TEACHER’S HEROISM Day, January 30, has served in the past few years as an opening event in the annual celebration of Kaganapan cityhood charter celebration in the City of San Fernando.
A most auspicious event to start the coming-to-fulfilment – that’s what “kaganapan” precisely means in Pilipino — of whatever promised greatness for this capital city and its people.
But for a select few in-the-know at city hall itself, who is even remotely aware of the meaning of that day? Of what heroic act the teachers accomplished and are now celebrated for. Or, who these teachers even were.
The significance of the event not only to the city but to the country itself prodded me to re-issue this piece published here some years back.
The “Rape of Democracy” it was called by the mosquito press – the intrepid underground publications and tabloids of the time – as it merited little if any play-up in the mainstream Marcosian media, especially in its flagship broadsheet Daily Express which was derisively punned and fittingly panned as the Daily Suppress.
So, the electorate was allowed to vote freely in the local elections of 1980. But the manual counting and canvassing of their votes was an altogether different matter.
Sensing imminent wholesale defeat for the administration’s Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL) candidates – yes wholesale, as bloc voting was prescribed by the Commission on Elections itself – even at the onset of the counting, operatives of the party in-power let loose their armed goons upon the polling precincts, taking the ballot boxes and all election materials, and – when they resisted – the teachers themselves.
Fading memory now notwithstanding, it was in the small barangay of Malpitic that the news of the “snatching of ballots” and “kidnapping of teachers” first came out, and spread fast across town with reports of similar incidents occurring in practically all barangays of San Fernando.
Herded at the municipal hall and under pain of death, the teachers were forced to play the charade of vote-canvassing – first reading “KBL,” then tallying the vote in the designated KBL box of the canvass sheet, regardless of what was written on the ballot.
No mere urban legend were the stories of the teachers – in fits of nervousness and intense stress – peeing in their skirts and, perhaps on impulse of courageous defiance, reduced to stuttering “LBK,” “KLB,” and “BLK,” everything but the acronym they were forced to utter.
Truly, a stuff of legend though was the fearless stand of the teachers led by Madam Tess Tablante to publicly expose the ordeal they went through that forced the regime to nullify the election results – acknowledging that the teachers were “threatened and coerced into making spurious election returns without regard to the genuine ballots in the ballot boxes” – and unseated the Comelec-proclaimed winner, re-electionist Mayor Armando P. Biliwang.
In the interregnum ensued an unprecedented rule of succession with a Philippine Constabulary officer, Col. Amante S. Bueno, deputy commander for administration of the 3rd Regional PC Zone at Camp Olivas, taking over as OIC-Mayor, and succeeded by lawyer Vic Macalino, on the recommendation of the Honorable Estelito P. Mendoza, governor of Pampanga, secretary of justice, solicitor-general, among other titles.
The political impasse coming to an end with the special mayoralty election in 1983 won by Virgilio “Baby” Sanchez, who was Biliwang’s predecessor. That this: the teachers defending – with their very lives if needed – the sanctity of the vote at the height of the dictatorship when elections were a mockery of democracy, was damned heroic.
That in all of the Philippines where electoral terrorism was wanton practice, such heroism had to happen in San Fernando could only speak of redoubtable courage, a testimony to true grit of the local teachers.
January 30, 1980 in San Fernando is no mere footnote but a shining milestone in the history of the Filipino struggle for democracy, coming as it is full six years before the EDSA People Power Revolt that finally ousted the dictatorship.
More than just being opening event to the annual celebration of Kaganapan, Teachers’ Heroism Day needs to be memorialized – in stone, as in a monument to the courageous teachers, most fittingly at the Heroes Park; in book form, as in an oral history of the personal accounts of the teachers themselves.
In this era of fake news and forged histories, that task for the city government is as much incumbent as urgent. As much for the teachers, as for patrimony of the Fernandino.
So, what’s keeping the city from doing it?
SO, WE WROTE here on Jan. 29, 2020. Now, fast forward to 2026.
NO, THE city government under Mayor Vilma Balle-Caluag did not wittingly disgrace the heroic teachers. It merely minimized their significance in this year’s Kaganapan 2026 that it so dubbed as “grandest and most historic cityhood anniversary celebration yet…”
Teachers Heroism Day – legislated by the then-Sangguniang Bayan ng San Fernando on Jan. 30, 1984 to be celebrated thereafter as “San Fernando Teachers Heroism Day” as fitting tribute to the 1980 heroic stand of the teachers – has not only ceased as kickoff event of Kaganapan: on the glorious silver anniversary rendition, it was all but totally expunged from the month-long calendar of events. Relegated as, indeed, a footnote to the “commemoration honoring the city’s journey, achievements, and collective aspirations” in the artcard #25FactsOn25th posted on the CSFP City Information Office FB page on Jan. 25, marked as 10 days to Kaganapan 2026.
Where the city government was only remiss in properly observing both a Kaganapan tradition and the enacted legislation of San Fernando Teachers Heroism Day, Mayor Caluag’s online myrmidons banded under her campaign handle “Laban San Fernando” were outright in their denigration of the city’s public school teachers – of allegedly being herded to Pradera for what it alleged as “ginagawang hakbang ng kabilang grupo na naglalayong guluhin ang resulta at demokrasya ng nakaraang eleksyon” with “libreng tour, snacks, at pagkain” – implying some kind of bribery in a thinly-veiled, if overtly irrelevant, reference to the Comelec-ordered recount of the 2025 city mayoralty election results. Irrelevant, as the teachers will not have any direct hand in the recount.
Still, the Laban San Fernando post even carried the caveat: “… paalala at panawagan din sa ating mga guro: anuman ang ialok o ibigay, panatilihin nating sagrado ang eleksyon at ang boto ng mamamayan.” Which, in the context of the overlooked Teachers Heroism Day celebration, comes as a flagrant affront to the city’s teachers.
Indeed, swift and stinging was Pampanga chapter of Assert, the official union of teachers and school principals in Central Luzon, in its rebuke of Laban San Fernando’s canard: “We strongly condemn the continued spread of false information and malicious accusations against the teachers of the City of San Fernando, Pampanga.” (translated from Pilipino).
In its social media post, Assert clarified that teachers have no role in any vote recount process and stressed that claims of payments or personal benefit connected to any alleged recount-related assembly are entirely false.
“Such statements are a blatant form of disinformation and an affront to an honorable profession,” the group said.
Furthering: “Teachers are professionals who have long served with dignity, integrity, and dedication to the education of our youth.”
That, the San Fernando teacher is. And more, much more given Jan. 30, 1980: That, in all of the Philippines where electoral terrorism was wanton practice, such defiant stand against it had to happen in San Fernando could only speak of redoubtable courage, a testimony to true grit manifest of the heroic character of the local teachers.
The vain attempt of Laban San Fernando to disparage that heroism – if only to show its fawning loyalty to Vilma Caluag – only exposed the utter shamelessness of the mayor’s online kindred.
Or is there some fear, of a sense of déjà vu in their Caluag-collected subconscious, of the aftermath of terrorized cheating in the 1980 city polls – the ultimate defeat of the incumbent mayor in 1983 – happening again post-Comelec recount in 2026?
That’s a hell of a stretch, wider than the 43 years spanning the not-so-dissimilar events. Alas, beloved guru Riza Shanti Lim is too far in the great beyond to make a divination of this.
More recent, and hewing closer to the case at hand though is the recount of the 2007 Pampanga gubernatorial polls. We all know where that ended.
Sans an iota of doubt on the integrity, dignity, and dedication of the teachers.
