Andrés Bonifacio
Andrés Bonifacio founded the secret society that started the Philippine revolution, led it for its first year, and was tried and shot by the men who took it over. He was born in Tondo, the working district of Manila, in 1863, was orphaned at fourteen and raised his siblings on what he earned making canes and paper fans, and worked as a warehouseman and clerk for foreign firms, reading at night: Rizal's novels, the lives of the American presidents, Les Misérables, the French Revolution. He joined Rizal's Liga Filipina the day it was founded in July 1892, and the day Rizal was arrested he founded something else, with a blood compact in a house in Tondo. This was the Katipunan, the Highest and Most Respected Society of the Sons of the People, which by 1896 had perhaps thirty thousand members organised in cells, an oath, a newspaper, and a purpose the Liga had not had, which was independence by arms. The society was betrayed to the friars in August 1896 and he brought the rising forward. At Pugad Lawin, in a field outside Manila, the members tore up their tax certificates - the Cry of Balintawak - and attacked the powder magazine at San Juan del Monte, where they were beaten. The war went better in Cavite, under the young mayor of Kawit, Emilio Aguinaldo, and that was the problem. At the Tejeros convention in March 1897 the Cavite men elected Aguinaldo president of a revolutionary government and Bonifacio, the Supremo of the Katipunan, director of the interior, an office a delegate then said he was unfit for as a man with no schooling; he declared the vote void and walked out. Aguinaldo's soldiers arrested him in April, wounded, tried him for sedition before a court of Aguinaldo's officers, and shot him and his brother Procopio in the hills of Maragondon on 10 May 1897. He was thirty-three. The Philippines has spent a century deciding whether he or Rizal is the father of the nation, and gives him a holiday but not the title.
- Lived: 1863 CE – 1897 CE
- Nationality: Filipino
- Roles: revolutionary, political_leader
