The Blood of Salamanca: Blood That Fertilizes the Soil of Conquest
By Maurice Montojo
Let them hate. Let the decadent scribes from the press, the comfortable reactionaries in their Manila salons, with their edgy voices pour out their contempt and their vulgar jests. Let the official communiqués twist the facts with the impudence of colossal lies, as that Austrian demagogue once noted in his manual of power: the greater the distortion, the more readily swallowed by those who cannot conceive such brazenness. None of this changes the iron dialectic of history. In the Philippine countryside—still semi-feudal, despotic, chained by landlord interests and the shadow of foreign capital—the situation has hardened into a necessariable condition. No “controlled” operation, no tactical maneuver by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, can avert the violent eruption that the objective contradictions of class and nation now impose.
On April 19, in Barangay Salamanca, Toboso, Negros Occidental, the 79th Infantry Battalion carried out what they pompously label a “legitimate encounter.” Nineteen bodies fell: Red fighters of the New People’s Army together with unarmed civilians—journalists, student leaders, peasant organizers, overseas human rights workers, local residents, and even two children. The military speaks of neutralized communist terrorist groups, recovered arms, and a blow struck against the Northern Negros Front. Some commentators, with the safe cynicism of those who have never known hunger or the muzzle of a rifle, reduce the dead to “corned beef”—mangled flesh processed like cheap canned meat.
But let the concrned look back with clear eyes, without the hypocrisy of selective outrage. Does this crude comparison include only the revolutionaries? When soldiers of the AFP themselves fall, torn apart by command-detonated explosives along patrol paths in the hills, are they too mere “corned beef”? The New People’s Army calls these devices what they truly are in the harsh arithmetic of asymmetric struggle: the people’s counterparts to aerial bombings. The establishment brands them “landmines” and screams “terrorism,” yet it forgets—or deliberately erases—that every ruling order in history has reserved for itself the monopoly of heavy destruction while condemning the improvised weapons of the oppressed. The state possesses jets, artillery, and foreign-backed logistics; the peasant in the mountains has only ingenuity and resolve. These explosives level, however imperfectly, a field long tilted by imperial superiority.
True indeed that there are instances of being killed or maimed from those weapons meant against the opporessor, but, the willingness to apologise, even to punish itself, enough to rectify errors as necessary to gain back the lost trust of the people. But the order? Can they? Or again create another narrative enough to blame the revolution as intended to?- remember, years ago one scientist doing research work was killed in a crossfire, even called him a participant in the battlefield at first, and as the narrative failed, blamed him for not coordinating with authorities or worse being mockingly asked why was he there? In that sense, is seeking truth from facts a mistake in the first place? And if the fallen of Salamanca are reduced to canned meat in the jests of cowards, then consistency demands the same label for AFP casualties strewn across the same revolutionary terrain. Yet such symmetry is never granted. This selective gloating reveals the moral rot of a class that cheers state terror but recoils when the people answer in kind.
What, then, is this so-called tactical defeat for the New People’s Army? The revolutionary forces, forged in their own long march—the winding path of advances and retreats, bitter defeats and hard-won victories—understand the deeper law: every drop of blood spilled in Salamanca or any other place fertilizes the soil. Whether armed combatants who fought to the last round or civilians swept into the fire of a militarized zone, the dead become seed. The countryside has not changed. Feudal exploitation persists. State terror grinds the peasant. Grinding poverty continues to drive men and women to take up arms. Far from extinguishing the flame, such operations pour gasoline upon it. The “enemy” studies its lessons, adapts its tactics, and multiplies. New Red fighters will emerge, tempered and hardened by the memory of Toboso.
To those outside the direct combat—the investigators, the writers, the organizers who dare enter the militarized hinterland to study, document, and expose—the label “terrorist” or “subversive” is fastened with mechanical brutality. Why travel from the United States? Why conduct research in a “hot zone”? Why show concern for Filipino peasants? These questions are not concern; they are mockery disguised as prudence. The unarmed are deliberately conflated with combatants because the ruling order fears the truth they embody: the documentation of abuses, the organization of the dispossessed, the forging of international solidarity. Among the dead: a journalist, a student leader, peasant organizers, two children. These are not regrettable “collateral” but the logical consequence of a desperate regime that equates any inquiry into its despotism with insurgency itself.
The aftermath confirmed the method of reaction. Forced evacuations of local residents, cordoned zones, an information blackout to prevent independent media and human rights groups from interviewing witnesses or conducting genuine investigation. Days later, a military-organized entourage is permitted its staged “fact-finding mission”—a sham designed to manufacture an AFP-certified fiction of heroic operation, palatable to the man in the street. This is the classic technique of the old order: fabricate the narrative that sustains its power, downplay contradictions, and rely on the masses’ unwillingness to believe that anyone could distort truth so infamously.
Yet history does not yield to press releases or official body counts. The blood of the Toboso 19—whether from ten armed revolutionaries who honored their final stand or from civilians caught in the maelstrom—irrigates the revolutionary earth. It lays bare the bankruptcy of the comprador state: a regime forced to resort to indiscriminate killing to prop up feudal remnants in an age that cries out for genuine national and democratic transformation. The people’s war does not advance despite these losses; it advances through them. Every tactical setback becomes a strategic school. Every act of brutality recruits fresh cadres from the ranks of the oppressed.
The situation is necessariable. The contradictions between landlord and peasant, between the puppet state and the toiling masses, between foreign interests and national sovereignty, cannot be “managed” forever by repression. They must erupt. And when they erupt, the revolutionary forces—tempered in the crucible of mountain and plain—will drive forward toward the conquest of the state. The old order may trumpet its fleeting triumphs in Negros Occidental, but the future belongs to those who grasp that violence, when seized by the people against their exploiters, is no moral aberration but the historical midwife of a new order.
Let them hate. Let the reactionaries mock and the establishment lie. The revolution scorns their approval. It requires only the inexorable logic of conditions that render it not merely possible, but inevitable. The blood spilled nurtures the ground from which fresher, more resolute Red fighters will spring—until the feudal countryside is transformed and the state itself is conquered in the name of the nation and the people.