TEACHER’S HEROISM Day, January 30, has served in the past few years as an opening event in the annual celebration of Kaganapan cityhood charter celebration in the City of San Fernando.
Ding Bayaning Talaturu mural sculpture unveiled at the city schools division office in 2021 as tribute to the “teacher-heroes” of January 1980. Marker alongside it was installed in 2022. CSFP-CIO file photo
A most auspicious event to start the coming-to-fulfilment – that’s what “kaganapan” precisely means in Pilipino — of whatever promised greatness for this capital city and its people.
But for a select few
in-the-know at city hall itself, who is even remotely aware of the meaning of
that day? Of what heroic act the teachers accomplished and are now celebrated
for. Or, who these teachers even were.
The significance of the
event not only to the city but to the country itself prodded me to re-issue
this piece published here some years back.
The “Rape of Democracy” it
was called by the mosquito press – the intrepid underground publications and
tabloids of the time – as it merited little if any play-up in the mainstream
Marcosian media, especially in its flagship broadsheet Daily Express which
was derisively punned and fittingly panned as the Daily Suppress.
So, the electorate was
allowed to vote freely in the local elections of 1980. But the manual counting
and canvassing of their votes was an altogether different matter.
Sensing imminent wholesale
defeat for the administration’s Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL) candidates – yes
wholesale, as bloc voting was prescribed by the Commission on Elections itself
– even at the onset of the counting, operatives of the party in-power let loose
their armed goons upon the polling precincts, taking the ballot boxes and all
election materials, and – when they resisted – the teachers themselves.
Fading memory now
notwithstanding, it was in the small barangay of Malpitic that the news of the
“snatching of ballots” and “kidnapping of teachers” first came out, and spread
fast across town with reports of similar incidents occurring in practically all
barangays of San Fernando.
Herded at the municipal
hall and under pain of death, the teachers were forced to play the charade of
vote-canvassing – first reading “KBL,” then tallying the vote in the designated
KBL box of the canvass sheet, regardless of what was written on the ballot.
No mere urban legend were
the stories of the teachers – in fits of nervousness and intense stress –
peeing in their skirts and, perhaps on impulse of courageous defiance, reduced
to stuttering “LBK,” “KLB,” and “BLK,” everything but the acronym they were
forced to utter.
Truly, a stuff of legend
though was the fearless stand of the teachers led by Madam Tess Tablante to
publicly expose the ordeal they went through that forced the regime to nullify
the election results – acknowledging that the teachers were “threatened and
coerced into making spurious election returns without regard to the genuine
ballots in the ballot boxes” – and unseated the Comelec-proclaimed winner,
re-electionist Mayor Armando P. Biliwang.
In the interregnum ensued
an unprecedented rule of succession with a Philippine Constabulary officer,
Col. Amante S. Bueno, deputy commander for administration of the 3rd Regional
PC Zone at Camp Olivas, taking over as OIC-Mayor, and succeeded by lawyer Vic
Macalino, on the recommendation of the Honorable Estelito P. Mendoza, governor
of Pampanga, secretary of justice, solicitor-general, among other titles.
The political impasse
coming to an end with the special mayoralty election in 1983 won by Virgilio
“Baby” Sanchez, who was Biliwang’s predecessor. That this: the teachers
defending – with their very lives if needed – the sanctity of the vote at the
height of the dictatorship when elections were a mockery of democracy, was
damned heroic.
That in all of the
Philippines where electoral terrorism was wanton practice, such heroism had to
happen in San Fernando could only speak of redoubtable courage, a testimony to
true grit of the local teachers.
January 30, 1980 in San
Fernando is no mere footnote but a shining milestone in the history of the
Filipino struggle for democracy, coming as it is full six years before the EDSA
People Power Revolt that finally ousted the dictatorship.
More than just being
opening event to the annual celebration of Kaganapan, Teachers’ Heroism Day
needs to be memorialized – in stone, as in a monument to the courageous
teachers, most fittingly at the Heroes Park; in book form, as in an oral
history of the personal accounts of the teachers themselves.
In this era of fake news
and forged histories, that task for the city government is as much incumbent as
urgent. As much for the teachers, as for patrimony of the Fernandino.
So, what’s keeping the
city from doing it?
SO, WE WROTE here on Jan.
29, 2020. Now, fast forward to 2026.
NO, THE city government under Mayor Vilma Balle-Caluag did not wittingly disgrace the heroic teachers. It merely minimized their significance in this year’s Kaganapan 2026 that it so dubbed as “grandest and most historic cityhood anniversary celebration yet...”
Teachers Heroism Day – legislated
by the then-Sangguniang Bayan ng San Fernando on Jan. 30, 1984 to be celebrated
thereafter as “San Fernando Teachers Heroism Day” as fitting tribute to the 1980
heroic stand of the teachers – has not only ceased as kickoff event of
Kaganapan: on the glorious silver anniversary rendition, it was all but totally
expunged from the month-long calendar of events. Relegated as, indeed, a
footnote to the “commemoration honoring the city’s journey, achievements, and
collective aspirations” in the artcard #25FactsOn25th posted on the CSFP City
Information Office FB page on Jan. 25, marked as 10 days to Kaganapan 2026.
Where the city government was only remiss in properly observing both a Kaganapan tradition and the enacted legislation of San Fernando Teachers Heroism Day, Mayor Caluag’s online myrmidons banded under her campaign handle “Laban San Fernando” were outright in their denigration of the city’s public school teachers – of allegedly being herded to Pradera for what it alleged as “ginagawang hakbang ng kabilang grupo na naglalayong guluhin ang resulta at demokrasya ng nakaraang eleksyon” with “libreng tour, snacks, at pagkain” – implying some kind of bribery in a thinly-veiled, if overtly irrelevant, reference to the Comelec-ordered recount of the 2025 city mayoralty election results. Irrelevant, as the teachers will not have any direct hand in the recount.
Still, the Laban San Fernando post even carried the caveat: “… paalala at panawagan din sa ating mga guro: anuman ang ialok o ibigay, panatilihin nating sagrado ang eleksyon at ang boto ng mamamayan.” Which, in the context of the overlooked Teachers Heroism Day celebration, comes as a flagrant affront to the city’s teachers.
Indeed, swift and stinging was Pampanga chapter of Assert, the
official union of teachers and school principals in Central Luzon, in its
rebuke of Laban San Fernando’s canard: “We strongly condemn the continued
spread of false information and malicious accusations against the teachers of
the City of San Fernando, Pampanga.” (translated from Pilipino).
In its social media post, Assert clarified that teachers have no role in any vote recount process and stressed that claims of payments or personal benefit connected to any alleged recount-related assembly are entirely false.
“Such statements are a blatant form of
disinformation and an affront to an honorable profession,” the group said.
Furthering: “Teachers are professionals who
have long served with dignity, integrity, and dedication to the education of
our youth.”
That, the San Fernando teacher is. And more, much
more given Jan. 30, 1980: That, in all of
the Philippines where electoral terrorism was wanton practice, such defiant
stand against it had to happen in San Fernando could only speak of redoubtable
courage, a testimony to true grit manifest of the heroic character of the local
teachers.
The vain attempt of Laban San Fernando to
disparage that heroism – if only to show its fawning loyalty to Vilma Caluag – only
exposed the utter shamelessness of the mayor’s online kindred.
Or is there some fear, of a sense of déjà vu in their Caluag-collected subconscious, of the aftermath of terrorized cheating in the 1980 city polls – the ultimate defeat of the incumbent mayor in 1983 – happening again post-Comelec recount in 2026?
That’s a hell of a stretch, wider than the 43
years spanning the not-so-dissimilar events. Alas, beloved guru Riza Shanti Lim
is too far in the great beyond to make a divination of this.
More recent, and hewing closer to the case at
hand though is the recount of the 2007 Pampanga gubernatorial polls. We all know
where that ended.
Sans an iota of doubt on the integrity,
dignity, and dedication of the teachers.
