Remembering a Prophet
MANILA, Philippines — Today we celebrate the 100th birth anniversary of one of the most influential farmer leaders of the Philippines in the past 70 years. Founder of the Federation of Free Farmers or FFF, Dean of the Ateneo College of Law, his name is inseparable from the history of agrarian reform and Filipino-Christian ideology.
His name was Jeremias Ungson Montemayor.
He was born on January 24, 1923, in Alaminos, Pangasinan. He grew up in a landlord family and to some, this made his later life as a peasant leader most unlikely. According to his mother, she named him after Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet known for his lamentations, because unlike other babies, he shed real tears at childbirth. It was her dream for him to become a priest, so she entered him in a minor seminary when he was fourteen. When he decided three years later that the priesthood was not for him, his mother wept in sorrow.
He was an intellectual prodigy and at the top of all his classes throughout his entire education. After completing the Bachelor of Arts program at the Ateneo de Manila University in 1948, he immediately entered its law school. It was at the Ateneo where he was fully exposed to the social teachings of the Catholic Church which would become the basis of the philosophy of the FFF.
He founded the FFF on October 25, 1953, the Feast of Christ the King. His efforts to concretize Catholic social teachings through the FFF were recognized even by the Vatican which named him to the newly established Council of the Laity in 1968. It was there that he also became friends with Cardinal Karol Wojtyla who later became Pope John Paul II.
Six years after finishing law at the Ateneo, he became the law school’s first graduate to become its own dean in 1958. It was a title that fit him perfectly. Towering at over six feet tall, he also wore spectacles that made him look even more cerebral. From that point on, people called him “Dean” as if it was his real name.
As an educator, he stressed the need for originality in thinking. He decried how many Filipinos were like “cowboys without cows” for their blind imitation of the west. Rather than go abroad for answers, he asked that our scholars and leaders go to the barrios instead and fully immerse themselves among the people. His books, particularly Ours to Share and Philippine Socio-Economic Problems, became the “bible” of many social activists at the time.
In organizing the FFF, he emphasized the need for organizations of farmers, not merely non-farmer organizations for farmers. He wrote, “…in the final count, no one can save the farmers except the farmers themselves, the genius of our experts and the benevolence of our millionaires notwithstanding.”
Together with other peasant organizations, many of which trace their roots to the FFF, the FFF has been instrumental in the enactment of practically all the relevant laws and regulations on agrarian reform since the time of Magsaysay. The very existence of the Department of Agrarian Reform and the Land Bank of the Philippines was a direct result of their efforts. The FFF was also a pioneer in cooperatives. Its economic arm, the Federation of Free Farmers Cooperatives, Inc., is one of the most reputable agricultural cooperative federations in the country today.
Despite his great stature, he was never the do-all savior and always tried to draw out the hidden strength of others, especially the small farmers. “The true leader,” he proclaimed, “is not a star shining by its own light, isolated in the far heavens. Rather, he is a satellite - a satellite of his people - glowing not so much by his own light as by the light of his people. He cannot remain completely apart from them. He stays low enough to feel the tug of their problems and aspirations and thus remains in orbit, but high enough to inspire the people to look up and endeavor to rise above themselves.”
Just as Mahatma Gandhi said, “There go my people, I must follow them for I am their leader” so too did he follow the farmers in all humility. Stories of the multitudes of farmers he met are filled with anecdotes of how he slept in the bare wooden floors of their nipa huts or under the trees, how he ate what they ate, how he rode tricycles to their meetings, and how he never turned away anyone who wanted to talk to him in the barrios.
A few years before his death, he mused that he had, after all, fulfilled his mother’s fondest hope of him becoming a priest - only that it was for the lay or unordained priesthood. With characteristic humor, he added that despite being named after a prophet, he only turned out to be a minor one. The FFF was his apostolate. It had taken every ounce of his being. Somehow, he still found the time to raise 10 children, two of whom followed him to the FFF.
While there have been significant improvements in the plight of the Filipino farmers, laborers, and other ordinary workers, there are those who might point out with bitterness that their conditions remain poor. And that even as they face new challenges with globalization, the landlord and elitist domination of Philippine society continues. He acknowledged this reality with some sadness but was not embittered. He was merely an instrument of God, he said, and instruments must know how to wait. Or as Saint Teresa of Calcutta said, “God has called us not to be successful, but to be faithful.” Besides, he pointed out, all the great movements of the world blossomed only after long years of opposition and often after their founders had died. And so, up to his final day on this earth, he was organizing, educating, conscientisizing and mobilizing the masses.
He died peacefully on June 9, 2002, as he slept in a farmer’s nipa hut, resting after another one of his never-ending farmer-seminars, and only kilometers away from where he had founded the FFF fifty years earlier.
