Dr. Dante Simbulan here to speak on Military Coups

Dr. Dante Simbulan here to speak on Military Coups

By Voltaire R. de Leon

If you haven’t done so, reserve a $15 ticket to the Welcome Dinner for Dr. Dante Simbulan on Saturday, November 25th at the Kalayaan Hall in Mississauga.

Doc Simbulan will be talking about a subject matter near and dear to his heart – “The Oligarchy and Military Coups”. Framing his talk on current events is his book The Modern Principalia: The Historical Evolution of the Philippine Ruling Oligarchy.

Filipinos who grew up in the 60s will recall the young army lieutenants, Crispin Tagamolila and Victor Corpuz, who defected to the New People’s Army in 1969. One could never separate the then Army Major Dante Simbulan from these two. Tagamolila later killed in an NPA encounter with the military and a disillusioned Corpuz later returned to the army fold.

Major Simbulan taught at the PMA and influenced a whole generation of PMA cadets and when Marcos declared martial law in September 21, 1972, the military arrested Simbulan and imprisoned him without charges and later exiled to the U.S.

The Modern Principalia now sits on my Filipiniana shelf next to Constantino. Doc Simbulan’s thesis was never published until last year by the UP Press and launched in Dilliman in December, 2005.

Just days before the Dilliman launch, Marine Captain Nicanor Faeldon escaped detention at the Makati Trial Court. Faeldon, following perhaps the examples of earlier patriotic soldiers of conscience, figured in the Oakwood mutiny of July 2003 to protest military corruption. Perhaps these coup plotters were emulating Tagamolila.

I’ll connect the dots in a little while, first the book.

The Modern Principalia

It is a hefty book, an archival gem that is the groundbreaking pickaxe, the father of later books on the Philippine ruling class – and on November 25th, the author will sign it.

Principalia traces the evolution of the tribal leaders from the time of colonization to the mid-19th century. What we generally knew from experience and anecdotal evidence – that the ruling class in the Philippine is made up of landowning family clans and their protégés, which Simbulan put into incontrovertible facts and captivating narrative. For it’s time, the Principalia thesis was just the diagnosis needed for the ailing nation.

The evolution of the Principalia is captivating stuff. Starting from the datus and the native nobility, they became to look more and more Spanish and Chinese as they intermarried with the Spanish peninsulares, local-born Spaniards and the successful Chinese Inquilinos and loan sharks making the principalia into the mestizo class.

Simbulan studied 169 families. Each family produced an average of more than 4 relatives in top government positions, to wit: 7 presidents, 2 vice presidents, 15 cabinet members, 42 senators, 127 representatives and 10 Supreme Court justices.

There’s a new study by the Philippine Centre for Investigative Journalism called The Rulemakers, How the Wealthy and Well-Born Dominate Congress. It confirms Simbulan’s original study that the ruling class shared the same gene pool.

It gets worse. Sixty-two percent of House Representatives in the 8th Congress (1987 –1992) had relatives in elected office. By the 12th Congress, the figure jumped to 68%.

When war broke out at the start of the 20th century between the U.S. and Aguinaldo’s Revolutionary Government, the principales defected to the American side later to form the Federalist Party with Trinidad Pardo de Tavera as head. Their platform: to be a star in the U.S. flag, a member of the Union.
Following a series of splits, more of the same parties emerged over time, each fighting the other for a piece of the political turf yet sharing the same ideology – power to them, the principalia – as they played golf at the Wac-Wac between elections.

The other end of the spectrum was the party that represented the commoner, the tao, who lived and worked under the rule of the principalia.

The Bonifacio Line

Such an organization was the Katipunan that reorganized Rizal’s reformist La Liga in order to take the road to complete national independence. Led by Bonifacio, the Katipunan was supported by a great mass of Filipinos suffering under the combined Spanish colonial rule of Church and State But it carried with it members of the principalia, including Emilio Aguinaldo whose team formed the Magdalo faction. This faction schemed Bonifacio’s eventual execution.

Simbulan traces Bonifacio’s line successively through the Union Obrera, the parliamentary Communist Party, Luis Taruc’s Socialist Party, the Sakdalista, the Labor Party – and after the Principalia thesis was written— Jose Maria Sison’s maoist Communist Part of the Philippines, Bayan Muna, Akbayan and others including the Party-list members of Congress.

Because nationalists of the Bonifacio line always strived for the ouster of foreign powers and at least with the socialists, for a structural equalization of political power to all classes, the modern principalia did everything to criminalize them and force them to go underground.

The modern principalia, today’s trapos (traditional politicians) know that their privileges – economic and political — are granted to them if they collaborate with more powerful foreign powers – Spain, Japan, the U.S. – and, in the future, maybe China. Except for a few, they are pervasively corrupt and will stop at nothing – electoral fraud, embezzlement, illegally engaged in business as bureaucrat-capitalists, outright thievery, even murder – to stay in power. They pay lip service to democracy and national independence while subverting people’s initiatives to attain them.

The Military

How then can you break the power of the new principalia?

I mentioned army mutineer Captain Faeldon’s escape from detention in the same breath as the Principalia’s Diliman book launch. It appears that one of the speakers at the launch said out loud that the answer to the power of the principalia is the military. A renowned political scientist attending the launch, Luis V. Teodoro, later commented that this idea was desperate and naïve because the coup plotters (unfortunately self-described as the Magdalo) were not as politicized as Tagamolila or Corpus and held little traces of Simbulan’s influence.

Still, the Chinese revolution succeeded because the nationalist 27th Division went over to Mao Ze Dong later followed by the New 4th Army and the Eight Route Army.

Does Dr. Simbulan believe that nationalist elements in the military can finally end the rule of the principalia? We’ll find out on November 25th.