It seems I am verbose today. Nothing very unusual.
He had interesting ways of "acquiring" land... learned, not coincidentally, in Cotabato. I lived in Agusan Sur from 79 to 81, and at that time the NPA presence was minimal. NGPI was the lever the NPA needed to break into the area; the people displaced by that project were their initial targets for organizing. I went back in 82 and it was a whole new ball game, an amazingly rapid change.
Yes, and as I said above, the distortions take place on both sides.
The term "Caraga" is a historical relic of rather dubious origin - as said above, Spanish records are far from reliable - long expired, revived for political reasons.
Not quite correct to say there were no Muslims on mainland Mindanao in 1538... Kabungsawan's arrival is generally dated to 1511. Really pretty irrelevant, though. In 1500 there were neither Muslims nor Christians, just a scattering of tribes, with numerous relationships among them. Some were Christianized, others were Islamicized. Others remained unconverted, and were called Lumad. The friction among them didn't reach the level of large-scale violence until sponsored migration drastically altered the demographic pattern and the balance of power.
I remember those days well. In 1979 San Fran was a one-street town with a really striking resemblance to a set for a Western movie. Swap stagecoaches for battered jeeps, horses for 125cc Honda dirt bikes, winchesters for M16s, and you'd have it. Disorder on a similar scale as well... landgrapping, claim-jumping miners, corrupt politicians and hired gunmen, the works, despite a severe lack of strong silent heroes riding over the horizon to liberate the little guys, though the NPA tried to fill that role!
Way too many stories to tell, including one or two involving Lademora and his guys... shouldn't get started though.
I didn't mean to suggest that Lademora or the Maneros had an independence agenda, only to cite them as examples of the kind of essentially personalistic leaders/groups with a nominal political agenda that features so prominently in Mindanao micropolitics.
Is Lademora still alive? He must be well up in years by now. He was no spring chicken when I met him, and that was... 82 or 83, I guess.
One might wonder how a guy from Panay (I know some say he was Tiruray, some say lots of stuff) managed to acquire land in Cotabato in the first place. Back to acronyms, you do of course know what ILAGA was taken to mean in those days...
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