Crispin Beltran

I woke up yesterday morning and thought that Crispin Beltran was still alive twenty-four hours before. For many, again, the worst feeling: regret. Had he been indisposed to fix his daughter’s house’s roof, he wouldn’t have suffered from heart arrest and fallen. He would still be enjoying the domestication of the rainy season with his family, taking rest for the coming parliamentary fights for a higher worker’s wage. My dad, who used to resist my activist advocacy, admires the old man. He called me upon watching television news of the labor leader’s death.

Some commented that he shouldn’t have climbed up that roof. Many wondered why a congressman had to work on house repair himself. TV viewers saw his daughter’s house; we too had watched his poor house in Batasan, Quezon City whenever features of his simple living are catapulted for mass media consumption. Pinakita lamang ng pangyayari ang payak na katotohanang hindi nagpayaman si Ka Bel. Still others were disappointed that he didn’t die facing the bullets of this fascist government. Ka Bel himself idealized that he wanted to die in the heat of the struggle. It is not how one died that is the crucible of biographical judgment. It is how one lived fighting for the rights of the oppressed that is ultimately important. The last moment of our ‘heroes’ – Rizal and Ninoy, Bonifacio and Rolando Olalia – that turned them into ‘martyrs’ is just the icing on the cake, that flash of visual-aural drama which will soon be monumentalized in plentiful narratives of nation-building, identity-formation, community-creation…the never-ending revolution.

With a touch of starstruck hysteria, I remembered the time when I had a close encounter with him. I went to the Batasang Pambansa for a youth and student protest on education issues linked to workers’ rights. I rode a tricycle and there was Ka Bel who ‘tripped’ with me at the back of the driver’s seat toward the dirty House (of Representatives). He was not yet a congressman then. This was the man I had read as one of the progressive movement’s leaders who were imprisoned by Marcos, escaped from prison and joined the armed revolution of the peasants in the countryside. Veterans of the labor movement also intimated the painful moment when the Kilusang Mayo Uno formally and publicly divided itself. The 1993 Labor Day mobilization saw the ranks of KMU depleted with the overwhelming majority rejecting its rectification of economistic campaigns attached to political prostitution and military adventurism. This I learned years ago, in integration programs with urban poor communities and workers' picket lines. Ka Bel was among the many who persevered in realigning the worker’s movement with the general people’s campaign for justice, freedom, independence and democracy. He did not sell the workers' wage and benefits campaign. He was a genuine labor leader, not a labor dealer. Slowly and surely many rejoined the national democratic movement and earned victories for the people’s rights and welfare. One after another, brutal regimes are being toppled with the seeds of fundamental change planted for the future. Crispin Beltran linked our struggle here in the Philippines with the anti-imperialist struggles of people the world over. He firmly cemented the basic alliance of his ranks—the workers—with the peasants in the people’s democratic revolution. It is his abiding belief that this country will never progress without feudalism being ended definitively. He fiercely campaigned, inside the parliament and on the streets, against bureaucrat capitalism. We now observe with caution, akin to Walter Benjamin’s admonition of the historic-theological battle against Evil that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” Ka Bel lived ‘til the end leading and fighting for the coming times when there will be no more exploitation and oppression.

Patay na si Kasamang Crispin Beltran. Mabuhay si Ka Bel! Mabuhay ang kilusang paggawa! Mabuhay ang sambayanang Pilipino! Mabuhay ang pambansa demokratikong pakikibaka!

Image from http://www.arkibongbayan.org/2006-03March17-KaBelProfile/pix2
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10:53 pm
thursday, 22 may 2008