Filemon Lagman
Filemon Castelar Lagman, also known by the aliases Ka Popoy and Carlos Forte, was a Filipino revolutionary socialist and labor leader who supported Marxism-Leninism. He split with the Communist Party of the Philippines in 1991 due to ideological disagreements to form the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino. He was assassinated in 2001 at the University of the Philippines Diliman in Quezon City.
Personal life
Filemon Castelar Lagman was born to Pedro Eduardo Diaz Lagman Jr., a teacher and prosecutor, and Cecilia Castelar, who was also a teacher. Filemon had five other siblings. He was a track and field athlete of Caloocan High School.Filemon's first wife was Dodi Garduce, while his second wife was Bobbie Jopson. His brother was Albay congressman Edcel Lagman.
Activism
Lagman's political views started to manifest during his early high school days when he frequently argued with teachers who did not share his ideas. During the First Quarter Storm, he was a member of Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan in the 1970s. After only a year at the University of the Philippines, he decided to go underground and do full-time organizing work in the factories and urban poor communities in the northern sector of Metro Manila. When martial law was declared on September 23, 1972, Lagman established the first network of the underground revolutionary movement in Navotas. He organized, along with his comrades, the labor unions in factories and other work sites, launched mass mobilizations, developed a political mass base among workers and recruited more party members for the Communist Party of the Philippines.CPP Manila-Rizal party secretary; 1978 Batasang Pambansa election
Ka Popoy was elected secretary of the Manila-Rizal Regional Party Committee of the CPP in the mid-1970s and spearheaded the broad formation which challenged the Marcos dictatorship in the 1978 Batasang Pambansa election. The Central Committee of the CPP admonished Ka Popoy and the whole regional committee for advocating participation in the elections because it ran counter to the party's election boycott and preference for rural armed struggle against the dictatorship. Ka Popoy was thus confined to a safe house while the Central Committee prepared for an inquiry into the issue, with Edgar Jopson succeeding him as Manila-Rizal's acting party secretary in July 1978. Ka Popoy was only able to return at the helm of the Manila-Rizal Regional Party Committee after the People Power Revolution in 1986. Despite his differences with the central leadership, Ka Popoy continued to strengthen revolutionary work in the capital.At the height of the CPP split, Lagman wrote the biggest critique on CPP founding chair Jose Maria Sison's book Philippine Society and Revolution—the Counter-theses composed of Counter-Thesis 1 and Counter-Thesis 2 . Lagman argued in his critique that Philippine society was capitalist in a backward and underdeveloped way, rather than being semi-feudal and semi-colonial. Lagman thus posited that a workers-led revolution must be waged to dismantle capitalism, instead of a protracted people's war from the countryside.