Dr. Pio Valenzuela: The Last Revolutionary (1954 Article)

Dr. Pio Valenzuela: The Last Revolutionary

By Exequiel S. Molina

Published in This Week, Magazine of Sunday Chronicle. July 4, 1954.

Some sixteen kilometers north of Manila, in the little town of Polo, Bulacan, lives a man who was the contemporary of our Revolutionary heroes. Together with Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto, he was one of the Katipunan"Big Three," the supreme council which had control over all Katipuneros and the dreaded "Camara Negra" which exercised the power to deal with traitors within the organization. 

Asked to recount his experiences as a revolucionario, Dr. Pio Valenzuela admonished, "I hope you can take down everything, son. I have plenty to tell you."

Looking out of the window, the old man started his story. He has a memory for dates, persons, and places: every once in a while, he would stop to see if I was keeping up with him. "Be sure you don't miss a thing, son," he would say.

Valenzuela joined the Katipunan on July 15,1892, one of a triangle whose two other men were Teodoro Plata, Bonifacio's brother-in-law, and Luciano de Guzman. (The Katipunan was so organized that every member was made to recruit two more, thus forming a live masonic triangle.) At the time he joined the Katipunan, Valenzuela was a fourth year medical student at the University of Sto. Tomas. For the next three years, he attended the secret meetings of the KKK and continued his studies at the Spanish school. In April 1895, he returned home to Polo to organize the movement in Bulacan. This work carried him to Obando, Malolos, as far north as Arayat. In December of that year, he was summoned to Manila by Emilio Jacinto to attend a meeting of the supreme council in Bonifacio's house on Oroquieta street. He was made fiscal and physician of the KKK. In the early part of 1896, he returned to Manila with two townmates and lived in Lavezares, Tondo, in a house which concealed printing presses for an eight-page magazine called Kalayaan, Liberty. Its articles were written by Emilio Jacinto, who used the pen-names "Dimasalang" and "Pingkian"; Andres Bonifacio, who signed his works "Agap-ito" and "Dimasalang" and Dr. Valenzuela whose nom de plume was "Madlang Away." He chose that name, the old doctor remembers, because "I was a ready for a brawl."

Despite a shortage of types, however, the magazine came out three months afterward. Through a ruse by Emilio Jacinto, they made the Spaniards believe the magazine was published in Yokohama, with Marcelo del Pilar as editor. The Spaniards sent an agent to Japan but found no such press. Valenzuela recalls that the membership of the Katipunan grew as fast as the circulation of the Kalayaan. "It grew so fast," he remarked, "that soon nearly all the men of San Juan and Mandaluyong had joined up-even those in the outlying provinces of Rizal, Bulacan, Cavite, Batangas, Pampanga, Tarlac."

On May 1, 1896, Valenzuela attended the Katipunan meeting in Barrio Ugong, Pasig where it was decided to step up collections for the purchase of arms from Japan. The meeting ended two days later in Bitukang Manok, near Antipolo. A month later, Valenzuela boarded the steamer Venus with Raymundo Mata, a blind man, and Rufino Magos, a companion. Their destination was Dapitan in Zamboanga. Valenzuela used Mata, the blind man, as an excuse to see Dr. Rizal, in exile, and inform him of the uprising planned by the Katipunan. During the trip, he used the name "Procopio Bonifacio."

"Rizal approved of our plans," Valenzuela remembers, "but he said we had to wait, till we had more guns." Valenzuela hurriedly returned to Manila, bringing back a kamuning cane and a small bust, both made by Dr. Rizal, the patriot had presented him.

When the ship had arrived in Manila, Valenzuela and his companions hired a banca to ferry them ashore. Once ashore, he hailed a calesa and was surprised to find his companions arguing with the boatman who refused to accept the peseta being offered to him. Thereupon, Valenzuela banged the kamuning cane on the banca three times, bringing the argument to a halt. Then he drew a peso piece, which the boatman promptly refused.

"I think that cane has a charm of some kind in it," he said. "Unluckily, some fellow from Cavite got it and it is probably still there, passing on from one hand to another."

While standard history textbooks say that Bonifacio flamed up when informed that Rizal's advice was to wait till the Katipuneros had sufficient arms, Dr. Valenzuela maintained that the Plebeian took the advice calmly and was for following it, were it not for the premature discovery of Katipunan through one of its members, Teodoro Patiño, on August 19, 1896.

At dusk on August 20, 1896, Valenzuela slipped in a calesa through a cordon of Spanish sentries and joined Bonifacio and Jacinto in Caloocan. Two days later, the first skirmish of the Philippine Revolution was fought in Pasong-Tamo, between forty Guardias Civil and a hundred bolo-wielding Katipuneros. The Guardias Civil fled, leaving behind one dead, and one rifle, and the day’s glory to the revolutionaries, who lost two men that day. The battle of Pasong-Tamo was not without its share of humor. The old doctor laughingly remembers Emilio Jacinto’s frustrations to become a horseman. “Every time he rode a horse, he always fell. In the end, he had to fight the rest of the battles on foot. “He was a great writer but no horseman.”

After Pasong-Tamo, there followed more skirmishes and the arrival of Katipunan reinforcements from all around Manila. “There was a time when there where about 10,000 Katipuneros camped on Tandang Sora’s land. She had to feed them and there was nothing elegant about the food. There were more than twenty taliasis of rice, and we butchered fifty carabaos. There was no time to cook the viand well; when Tandang Sora found out I had no particular fancy for half-cooked carabao meat, she gave me boiled eggs. Emilio Jacinto shared those eggs with me. We always ate alone, in a secluded spot.”

Dr. Valenzuela acted as trouble-shooter for the KKK, going from one town to another, checking up on the different organizations. Returning to Manila from Biñan, he gave himself up to Malacañan. He was confined at Fort Santiago and tried for rebellion. In November, 1986, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, together with Juan Castañeda, father of Gen. Mariano Castañeda, Antonio Luna who got twenty years, and some sixty others.

Following their conviction, the revolucionarios were shipped to Barcelona, where a large crowd awaited them. “It seems”, the doctor muses, "that the friars had been circulating stories in Spain that Filipinos had tails. But the crowd that met us at Barcelona was disappointed, when they saw us in our clean suits." 

From Barcelona, the prisoners were taken to Madrid, where they stayed one month. Valenzuela remembers Antonio Luna as a good cook and an attractive young man who was constantly visited by a pair of Spanish girls. Valenzuela was responsible for Luna’s release when he testified that Luna was in no way a member of the revolutionary movement. This after Luna's instructors in the Belgian academy where he studied the art of war had interceded with the king of Spain. 

For the others, one prison followed another: Malaga, and finally, the Spanish outpost in Melilia, Africa. Following the Treaty of Paris, Valenzuela was finally released in March, 1899. 

He returned to Manila to find himself prisoner once more, this time by the Americans, who were informed by an archbishop that he and Castañeda were generals of the Filipino insurgents. They were confined in a house in Intramuros for three days. Hearing of their plight, Dr. Burgos, a nephew of the martyred Father Jose Burgos, appealed to the American commander. Castañeda was released after he promised not to fight against the Americans, while Valenzuela remained in jail when he refused to give his word. He stayed captive until after the death of Antonio Luna. His bitterness over the death of Bonifacio and the death of Luna made him realize it was useless to fight the Americans. "I wouldn't mind dying at the hands of foreigners but not at the hands of my countrymen.”

Valenzuela was released in August, 1899, and returned to Polo. Following the first elections under the American regime, he was elected president of the municipality on September 6, 1899, and from then lived a quiet life as town official and doctor.

Friends wanted him to run for the governorship of Bulacan, but Dr. Valenzuela refused twice. The third time, he accepted. The election for the Bulacan governorship of 1919 had its share of dirty dealings: however, he fought for two years; finally, the Supreme Court declared him governor. He served the remaining year of that term, was re-elected to office in 1922, and retired at the end of his term in 1925.

Don Pio, as the people of Polo know him, was born July 11, 1869 in Polo. He had an inclination for medicine and everyone around knew he would turn out to be a good doctor. Of his days as a medical student, he remembers how rigid the studies were and how out of sixty classmates only twelve survived the course at the University of Santo Tomas and the San Juan de Dios Hospital.

Dr. Valenzuela married on October 9, 1900 and had ten children, seven of whom are living: Abelardo, a chemical engineer now in Guam; Arturo, employed in the Bureu of Customs; Mercedes, former professor at Philippine Women’s University, married to Joaquin Los Baños, an engineer; Rosa, a pharmacy graduate, married; Amadeo, who works for a Manila automobile concern; Alicia, a teacher now in Malolos; and Diego, who followed his father’s profession and is now a doctor at the North General Hospital.

At eighty-five, Don Pio lives a sedate life. His short cropped hair has turned white. His back is a little bent, but he is as strong as ever: he smiles, though he complains about his knees, which grow a little weaker every day.