Who knows?
November 30: The birth anniversary of the Great Plebeian and working class hero, Andres Bonifacio. In 1964, Kabataang Makabayan was established. In 1998, the comprehensive national democratic youth organization Anakbayan was born. In 2022, however, soldiers would put an end to Ericson Acosta’s life.
I was at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani when the news broke out. Many others were in Liwasang Bonifacio, observing the Supremo’s birthday with a protest action against the increase of prices of basic commodities while wages remain dismal. How tragic, I thought, that Ericson perished on the day Bonifacio was born. But revolutions are rife with beginnings and endings, with countless start-and-ends.
And, as another revolutionary from another time, Salud Algabre, once declared, “No revolution ever fails. Each is a step in the right direction.”
State mercenaries did the dastardly act around 2:00 AM. Elements from the 94th and 47th Infantry Battalion captured him and Joseph Jimenes, a peasant organizer and his companion, alive. The military snatched away their lives by strafing the house of the Francisco family, who are still missing to this minute, to stage the sarswela that Acosta and Jimenes died in an “encounter.”
There was no encounter; there was a double-murder.
Ericson Acosta was murdered more than a year after the military had slain his wife, Kerima Lorena Tariman. Five days before, six alleged New People’s Army rebels were reportedly killed in Sultan Kudarat — under, yet again, the soldiers’ favorite excuse: “encounter.” How many more revolutionaries and defenseless peace consultants were killed before? Decades after Bonifacio was extirpated by another Filipino, they’re still killing revolutionaries.
Every day, we encounter reports of Filipinos being killed: hapless drug suspects, farmers falsely tagged as armed rebels, red-tagged activists and community organizers, journalists, teachers, ordinary folks, even local officials and politicians. And unarmed peace activists and revolutionaries. The headlines are almost always splashed with the blood of people executed with impunity, without remorse, without any hint of apologia from their murderers. In a society where Dutertian fascism and the lawlessness of the gun thrive, these killings are normalized. Many of them are relegated into oblivion.
More tragically, we often fail to see, is how the normalization of extrajudicial killings and murders in this nation often trivialize their victims in numbers, as if they were not human beings who lived sublime lives. As if they are mere statistical data of violence. Ericson is not, and should never be, just another addition in the tally board of the murdered in this government’s war against its own people.
Say his name: Ericson Acosta. He was a poet, one of our country’s best. He won a National Book award for his book of poetry. Beyond that, he was an exceptional activist; the quintessential artista ng bayan who offered his art, who consecrated his art, in the struggle of our people for freedom. He embodied the best values inculcated in the University of the Philippines: patriotism, courage, service to the people. Honor before excellence. He was a husband, a father, a comrade. A self-styled bohemian, in his late wife’s words, who abnegated his “crazy drinking habit” for the life of struggle. A patriot who proved beyond words that offering his life to serve our people is the noblest act of heroism.
Ericson exemplified the revolutionary tradition of our people. He had the heroic DNA of Bonifacio. He dared to envision a society without the shackles of feudal control and landlessness, and sought to turn it into a reality. He wrote poems that spoke of the people’s anguished lives, and the necessity to fight with them. He wrote songs that inspired — and still inspires — countless generations of activists to tread the same dangerously heroic path he had taken. He lived with the farmers of Samar, Bicol, and Negros to understand their condition. He fought with them. He went to prison under Ninoy’s son, but his cases were eventually thrown out. He stood by tomorrow’s revolutionary promise. In the Longfellowian language: he was a hero in the strife. And not merely because he refused to be driven like a cattle.
Ericson Acosta’s brutal death is the Filipino people’s loss. The nation lost one of its best and brightest because this regime, under the son of an ousted dictator who murdered hundreds of revolutionaries and activists like him, insists on a despotic counter-insurgency method to deal with our people’s funereal living conditions. The downtrodden farmers with whom Ericson lived and fought to achieve a better world, lost their ardent champion. Words are not enough in explicating the grief that comes with this huge loss. They will never be.
In 1982, after Marcos’ military summarily executed another gallant working-class hero, Edgar M. Jopson, Don Joaquin “Chino” Roces wrote an elegy and lamentation for Edjop. He asseverated:
One day, who really knows, we will no longer be decorating Filipino soldiers for killing fellow Filipinos.
Who knows? But the answer to this question lies in our collective affirmation of our people’s struggle to cast away a society where more Ericson Acostas would be murdered by the ruthless gods of Malacañang and Camp Aguinaldo because of their fear of our people’s radical vision for the future. Who knows, indeed.
