As the Filipino people recalls this month the 148th birth anniversary of Jose Rizal, the country’s national hero, it would be good to remember that Rizal, his works and his sufferings, inspired Andres Bonifacio, his main rival for heroic preeminence in the popular imagination, to carry out the Revolution of 1896. Rizal was the first to call himself and his fellow indios Filipinos and the first to point out that we are a nation. It was also Rizal, through his novels and his exile to Dapitan who pointed out the necessity of separating from Mother Spain, and no longer through peaceful means but through a violent revolution.
DESTINY DENIED A Chronological Summary of Events Leading To The June 12, 1898 Declaration of Philippine Independence by Peter V. Uckung
It was a treaty on paper, serving only as a respite for the Spanish colonial government and the Filipino revolutionists. Neither party ever fully complied with the conditions in the Pact of Biak-Na-Bato. The Filipinos did not surrender all their arms; most of the officers of the revolutionary army retained their command and soon resumed harassing the colonial government. The Spaniards, on the other hand, did not pay the full amount of the agreed settlement with Aguinaldo and continued to treat the rebels who surrendered harshly. Worse, the Spaniards never really carried out the promised reforms. The Philippines by 1898 was a powder keg waiting for a spark.
Independence in the Eyes of the Filipinos by Mona Lisa H. Quizon
According to historian Esteban de Ocampo the “Filipinos are by nature and tradition a liberty-loving people”. Proofs are the various struggles, uprisings, mutinies, revolts, and insurrections of our forefathers from the time the Spaniards landed in our soil till the occupation of the Imperial Japanese. Filipinos had shed their life and blood for our freedom.
“It is precisely the fragmentation of our society that is the most prolific source and the strongest bulwark of the injustices that prevail among us. Our struggle for liberation must therefore be not only against the forces that now divide our national community, but against the forces that would further divide it, and transform what is already a fragmentation into an anarchy.”