Last Years
On 25 January 1942, the Japanese occupation forces arrested Pedro and other Filipino leaders. He was still incarcerated at Fort Santiago when his brother Jose, who was named Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in December of the previous year, was executed by the Japanese.
Pedro, who was then 66 years old, would stay in prison for two years, but he was released to his family because of a stomach ailment in 1944. After a few months of recuperation, he reported to President José Laurel, who refused to return him to Japanese custody.
A bachelor, he joined his protégé Luis Taruc, who had founded the guerilla force Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon (Hukbalahap) (Tagalog for People's Army Against the Japanese). On 15 January 1945, Pedro succumbed to complications of his stomach ailment at a guerilla base in Minalin, Pampanga 16 days before he turned 69.
Read more about this topic: Pedro Abad Santos
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead—and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)