Adolfo Alcances, called Popo, was the sixth among eight brothers and sisters. Lively discussions of current events, everyday observations, even arguments, marked the dinner table conversations of the Alcances family.
Their father was an accountant and their mother a midwife. They lived in a quiet neighborhood in Tondo, Manila. The parents had nationalist, progressive ideas which they shared with their children, encouraging them to be critical, articulate and curious. Popo was a quiet and serious boy who helped in the house chores and even darned his siblings’ clothes sometimes. He accompanied his younger sister to school and helped tutor a cousin. When he began receiving a stipend as a government scholar, he didn’t spend it on himself but instead put it aside to repair, he said, the family’s narra dining table.
After graduating from a public elementary school, Popo was accepted into the then newly established Philippine Science High School. He was among the school’s second batch of scholars and quickly adjusted to the new environment. Now nicknamed Dopits by his peers, he was good at math and chess, and played the guitar. He was elected vice president of his section, and became a cadet officer in the school’s preparatory military training (PMT) program.
Dopits was in high school when he started to join the mass protest actions that were rapidly gaining momentum in the late 1960s. A sister recalls that after one such occasion he had to be taken to hospital after being stabbed by an unknown man in Quiapo. (As was his father, whose blood pressure shot up upon learning about the assault.)
It was in college (UP Diliman) that he joined the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (1971) and became involved in campus politics. While campaigning for his side in the 1972 student council elections, Dopits was again assaulted (this time by a suspected government agent).
With the declaration of martial law in September 1972, the youth activists went into action. Dopits led a group of SDK members who kept their chapters alive. They reached out to workers and poor communities in Quezon City and Marikina. They put up posters denouncing the dictatorship and scrawled slogans along the streets. His comrades remember Dopit’s calm and attentive demeanor, his ability to clearly analyse situations, and to help work out ideas and solutions.
After about a year, Alcances joined the underground resistance in Central Luzon. He organized farmers, women and youth in the rural areas and established contacts with professionals in the town centers. His brother-in-law who was then working in Mabalacat, Pampanga recalls that Popo would drop in from time to time; he would introduce himself as a farm technician who knew his way around Tarlac, Zambales, Pampanga.
Among his clandestine activities, for which he solicited much-needed assistance, was to secure medical attention for the sick and wounded.
It seems that Alcances had been moving around with a group in Tarlac, which by then had become one of the most heavily militarized areas in the country. Not only was it an area that hosted important facilities of the US military (the Voice of America facility in Concepcion, the US radio transmitter in Camp O’Donnell, the Crow Valley weapons training range in Capas), the province was also the site of Camp Servillano Aquino in San Miguel (headquarters of the Philippine Army’s 5th Infantry Brigade, later expanding to become the 5th Infantry Division). Multiple units of the Philippine Constabulary were based in Tarlac. The PC soon took control of the paramilitary units that had been organized by powerful landlords and supplied them with high-powered weapons.
Landlordism, and a long history of peasant resistance, would explain why successive governments, and more so the Marcos dictatorship, devoted such attention to securing Central Luzon. For military purposes, the region was vital for the protection of Manila, the seat of national power.
On June 12, 1978, just weeks after he turned 26, Alcances, by then also known as Ka Temi, was in Capas, Tarlac with three other persons. Finding themselves surrounded by government troops, they fought back and all four were killed.
Upon learning of Popo’s death, family members travelled to Tarlac but they were not able to see or bring back his body; only a picture was shown to them for confirmation.
Popo Alcances, kind and promising, a good boy, had freely offered his life for the sake of a better life for his fellow Filipinos.
