The Debate

Cambridge, July 1985.

The fall wind moved through Harvard Yard like a question looking for someone brave enough to
answer it. Inside a modest auditorium, beneath a banner that read MANINDIGAN: Filipinos for
Democracy, two men sat at opposite ends of a long table.

One was Secretary Emilio Navarro—Defence Minister, pillar of the regime, and the kind of man
whose calm sounded like order until you listened closely. He wore his suit like an oath: sharp,
unmoving.

The other was Felix Ramirez—planter, military man, activist. By all accounts, an inconsistency
in terms. A man who had once had more land, more clients, and more friends—before he
started calling things by their true names. Now, he was known mostly for the silences that
followed his speeches.

The student moderator opened the session briskly, reciting affiliations and thanks. Felix’s gaze
moved slowly across the audience—students, exiles, foreign academics.

In his jacket pocket: a letter.

No return address. Just a photograph. A boy, no older than seventeen, facedown in a field, his
limbs tied like broken branches. No name. Just a dark ring of dried blood around his head, like a
shadow that would not leave.

The envelope had one word written on it: SALVAGED.

Felix didn’t know him. But he knew his story.

The moderator introduced the first question.

“Secretary Navarro, do you believe the government still represents the will of the people?”

Navarro looked to the crowd and answered smoothly. “The government is firm because it must
be. Discipline ensures stability and reforms take time. But always—always—the people are our
priority.”

There were a few polite nods. One or two claps.

Then Felix spoke:

“I believe that the problem between the rich and the poor,” he said, voice low but unwavering,
“the constant sense of hostility—especially on the part of the poor—comes not so much from
the fact that they are poor and orhers are rich, but from the fact that the government prevents
them from becoming rich, even if they tried their damnedest.

They can’t.

The system defeats them.”

No metaphor. No anger. Just fact—with grief disguised as truth.

A ripple moved through the crowd—quiet but undeniable. Some students sat straighter. Others
glanced toward the faculty row.

Navarro didn’t flinch. “Mr. Ramirez forgets how fragile peace is. A firm hand keeps chaos at
bay.”

Felix turned to him, slowly.

“I haven’t forgotten, Secretary. I’ve buried friends who believed in peace. I’ve seen what
happens when people are asked to wait one more year, one more term, one more life. Always
one more.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. His calm made people lean in, and when he paused,
the stillness in the room felt intentional.

After the event, the crowd began to thin. Some students approached Navarro for photographs.
Others clustered in corners, their conversations hushed and urgent.

Felix had just turned toward the door when an older man stepped into his path—Filipino, with a
slight Boston accent and a long coat that hung heavy on his shoulders.

“You said all the right things,” the man said. “But what good is it if nothing changes?”

Felix studied him for a moment. “Have you been home recently?”

The man shook his head. “Not since ’72.”

Felix nodded. “Then let me tell you—it changes even when you’re not watching. Sometimes
slowly. Sometimes in the wrong direction. But never on its own.”

Outside, another student caught up with him.

“Sir Felix?”

He turned. A new face. Nervous.

“Tomas,” the boy offered. “Thank you for speaking today.”

Felix smiled. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s not,” Tomas said. “You reminded us it’s not wrong to want to build something.”
Felix nodded. “It’s not wrong to want more. Only to take it from someone else—or to rig the path
so others can’t follow.”

Tomas looked like he wanted to respond, but Felix had already turned toward the cold.

Back in Negros, the sugar fields waited.

The wind smelled of molasses and sun-warmed rust—familiar, sticky in the lungs. On the
barangay road, children zigzagged through the dust, playing patintero with lines drawn in chalk
and instinct. Their laughter rose over the whine of tricycles and the creak of overloaded carts.
Bare feet slapped the earth, quick and sure, tracing patterns the road seemed to remember. No
one called them home yet. The light was still gold, and for a moment, the world was still theirs.

Neighbours called to one another from porch to porch. Someone was boiling rice. Someone
else offered guava from the tree in their yard. And in these small exchanges—murmurs,
greetings, shared salt—life held.

He returned without ceremony, but word travelled faster than dust: he had debated the
Secretary. He had spoken plainly. And he hadn’t backed down. So when the parish priest
invited him to speak, people came—first a few, then more.

He didn’t give them hope but he gave them language.

He taught them the names of laws, of loopholes, of rights. He showed them how to see the
machinery—not just its violence, but the blind spots that let it thrive. The muck and mire of the
swamp designed to drown the honest and reward the cruel.

He told them it wasn’t shameful to want a better life. What was shameful was a government that
made it unreachable.

And sometimes—when the gathering was small and the stillness felt heavy enough to carry
truth—he would say:

“They said discipline would save the country. But I’ve seen what those words looked like
after curfew.”

‘Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan’ (For national progress, discipline
is needed.)
‘Bagong Lipunan’ (New Society)

They printed those on banners. Spoke them on the radio. Promised a better nation. But
the ones who spoke them never had to hear the boots at midnight. Or the creak of the van
door before someone was taken. The rest of us learned what those words really meant—
when the names stopped appearing in the newspapers, and the chairs at the table stayed
empty.”

The crowd never clapped after he spoke. But always, they listened.
It was under the acacia tree that Rosa found him. She had lingered after a training session,
notebook still in hand.

“Juan’s been helping me study for the Pisay entrance exam,” she said, eyes still on her
notebook. “I want to be an engineer. Maybe fix things. Make life easier.”

Felix smiled. “Juan’s a good man.”

Rosa nodded. “He says the same about you.”

She looked out onto the horizon. “I want to get my family out of this. Not by shouting, but by
building. By making something that lasts.”

Felix studied her—earnest, clear, resolute.

“You’re already building something,” he said.

Rosa didn’t miss a single meeting after that.

She had already been involved—passing out flyers, coordinating transport—but something in
her changed. She started drafting statements. Asking harder questions. Watching not just what
the movement said, but how it moved.

Felix tried to keep her close. But she was no longer asking for permission—just direction.

As always, the killings didn’t stop.

His wife, Teresa, brought him news of two boys salvaged by the riverbank. Their mother had
collapsed in the centre of the village, screaming their names until her voice gave out.

Teresa, a human rights lawyer, tried to trace justice up the chain. But the trail ended where it
always did—in shadows.

“They were sixteen,” she said one night. “Two of them. Dumped by the river. One had a rosary
in his hand.”

Felix’s mind drifted to the boy in the photo mailed to him months ago.

It wasn’t him.

But by now, they all blurred together—different names, all with the same ending.

Beyond the hush and the murmurs, the movement kept growing.
While the reds wanted fire and the yellows wanted polish, both wanted Felix. For credibility.

He tried to return to farming. But each time he stepped back into the field, someone came
knocking.

“Just one meeting.”

“Just this speech.”

“Just your name.”

And he would go. Not because he believed in who was asking. But because someone who
remembered what it was all for had to be in the room.

That night, cicadas hummed like wires stretched out too tight, their rhythm interrupted only by
the sudden, hollow call of a tuko—sharp, spaced, insistent.

The sugarcane stirred in the breeze, rustling like dry paper. Inside, the light was low. That’s
where Teresa found him—standing by the window, still as the dark, listening.

“There’s going to be a rally next week,” he said. “They’re planning something loud. Disruptive.”

“Are you going?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No.”

But Rosa had already volunteered.

He hadn’t told her not to go. Only warned her that movements, like regimes, could use people.

“But if I don’t go,” she had said, “who will speak for people like me?”

A week later, the call came.

Rosa was dead.

Shot during the rally—caught between the soldiers and the barikada. She had been unarmed.
She’d been trying to pull another student out of the smoke when the bullets came.

Felix didn’t cry. He sat in the fields, sugarcane brushing against his boots, and listened to the
wind.

“She asked me,” he said softly, “if someone like her could ever make a difference.”

He had said yes.

And he had meant it.

He wrote Rosa’s name on a slip of paper and placed it beside his.

She had climbed. She had tried.

And the system defeated her.

Not because she was wrong, but because she dared to rise in a place built to hold her down.

At the next meeting, Felix stood before the crowd—students, vendors, farmers.

“We are not angry because wealth exists,” he said. “We are angry because the world is built to
keep us from ever reaching it.”

He paused.

“And yet we try. That is what makes this fight worth fighting.”

Outside, the wind moved through the cane fields, carrying the sound of his voice—soft, steady,
and still standing—into the places Rosa once dreamed of reaching.