A Brief History of Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) Movement in the Philippine Student Sector 1976-1977 Part I

Introduction

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).