Half-moon over Lantad

an earlier version was published as a three-part series in the Mindanao Gold Star Daily, from January 9-11, 2008 while an abridged edition was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on January 20, 2008

...but when we enter the light some of us
carry a little piece of darkness with us
and will not let go
we are children of the night

-Richard Shelton, "Children of the Night"

BALINGASAG, MISAMIS ORIENTAL – On Christmas Eve, there was but the dull porcelain glow of a half-moon over the steep flank of Mt. Batal on the northeastern rim of peaks surrounding this legendary communist Shangri-La in the 80s, 60 kilometers east of Cagayan de Oro.

No bright-lit sun-powered Christmas lantern or tree cast its lights over the sitio of Lantad during the Christmas season in 2007.

A tall Christmas tree, made of a dozen strands of series lights mounted on a tall bamboo pole, topped with a lantern, brought here by the provincial government, remained unlit.

But singing, yes, there was incessant singing, you’d wish to God and Allah and Magbabaya, and the Sto.Niño, or Saint Videoke, Dispenser of Songs, for the end of the sound blight.

On Christmas eve, the residents here laughed while listening to the wild imagination of a Cagayan de Oro-based AM radio host on the static-crowded air lanes trying to imagine Lantad as the now-and-forever city of bright lights by the fog-covered forests.

But the noses of its residents continued to gather soot from the kingkilya (improvised kerosene lamps) while slurping the season’s instant noodle soup, while on the floor, a carpet of freshly-picked coffee beans prickled the soles of our muddied feet.

The houses displayed no Christmas ornament and not many wore new clothes. Christmas Eve dinners had at least something from a can, courtesy of the village cooperative store.

Ours were sardines swimming in a saucer’s pond of tomato sauce, which the newly-circumcised children, wearing oversized shirts, wolfed down quickly for they had to scramble back to the videoke.

The breaking news then was that the soldiers have slaughtered a goat and have shared the feast of papaitan with most homes. It would take another night though before platefuls of those dishes will reach our table.

Christmas midnight was celebrated collectively over biko, binignit and coffee after a short prayer at the Roman Catholic Chapel of the Sto. Nino, in the background the drunken warble of a soldier whacked-out on beer and whiskey.

Most of the worshippers at the threadbare chapel were women and children, who seemed less fervent at their prayers than the new converts of the red hulk of a song machine down at the cavernous bodega.

Christmas was a normal workday. The women gathered to wash clothes at the communal bath and the others set their coffee beans, corn and peanuts to dry on the cemented basket ball court and some were grinding coffee by a sari-sari store as they swapped critiques on last night’s videokethon. The young children went to dirty themselves first thing in the morning by dipping into a pool of rainwater, pulling strings tied to rather amphibious, candy-colored plastic toy cars --gifts from the 8th IB’s Col. Eric Vinoya.

The rest of the day was spent mostly at the bodega, where children and adults first watched, with the sound switch on ‘off’, Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire on HBO, while the videoke was full blast with songs from 6cyclemind, Renz Verano, Elton John, Bob Marley and Britney Spears.

Towards noon, the consensus was to watch a film. The CAFGUs, mostly locals now, called the shots as their choice, Jean Claude Van Damme’s Knock Off won over the army soldiers’ Tears of the Sun. But again the soldiers won the children’s hearts as they paid for all the children’s entrance fees.

ONCE REMOTE AND impregnable natural fortress, Lantad is now linked to the rest of the world by a 21-km. road costing the Misamis Oriental government P4.7 million. Moreover, solar power technology valued at around P40 million is hoped to help transform this village.

They’ve got three schoolhouses for the 170 schoolchildren taught by four teachers, a solar drier-cum-basketball court, a communal bath and laundry area, communal toilets and a new warehouse which doubles as community hall. The health center will also have a small refrigerator to store vaccines and other essential drugs and equipment. Some 100 homes will also soon avail of electrical connections to their homes to a huge AC 10 solar panel.

The cooperative manages several communal appliances like the refrigerator, DVD player, a computer, a television set hooked on to a satellite dish.

About 60 government troops belonging to two detachments, a platoon from the 8th IB and local paramilitary volunteers of the 23rd IB, guard the village, 24/7, as they say.

But the soldiers know theirs is an uncanny position. “We are guarding the people from those who are against the government but who are mostly relatives of the residents here. At iba po ang lukso ng dugo. Dugo sa dugo. Mas mabigat po ang dugo kaysa tubig, alam mo yun,” 2Lt. Jonald Fallar, the commanding officer of the army detachment,says as he tried to explain the dilemma. He has been on the job for the past four months, his first after graduation from the Philippine Military Academy last March 2007.

“We are trying our best to gain the villagers' trust in the government. If we are worthy of their trust, then we can avoid encounters and no blood is shed, and we keep this good relationship with the community.” Fallar says.

Not a few of the villagers have remarked that this new batch of soldiers who had encamped here are different from those who enforced peace with brute force a decade ago.

Ibrahim Musa, an army private from Indanan, Sulo, and a former member of the MNLF, had recalled the cold stares and lukewarm regard of the village people to soldiers five years ago.

“But when we helped in building the toilet, the basketball court and the communal bath, they began to open up to us. Perhaps they saw that we care for their welfare, that we are here not only to carry guns around,” he said, despite a bandolier of bulbous-headed bullets slung over his shoulders.

But he,like most villagers, knows the insurgency is still active. “Look at those peaks, Ma’am, don’t be deceived by those clouds, they might appear near but it takes a day to climb one and their summits are still much higher behind those clouds. Somewhere in some of those forests, the rebels are waiting, looking down into this valley.”

And yet, those toilets, constructed under the Kalahi ng Kalayaan program of the armed forces,has earned disdain from the revolutionaries since 1996. This, they say is part of the psy-war.

No less than Cesar Renerio, spokesperson of the National Democratic Front for Northcentral Mindanao had commented in 2006 that “(Constructing) Toilets will not solve the people’s problem (of insurgency),” Renerio noted in a communiqué published online in 2006.

Renerio had added that the efforts of government and military to win the hearts and mind of the Higaonon, the tribal ancestry of its 2,000 residents, "had little or no idea at all of the centuries-old problem of people having little or no land to till."

But this time, it appears that some government officials know what they are doing. The Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) regional director John Maruhom said that making Lantad an agrarian reform community is essential. "Most insurgencies find deep anchors in tenurial land disputes. That's why it is important that we gave the farmers here leaseholds to their farmlots," he added.

Most of Lantad is classified as timberland and therefore are not disposable land areas. About 30 farmers, including four women, got stewardship certificates instead of certificates of land ownership (CLOA).

But how would that big red hulk of a machine, its speakers looking like the giant but blind black eyes of bumblebees, obviously civilization’s obsolescent fluff, would eventually fit in the post-conflict reconstruction of Lantad?

Will the soldiers and farmers duel to death over the song, My Way as in many videoke bars in the cities?

So far, not yet. It has been the solace of soldiers far from their beloved, crooning Marco Sison’s My Love Will See You Through.

But William Castillo, the coop’s chair, has the patience of growing corn. He is hopeful this craze over the videoke will wane. “We will be stricter with the schedules when the children will go back to school and besides the soldiers will have empty pockets after Christmas. Salaries and honoraria are often delayed,” he says.

As for the refrigerator, they still have to think what to do with it. Maybe stock whiskey and beer and ice despite the cooperative’s policies not to sell any, Castillo mused.

But some women were thinking about storing fresh milk from cows and goats and packing in fresh fish from the lowlands and vegetables that might easily spoil overnight.

The computer, the latest model with a flat screen and streamlined CPU to charm a technophile, will have to wait till the drive CDs, misplaced during the festivities, are found.

The solar electrification is just one of the components of the Solar Power Technology Support (SPOTS), an ambitious DAR project which “integrates the development of human resources through trainings in rural enterprise, agribusiness and institutional development with solar power technology.”

“For Lantad, it is a cart-before-the-horse story,” said Maruhom.

He recalled that in 2006, Gov. Oscar Moreno broached to the DAR staff to include Lantad in the SPOTS project. The DAR saw Lantad’s potential but SPOTS was only for agrarian reform communities and Lantad wasn’t an ARC.

But it was not much of a problem – DAR soon saw, after an evaluation, that the village can qualify as a special ARC. And so, the villagers were organized and trainings were fast-tracked.

Paquito Da-ao, chair of barangay Kibanban of which Lantad is a sitio, was euphoric over the slew of projects.

"We held a planning session in 2006 and pegged the road project to happen in five years and the electricity in 10 to 12 years," Da-ao said.

He further said that it now becomes important that “from now on,the people will be self-sufficient and build other projects on their own instead of depending on the national or provincial governments.”

He said that a multi-purpose cooperative trained by DAR and other government agencies and non-government organizations, had been set up to manage the solar power technology and a cooperative store.

Bringing in the videoke was also the brainchild of the coop officers as part of its At P5 per song, it will earn the coop loads of coins a month.

Community stalwart Bruno Lindahay, 58, knew that the road is important for the village in order to end its isolation and get integrated into the mainstream democratic life.

"Now we can bring our sick people to hospitals quickly. We can bring our farm harvests faster, at much lesser cost," Lindahay said.

Farmers here grow coffee, corn, rice, vegetables, flowers, root crops and livestock. Previously, they brought their produce to town using horses and cows, and slung sick people on hammocks and carried them down a worn footpath to town.

The road makes it easier for others to visit the place. "Now, it is also possible for government officials and private visitors to come here and se with their own eyes how we live," Lindahay added.

Lindahay was amazed how quickly and cheaply the projects were implemented. He had knocked on the doors of previous government administrations. "They (officials) always told me it (the road) cannot be a priority and that it would cost at least P20million to build a road.'

But Lindahay and his wife Flora were nostalgic of the time when the place was a commune. “There was no drunkenness, no gambling, no wife-battering,” Flora recalled. But Bruno also said that he could not listen to the news on the radio unless he did it on the sly.

But of course, the problem was "the people's revolution was anti-government and illegal". And he wanted his children to be educated instead of growing up in the forests and he got tired of hiding in the forests, “afraid even of his own shadow.”
So he and the members of 30 other families who fled from Lantad in the 1990, came out of the forests.

The village used to be the headquarters and training camp of the Front 4B of Nortcentral Mindanao Command of the New People's Army (NPA) in the 80s. Young militants who fled the grip of the Marcos dictatorship established a bustling commune here and cultivated a collective farm with the residents.

The revolutionaries also trained the locals on health and taught reading and writing to children. They decreed land reform, distributing to farmers half-page land titles written in cursive script.

Communism and revolution had rooted deep and government efforts through the years to bring back its populace to its fold brought much resistance.

In the 90s, the military took back the 3.2-square km. territory after Operation Skylark, a long siege and constant aerial bombardment. All its 3,000 residents were displaced and there were innumerable cases of human rights violations from both the government troops and the rebels.

As for the Higaonon heritage, Bruno sees that the new technology will hasten the dying of the Higaonon culture.

“Not one of my children speak Binukid anymore. They can understand a bit and speak Bisaya and Tagalog instead. How can the rituals survive if none of them will speak Binukid?”

But he also mourns that the elders, himself probably included, might not have given the right example for the young folk to emulate. “Some of us would just walk down the hills to the plains and all they would ask from lowlanders would be a bottle of Fighter (wine),”he says.

Gov. Oscar Moreno had been saying that “we know Lantad is the most difficult of all challenges to local governance. But if Lantad is a success then all the other conflict areas will be easy.”

He had met some NDF bigwigs, unofficially he stressed, in the Netherlands last year and told NDF’s Luis Jalandoni that “they (Misamis Oriental government) are trying to address the root causes of the insurgency.”

Gov. Moreno is setting his sights on another quest to encourage people to bring in peace and development in their midst, one remote village at a time: Today, Lantad. Tomorrow, Tama, another remote and isolated village and erstwhile habitat of the communist insurgency in Magsaysay town.

Let’s hope Moreno would think twice about erecting a Christmas tree, as if it is flag or cross. And will the village cooperative take time to (re)consider whether to bring in the videoke to Tama?