Ruination of the Sun

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Larrazabal, Mayari | 20 Marth 1584

"Ibagsak ang Kalayaang hindi nakatuon sa ikabubuti ng manggagawang Mayar!" (Down with freedom unsuitable for the masses of Mayari!)

"Patalsikin si Hidalgo at ang Ibañez Five!" (Remove Hidalgo and the Ibañez Five!)

The blood curdling cries of hordes of men and women along one of the busiest thoroughfares in downtown Larrazabal echoed several avenues away. Perhaps even enough to reach the Presidential Palace and the ears of the men they hold responsible for their plight.

The call to assemble today was quite spontaneous, but the relative advent of communication technology even in a country such as Mayari had allowed easily these men and women to coalesce. Through the use of text messaging as well as social media, close to a thousand souls managed to depart their homes and arrive in the capital for a half-day program condemning recent actions in the Mayari Congress. The great majority of these protesters belonged to the working and lower middle classes, joined by university students from a similar background, and together they formed a sea of red and yellow that paid no heed to the hustle and bustle of daily city life - much to the dismay of commuters afflicted by the worsened traffic the protest brought about.

Aside from their common socioeconomic statuses, these men and women also counted upon another similarity that bound them together strongly - and that was their association with the Mayari People's Democratic Movement. The MPDM was a broad front of various grassroots organizations that represented a plethora of interests such as national agrarian reform and land distribution, accessibility to education of the poorer youth, and rights for maids and other household helpers. It was a notoriously influential organization in Mayar politics and the bane of the neoliberal government ever since their ascent to power.

Perhaps most notably, the MPDM was the "mainstream" wing of the Communist Party of Mayari. Just twoyears  after the establishment of Mayari as a sovereign state, the first formal manifestation of leftism in the country found itself banned in participating in the process up to today. Unsurprisingly, as the CPM had its roots in Perovist revolutionary thought and thereby felt inclined more to go down the path of violence. It could not simultaneously do so while fielding participants for elections; it fled underground and fully commit itself to armed insurrection.

Yet despite its fledgling popularity during the early years, the CPM eventually dwindled in numbers and in strength. The rather successful disintegration of its ranks by Mayari's internal security forces - armed and trained by external powers with an anti-communist agenda - effectively maimed the party's capability to wage its war. By the 9th electoral cycle in Mayari by 1520, the CPM was effectively gone. Many thought their campaign to be done with, a thorn that had already been dealt with and no longer relevant in contemporary times. The emergence of the MPDM served to disprove otherwise.

The MPDM did not hide its affiliation with the CPM even during its inception, and they had no reason to; the years of its creation and rapid surge in popularity were the heyday of the more moderate and the mainstream leftist party in Mayari, the Sosyalismo at Aksyon (Socialist Action Party). Despite significant ideological splits and different points of origin, the SAP viewed the MPDM with sympathy and thereby struck down legislation forwarded by the other two major parties - the National Party and Kalayaan - to ban it alongside its sister organization the CPM. Well known in national political circles also, however, was the fact that the SAP had much to gain by supporting the growth of the MPDM.

For the leaders of the SAP, the MPDM served to pool their voting base together and to advance their agenda with popular support. The SAP suffered the illness of having formed as an "alternative" to the CPM during Mayari's independence, and for the then revolutionary fervor shaking Mayari, the SAP was regarded as a weak splinter faction despite its lack of affiliation with the CPM. Furthermore, the SAP's founders and leaders were considered to be part of the powerful landowners that exploited the peasantry - then the core of the socialist movement in the predominantly agrarian and newly-independent Mayari. Indeed, the SAP's founder was a titled man himself known as Don Carlos Vestergaard - a man with long Oslan descendants part of the socialist movement only by his conscious rejection of his status and acceptance of the need for political and economic emancipation of his peasants. Had he not been the first major landowner to release his own peasants and subsequently crystallized his vision into a coherent organization, Don Vestergaard would be just like all the rest and would have likely found himself an ardent member of the more conservative NIP.

Even as the SAP lost its mandate to serve beginning with the elections of 1538, the MPDM had managed to entrench itself enough that doing away with it arbitrarily would demolish the credibility of the new NP-Kalayaan coalition government. And so it served thenceforth as the mouthpiece and at times the recruitment ground of the CPM, which made its grand return with a bombing that killed hundreds in 1569. It had limited strength still, though, and could resort only to such terrorist acts to further its cause of overthrowing the neoliberal government in power and establishing a proletarian state. The other side of the coin was the mass agitation spearheaded by the MPDP in increasing frequency against the presidency of Alberto Hidalgo.

On this particular day in Marth, the date of establishment of the MPDM, protesters drew ire from the passage of a bill in Mayari's lower legislative house that would amend - or in their eyes water down - the government's cash transfer program, one of the last forms of social insurance still in existence in Mayari. The passage of the bill represented the victory of Kalayaan's hard line clique of neoliberals under Hidalgo himself, which was more interested in diverting money to the purchase of imports or the improvement of infrastructure - or even to line up their own pockets.

The crowd of protesters, having finished their hour-long march from their point of convergence, now gathered around several leading figures of the MPDM, were centered around a burning effigy of Labor Secretary Hector Nillson while continuing their frenzy of outrage. They occupied nearly half of Romualdez Boulevard at the intersection of Mayari's university belt and Axel Avenue.

Labor Secretary Nillson being the target for today's demonstration did not come as a surprise to anyone. Nillson, a key member of Hidalgo's faction in Congress particularly the upper house, was elevated to the position of Labor Secretary following a cabinet shuffle in 1583. Such a move had been an outrage to the MPDM, as Nillson was the architect of the removal of the remnants of the safety net put in place before Kalayaan seized dominance over the national government back in 1550. He was a veteran politician and arguably the most hated man second only to the president by the throngs of impoverished who relied on government support to sustain their education, healthcare, or even their mere existence.

But he, of course, did not work alone. The aforementioned clique of hard liners in Kalayaan were known as the Ibañez Five, though such a label is misleading; the clique consisted of more than a hundred members of Congress in both houses, a great percentage of Kalayaan party members who have been elected back in 1580. The remaining ones belonged to the so-called social democratic wing of the party, which ironically did not consider themselves as such and therefore have not joined the SAP instead.

Hidalgo's faction was named after Romulo Ibañez, patriarch of one of the oldest landowning families in Mayari. Ibañez was also the President of Eastern Star Holdings from 1535 to 1544 and then again from 1548 to 1570. His brief hiatus from 1544 occurred only during his unsuccessful venture to claim a seat in the Senate. Despite his failed bid, Ibañez found several other ways to imprint his mark on Mayari politics, developing a network of allies in Kalayaan and funding their campaigns in 1550 and beyond. The nearly ninety year old man retired in 1571, although still serves as his real estate empire's honorary chairman.

It was the MPDM which applied this name to Hidalgro's grouping, identifying the President himself alongside Labor Secretary Nillson and three Senators as the "main puppets of the Ibañez-led oligarchy".

As Nillson's deformed effigy finally burnt to the ground, the crowd's attention focused on the first speaker of the program that was now going to commence under the sun. The eyes of the men and women - as well as those of the weary ones of the squads of police beginning to surround the mob - clung to the figure not of the MPDM's local leaders, but a senator of the Democratic Republic.

The stout and girthy senator Crisanto Cortes Jansen seemed to gather his wits about him, gripping firmly a mic given to him by the MPDM's General Secretary moments before. With a full and resonating voice, he addressed his people.

"Citizens of Mayari! We stand now at an important moment that will affect the futures not only of us gathered here, but our sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters. The reactionary administration of President Alberto Hidalgo and his army of big business hacks are on the verge of triumph, in their agenda to end all aid - measly as it is - to the urban poor, the farmer families, and everyone in between. We stand shocked at the existence of such a blatantly anti-people government, but I ask, will we remain immobile as our Democratic Republic transforms into a playground for the rich and a land of the few and not the many?"

The Mayar word for nay was chanted by the crowds, their fists pumped as they continued listening.

Crisanto Cortes Jansen held a special place in the hearts and minds of these people - he was the only senator who came from the SAP. Born to a rice farmer's family as the ninth child, Cortes Jansen's earliest foray into the socialist movement was actually holding a rifle and wearing the armband of the Communist Party of Mayari. Although he had renounced his ties with the CPM by his late twenties and moved on to the SAP, rumors were abound that he continues to act as a sleeper agent of the CPM's alleged infiltration of the SAP. Instead of ruining his credibility, Cortes Jansen found himself endeared by the MPDM - or perhaps precisely because of his connection to the CPM that made the MPDM's people gravitate to him.

But even as a senator of the SAP, his presence and let alone his speech at a function of the MPDM, was considered extreme by his own partymates. Those in the lower house would go as far as to condemn Hidalgo's demolition of social safety nets in party caucuses and in speeches in the floor, but none would dare attend public demonstrations. Unsurprisingly, as many members of the SAP in the halls of power actively distanced themselves nowadays from the MPDM for fear of having their budget allocations by Hidalgo's cabinet and senate taken from them.

Cortes Jansen would continue his tirade with rhetoric reminiscent of the CPM's proclamations, and the demonstration would end up in a confrontation later on. It would be an eventful day in Larrazabal.