Filemon Lagman

Also known as: Ka Popoy — the nom de guerre and press styling of his whole career · Popoy Lagman — the short styling of the news record · Carlos Forte — an underground alias ([Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filemon_Lagman "Filemon Lagman — Wikipedia"))

The Marcos-burial ruling, Ka Popoy, the 1947 parity vote, and the Company's Bengal anchor

Definition

Filemon Lagman — Filemon Castelar Lagman, “Ka Popoy,” March 17, 1953, Bicol – February 6, 2001, Quezon City — was a Filipino revolutionary socialist and labor leader: secretary of the Communist Party of the Philippines’ Manila-Rizal committee under martial law, theorist of an urban, workers-led line against protracted people’s war, and after his early-1990s break with the CPP mainstream a founder of Sanlakas, founder-organizer of the labor federation Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP), and leader of the underground Partido ng Manggagawang Pilipino (PMP). (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman, Wikidata — Q5448378) His brother is Albay representative Edcel Lagman, whose entry in this wiki carries the family record — their brother Hermon disappeared under martial law, and Filemon was shot dead by unidentified gunmen at the University of the Philippines Diliman on February 6, 2001, as he prepared a labor party’s launch for the May elections; no one has ever been convicted. (Philstar — Popoy slain, UCANews — first assassination victim, Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman)

His signature was the city. Where the CPP mainstream built its war from the countryside, Lagman — a Caloocan High School track athlete recruited through the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan in the First Quarter Storm years, a UP dropout who organized the factories and urban-poor communities of northern Metro Manila — argued in his “Counter-theses” against Jose Maria Sison’s Philippine Society and Revolution that the Philippines was backward capitalist, not semi-feudal, its revolution to be made by workers in the cities. (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman) The line cost him his standing — he was admonished for leading a formation into the 1978 Batasang Pambansa election against boycott policy — and eventually the party itself, in the rupture the carriers date to 1991, 1992 or 1993. (UCANews — first assassination victim, Bulatlat — A ‘Dirty War’)

Identities

Source Type	Identity
Wikipedia	Filemon Lagman (verified this session)
Wikidata	Filemon Lagman (Q5448378) — “Filipino trade unionist” (verified this session) (Wikidata — Q5448378)
DBpedia	N/A — dbpedia.org data endpoint unreachable this session (ETIMEDOUT)
ProductOntology	N/A
Wiktionary	N/A — “lagman” is a headword for the Danelaw lawspeaker and the Central Asian noodle dish, not the person (verified this session)
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)	N/A — id.loc.gov unreachable this session (HTTP 403)
MeSH	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A
Google Scholar	Filemon Lagman Ka Popoy CPP Manila-Rizal Alex Boncayao Brigade split urban insurrection Counter-theses Sanlakas Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino Partido ng Manggagawang Pilipino KRMR assassination 2001 UP Diliman
ConceptNet	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A

Also Known As

Ka Popoy — the nom de guerre and press styling of his whole career
Popoy Lagman — the short styling of the news record
Carlos Forte — an underground alias (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman)

Examples and Analogies

The rebel as union-builder: after the break, the organizer’s craft that had built the underground in Navotas went into open mass work — Sanlakas, founded October 29, 1993 with Lagman among the founders, and BMP, founded 1995 in the UCANews record — the same factories and communities, above ground. (UCANews — first assassination victim, Wikipedia — Sanlakas)
A party cut twice: the CPP split off him in the early 1990s; then the Alex Boncayao Brigade — whose top leaders, contemporaneous reporting records, included Lagman, Arturo Tabara and Nilo de la Cruz — split from him again, reportedly over a P250-million PEA-Amari payoff rift in 1997; at his death he was organizing a new labor party from what remained. (Philstar — 3 of 4 suspects identified, Bulatlat — A ‘Dirty War’)
The family’s three costs: Hermon disappeared under martial law; Filemon assassinated in 2001; Edcel wrote the reparation and anti-disappearance statutes — the family record carried in this wiki’s Edcel Lagman entry. (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman)
Verified biographical data:
Life: born March 17, 1953, Bicol; brothers Edcel and Hermon; first wife Dodi Garduce, second wife Bobbie Jopson (Edgar Jopson’s sister); son Dante (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman)
CPP career: secretary, Manila-Rizal Regional Party Committee, mid-1970s; replaced by Edgar Jopson July 1978; regained leadership after 1986 (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman)
Arrests: 1994, and again during the 1996 APEC summit in Manila (UCANews — first assassination victim)
Death: shot ~5 p.m., February 6, 2001, at the UP Alumni Center approach, Diliman; four gunshot wounds to the head; declared dead 9:10 p.m. at the Philippine Heart Center; buried February 12, 2001, Loyola Memorial Park, Marikina (Philstar — Popoy slain, UCANews — first assassination victim)

Usage Scenarios

1. Studying the CPP’s Great Splits

Lagman is the case study of the urban line: the “Counter-theses,” the 1978 election defiance, the Manila-Rizal committee’s rupture into the KRMR — with the dated carriers to keep straight (1991 in his Wikipedia record, 1992 in the UCANews account, 1993 in the Bulatlat retrospective). (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman, UCANews — first assassination victim, Bulatlat — A ‘Dirty War’)

2. Tracing the Post-Split Left’s Institutions

The organizations he founded or led form a genealogy still visible in party-list politics: Sanlakas (1993) with its labor and urban-poor affiliates; BMP; the underground PMP, founded at its January 30–February 5, 1999 congress; and Partido ng Manggagawa, launched August 5, 2002 from the PMP’s posthumous merger with two other socialist parties. (Wikipedia — Sanlakas, Wikipedia — Partido ng Manggagawa)

3. Reading an Unresolved Assassination

The killing is carried in the register of court record and current status: Task Force Popoy’s identification of three of four suspects within days; the July 2007 dropping of the case against eight suspects by the Quezon City Prosecutor’s Office after witnesses failed to appear; no conviction, no accepted attribution. (Philstar — 3 of 4 suspects identified, Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman)

4. Placing the Urban-Poor Movement of the 1990s

The BMP-Sanlakas milieu he led — worker and informal-setter federations, the “Resign All!” position of EDSA II — is the documented bridge between the armed underground of the 1970s and the electoral left of the 2000s. (Wikipedia — Sanlakas)

Strategies

Organize where you are: his career ran from the premise that the revolution’s subjects were the city’s workers and poor — Navotas’ underground network under martial law, the factories of the 1990s above ground. (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman)
Fight the line with a document: the “Counter-theses” contested semi-feudal orthodoxy with a class analysis of the economy — the flag of every faction he later built. (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman)
Convert the underground into the electoral: the labor party he was launching at his death was completed after him through the 2002 merger. (Philstar — 3 of 4 suspects identified, Wikipedia — Partido ng Manggagawa)
Demand accountability without prejudging: BMP secretary general Leody De Guzman’s vow — “We will not accept a whitewash of the case” — fixed the movement’s posture toward a killing no forum has resolved. (Philstar — 3 of 4 suspects identified)

Security and Safety Measures

The killing’s documented circumstances: gunmen mixed with a crowd of some five hundred gathered for a forum — Kit Belmonte was introducing Edcel Lagman when the shots began — and fired .45-caliber pistols; the suspects fled in a commandeered car; President Arroyo ordered the perpetrators arrested “at the soonest possible time.” (Philstar — Popoy slain)
The investigation: Task Force Popoy (PNP, NBI, CIDG, Central Police District) under Director Edgar Aglipay identified three of four suspects within four days, released sketches and offered a P500,000 bounty; the family hired private investigators after the police missed a February 12 arrest deadline. (Philstar — 3 of 4 suspects identified, Bulatlat — A ‘Dirty War’)
Allegations carried with their forum: the 1989 assassination of U.S. Colonel James Rowe is listed among the killings attributed to the ABB of his era in contemporary reporting — an attribution carried here only as such. (UCANews — first assassination victim)
Current status: dismissed against eight suspects in July 2007 for want of witnesses; no conviction; responsibility disputed among the documented theories — rightist destabilization, an RPA-ABB factional motive (the NDF’s suggestion, rejected by the RPA-ABB’s leaders), and the CPP mainstream’s denial, its chairman blaming Lagman’s own breakaway group. (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman, Bulatlat — A ‘Dirty War’)

Historical Context

Lagman was made by the dictatorship and unmade in its aftermath. Born in 1953 to the Albay family whose brother Hermon the dictatorship’s forces disappeared, he passed through Caloocan High School and the SDK into the UP of the First Quarter Storm, left after a year for the underground, and rose to the secretaryship of the Manila-Rizal committee — the capital’s party apparatus, whose armed wing, the Alex Boncayao Brigade, he would later lead in the record of contemporaneous reporting. (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman, UCANews — first assassination victim)

The fall of Marcos returned him to the committee’s leadership and then to the argument that broke the movement: the “Counter-theses” against semi-feudal orthodoxy, the urban-workers line, the 1978 defiance of the boycott reprised against the reaffirmist center. In the early 1990s the rupture came — 1991, 1992 or 1993 in the different carriers — and the Manila-Rizal splinter built its own institutions: Sanlakas in October 1993, BMP in 1995, the underground PMP at its January–February 1999 congress. (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman, Wikipedia — Sanlakas, Wikipedia — Partido ng Manggagawa)

On February 6, 2001 — seventeen days into the government EDSA II installed — he was shot dead at UP Diliman, the first high-profile assassination of the new administration in the police director’s own accounting. Task Force Popoy identified suspects within days; the theories multiplied; the case against eight suspects was dismissed in 2007 when the witnesses did not appear. (Philstar — Popoy slain, UCANews — first assassination victim, Bulatlat — A ‘Dirty War’, Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman) The organizations survived him: BMP’s unions struck on the funeral day, and Partido ng Manggagawa contests elections still. (Philstar — 3 of 4 suspects identified, Wikipedia — Partido ng Manggagawa)

Challenges and Controversies

Who Killed Ka Popoy

The unresolved question. The documented theories: pro-Estrada destabilization aimed at the new government; an RPA-ABB factional motive — the NDF’s statement that the RPA-ABB “could have killed Popoy on suspicion that he leaked” an alleged plot against Sison, which the ABB’s breakaway leaders, Nilo de la Cruz and Arturo Tabara, rejected, calling their differences “only debates”; and the CPP chairman’s counter-blaming of Lagman’s own circle. Each is carried with its carrier; none proved in any forum. (Bulatlat — A ‘Dirty War’, Philstar — 3 of 4 suspects identified)

The Case That Dissolved

The Quezon City Prosecutor’s Office dropped the case against eight suspects in July 2007 after the witnesses failed to appear — the end of the pursuit Task Force Popoy began with sketches, a bounty and suspects named in camera. Current status: dismissed, unprosecuted, contested. (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman, Philstar — 3 of 4 suspects identified)

The Urban Line Against the Countryside

The strategic quarrel that framed his life — workers’ revolution in a backward-capitalist Philippines versus protracted people’s war — remains the organizing controversy of the post-1992 left; his organizations are its institutional residue, the armed formations that split with and from him its bloodier one. The UCANews obituary’s register — “former leader of a communist urban hit squad” set against the movement’s organizer of the 1990s — is the same biography never reconciled in a court. (Wikipedia — Filemon Lagman, Bulatlat — A ‘Dirty War’, UCANews — first assassination victim)