Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2014
Shortly after World War II a Communist guerrilla army, the Hukbong Magpalayang Bayan (HMB), or People's Liberation Army, became a serious threat to the new Philippine Republic. The Huks, as they are commonly known, controlled large parts of the sugar cane and rice growing areas of Central Luzon and carried out military and political operations in other parts of the islands. Like their Communist counterparts in Vietnam and Malaya, the Huks began as an anti-Japanese guerrilla army. In fact, Huk originally referred to Hukbalahap, a contraction of a phrase meaning People's Army Against the Japanese. As the military arm of the Communist Party, however, their ambitions always exceeded mere anti-Japanese activities.
After the Japanese defeat, successive Philippine governments wrestled with the problem of eliminating the Huks. Policies of coercion failed because the Philippine Army and Constabulary were not up to the task. Policies of conciliation failed because the demands of the Huks were regarded as unreasonable. By 1949 it became clear that the issues dividing the Huks and the government would have to be settled by force. Following the allegedly fraudulent election of President Quirino in 1949 the Huks gained steadily. By 1950 large unit raids were common and a full-scale attack on Manila was envisioned for 1951.
This article was written while the author was at the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. The views presented are his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions with which he has been affiliated.
1 A brief history of the Huk movement is contained in the first few chapters of Scaff, A., Philippine Answer to Communism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1955)Google Scholar.
2 Valeriano, N. and Bohannan, C., Counterguerrilla Operations: The Philippine Experience (New York: Praeger, 1962), p. 33 Google Scholar.
3 Pomeroy, W. J., The Forest (New York: International Publishers, 1963), esp. pp. 38–43, 156, 166–168 Google Scholar; Valeriano arjd Bohannan, op. cit., p. 32. See also Lieberman, V., “Why the Hukbalahap Movement Failed,” Solidarity (10–December 1966), pp. 22–30 Google Scholar.
4 A barrio usually contains 1000–2000 people; a municipality is generally composed of 15–40 barrios.
5 The pattern of incentives obviously depends upon the control situation within the community itself. In other words, HCj appears on the right hand side of the equation as well as the left. Equation (1) must therefore be regarded as derived from an original equation, the HCj on the right hand side having been “solved out.” The parameters of equation (1) will as a consequence be somewhat larger than those of the original equation.
6 Since this study is confined to a particular geographical area, municipalities on the edges of that area will have borders with external municipalities that are not represented in the summation of (2a); hence, the inequality. This is a reasonable way of handling the weights since external municipalities have no critical barrios for primarily exogenous reasons and therefore make no contribution to HCN. The alternative would be to force the weights to add to one by scaling them up, resulting in a somewhat lower estimate of k.
7 The best textbook reference is Malinvaud, E., Statistical Methods of Econometrics, North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam, 1966 Google Scholar.
8 An estimate is unbiased if its expected value equals the true value of the parameter. An estimate is consistent if, as the sample size becomes large, the estimate tends in a stochastic sense to the value of the parameter. See Kendall, M. G. and Stuart, A., The Advanced Theory of Statistics, Griffin, London, 1961, Vol. 2, Ch. 17Google Scholar.
9 Smaller in the sense that the average element of A2 is smaller than the average element of A. For particular elements this need not be true.
10 The analogy of this discussion to input-output systems should be obvious to economists. The matrix A is an input-output matrix with the special condition that each industry must sell to the same industries from which it buys.
11 It should be mentioned that there are factors other than coercion that would be contained in the contiguity effect. For example, the strong kinship tie among Filipinos would imply sympathy for the cause of relatives in neighboring areas. But the quantitative importance of this and similar qualifications is likely to be small.
12 The use of coercion does not imply a high level of violence. An efficient coercive organization does not have to carry out its threats if they are truly credible. An occasional penalty swiftly administered may be all that is necessary. The correlation between effective coercion and observed incidents of violence is probably quite weak.
13 Since there are virtually no Pampangos in Southern Luzon success of the movement there would imply that either the language barrier has been hurdled, considerable coercion has been employed, or the movement there has a different basis.
14 Pampangans are residents of Pampanga province; Pampangos are people who speak the Kapampangan dialect. Almost all Pampangans are Pampangos, but the reverse is not quite true. In this historical discussion the distinction, although necessary for literal accuracy, is of no great consequence.
15 Larkin, J. A., The Evolution of Pampangan Society: A Case Study of Social and Economic Change in the Rural Philippines (Doctoral Dissertation in History, New York University, 1966)Google Scholar. There are a number of Filipino historians who dispute the importance of sectionalism in the Revolution. See for example, Kalow, T., The Philippine Revolution (Manila, 1925)Google Scholar. Among American writers it is often referred to as the Tagalog Rebellion.
16 Landé, Carl H., Leaders, Factions and Parties: The Structure of Philippine Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965)Google Scholar.
17 From private conversations with Luis Taruc I gather that the Huk leadership, was unaware of this, although in recent years Taruc has reflected on its importance.
18 Tangco, Marcelo, “The Christian Peoples of the Philippines,” Natural and Applied Science Bulletin, XI, 9–114 Google Scholar.
19 Note that Pampanga as a province has the highest overall rate of tenancy, but that there are many municipalities outside of Pampanga that have higher rates than specific Huk-dominated municipalities within Pampanga.
20 Jacoby, E., Agrarian Unrest in Southeast Asia (Bombay: Asia Publishing Co., 1961)Google Scholar.
21 Starner, F. L., Magsaysay and the Philippine Peasantry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961)Google Scholar.
22 Mitchell, Edward J., “Inequality and Insurgency: A Statistical Study of South Vietnam,” World Politics, xx (04 1968)Google Scholar, “The Significance of Land Tenure in the Vietnamese Insurgency,” Asian Survey, August 1967.
23 See Mitchell, op. cit.; and Land Tenure and Rebellion, The RAND Corporation, RM-5181 (Abridged) (Santa Monica, 06 1967)Google Scholar.
24 The configuration representing the Hacienda in Fig. 2 is a gross approximation. For our purposes it is only necessary that its general location be correct.
Comments
No Comments have been published for this article.