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Romeo Cabusao
VALENTINE’S DAY SPEECH BEFORE LABORERS AND FARM TENANTS IN SAN FERNANDO
FLANKED BY SOCIALIST LEADER PEDRO ABAD SANTOS AND
JUSTICE SECRETARY JOSE ABAD SANTOS, PRESIDENT QUEZON ALTERNATELY
PRAISED AND SCOLDED THE PEASANTS, CAJOLED AND PLEADED WITH THEM,
PROMISED PROSPERITY AND MADE THEM VOW TO RENOUNCE VIOLENCE
Pedro Abad Santos was 10 years
older than his brother Jose but it was
Jose who would achieve greater prominence
because he became the
country’s Justice Secretary and Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court, and suffer
a high-profile martyrdom during
World War II. Pedro was marginalized
from civil society as he pushed farther
and father left in his political ideology.
While both of them had the same mission
in life, which was to improve the
condition of the masses, they held op-
Jose Abad Santos posite views on how to attain this.
Thus, Pedro and Jose Abad Santos endeavored
to impose on history their separate ideologies, representing
revolution and evolution, respectively, as means of securing
change in the existing order.
Pedro founded the Socialist Party of the Philippines in 1932;
two years later, together with his assistants Agapito del Rosario,
Luis Taruc, Lino Dizon and others, he reorganized the Aguman
ding Talapagobra ning Pilipinas (ATP) into the Aguman ding
Maldang Talapagobra (AMT), similar to the general workers’ unions
in Spain, Mexico and France, which advocated the expropriation
of landed estates and friar lands, farmers’ cooperative stores
and the upliftment of peasants’ living conditions. On November
7, 1938, during the anniversary of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution,
the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) and Pedro Abad
Santos’ Partido Sosyalista ng Pilipinas (PSP) held a convention at
the Manila Grand Opera House where they declared their merger
as the Communist Party of the Philippines. Crisanto
Evangelista was elected president, with Pedro Abad Santos as
vice president and Guillermo Capadocia as secretary general.
In those few remaining years before World War II, organized
peasant uprising was sweeping the Kapampangan Region. To quote
Justice Leopoldo Roviera, Pampanga had become “a Little Russia
where it is not the voice of justice but jurists that prevail but the
voice of Lenin and Stalin.” Luis Taruc wrote that Don Perico
(Pedro Abad Santos) was a Marxist who instructed peasants to defy
landowners by keeping all the harvest, and promised legal assistance
if sued.
Meanwhile, his younger brother Jose Abad Santos was a rising
Pampanga was on the verge of a peasant revolt when Philippine
President Manuel L. Quezon (top, left) came to San Fernando
and spoke before a crowd of farmers and farm tenants, with
Socialist leader Pedro Abad Santos (top, right) sharing the stage
with him
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Florence Horn
Kasaysayan