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Philippines The Huk Rebellion
At the end of World War II, most rural areas, particularly in
Central Luzon, were tinderboxes on the point of incineration. The
Japanese occupation had only postponed the farmers' push for
better conditions. Tensions grew as landlords who had fled to
urban areas during the fighting returned to the villages in late
1945, demanded back rent, and employed military police and their
own armed contingents to enforce these demands. Food and other
goods were in short supply. The war had sharpened animosities
between the elite, who in large numbers had supported the
Japanese, and those tenants who had been part of the guerrilla
resistance. Having had weapons and combat experience and having
lost friends and relatives to the Japanese and the wartime
Philippine Constabulary, guerrilla veterans and those close to
them were not as willing to be intimidated by landlords as they
had been before 1942.
MacArthur had jailed Taruc and Casto Alejandrino, both Huk
leaders, in 1945 and ordered United States forces to disarm and
disband Huk guerrillas. Many guerrillas, however, concealed their
weapons or fled into the mountains. The Huks were closely
identified with the emerging Pambansang Kaisahan ng mga
Magbubukid (PKM--National Peasant Union), which was strongest in
the provinces of Pampanga, Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, and Tarlac and
had as many as 500,000 members. As part of the left-wing
Democratic Alliance, which also included urban left-wing groups
and labor unions, the PKM supported Osmeña and the Nacionalistas
against Roxas in the 1946 election campaign. They did so not only
because Roxas had been a collaborator but also because Osmeña had
promised a new law giving tenants 60 percent of the harvest,
rather than the 50 percent or less that had been customary.
Six Democratic Alliance candidates won congressional seats,
including Taruc, who had been released from jail along with other
leaders, but their exclusion from the legislature on charges of
using terrorist methods during the campaign provoked great unrest
in the districts that had elected them. Continued landlord- and
police-instigated violence against peasant activities, including
the murder of PKM leader Juan Feleo in August 1946, provoked the
Huk veterans to dig up their weapons and incite a rebellion in
the Central Luzon provinces. The name of the HUK movement was
changed from the People's Anti-Japanese Army to the People's
Liberation Army (Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan).
Roxas's policy toward the Huks alternated between gestures of
negotiation and harsh suppression. His administration established
an Agrarian Commission and passed a law giving tenants 70 percent
of the harvest, although this was extremely difficult to enforce
in the countryside. The Huks in turn demanded reinstatement of
the Democratic Alliance members of Congress; disbandment of the
military police, which in the 1945-48 period had been the
equivalent of the old Philippine Constabulary; and a general
amnesty. They also refused to give up their arms. In March 1948,
Roxas declared the Huks an illegal and subversive organization
and stepped up counterinsurgency activities.
Following Roxas's death from a heart attack in April 1948,
his successor, Elpidio Quirino, opened negotiations with Huk
leader Taruc, but nothing was accomplished. That same year the
communist PKP decided to support the rebellion, overcoming its
reluctance to rely on peasant movements. Although it lacked a
peasant following, the PKP declared that it would lead the Huks
on all levels and in 1950 described them as the "military arm" of
the revolutionary movement to overthrow the government. From its
inception, the government considered the Huk movement to have
been communist instigated, an extension onto the Luzon Plain of
the international revolutionary strategy of the
Cominform (see Glossary)
in Moscow. Yet the rebellion's main impetus was peasant
grievances, not Leninist designs. The principal factors were
continuous tenant-landlord conflicts, in which the government
actively took the part of the latter, dislocations caused by the
war, and perhaps an insurrectionist tradition going back several
centuries. According to historian Benedict Kerkvliet, "the PKP
did not inspire or control the peasant movement . . . . What
appears closer to the truth is that the PKP, as an organization,
moved back and forth between alliance and nonalliance with the
peasant movement in Central Luzon." Most farmers had little
interest in or knowledge of socialism. Most wanted better
conditions not redistribution of land or collectivization. The
landlord-tenant relationship itself was not challenged, just its
more exploitive and impersonal character in the contemporary
period.
Huk fortunes reached their peak between 1949 and 1951.
Violence associated with the November 1949 presidential election,
in which Quirino was reelected on the Liberal Party ticket, led
many farmers to support the Huks, and after that date there were
between 11,000 and 15,000 armed Huks. Although the core of the
rebellion remained in Central Luzon, Huk regional committees also
were established in the provinces of Southern Tagalog, in
northern Luzon, in the Visayan Islands, and in Mindanao.
Antigovernment activities spread to areas outside the movement's
heartland.
Beginning in 1951, however, the momentum began to slow. This
was in part the result of poor training and the atrocities
perpetrated by individual Huks. Their mistreatment of Negrito
peoples made it almost impossible for them to use the mountain
areas where these tribespeople lived, and the assassination of
Aurora Quezon, President Quezon's widow, and of her family by
Huks outraged the nation. Many Huks degenerated into murderers
and bank robbers. Moreover, in the words of one guerrilla
veteran, the movement was suffering from "battle fatigue."
Lacking a hinterland, such as that which the Democratic Republic
of Vietnam (North Vietnam) provided for Viet Cong guerrillas or
the liberated areas established by the Chinese Communists before
1949, the Huks were constantly on the run. Also the Huks were
mainly active in Central Luzon, which permitted the government to
concentrate its forces. Other decisive factors were the better
quality of United States-trained Philippine armed forces and the
more conciliatory policy adopted by the Quirino government toward
the peasants.
Data as of June 1991
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