My Martyred Brother
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Tony Hilario with Anne Andrada on an immersion trip in the countryside sometime between the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is probably the only photo existing photo of him after he dropped out of UP and went fulltime in the movement.
As a founding member and later Secretary General of the pre-martial law youth organization called Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK or SaDeKa), TonyHil had been forced to go underground even before martial law was declared. He and 62 others had been included in the military's so-called “order of battle,” or a list of those deemed to have violated Republic Act 1700, or the Anti-Subversion Law, for advocating radical change in Philippine society. They faced arrest and detention after the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in the aftermath of the bombing of the proclamation rally of the opposition Liberal Party at Plaza Miranda in Manila on August 21, 1971, which Marcos had blamed on communists, without, however, offering conclusive proof.
Early Years
Tony was my older brother. Our age gap was just three years.
He was born on November 7, 1949, the fourth among seven children of parents who were both professionals. Papa was a lawyer and an official of the now-defunct Public Service Commission. Mama was a nurse in a public elementary school in the city of Manila.
We grew up from the 1950s onwards in the predominantly lower to middle-class La Loma district in Quezon City. Our parents rented an old house along Calamba St. with a tall and leafy sampaloc tree in front that provided ample shade during the hot summer months. The family spent the better part of the 1950s there.
Tony Hilario in Grade 1
Tony Hilario at first communion
In 1959, we moved to a 240-square meter property along Dr. Alejos St., just a stone's throw away from Calamba Street. Our parents built a modest house with four small bedrooms that accommodated a total of ten people, including a househelp from the province. There were two fully grown acacia trees facing the street that also provided shade to passers-by, including pandesal vendors on bicycles that plied the area. Sadly, those two trees had to give way to the construction of a slightly bigger house within the same lot in 1968.
It was in that house, built courtesy of a housing loan from the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) payable in 20 years, where Tony spent most of the 1960s. He did not socialize much with the boys in the neighborhood, who regularly played basketball and other contact sports, preferring to spend his spare time studying and reading books and magazines, including Popular Mechanics.
While our parents had to constantly struggle to make ends meet, they made sure we seven children would get an adequate education. Tony completed elementary and high school at Lourdes School in Quezon City, an exclusive Catholic school for boys. Upon graduation from high school in 1965, he seriously considered studying for the priesthood. But instead of going to a seminary, he decided to take the entrance exams at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. He passed and enrolled in an Electrical Engineering course.
In Baguio City in 1961 on a family outing. He was 12 years old at the time.
Tony was only 18 when he entered UP. That decision would change his life because he would devote his energies instead to changing Philippine society for the better. Like similar-minded UP students at the time, he wanted to see Filipinos emancipated from poverty and social injustice.
I’m not sure whether Tony dropped out of second or third year of studies at the UP College of Engineering, because by the late 1960s he had been swept up in the nationalist ferment on campus and had become too deeply involved in radical politics.
Baptism of Fire
On January 26, 1970, both moderate and radical groups converged in front of the old Congress building in Manila to demand that the Marcos administration make an iron-clad guarantee of a non-partisan Constitutional Convention. After Marcos had delivered his State-of-the-Nation-Address (SONA), all hell broke loose as riot police dispersed the rallyists with truncheons.
It was then that our family realized the extent of Tony’s involvement in the movement. Our parents received a phone call from his girlfriend (later his wife), Anne Andrada, that he had been badly injured the night before when riot police beat him up with truncheons along with other students, and that he was confined at the UP Infirmary. We rushed to the UP campus and there found him sitting in a hospital bed all black and blue, his head heavily bandaged, from the beating he had suffered the night before. Despite his injuries, however, he was fully conscious and even in high spirits.
Tony’s baptism of fire that day apparently did not diminish his enthusiasm for the militant cause. Having experienced at close range the coercive power of the state, he became even more convinced that radical change was necessary. But prudence also dictated that he avoided actual confrontation with police in protest actions, and instead concentrated on behind-the-scenes organizational work. During the period now known as the “First Quarter Storm of 1970,” Tony laid the groundwork for expanding the membership of the SDK from a few hundreds to thousands nationwide, with chapters in the major schools in Metro Manila and communities in urban centers like Baguio, Cebu, and Davao.
As SDK Secretary General, Tony had plenty of work to do in the ideological, political, and organizational spheres. The ideological aspect involved organizing discussion groups and producing materials on nationalism and democracy for study by members; the political aspect included setting the political line on current issues, mobilizing members for protest actions, and building alliances with other sectors; while organizational work meant putting up chapters at the school and community level, establishing committees at the district, provincial, regional and national levels, and assigning individual and collective tasks. With the broad scope of his work as GenSec, TonyHil practically lived in the SDK National HQ, which moved to various locations, mainly in Quezon City.
Our family saw him only a few times at home after the First Quarter Storm and even much less later, when he had to take strict security precautions after learning that he was already included in the military’s order of battle.
On the rare occasions that Tony showed up at our residence in Quezon City, it was only to get a fresh set of clothes, or to retrieve some of his books. He was tightlipped about his activities, perhaps out of the belief that the less we knew, the better for all of us later, given the dangerous times. But the books he kept in his bedroom gave us an indication of what he was spending time on, for they were mostly Marxist classics and nationalist works by Claro M. Recto and other writers.
Martial Law
With the imposition of martial law in September 1972, Tony decided to go completely underground, staying in safehouses arranged by comrades and friends. By this time, SDK had also gone underground, having been declared an illegal “front organization” under Proclamation 1081.
In the underground, Tony was initially assigned to handle organizing among youth and students on the national level. But later, perhaps because of his organizing skills, he was deployed to Western Visayas, where it was felt he could make an impact and accelerate consolidation work. That meant organizing the farmers, fishermen, youth, women, and other sectors.
In Western Visayas, which covered Panay Island and the provinces of Aklan, Capiz, Antique and Iloilo, Tony organized under very difficult conditions. But even as he might have been well-versed in theory and had enough experiences in the legal mass struggle and later in the underground, his luck ran out barely a year after setting foot on Panay Island.
Even today, the details of Tony’s death are sketchy. As far as we know, he and four or five others who were collectively responsible for organizing work in Western Visayas had been holding a meeting in a house in a remote municipality in the northern part of the province of Aklan sometime in February 1974. The meeting was held in the nipa hut of a farmer and had been going on for several days without any incident. Unbeknownst to them, however, a team of Philippine Constabulary troopers had already crept up a hill and surrounded the house and called on those inside to surrender. One of those in the meeting managed to escape by jumping into a ravine, but the rest, including TonyHil, who was said to have carried a firearm, were caught flat-footed. They were said to have been made to dig their own graves, then shot and killed by the soldiers.
News of Tony’s death in Aklan reached his wife only a week later. Someone had alerted Anne to a news report in the government-controlled Manila Bulletin broadsheet that an encounter between government troops and a group reported to be “NPA rebels” had taken place in the hinterlands of Aklan, and among those killed was a certain “Jose Solis.” Anne knew that he had indeed adopted that nom de guerre, but could not obtain confirmation of the news at once. When Tony’s comrades did confirm the news, our eldest sister made arrangements to fetch his remains from Aklan only in April, or more than a month later. This required a long and arduous trek to the remote area in Aklan where Tony and his comrades had been buried. They were able to exhume his remains for proper burial, about two weeks later, at the Loyola Memorial Park in Marikina.
At the time, I was already detained at the Youth Rehabilitation Center (YRC) in Fort Bonifacio for seven months as a POV (Public Order Violator) but without having any formal charges filed in court, like many other detainees. I joined those who knew Tony from way back in holding a memorial meeting one night after dinner, after we confirmed the sad news.
Roots of Radicalism
As far as I could gather, Tony’s radical views were shaped not only by close interaction with like-minded students and professors at UP from the mid-‘60s onward, but also by turbulent external events. This was the time of the Vietnam War, and massive opposition to it both in the Philippines and abroad. Student power had already emerged to oppose the “military-industrial complex” not only in the United States, but also in Europe. In China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was in full swing in the second half of the decade and in the early 1970s. Tony’s wife, Anne, the daughter of a retired Commodore in the Philippine Navy, was among those who had been able to visit China in 1967 during the Cultural Revolution and she brought home copies of “Quotations from Chairman Mao’ autographed by their Red Guard guides.
While Papa did not exactly oppose Tony’s radical views, he did not encourage him either. Papa apparently respected his views, but constantly worried over his safety, and wanted him to stay away from trouble, aware that his son’s involvement in leftist activities would almost certainly court the ire of the military.
Reminiscences of TonyHil
Those with whom he worked in SDK recall TonyHil fondly. I have heard it often said that he exerted a deep and lasting influence on the thinking and even lifestyles of the members of the organization. He had read many books and was therefore able to adequately and clearly explain the theoretical underpinnings of the movement to new recruits. He spoke in a soft voice that seemed to carry much authority in discussion groups and meetings because he had a solid grounding in the Marxist classics and writings by Claro M. Recto, and other intellectuals of the ‘50s and ‘60s.
He also epitomized simple living and hard struggle in the movement: he would leave our house attired in what’s been called radical chic at the time—faded denim pants, T-shirt, light jacket and battered rubber shoes—and chain-smoke Marlboro cigarettes and drink endless cups of coffee in seemingly interminable meetings with his comrades throughout the day until well into the night.
Another thing that his comrades remember him by is that he did not consider himself above the membership. He shared weal and woe with the others, and would even help out in mundane tasks in the SDK HQ, like scrubbing the toilet floors clean. By adopting a simple lifestyle, he tried to inculcate in the organization the importance of leadership by example.
Tony’s deep commitment to the movement for genuine social
change led him to make a decision to move from the confines of the university to the larger reality in this country. He would join workers in the picket lines to learn from them, and he would later immerse himself in rural communities and help organize farmers to assert their rights.
“They were said to have been made to dig their own graves, then shot and killed by the soldiers. ”
Tony could have simply chosen to pursue his engineering course and, like many other student youth of the time, graduate from the State University and pursue a lucrative career. But he stood for principles that transcended conventional notions of what life should be and how it should be lived. He chose to live life according to his own terms, to identify his own future with the future of the entire Filipino people, and to encourage others to rage against the dying of the light in the land of his birth.
Charting a Better Future
Many other youths paid the ultimate sacrifice in fighting for radical change in Philippine society. But while Tony may be remembered today only by his immediate family and former comrades in the Philippine progressive movement, he left a legacy of commitment to change that has undeniably inspired others to forge a better future for Filipinos.
Two generations of activists have emerged in the more than four decades since the First Quarter Storm of 1970. While there are still those who believe that armed struggle is the only legitimate avenue to genuine change in the country, others have chosen to pursue peaceful reforms within the system. Thoroughgoing change in Philippine society will require putting an end to massive poverty—something that successive governments even after the downfall of the martial law regime had failed to do after four decades. But while genuine social change remains an elusive dream, a vision of a better society for all Filipinos has been charted by TonyHil and many others, even at the cost of their own lives.
Ernesto M. Hilario studied Political Science at the University of the Philippines and has worked for various government agencies, NGOs and mainstream media since 1978. He writes a regular column for the Manila Standard broadsheet and also works as a freelance writer-editor.
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