Rizal's death fills the rebels with new determination, but the Katipunan is becoming divided between supporters of Bonifacio, who has revealed himself to be an increasingly ineffective leader, and its rising star, Aguinaldo.

At a convention held at Tejeros, the Katipunan's headquarters in March 1897, delegates elect Aguinaldo president and demote Bonifacio to the post of director of the interior.

Bonifacio withdraws with his supporters and forms his own government.

After fighting breaks out between Bonifacio's and Aguinaldo 's troops, Bonifacio is arrested, tried, and on May 10, 1897, executed by order of Aguinaldo.

Emilio Aguinaldo himself suffers reverses at the hands of Spanish troops as 1897 wears on, being forced from Cavite in June and retreating to Biak-na-Bato in Bulacan Province.

The futility of the struggle is becoming apparent, however, on both sides.

Although Spanish troops are able to defeat insurgents on the battlefield, they cannot suppress guerrilla activity.

In August armistice negotiations are opened between Aguinaldo and a new Spanish governor.

By mid-December, an agreement wis reached in which the governor will pay Aguinaldo the equivalent of US$800,000, and the rebel leader and his government will go into exile.

Aguinaldo establishes himself in Hong Kong, and the Spanish buy themselves time.

Within the year, however, their more than three centuries of rule in the islands will come to an abrupt and unexpected end.

Jose Rizal, the most outstanding of the Filipino Propagandists, is a physician, scholar, scientist, and writer.

Born in 1861 into a prosperous Chinese mestizo family in Laguna Province, he had displayed great intelligence at an early age.

After several years of medical study at the University of Santo Tomas, he had gone to Spain in 1882 to finish his studies at the University of Madrid.

During the decades that follow, Rizal's career will span two worlds: among small communities of Filipino students in Madrid and other European cities, he will become a leader and eloquent spokesman, and in the wider world of European science and scholarship—particularly in Germany—he will form close relationships with prominent natural and social scientists.

The new discipline of anthropology is of special interest to him; he is committed to refuting the friars' stereotypes of Filipino racial inferiority with scientific arguments.

His greatest impact on the development of a Filipino national consciousness, however, is his publication of two novels—Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not) in 1886 and El Filibusterismo (The Reign eof Greed) in 1891.

Rizal draws on his personal experiences and depicts the conditions of Spanish rule in the islands, particularly the abuses of the friars.

Although the friars have Rizal' s books banned, they are smuggled into the Philippines and rapidly gaine a wide readership.

Other important Propagandists include Graciano Lopez Jaena, a noted orator and pamphleteer who had left the islands for Spain in 1880 after the publication of his satirical short novel, Fray Botod (Brother Fatso), an unflattering portrait of a provincial friar.

In 1889 he establishes a biweekly newspaper in Barcelona, La Solidaridad (Solidarity), which becomes the principal organ of the Propaganda Movement, having audiences both in Spain and in the islands.

Its contributors include Rizal; Dr. Ferdinand Blumentritt, an Austrian geographer and ethnologist whom Rizal had met in Germany; and Marcelo del Pilar, a reform-minded lawyer.

Del Pilar is active in the antifriar movement in the islands until obliged to flee to Spain in 1888, where he becomes editor of La Solidaridad and assumes leadership of the Filipino community in Spain.

Rizal had returned briefly to the islands in 1887, but because of the furor surrounding the appearance of Noli Me Téngere the previous year, he was advised by the governor to leave.

He had returned to Europe by way of Japan and North America to complete his second novel and an edition of Antonio de Morga's seventeenth-century work, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinos (History of the Philippine Islands).

The latter project stems from an ethnological interest in the cultural connections between the peoples of the pre-Spanish Philippines and those of the larger Malay region (including modern Malaysia and Indonesia) and the closely related political objective of encouraging national pride.

De Morga provides positive information about the islands' early inhabitants and reliable accounts of pre-Christian religion and social customs.

Rizal returns to the Philippines in June 1892 after a stay in Europe and Hong Kong, partly because the Dominicans have evicted his father and sisters from the land they have leased from the friars' estate at Calamba, in Laguna Province.

He also is convinced that the struggle for reform can no longer be conducted effectively from overseas.

In July he establishes the Liga Filipina (Philippine League), designed to be a truly national, nonviolent organization. 

It is dissolved, however, following his arrest and exile to the remote town of Dapitan in northwestern Mindanao.

The Propaganda Movement languishes after Rizal's arrest and the collapse of the Liga Filipina.

La Solidaridad goes out of business in November 1895, and in 1896 both del Pilar and Lopez Jaena die in Barcelona, worn down by poverty and disappointment.

An attempt is made to reestablish the Liga Filipina, but the national movement has become split between ilustrado advocates of reform and peaceful evolution (the compromisarios, or compromisers) and a plebeian constituency that wants revolution and national independence.

Because the Spanish refuse to allow genuine reform, the initiative quickly passes from the former group to the latter.

Andres Bonifacio, a self-educated Filipino man of humble origins, founds a secret society, the Katipunan, in Manila after Rizal's arrest and exile.

This organization, modeled in part on Masonic lodges, is committed to winning independence from Spain.

Rizal, Lopez Jaena, del Pilar, and other leaders of the Propaganda Movement had been Masons, and Masonry is regarded by the Catholic Church as heretical.

The Katipunan, like the Masonic lodges, has secret passwords and ceremonies, and its members are organized into ranks or degrees, each having different colored hoods, special passwords, and secret formulas.

New members go through a rigorous initiation, which concludes with the pacto de sangre, or blood compact.

The Katipunan spreads gradually from the Tondo district of Manila, where Bonifacio had founded it, to the provinces, and by August 1896—on the eve of the revolt against Spain—it has some thirty thousand members, both men and women.

Most of them are members of the lower- and lower-middle-income strata, including peasants.

The nationalist movement has effectively moved from the closed circle of prosperous ilustrados to a truly popular base of support.

Rizal remains in exile at Dapitan during the early years of the Katipunan.

He has promised the Spanish governor that he will not attempt an escape, which, in that remote part of the country, would have been relatively easy.

Such a course of action, however, would have both compromised the moderate reform policy that he still advocated and confirmed the suspicions of the reactionary Spanish.

Whether he comes to support Philippine independence during his period of exile is difficult to determine.