Kumander Bilog’s new quest for freedom

FOR 29 COUNTS OF MURDER Former CPP leader Rodolfo Salas is escorted to the Manila Regional Trial Court for his Feb. 28 arraignment, which was eventually postponed. —JOAN BONDOC

ANGELES CITY, Pampanga, Philippines — Regina and her youngest brother, Jody, are no cyberwarriors, but they have taken to the internet since the police arrested their father, Rodolfo Salas, in his home here on Feb. 18 on murder charges.

“We want to tell stories how our dad has been living his life since his release in 1992,” Regina, 46, said of the website, www.aboutrudysalas.com, they put up to share information, stories and updates on their father.

Jody, 41, who was only 7 when Salas was nabbed for rebellion in 1986, said remembering the facts and appreciating and sharing history was “therapeutic.”

For the siblings, the 29 counts of murder listed in three criminal cases in relation to the discovery of a supposed mass grave in Inopacan, Leyte, have cast their father as a killer ra¬ther than a patriot.

The cases seemed to be an attempt to erase his important contributions to the Philippine revolutionary movement, Regina said.

Salas, also called Kumander Bilog, chaired the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and headed its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA) until 1987, after the arrest of Bernabe Buscayno in 1976 and Jose Maria Sison in 1977.

‘My hero’

Regina is based in Arizona in the United States, where she has been serving in the Flagstaff City Council since her election in 2018.

“My career in the Philippines and in northern Arizona has been dedicated to public service and community impact following the example set by my dad, my hero,” she said. “Social justice, resilience, self-sacrifice and service to the people were ingrained early in my consciousness, as exemplified by my dad.”

These values run deep in the Salas family.

Salas’ grandfather, Gregorio Canda, of Mexico town, Pampanga province, joined the pea¬sants’ uprising against Spain. His father, Felimon Salas Sr., was a fighter in the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon and a member of the old Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas. Two of Salas’ brothers were killed by the military.

Salas graduated salutatorian of his high school batch of 1964 at the Holy Angel University here. That same year, he joined the local chapter of Kabataang Ma¬kabayan, then yet to be outlawed.

He completed an enginee¬ring course at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, and worked in Philippine Airlines for six months.

He joined the CPP when it was founded on Dec. 26, 1968, working full-time with peasants and wor¬kers and later heading the party’s Central Luzon committee.

Biggest growth

Salas filled the vacuum left by the arrests of Buscayno and Sison. The CPP-NPA achieved the “biggest growth” under his leadership, according to a former comrade who also occupied a top post.

That meant having 22,000 fighters, 40,000 reservists, 3,000 urban partisans and 2 million people as an organized mass base shortly before the 1986 People Power Revolution.

The growth of the CPP-NPA forces was nationwide although Salas mainly stayed in Central Luzon.

Recalled his former comrade: “Innovations in the party-army territorial area organization structure made the big difference in effective expansion and consolidation. United front work produced fast-expanding networks of both underground and legal organizations, bringing forth a strong, open, and legal democratic mass movement that effectively isolated the dictatorship [of Ferdinand Marcos], leading to its downfall.”

The NPA was ready to take control of Davao and Baguio cities and Metro Manila and establish the revolutionary government in these areas, Salas had said. But the United States intervened in no time by removing Marcos and installing Corazon Aquino, he said.

Life after CPP

When he found it hopeless uniting factions within the re-volutionary movement — some of which resisted his reinstatement although he was elected as chair — Salas cut his ties with the CPP-NPA and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines for good in 1993.

Like a real revolutionary, he did not waste his life on mundane concerns.

Where before the military did not even know how he looked, Salas went about Angeles in plain sight, having no need for a bodyguard. He wore simple clothes and drove himself in a pickup truck. On some nights, he went drinking with one or two high school buddies.

In Clark, he organized wor¬kers’ cooperatives that helped the state-owned Clark Development Corp. clean up the former US air base of Mt. Pinatubo’s ash. (The base was returned to the Philippine government after the termination of the PH-US military bases agreement.)

One of the cooperatives la¬ter took a medical transcription contract.

In Clark’s Sacobia, he farmed land with Manuel “Ka Mitzi” de Vera, a former NPA supporter who wanted to improve agriculture, education and health among his fellow Aeta.

By 2012, Salas had organized a livelihood cooperative of workers in Feedmix Specialist in Pulilan, Bulacan. The company flourished, enabling it to expand its export of fish products.

At one point, then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo tapped Salas to rescue two electric cooperatives in her native Pampanga.

He also began a new family, raising two kids with his partner, Joana.

“I never regretted giving my youth and most of my life to the cause of national freedom and people’s liberation. Serving the motherland is the highest form of love,” Salas told the Inquirer in 2012.

His involvement in legal activities was a subject in TV documentaries, special features and columns, including “Running a Revolution” in Asiaweek magazine in 1994 and ABS-CBN News Channel’s “Pipol” in 2012.

Which was why Salas was dumbfounded when Central Luzon police director Brig. Gen. Rhodel Sermonia bragged that his arrest was an accomplishment in the implementation of President Duterte’s Executive Order No. 70 on ending local insurgency.

No court notified him of the cases or issued him a subpoena although his whereabouts were known.

Dated Aug. 18, 2019, the arrest warrants covered 37 other people, including Sison, who is now based in the Netherlands.

“I never hid,” Salas told Sermonia at a press briefing in Camp Olivas.

He tried to speak when Sermonia coaxed 14 former NPA rebels to identify him as their “ta¬gapagsalita sa mga pagsasanay” (lecturer). But the police general prevented him from speaking, citing the pending cases.

Deja vu

As if on cue, the emcee quickly ended the briefing.

On Facebook, Salas’ friends and coworkers decried the charges as “out of place.”

“He’s long [lain] low. Why does [the government] still bother him?” one comment went, somewhat summing up the reactions.

Salas is in his third fight for freedom, and his sister, Angie, finds this to be “more difficult.”

For one, he’s now 72. For another, shingles have deafened his right ear and he has a heart condition that needs medical attention.

His arrest and detention in Camp Bagong Diwa in Bicutan, Taguig City, are “inconceivable deja vu,” Regina said.

“It brings back trauma and opens up old wounds and fee¬lings of danger, helplessness, pain and constant worrying about my dad’s safety and health,” she said. “I hope and pray that the judiciary will resolve my dad’s case in an impartial and expeditious manner.”

After his arrest in 1973, Salas was detained at Camp Olivas but he escaped after “three months of severe torture” from his captors. He was locked in an isolation room, his hands cuffed and his feet manacled.

In 1992, his imprisonment ended in a “vicious joke” because his release was thought to be due to a pardon from then President Fidel Ramos.

Salas said he got himself out of Camp Crame because he had served six years in jail on rebellion charges.

But his spirit did not bend under these humiliations. “I have not committed any crime against the Filipino people,” he said then.

‘Traveling skeletons’

It was a matter of pride for him to clarify this when the police briefly presented him to reporters nine hours after his arrest on Feb. 18.

Tucking a small water container under his arm as he was escorted out of a hall, Salas showed no fear. Neither did Jody, who recently asked the Supreme Court to order his father’s release.

Karapatan denounced Salas’ arrest and the “trumped-up” charges, saying a similar case in 2000 in Baybay, Leyte, was dismissed in 2005 for insufficient evidence.

In 2011, the military filed multiple murder charges following the discovery of a supposed mass grave in Inopacan. The military said the skeletons belonged to NPA rebels accused of being government spies.

Karapatan described the current cases to be of “traveling skeletons” because the remains of five victims in Baybay turned up in Inopacan.