(This excerpt takes almost seven minutes to read.)

Economically speaking, Mayor Hermosilla seemed very successful during the wartime period, during which he accumulated vast amounts of property. Former treasurer Rafael Omega (1945a) claimed in his affidavit executed after the war that, considering Ormoc’s scant financial situation, it was very strange that Hermosilla gained so much profit from his being municipal mayor.

According to Omega, as of July 1942, during the first stage of the [Axis] occupation of Ormoc, its municipal treasury had only a very little amount of money: about a thousand pesos in emergency notes, some mutilated old treasury notes, some mutilated coins that amounted to no more than ten pesos, and some [Axis] military notes.

The treasury’s total cash at the time Omega became treasurer barely reached P5,000. Ormoc’s annual income from 1 July 1942 to 31 December 1942 did not even reach P15,000. The income for 1943 did not reach P20,000 and for 1944 from the year’s start until 30 September the income was a little more than P20,000. Omega added that when he left office as municipal treasurer there were about P35,000 in [Axis] military notes, all of which were said to have been burned by the [Imperialists] because they did not allow the municipal officials to take any of the government property in the municipal building.

Omega testified that Hermosilla’s salary during the [Axis] occupation was more than P40, which was paid in old Philippine currency notes. Omega (ibid.) claimed that since Mayor Hermosilla was merely an “average Filipino” in the province, it was strange that he could accumulate many pieces of property during that time, such as the purchase of a house and lot costing P4,000, even though his salary was P40 only.

As mentioned earlier, Hermosilla used to be a municipal teacher, and Omega claimed that for fifteen years prior to the arrival of the [Axis] Hermosilla could not even build a shack in Ormoc. Hermosilla went to Cebu and got employed in the Club Filipino with a salary of P60 a month.

Omega strongly averred in his affidavit that Hermosilla started to get corrupted when he worked in the club, as indicated by the fact that, although he had been employed for less than two years only, he was able to build a house in Cebu costing more than P1,000 pesos. Since his election as Ormoc’s mayor in December 1940, for a term lasting up to the beginning of the [Axis] occupation in May 1942, Hermosilla was able to buy a house and lot costing P4,000.

Mayor Hermosilla could have saved this large amount of money within several months since he was elected mayor, but Omega noted [that] it was impossible for Hermosilla to have saved that much money unless something was underway. Not only was he able to buy a costly house and lot, but Hermosilla also bought an agricultural piece of land costing more than P500 and jewelries from Felix Sumaljag, a businessman in Cebu. Mayor Hermosilla was said to have planned the purchase of another piece of land situated in Cananga, located 15 kilometers north of Ormoc City proper (ibid.).

Omega advanced the claim that Hermosilla’s accumulation of property could have been carried out during the procurement of foodstuffs conducted by the Home Guard, which became the mayor’s private army. As mentioned earlier, Hermosilla reportedly made use of this organization to liquidate or kill his political enemies in the town even as he was maintaining some contact with Miranda’s guerrilla groups. Moreover, he appropriated for his own use the Home Guard’s activities, which were linked to the community activities of the DANAS.

In actuality, Hermosilla was not only a municipal mayor at the time but also the commander-in-chief of the Home Guard. As such he managed to borrow a motor launch owned by the [Axis] for the purpose of patrolling the waters of Ormoc Bay. These patrols were jointly managed by his nephew, Francisco Hermosilla, the warden of the Home Guard, and his son Romeo Hermosilla, who was the assistant warden.

Under their administration, several sailors and merchants from Cebu and Bohol were brought to Ormoc. Their cargoes were either confiscated by Mayor Hermosilla through the [Axis] military officer, Sergeant Shinkai (who presumably was attached to the Abe Detachment Forces in Ormoc), or sold by the owners of the sailboats at a price dictated by Hermosilla and Shinkai.

Omega claimed that parts of the cargoes that he, his nephew, and his son confiscated were brought to his house for his own consumption, but some were also sold because he was running a store in his house. The rest was brought to the municipal building for sale to the public. Omega believed [that] the profits Hermosilla gained from the proceeds of the sale went to his personal pocket because Omega could not find any statement of account of the sale and it was never turned over to the municipal treasury (ibid.).

Pelagio Codilla (1945), a former councilor of Ormoc when Hermosilla was mayor, claimed that the latter took advantage of Lieutenant Abe’s appeasement policy toward suspected guerrillas or people evacuating to the mountains, especially the provision of foodstuffs to surrendered guerrillas.

When the civilians decided to come down to the center of Ormoc during the pacification campaign, Hermosilla used the municipal truck to ferry the civilians from the mountains to the town, together with all their foodstuffs such as corn and rice. Hermosilla extracted from them 20 percent of their palay or rice or any foodstuff loaded on the truck. These food items were stored in the municipal building.

Codilla claimed that more than 1,000 cavans of rice were stored in the warehouse of the municipal building. Because of the very serious food deficiency in Ormoc, Codilla requested Mayor Hermosilla to sell the rice through the neighborhood association. However, the mayor replied that he would not touch a grain of rice in the municipal building unless and until there really was an acute shortage of food.

Codilla added that Hermosilla profited tremendously from sugar. Sometime in 1943, Ormoc faced a sugar shortage, although big hacenderos had owned large sugar plantations even before the war. The mayor called a meeting of all prominent residents to discuss the sugar shortage in the town. It was agreed that all residents of Ormoc had to mill muscovado sugar, produced from sugarcane that could be harvested anywhere.

Hermosilla appointed Agapito Pongos as manager for the harvest of sugarcanes and their milling. Labor was compulsory. Codilla claimed that they had to arrest civilians to get them to work because they were afraid to go out in the open, lest guerrilla groups fire at them. When they had already produced sugar, Hermosilla announced that its price must not be less than P20 per picul. Codilla (ibid.) reportedly protested, saying

The price was too high and the poor could not afford to buy such sugar […] during peacetime, the hacenderos had to buy seeds for sugar cane, had to plow, had to clean the farm, had to buy fertilizers and yet sugar cost only P4.50 a picul. Now, all we had to do was to cut the sugarcane from anybody’s farm on which we had not spent a cent, why must sugar cost twenty pesos a picul?

Even in the town of Ormoc, the basic policy of food distribution should have been in accordance with the rules and regulations of the DANAS. However, it was observed that Hermosilla utilized the activities of this group for his own ends. According to Codilla’s testimony, the sugar that Hermosilla obtained was sold in his store as well as in the store run by his nephew, Francisco, at a high price.

Codilla said [that] there were rumors in town that went this way: “We buy the sugar from Mayorhood, instead of from the Neighborhood.” He added that there were also tags such as “Kingkohood” and “Nesinghood,” which probably meant the name of the store ran respectively by Francisco “Kingko” Hermosilla and Hermosilla’s brother-in-law (name unknown). Codilla claimed that Agapito Pongos was the one who milled the sugar, while Romeo Hermosilla, chief warden of the Home Guard, ensured the arrest of civilians to obtain labor in the cutting and milling of sugar canes (ibid.).

[…]

In May 1945, with the U.S. Army’s approval, Potenciano Larrazabal was appointed Ormoc’s mayor, replacing Jose Codilla. Meanwhile, Hermosilla was searched by the CIC but escaped arrest until late August 1945 when he was finally apprehended and put in a civilian internment camp in Tacloban for several months under the charge of collaboration with the [Axis] (Lear 1979b, 160).

As stressed by Lieutenant Bacalso, a CIC investigator, in spite of his efforts to find the facts no Ormoc resident was willing to testify against Hermosilla. Bacalso was surprised at how strong and influential this political figure in Ormoc was. On the contrary, Ormoc’s local residents testified on Hermosilla’s behalf, recalling “his benevolence” in saving their lives to the detriment of his own safety. After the investigation was completed, Hermosilla was officially cleared of all charges and released from custody (M. Hermosilla 2006).¹¹

(Emphasis added.)

Similarly, the future anticommunist dictator, Ferdinand E. Marcos, probably collaborated with the Axis as well:

The records show that the Army dismissed Mr. Marcos’s official claims that he led a guerrilla unit during the [Axis] occupation as “fraudulent” and “absurd.” They also suggest, although they do not prove, that Mr. Marcos was [an Axis] collaborator.

At the same time, the official records clearly state that people listed as members of the guerrilla unit that Mr. Marcos claimed to have led did work for the [Axis] and brutally treated Filipinos who interfered.