List of Unofficial Presidents of the Philippines

The list of unofficial Presidents of the Philippines include people that Philippine historians and other figures have identified as having held the presidency of a government that intended to represent the Philippines but are not counted by the Government of the Philippines as an official President of the Philippines.

Andrés Bonifacio is considered by some historians to be the first President of the Philippines. He was the third Supreme President (Spanish: Presidente Supremo; Tagalog: Kataastaasang Pangulo) of the Katipunan secret society. Its Supreme Council, led by the Supreme President, coordinated provincial and district councils. When the Katipunan went into open revolt in August 1896 (the Cry of Balintawak), Bonifacio transformed it into a revolutionary government with him as President. While the term Katipunan remained, Bonifacio's government was also known as the Tagalog Republic (Spanish: Republica Tagala). (Although the word Tagalog refers to a specific ethnicity, Bonifacio used it to denote all indigenous people in the Philippines in place of Filipino which had colonial origins.)

Some historians contend that including Bonifacio as a past president would imply that Macario Sakay and Miguel Malvar y Carpio should also be included.Miguel Malvar y Carpio continued Emilio Aguinaldo's leadership of the First Philippine Republic after the latter's capture until his own capture in 1902. Macario Sakay founded a Tagalog Republic in 1902 as a continuation of Bonifacio's Katipunan. They are both considered by some scholars as "unofficial presidents". Along with Bonifacio, Malvar and Sakay are not recognized as Presidents by the Philippine government.

...
Wikipedia