AS the nation marked the 154th birth anniversary of Katipunan revolutionary movement founder Andres Bonifacio on Thursday, his great-great-grand-nephew appealed to the government to declare his forebear as the “first president of the Philippines.”
Lawyer Gary Bonifacio, now an election officer in San Juan City, based his petition on the recommendations of many nationalist historians and scholars to correct historical injustices.
The hero founded the anti-colonial secret society called Kataastaasan Kagalang-galang na Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (KKK) or the Katipunan on July 7, 1892.
“Supremo Andres Bonifacio’s Katipunan was not only a revolutionary organization but it was a revolutionary government of the Philippines,” he said during a Pandesal Forum held recently at the Kamuning Bakery Café in Quezon City.
The Father of the Philippine Revolution referred to all Filipinos and the country as Tagalog and the Tagalog republic, because he refused to use the colonial name imposed by the Spanish colonizers.
“When he used the term ‘Tagalog people,’ it referred to all of us whether Tagalog, Visayan, Ilonggo, Ilocano, Tausug,” Bonifacio noted.
With his goal to unite the country and to win independence from Spain by means of revolutionary movement and government, the Filipino warrior deserves to be considered as the nation’s first chief executive, he said.
“Andres Bonifacio had a vision and concept of our nationhood,” he said. “In fact, he even opened Philippine citizenship to foreigners living in our isles, to the Chinese who were already second generation here and to fourth-generation Spaniards here.”
The call of the hero’s descendant is not the first time that an attempt was made to have Bonifacio declared as the first president of the Philippines.
A clearer idea of Bonifacio’s Katagalugan government rose in the late-1980s, when letters and other important document signed by Bonifacio part of the collection of Epifanio de los Santos, a noted historian and former director of the prewar Philippine Library and Museum, became accessible.
Based on three letters and one appointment paper, written by Bonifacio on printed letterheads dated from March 8 to April 24, 1897, and all addressed to Emilio Jacinto, Bonifacio was the first president of a national government.
Such letters contained the following titles and designations: “Pangulo ng Kataastaasang Kapulungan [President of the Supreme Council]”; “Ang Kataastaasang Pangulo [The Supreme President]”; Pangulo nang Haring Bayang Katagalugan [President of the Sovereign Nation of Katagalugan]” and “Kataastaasang Panguluhan, Pamahalaang Panghihimagsik [Office of the Supreme President, Government of the Revolution].”
Even prewar scholar Jose P. Bantug referred to Bonifacio as the “Kataastaasang Pangulo” and “General No. 1.” Jose P. Santos in 1933 and Zaide in 1939 came to the same conclusion and cited his presidency.
Both men, however, misread the phrase “Ang Haring Bayan” found in the Minutes of Tejeros Assembly (March 23, 1897), the Jacinto Appointment Paper (April 15, 1897), as well as the undated Bonifacio Manifesto titled “Katipunan Marahas ng mga Anak ng Bayan,” as “Ang Hari ng Bayan.”
The first phrase refers to Bonifacio’s adaptation of the Western concept of republic from res publica, literally public thing or common wealth to the Filipino concept of “sovereign people.”
Hence, the government he headed before March 22, 1897, was democratic in nature and national in scope, contrary to some postwar historians’ contention that Bonifacio attempted to establish a government separate from Aguinaldo’s only after the Tejeros Assembly, and was, therefore, guilty of treason.
These are some of the evidences that, if recognized, would change the part of the country’s history that officially honors Emilio Aguinaldo as the first and the youngest President of the Philippines (1899-1901) and first president of a constitutional republic in Asia.
Andres Bonifacio was born on November 30, 1863. He and his brother Procopio were both murdered in Mount Buntis in Maragondon, Cavite. History has the Bonifacio brothers executed by the soldiers of and upon orders of Aguinaldo after their trial in Naic, Cavite, and the 1897 Tejeros convention.
Following their prosecution, their other family members were persecuted and went into hiding for many years.