Spanish-American War, Naval Battle of Manila Bay, May 1, 1898. Published by Werner Company, Akron, Ohio. | Photo Courtesy of the Library of Congress (2016/10/28) via Wikimedia Commons
We like to tell ourselves that 7,646 islands resisted three empires and outlasted them all. That we are a people of warriors and martyrs, of Lapu-Lapu and Rizal, of guerrillas in the hills and students in the streets. But there is another, less comfortable truth: every foreign flag that flew over this archipelago was held up not only by foreign bayonets, but also by Filipino hands.
From the moment Spain stitched scattered polities into “Las Islas Filipinas,” colonization was never a simple story of invaders versus natives. It was a pact between a foreign power and local elites who saw in the new order not slavery, but opportunity. The Spanish Crown parceled out vast territories through the encomienda system, turning lands that were once communally tilled into fiefdoms granted to encomenderos—many of whom worked through or later merged with local principales who collected tribute from their own people. The friars ruled the towns, but they were flanked by native functionaries who translated edicts, enforced forced labor, and ensured that the pueblo feared both Church and Crown. For every peasant flogged in a plaza, there was almost always a brown hand holding the whip.
Even after Spain was gone, the ghost of the encomienda survived in our land regime. American rule brought the Torrens Title system, supposedly to “modernize” and clarify ownership, but in practice, it often validated massive estates first assembled under colonial grants and friar holdings. Titles anchored in centuries‑old abuses were now wrapped in legal certainty and state enforcement. The old encomendero was reborn as the hacendero and landed capitalist, armed not with royal decrees but with Torrens certificates and sheriff’s writs. What began as colonial plunder was laundered into “private property,” locking generations of farmers into tenancy and landlessness.
When the galleons gave way to gunboats and the United States arrived claiming to “liberate” us from Spain, the script did not change—it merely shifted languages. Revolutionary leaders who once fought under the Katipunan banner negotiated positions in the new colonial bureaucracy. The Philippine Constabulary, that feared instrument of American rule, was staffed largely by Filipinos ordered to hunt down other Filipinos in the hills. Some ilustrados argued that “tutelage” under the Americans would modernize us faster than independence ever could; in exchange, they gained access to contracts, education, and patronage. While the Philippine flag was raised in 1946, the economic and land arrangements left behind made sure we remained tethered to the same landlord class and to Washington’s interests long after the formal empire ended.
The Japanese occupation laid bare the ugliest face of collaboration. Even as guerrillas died in the mountains and civilians were massacred in cities, prominent politicians and businessmen joined the puppet government, signed proclamations in the name of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” and profited from contracts and concessions under Tokyo’s protection. Then there were the Makapili—Filipino informers and auxiliaries who pointed out guerrillas and suspected sympathizers, often with faces covered and fingers extended, condemning neighbors to torture, execution, and disappearance. They did not merely “cooperate”; they became the sharp edge of Japanese repression, turning fear and hunger into weapons against their own communities. Many collaborators would later return to politics in the postwar republic, rehabilitated by amnesties and deals, their wartime choices papered over in the name of “national reconciliation.” The line between “collaborator” and “patriot” blurred—not because history was unclear, but because power insisted on amnesia.
The pattern is painfully familiar: each colonial regime found its most effective allies among local elites willing to trade the freedom of the many for the advancement of the few. Collaboration was not always born of simple greed; sometimes it came cloaked in pragmatism, fear, calculations about “lesser evils,” or dreams of reform from within. But the result was the same. Tax collectors who squeezed rice from starving tenants, soldiers who enforced curfews and burned villages, Makapili who raised a hand to condemn a neighbor, politicians who legitimized foreign rule with signatures and speeches—these were not foreigners. They were us.
“History will remember the collaborators of this century, too. They sit in boardrooms and cabinet meetings, in legislative halls and gated subdivisions, fluent in the language of “investor confidence,” “geopolitical alignment,” and “public‑private partnership.”
We like to believe that this era is over, that today’s Republic is finally ours. Yet the logic of collaboration still lives on, only now the empire is not just a flag but a system: global capital, security treaties, development loans, disinformation networks, and transnational corporations. Our modern collaborators are officials who sign away natural resources for a pittance, who welcome foreign troops under the banner of “mutual defense” while ignoring the sovereignty of coastal communities, who accept infrastructure funded by external powers in exchange for long-term dependency and strategic silence. They are legislators who vote for laws written to appease creditors and investors while leaving farmers landless and workers disposable—still hemmed in by land patterns that trace their roots back to encomiendas blessed first by friars, then by Torrens titles, and now by banks and courts.
The collaborators of old enforced the cedula and polo y servicio; their descendants today enforce contractualization, privatized utilities, and debt bondage to banks and landlords. Yesterday’s friar estates have become corporate plantations and real estate empires. The constabulary outposts have morphed into police stations and military detachments where poor suspects are tortured, red‑tagged, or disappeared. The faces in the portraits have changed; the role—local agents of distant interests—has not.
To tell the full history of the colonization of these 7,646 islands is to admit that foreign powers never acted alone. They always found partners among us: the encomendero and his heirs, the lawyer who legitimizes an unjust treaty, the mayor who delivers votes in exchange for projects, the businessman who bankrolls campaigns to keep regulations weak and wages low, the modern Makapili who identifies activists and organizers for harassment in the age of “counterinsurgency” and “anti‑terror” lists. Collaboration is no longer a wartime label; it is a daily practice whenever those in power side with money and empire over people and nation.
It is not a call to wallow in shame, but to change the narrative of heroism. The true opposite of the collaborator is not the lone martyr on a pedestal, but the organized communities who refuse to be bought, who defend their land and waters against destructive projects, who push back against military bases and extractive deals, who demand that the state answer to citizens rather than creditors and clients. Our islands remain colonized whenever our leaders speak more fluently to ambassadors and bankers than to farmers and jeepney drivers.
History will remember the collaborators of this century, too. They sit in boardrooms and cabinet meetings, in legislative halls and gated subdivisions, fluent in the language of “investor confidence,” “geopolitical alignment,” and “public‑private partnership.” We must decide, island by island, town by town, whether to let them keep writing the same story—or finally break the pattern and prove that an archipelago once carved up by empires can at last belong fully to its people.
