From Firebrand to Torchbearer: A Tribute to Ka Bel

By Nene Pimentel

As a young man growing up in Cagayan de Oro in the 50s and the 60s, I hardly knew Crispin Beltran. I did read of him now and then in a Manila daily that we got in Cagayan de Oro which at the time was at least three hours by propeller planes and at least three days by boat from Manila.

Trouble maker

By the standards of a community that did not want its comfort zone disturbed, Ka Bel was made to look like a born trouble maker who, the capitalists in Manila, would have wanted eliminated.

I was, even, then, amazed that such a man could keep on doing what he believed was the right thing to do and that was to fight for the rights of underprivileged no matter what the cost.

Paths crossing

In the early ‘70s when I was doing my duties as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention representing my province of Misamis Oriental, now then and then our paths would cross in forums and in demonstrations against the inequalities of Philippine society. But even then I hardly knew Ka Bel. He was already a veteran of street marches and I was a neophyte trudging along with marchers now and then without knowing fully what it was we were marching for.

Then in 1972, Marcos declared martial law. I did not know what happened to Ka Bel. I learned later that a few years after the declaration, he arrested upon complaint of big business whose cozy relationship with Marcos was being upset by his labor activism. Apparently, he escaped a year or two after his arrest and continued the fight against the Marcos dictatorship underground.

I had my own troubles with the martial law regime and bouts with illegal arrests and detentions. Thus, I lost track of the whereabouts of Ka Bel.

In limelight again

But after we finally succeeded in ousting Marcos in 1986 in the wake of People Power I that Cory Aquino and Cardinal Sin led, Ka Bel was again in the limelight of the struggle against oppression of the laboring masses and sometimes he tangled physically with the police and military officers who, more often than not, sided with the capitalists who invariably wanted to suppress even their peaceful demonstrations for the redress of their grievances.