Jose V. Fuentecilla - Fighting from a Distance: How Filipino Exiles Helped Topple a Dictator

THE ASIAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

Series Editors
Eiichiro Azuma
Jigna Desai
Martin F. Manalansan IV
Lisa Sun-Hee Park
David K. Yoo

Roger Daniels, Founding Series Editor

A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.

How Filipino Exiles Helped Topple a Dictator

JOSE V. FUENTECILLA

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

2013 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 C P 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fuentecilla, Jose V.
Fighting from a distance : how Filipino exiles helped
topple a dictator / Jose V. Fuentecilla.
pages cm. (The Asian American experience)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-252-03758-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-252-07912-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Marcos, Ferdinand E. (Ferdinand Edralin), 19171989.
2. Movement for a Free Philippines (Organization).
3. FilipinosUnited StatesHistory.
4. ExilesPolitical activityUnited States.
5. PhilippinesPolitics and government19731996.
6. PhilippinesForeign relationsUnited States.
7. United StatesForeign relationsPhilippines.

DS686.5 .F84 2013

959.904'6 2013005910

On May 19, 1973, a gathering of students and young professionals slowly filled the seats in the auditorium of the Holy Name School on West 97th Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. Most were Filipinos and their American friends, drawn mainly by the news of events in Manila. Eight months earlier, on September 21, martial law had been declared by the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos.

Reports, both good and bad, traveled across the Pacific Ocean to confused relatives and friends in New York and other cities with large concentrations of Filipinos. There was peace and order in the homeland, they were told. In the meantime, because of the suspension of constitutional rule and the imposition of martial law, Marcos decrees were now the law of the land. The people filing into the auditorium felt the need to initiate some kind of collective response. As challenges to martial law spread in the Philippines, they moved to forge an overseas counterpart to the homegrown dissent. At that meeting, the outlines of an organized opposition took tentative form.

On September 22, almost a year to the day after the declaration of military rule, a national conference was convened, at which the first U.S.-based resistance to Philippine martial law was formally organized. It called itself the Movement for a Free Philippinesthe MFP for short. The group named officers, issued resolutions, and formed committees. It placed an advertisement (5 inches wide by 8 inches deep) in the New York Times on September 27, announcing its formation (see illustrations). The ad appealed to the Filipinos in the U.S. to the American Peopleto the People of the Philippines, declaring the movement's intent to work peacefully for the return of constitutional rule to the Philippines. The MFP was soon followed by a number of other groups. Among the major ones were the Friends of the Filipino People (FFP) and the California-based Katipunan Ng Mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP)the Union of Democratic Filipinos.

From the start, the leaders of these groups differed on goals and tactics. Strong personalities and deeply held political philosophies made consensus problematic. They were driven mainly by an abiding hatred for a dictatorship. They were focused on two goals: to expose the effects of martial law and to either cut or eliminate U.S. military aid to the Marcos regime. The members, mostly newly arrived immigrants who still had close ties to the Philippines, were acutely disturbed by the martial law directives that had muzzled the press, dissolved the legislature, jailed political opponents or driven them into exile, and outlawed organized dissent. They were witnessing a sudden shift to a state of affairs in their country that they had never experienced. These were new immigrants, most of whom had arrived during the late 1960s. They had spent the formative years of their lives under American tutelage after the liberation of their country from Japanese occupation in 1945. From the Americans they had learned the basic tenets of freedom and democracy. Now they were watching as their homeland's loss of those values was ignored by the same U.S. government that had made it possible for them to enjoy these freedoms. Also of concern were the uncertain fates of their families and friends back home under the new regime.

Who were those Filipinos who answered the call to gather in Manhattan on that spring day in 1973, and then a few months later came back together in larger numbers in Washington, D.C., to formally lay the foundations of a nationwide movement to resist the imposition of a new political order in their homeland? For the most part, they were two generations away from the first Filipinos who had come to the United States at the turn of the century. Their ancestors were the farmworkers who had toiled in the pineapple groves of Hawaii and the lettuce fields of California, the cannery workers at Alaska's fish factories, and the shrimpers on boats in Louisiana. By the 1960s and 1970s, this third generation included professionals who had entered through the urban immigrant gateways of the East and West Coasts. College students, medical workers, accountants, engineers, office workersthey swelled the Filipino population to close to a million. But beyond their numbers, they brought with them a life experience from the country that they had only recently left, but that had been virtually abandoned by the earlier Filipino settlers. True, many arrived as permanent economic migrants. Others intended their stay to be a temporary stopover while they accumulated skills and funds that they could eventually use back in the Philippines. Still others, a very small segment, found themselves exiled from home by virtue of being labeled enemies of the new regime in Manila.

Whether they considered themselves new immigrants or refugees or exiles, there was one overarching sentiment that impelled them to join the U.S.-based resistance movements: they were strongly troubled by the rise of a dictatorial regime in Manila, and they felt that they must organize to stop it. They could hear the rising voices of dissent there, and they understood that an overseas voice would be needed to amplify those messages. Fortuitously, they found themselves in a country from which they could safely launch their own resistance (although, as will be seen later, it was not an entirely safe refuge). By exposing the abuses of martial law to the American public, they intended to tap into the American belief in the primacy of human individual rights. The United States, they argued, had chosen to disregard these violations of human rights because the U.S. government placed a higher value on its vital economic and military interests in the Philippines. The next step would be to channel public displeasure toward their legislators, particularly the U.S. Congress. Hence lobbying for a reduction, if not elimination, of U.S. military aid to the Marcos regime was a major activity. They viewed this aid as the key prop that was keeping Marcos in power.

Even when their numbers were combined, the various opposition groups constituted only a fraction of the more than one million Filipinos in the United States during the 1970s. Early attempts to reach out to their compatriots were met with a general apathy toward participating in politically motivated activities. Fear of a backlash or retaliation from the Marcos regime was also a factor. To be sure, there was a vigorous Manila-based opposition to Marcos that inspired their U.S.-based counterparts. Over the fourteen years of martial law, resistance activity flourished. Students, farmers, religious groups, politicians, professionals, and working-class populations came out against the Marcos regime. Most prominent were Marxist-inspired insurgents, fired by an ideology and emboldened by an armed guerrilla cadre. But they were all vulnerable to swift retribution from the regime. In contrast, the U.S.-based opposition groups knew that being an ocean away provided them some degree of safety. Despite the distance, as taxpaying and voting citizens, they were well placed to influence events in the Philippines.