Balangiga—a deer among cattle

Now and then when reading reports of the “Yolanda” rehabilitation work, we come across the name of a small town in Southern Samar, and we are happy to realize the town lives on outside of history texts. It hasn’t disappeared into history’s shadows. The town is Balangiga where 113 years ago on Sept. 28 the people of the town—farmers, town officials, merchants, landed people and landless tenants—rose up against the occupying American army. This was the only town in the entire country where the civilian population attacked veteran infantry men. Some 75 US soldiers died in the attack or were in hospitals in the days after. More than double that number of townspeople died.

The town was damaged by Yolanda, but not as seriously as towns further up the west coast of the island. The more a person reads of the town’s revolt in 1901, the more we must admire its people. They were at odds with the guerrillas in the mountains behind the town, as they were with the American soldiers. They were the only people in the entire country to revolt without soldiers or guerrillas by their side. In all the wars of history, are there similar examples of civilians taking up arms against veteran soldiers?

I remember a poem of James Dickey’s titled “Deer Among Cattle,” about a man who finds one night that a deer has jumped the electrified fence into a corral of cattle, and is eating grass alongside them. The cattle are doomed to be fattened and slaughtered. The deer alone can escape; he can jump back over the fence and regain its freedom in the forest. The cattle look away from the flashlight beam of the man; the deer looks back unafraid. The people of Balangiga were the deer for their generation. They alone were free.

We can’t know what the people of 1901 would do in modern-day Balangiga in any detail, but we can understand the lenses and points of view those people would bring to modern decision-making based on the preparations they made for that Sept. 28 battle long ago.

First of all they displayed then a very sensitive response to injustice. The suffering they received from the American soldiers in Balangiga was serious, but comparable to the sufferings of hundreds of other towns throughout the country. The American soldiers took the food stores of the people at times; they forced the people to cut down fruit trees that surrounded the town, so they could more easily see guerrilla attacks coming; they forced the men to work on road and other projects without pay, and they drank too much and harassed women when they did so. Sadly the problems were common to those of other towns, but only the people of Balangiga responded so intensely. Someone or something had given them a sharper sense of injustice.

Secondly we know from the testimony of the parish priest that the leaders of the attack included town officials, merchants and landlords, farmers, tenants and women. Was there any more democratic group in any town in 1901? Where had the impulse for it come from?

Much later the Americans blamed the parish priest, Fr. Donato Guimbaolibot, for the violence in Balangiga. They were right in a way: He was crucial to what happened. He was responsible for the sensitivity to justice and the democracy of the people’s leaders. The people themselves were responsible for the violence; the priest left the town the night before the attack in order, it seems, to disassociate himself from it. He didn’t reveal the plot to the Americans, although he had played chess with the captain in charge of the soldiers and their doctor, both Catholics. He respected the people’s decision, even if he didn’t agree with it.

Father Guimbaolibot had taught in the major seminary in Cebu. He volunteered to work in Samar when the bishop asked for help there. He was a tall, thin, quiet man who in the brief time he was in Balangiga made a deep impact on the people.

The people of Balangiga 1901, if called to help us solve today’s problems, including those caused by Yolanda, would proceed with great sensitivity toward the suffering poor and respect their grief and losses. They would make sure the poor benefited first from the rehabilitation efforts. Secondly they would opt for the inclusion of the poor in all the decision-making that occurs in matters directly affecting their lives.

The story is told that Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York once stopped in Samar to meet Father Guimbaolibot. It was 1952 and Father Guimbaolibot was about 80 years of age and considered a very holy man. Cardinal Spellman was in charge of all US Army chaplains. When the two met, Spellman knelt, kissed the old man’s hands and apologized for the American soldiers of 1901 for their torture of the priest and the sorrow they caused the people.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates (urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com).