In early 1976, CPP protest
activities in the youth and student sector (YS) suffered a major blow, albeit
temporarily, with the arrests of student leaders in the University of the
Philippines (UP) and the ensuing supression of student anti-martial law protests
in Diliman.
However, the CPP’s
underground assets in UP were largely intact. What is more, by this time, CPP
branches and national-democratic (ND) groups had been put up in quite a few
universities in the greater Manila area (GMA). They too, had sidestepped the
government onslaught.
The CPP Manila-Rizal
committee (MR) planned to begin another round of protests using these assets
later that year. The protests in the student sector were to complement MR’s
grand scheme of starting a general uprising (Sigwa) in the region in a few
years , with its fast growing mass base in the labor, urban poor, and church
sectors as the main effectives. MR had a nascent disagreement with the CPP
central committee over this uprising, but that is another story.
District
Supervision
The CPP branches in the
penetrated schools were supervised by the respective MR district committees.
For example, the CPP branch in UP and other Quezon City schools were
administered by MR’s District 2 (D2), while the CPP branches in Manila schools
were managed by MR’s District 3 (D3).
Sometimes, MR transferred
seasoned cadres from one district to another to strengthen school organizing in
that district. For example, as early as 1975, a number of organizers were
dispatched from UP, where organizing was advanced, to the University of the East (UE) in the Manila
University Belt (UB), where organizing was just starting. UE was of critical
importance to the CPP. It had a huge student population of about 60,000, and
its official student paper, The Dawn, had an enormous circulation.
In Quezon City, the schools
where the CPP had strong branches, apart from UP, were Trinity College and St.
Joseph’s College. The CPP has a hard time making in-roads in Ateneo de Manila
University (ADMU) and Maryknoll College (MC), because these schools were
dominated by the Philippine Social Democratic Party (PDSP).
In UB, the strong schools
were University of Santo Tomas (UST), Far Eastern University (FEU), Manuel L.
Quezon University (MLQU) and UE. In the South of Pasig area, the CPP
functioning units were in Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (PLM), University of
the Philippines College Manila (UPCM), Adamson University (AdU), Philippine
Christian University (PCU), St. Scholastica’s College (SSC), and De La Salle
University (DLSU).
SGYS
In mid-1977, to unclutter
the management of party work in YS, MR
created a special committee called “Standing Group for Youth and Students”
(SGYS) from outstanding cadres pulled from UP and UST. MR then put all the school branches (including UP’s) under SGYS’
supervision, and away from hands of the district committees. The latter already
had their hands full organizing urban poor and workers.
The new committee was called
a standing group because of its specialized mandate of badgering the CPP school
branches to produce results. However,
because of its strategic importance in forming national public opinion, the CPP
branch in UP was oftentimes given direct instructions by MR and even by the CPP
central committee. The SGYS did not mind being bypassed though.
SGYS divided its YS
activities into the following areas: Quezon City (which includes UP), the
University Belt (UB), and the so-called “South of Pasig” area. The latter area
covered Intramuros and Taft Avenue. The school party branches
were given instructions by SGYS to contribute to the creation of an
anti-martial law protest movement in the national-capital region, through their
respective mass bases. The main issue the CPP branches were told to harp on was
high tuition fees. The mode of political action was the mass boycott of
classes. The single most used slogan was: “Oppose the commercialization of
education!” These issues were to be ultimately linked to the Marcos
dictatorship and sure enough, to “US imperialism.”
The connection between
Philippine education and US policies was made by citing the creation by Marcos
of the “Presidential Commission to Survey Philippine Education.” (PCSPE) CPP propagandists alleged that this was a
scheme by Marcos and the US to make Philippine education produce more cheap but
skilled Filipino workers for US corporations.
New
Orientation: Scaling Down Expectations
At this point of the
narrative, we point out that the Philippine student sector was now playing but
a supporting role in the CPP’s overall design. This was a big departure from
the strategic orientation in the epic anti-CAFA (Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities),
anti-Vietnam War, First Quarter Storm (FQS) and Diliman Commune campaigns,
where the Philippine student sector was the spearhead and main body combined.
Quietly and smoothly, the
CPP was now internally scaling down its long-standing expectation of YS as the
main factor in influencing public opinion, as laid down by CPP chairman Amado
Guerrero in his book and CPP bible "Philippine Society and
Revolution." (PSR) This new thinking did not show in CPP propaganda, but
it showed in the priorities of the party's organizing work, and in the kind of
people who attended its rallies.
Given the realities of
martial law, the CPP was implicitly admitting
that those who could best survive open defiance of military rule, namely
the religious and labor sectors, had assumed this role. Unfortunately the YS
sector had borne the brunt of martial law suppression, with Marcos making sure
of it. It could not influence public opinion the way it did before martial law,
because it had a hard time hitting the streets. As proven in the historic
December 6, 1975 Bustillos rally, the religious and laboring sectors could do
it. This was because of the church garb for the former, and sheer desperation
for the latter.
That said, while MR had
plans for the YS sector in its own domain, the national leadership also saw the
need to expand the CPP’s YS organizing work to include every significant urban
center outside of GMA where there was a sizable tertiary student population.
These areas included Baguio, Dagupan, Angeles, Cabanatuan, Los Baños, San
Pablo, Naga, Legazpi, Cebu, Dumaguete, and Davao. The CPP still had enough
residual trust in, as Amado Guerrero famously put it in PSR, the students' "keen political
sense" for it to include YS in its national strategy.
NDF-YS
Thus, in early 1976, the CPP
leadership, in consultation with MR, began broaching the idea of forming “NDF-YS,” which was to begin this long-term work. It
envisioned NDF-YS to eventually become the CPP’s “National Youth and Students
Bureau” (NYSB) which was so successful and powerful in the immediate years
before martial law. NYSB was the CPP organ which ran the big radical student
organizations like Kabataang Makabayan (KM), Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan
(SDK), and Malayang Samahan ng Bagong Kababaihan (Makibaka) which gave Marcos a
lot of sleepless nights.
There was a bit of nostalgia
going on here. Many in the CPP leading organs who received directives from the
NYSB as student activists, were whimsically longing for the return of the NYSB
to bring back the glory days of student power.NDF-YS was named such
because it was under the supervision of the CPP’s Preparatory Commission for
the National Democratic Front (Prepcom NDF). Prepcom NDF was a national CPP
organ, which acted as its united front commission. Formed in 1973, its job was
to gather as many non-communist allies as possible to the CPP fold. The
rationale for the NDF-YS being placed under Prepcom NDF was that the
personalities and organizations that were going to assist NDF-YS were in the
main non-CPP entities who were contacts or sympathizers of Prepcom NDF.
NDF-YS’ top priority was to
assist the different CPP regional committees around the Philippines establish their own YS underground commitees
in the schools and communities. In doing this, it used the various chapters of
existing nation-wide organizations found in the catholic and protestant
churches as legal covers. Needless to say, without these reliable legal covers,
the exposed student organizers would have invited suspicion and eventual
arrest.
In the Catholic Church, the
organization of choice were the Student Catholc Action of the Philippines
(SCAP), and the National Secretariat for Social Action (NASSA). The CPP also
had a hard time going into SCAP, as it was also controlled by the PDSP, or, as
it was commonly called, the "Soc-Dems." In the protestant churches,
it was the Student Christian Movement (SCM), the Methodist Youth Fellowship
(MYF), and the Division of Youth Ministry (DYM) of the National Council of
Churches in the Philippines (NCCP). MYF
was the youth arm of the United Methodist Church (UMC) in the Philippines.
Setting
Up NDF-YS
By the second quarter of
1976, the cadres for NDF-YS had been picked, with a veteran cadre selected to
chair it. This cadre, in his late twenties, was a former KM member, who had
participated in the violent rallies in 1966 against the Manila Summit
Conference. When he was picked for the job, he headed the CPP’s Civil Research
Department (CRD), which was directly under the CPP central committee. The CRD
was basically an economic research group.
A UP student leader
competent in alliance building was selected as a member, along with a UP law
student with a vast experience in underground organizing. Another UP student
adept at touching base with the so-called “anti-Marcos reactionaries” joined
the committee ocasionally as a political officer (PO). The three-man committee
underwent several extended orientation meetings, and began to do the tedious
spadework.
The major areas of CPP
activity in the YS sector as of mid-1976 were, therefore, conducted by the
following organs: the enlarged party
branch in the University of the Philippines (UP), the new party branches in the
newly breached tertiary schools in GMA, and the National Democratic Front- Youth
and Students (NDF-YS).
