darling
of the mosquito press for leading a series of peaceful,
but violently dispersed, mass actions against the
Education Act of 1981. I remember grasping his hands and
telling him, with the condescending tone of an “MF” or
middle-forces guy talking to a “YS” (respectively,
movement steno for the professional and youth-student
sectors): “So you’re the famous Lean….” I remember how to
this Alejandro had replied with a self-effacing “hindi
naman!!”
Looking
back, I’m not sure now if he was indeed being
probinsyano bashful or was just plain being
respectful, especially to someone who was trying to act
like his senior and superior. I would see more of this
demeanor on Alejandro’s part as he moved forward in his
work of building a nationwide multisectoral and
multipartisan movement for the dismantling of dictatorship
and the restoration of democracy in the country. It was in
this work that Alejandro really “flew” as he, almost
single-handedly, crossed social, economic and political
divides to bring the likes of the “Grand Old Man of the
Opposition” Sen. Lorenzo “Ka Tanny” Tañada to work with
the likes of peasant leader Jaime Tadeo and labor leader
or urban-poor leaders Eddie Guazon and Josie Cabrera. His
unabashedly Marxist viewpoint notwithstanding, Alejandro
even got Don Jaime Zobel de Ayala to be his photographer
in the latter’s project to make portraits of famous
Filipino personalities.
I became
part of Alejandro’s staff in Bayan when this “new
patriotic alliance” was put up in 1985. The last time I
came up close and personal with Alejandro was two years
and a restored democracy hence, back at 5 Rosal Street,
which by then had become Bayan’s national headquarters.
That last time, all I could do was whisper his name while
sobbing and stroking his arm as he lay dying on the front
seat of his car. I was the first to come out of our office
and approach his car as it sat there in the early
afternoon sun, with the air still smelling strongly of
cordite and nary another soul to be found on that street.
It was I who opened the car’s door after which its
bullet-riddled window glass came crashing, revealing
Alejandro’s still twitching body. At the moment, with that
gory sight and shattering glass, whatever illusion I
had—that democracy had returned to the country and that
anybody peacefully campaigning for socioeconomic and
political reform could now do so with the protection of
the government—evaporated within me.
In 1989 on
the second anniversary of his murder, I wrote in the
Manila Chronicle that Alejandro, had he been permitted to
live and build a political career in the mainstream, would
have, given his mind and his skill at building alliances,
highly developed for someone so young, gone on to become
timber worthy of the presidential race. I believed so
then, and I still believe so now.
For he
would have done so—build his career, that is—still under
the banner of and call for “new politics” (as against old
or trapo politics) that he ran under as candidate
for representative of Navotas-Malabon in the 1987
congressional elections. And he would have succeeded in
bolstering the people’s faith in themselves strongly
enough for them to carry him from one electoral victory to
another. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but I base this on the
fact that the issues that galvanized people then to heed
Alejandro’s call to action in the ’80s are still very much
around and would most certainly fuel popular support for
his brand of politics and activism.
Just what
is such brand? Many of his contemporaries—whether on his
side or not—saw Alejandro as a mass activist who was also
an intellectual—a rare breed that informed action with a
clarity of vision and purpose borne of the “objective
analysis of concrete conditions.” Living by such famous
Marxist dictum, he was able to skillfully identify who
could be counted upon as friend to a certain issue-related
cause or avoided as a potential stumbling block to the
building of a united front. He was also able to formulate
messages that his different audiences were able to relate
to; he knew his audience and he crafted his message in
accordance with what he analyzed and believed would strike
a responsive chord in the mind’s eyes of his audience. Any
advertising man or woman worth his or her salt would be
doing the same thing, if only to sell products.
Alejandro
considered himself a “propagandist,” a role that he
believed everyone with a stake in the affairs of the
nation should be able to do, as a matter of course and
duty. In an article that he wrote for the Diliman Review
in 1981 entitled “A Propaganda Bit About Propaganda,” he
sought to clear the term of negative connotations given to
it by many academic definitions, including those by
Marxist authors.
Foremost
among these was the definition of propaganda as the
“management of mass communications for power purposes” and
as communication that sought to manipulate people’s minds
to behave a certain way or follow a certain course of
action. For Alejandro, propaganda simply meant policy
decisions already agreed upon by the body-politic as
articulated or formulated by its elected representatives.
It was then a matter for members of the body-politic to
decide on which policy served to advance whose interest
and having decided so, to act in defense or opposition
thereto. No one can claim to be above this process or, in
Alejandro’s terms, to be apolitical and to be indifferent
to what’s going on. For everyone, he said, is a product of
society and, like propaganda itself, is subject to the
“forces within it and its historical past.”
He said:
“Any attempt to define propaganda without first trying to
situate it sociohistorically, and to rely on narrow and
limited observations as basis, will sooner or later crash
on a well of criticism.”
Such
perspective about propaganda appeared to have worked well
in helping Alejandro understand the motivations of those
he worked with and to craft the set of arguments that he
thought was likely to convince them to make common cause
with him.
It was
this understanding of the nature of propaganda that
appears to have been what had prevented him from falling
into the trap of sloganeering and dogmatism that bedeviled
and continues to bedevil many a mass leader and activist
till now. It was this characteristic that won over many
allies to the nationalist and democratic cause of Bayan
under the different issues that Alejandro had so
skillfully presented as compelling basis of unity and
cooperation. And it was this characteristic that probably
had prompted the dark forces of repression in this country
to unleash their dogs to kill Alejandro 20 years ago,
hoping that doing so would nip a budding serious threat to
the continued rule of the powers-that-be wherever these
might be.
Wednesday
marks the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Lean
Alejandro, quintessential activist and mass leader of the
1980s. On Tuesday his friends and former comrades in the
antidictatorship movement of that decade, people whose
lives he had touched, however so ethereally brief, gather
at the Bahay ng Alumni in Alejandro’s beloved alma mater
of UP to solemnly observe the occasion. Many of them, like
me, have moved on to other pursuits and other interests,
most related to something called “earning a living” and
“rearing a family.”
Unlike us,
Alejandro was never given a chance to do any of these. As
his friend and close ally Karina Constantino-David told a
gathering held in honor of his 47th birth anniversary on
July 10: “Hindi tumanda si Lean ng katulad natin.
But he will outlive us all.” By dying, Alejandro gave up
the ultimate of what he had for this country he loved so
much. By killing him, his murderers have immortalized him. |
