# Filemon Lagman

Filemon Castelar Lagman (March 17, 1953 – February 6, 2001), popularly known as Ka Popoy, was a revolutionary socialist and workers' leader in the Philippines 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 (BMP). He was assassinated in 2001.

## 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 (sister of martial law dissident Edgar 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 (Democratic Association of the Youth) 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 21 September 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).
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 elections. 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 call to head to the countryside to wage armed struggle against the dictatorship. 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 (PSR: A Semi-feudal Alibi for Protracted War, PPDR: Class Line vs. Mass Line and PPW: A New-Type Revolution of the Wrong Type) and Counter-Thesis 2 (On the Reorientation of the Party Work and the Reorganization of the Party Machinery). 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.
In 1991, he split with the CPP to form Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP) and the multi-sectoral group Sanlakas. He also led the formation of the Partido ng Manggagawang Pilipino (Filipino Workers' Party), an underground revolutionary socialist party, which, after his death, merged with the Sosyalistang Partido ng Paggawa (Socialist Party of Labor) and the Partido para sa Proletaryong Demokrasya (Party for Proletarian Democracy). He was assassinated in 2001.

## Death

Lagman was ambushed and shot to death by two unknown assassins on the afternoon of 6 February 2001, at the east-side steps of the University of the Philippines-Diliman's Bahay ng Alumni in Diliman, Quezon City. At the time of his death, Ka Popoy was working on the launch of the Partido ng Manggagawa, the workers' political party that would participate in the 2001 mid-term elections.

## Aftermath

His assassination is speculated to have been carried out by a military faction loyal to deposed president Joseph Estrada which aimed to destabilize the newly formed government of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Further investigation by the police revealed that the assassins and the culprits may have come from the Revolutionary Proletarian Army-Alex Boncayao Brigade, another "rejectionist" faction of the CPP. The perpetrators were never caught. In July 2007, the Quezon City Prosecutor's Office decided to drop the case on eight suspected communist assassins since the witnesses were unable to attend the preliminary investigations.