Obviously Isio’s order was not without effect, for we learn that sometime during August, 1900, a man had just left the camp “with the head of the infamous Juan Carballo to hang it in a public place with a label saying ‘Juan Carballo, a man pernicious to the revolution. May he rest in peace.’”[21]
Isio’s agents collected blackmail according to a regular tariff, based roughly on the value of estates, threatening that those who did not pay up would be regarded as spies of the heretics.[22]
And now let us briefly review conditions in Luzón. Here many of the common people were at first hostile to the Americans, but flesh and blood could not endue what they had to suffer at the hands of vicious Insurgent officers and ignorant soldiers, and ultimately, having learned by experience that Americans were not the incarnate fiends which they had been led to expect to find them, they began to turn to them for help. And the answer of the Insurgent leaders was everywhere the same,—death. On March 20, 1900, Tinio ordered the killing of all officials who did not report to the nearest guerilla commander the movements and plans of the American troops.[23]
It has been claimed that there was no opposition to the Katipúnan Society, and that the Filipinos everywhere joined it gladly. This was not the case. At different times there were a number of similar organizations opposed to it, and most important of these was the “Guards of Honour.”[24] Its members were ruthlessly murdered. On April 18, 1900, a guerilla chief in Union Province found it necessary to order that all towns in which members of the “Guards of Honour” lived should be burned with the property of the members of that association; that their fathers, mothers, wives and sons should be beheaded, while the men themselves should receive that punishment or be shot. All grown men in every town, and the Sandatahan, were to proceed immediately to aid in the attack upon the Americans and Guards of Honour under pain of being shot or beheaded.[25]
Señor Sergio Osmeña, Speaker of the Philippine Assembly.
In July, 1900, General J. Alejandrino ordered:—
“1st. That the Commanders of Columns proclaim as traitors all those in their respective Zones who in obedience to personal interests or from weakness under pressure of the enemy, accept civil positions and they shall be treated as such when they fall into our hands.
“2nd. The commanding officers of columns will concentrate their forces so as to fall upon the towns where exist individuals who favour the formation of such unpopular and despotic Governments and will use every means to arrest the said traitors.”[26]