18 JULY

1898 - Beleaguered colonial Spanish troops led by Lieutenant Commander  Juan Lalat surrender to the Filipino revolutionary forces under  Commander Vicente Quesada in Aringay, La Union  more than a  month after Gen. Emilio F. Aguinaldo declared the Independence of  the Philippines ("under the protection of  the powerful and Humanitarian Nation,"--unknown to Aguinaldo, the emerging imperialist superpower of the 20th century); the Spaniards have been entrenched in the convent  of this town following a sustained combat between the opposing  forces but as the Filipinos prevailed, they were forced to capitulate to Quesada, the province's revolutionary governor who  treats them with all humanitarian considerations; some three months earlier during the second phase of the Philippine Revolution against Spain, Aguinaldo forged an alliance with Admiral George Dewey of the United States that has been rather concurrently fighting a war against Spain; the "alliance," however, would turn out to be a sinister deceptive ploy of the Bald Eagle nation that would soon renege on its military and diplomatic leaders' promises of honoring Philippine Independence, and even staging the infamous Mock Battle of Manila that would falsely make it appear that the Americans, instead of the Filipino revolutionaries, defeated the Spanish colonial forces in the Southeast Asian archipelago and the capital, Manila, as prelude to the baseless December 1898 Treaty of Paris where by that time,  the virtually expelled Spaniards will supposedly "cede" the Philippines to imperialist America; the freedom-fighting Filipinos would then stage a bloody and protracted, though unsuccessful, struggle to assert their independence and fight the vile invading U.S. forces during the Philippine-American War (1899-1914).


Photo credit: http://jibraelangel2blog.blogspot.com/2010/06/members-of-royal-spanish-army-filipino.html