I was at UP Diliman from the early 1980s and then, after I graduated I went back in the early 1990s. Decades later, I went back to UPD for more studies. All in all I went to UPD for 12 years.
I was never recruited to become a member of the Communist Party or the New People's Army. It was Martial Law at that time I was first in UPD and the NPAs were in the mountains, far from the reach of the military.
I have had professors who were political prisoners in the 1970s when Martial Law was first imposed. Some of them were student leaders or writers for the Collegian in 1972. They were tortured and imprisoned. Some of them were charged, others were not charged but they were released after they were tortured. It's hard to believe, I know, but some of them still had scars.
Guess, what? They so openly criticized Marcos and Martial Law. They explained student activism and the price they paid for their convictions. They criticized our cacique democracy and the claw-hold of a very well disguised historic US imperialism and colonization. Those professors discussed Marxism, and Leninism and Maoist communism but they discussed it with the same fervor as they discussed Rousseau, Bentham, Foucault, Noam Chomsky and other theorists. They discussed those with the same enthusiasm as they discussed Rizal, Bonifacio, and Aguinaldo, the Philippine Revolution or the Filipino-American War. We discussed Lino Brock and Nora Aurora as much as we discussed Henry Sy and capitalism in the Philippines. This was inside the classroom. The discussions were part of what we studied. And we studied anything and everything. UP tried to give students a well-rounded education. We were not being recruited.
There were a lot of student organizations, the League of Filipino Students, the SAMASA party, etc. They held lively symposia and discussions about communism, socialism, democracy, etc. We were required to read Constantino's many books. But none of them ever tried to recruit me.
Let me tell you who were active in recruiting students to join their organizations in my time:
- Fraternities and sororities. Fraternities openly recruited young men so that they can have a “home" and a “family" of their choice other than the family they had which was a family of their “accident" of birth. Sororities recruited young women so that they can put their talents to good use for community and social work.
- CCC. Yep, the Campus Crusade for Christ invited people for Bible studies, for sharing, for prayers. They provided support for students who were feeling homesick and anxious.
What was surprising to me, however, was the number of young men who were “cross-enrolling" from the Philippine Military Academy or the National Defense College--I never knew if they were serious or if what they said were true. I usually met them in my Political Science classes. So, in my time, there were very young men from military backgrounds who attended classes with us and I had always wondered if they were gathering intelligence on students who were of the communist persuasion.
So, in summary, I was recruited to join a sorority and to join the rabidly anti-communist Campus Crusade for Christ. I was NEVER recruited by any communist organization or group. On the other hand, I was approached and chatted up by two male students who said that they were sent there to attend classes and just to observe Communist infiltration. If what those male students told me were true, in my time, it was the military that was infiltrating UPD sniffing out communists lurking in the classrooms.
I am not saying there were no communists in UPD -- I just never met any. All I met were people who loved to discuss sociopolitical theory and history and observe society and point out how valid or invalid the Western theories were and how they may or may not be applied in the Philippine setting.
So, if you want to know if in my time there were communists in UPD, the short answer would be, yes, there may have been communists (as in, people who believed in the truth of the tenets of communism as an ideal) but they were persuading people to think for themselves. Their catchphrases were kamulatan (awareness) and kasarinlan (independence and self-determination) and hustisya (justice). In short, this is normal in UP and no one was recruited. We were free to listen and engage in discussion, but we were never recruited to join. I wasn't.
If you ask me, the red-tagging issue raised by the Philippine military is just the military still chasing ghosts of Communists long dead and no longer in the campus -- if you ask me, the military is looking for people who may have joined the ranks of the desaparecidos and those who lie in unmarked graves in the countryside. Most students I knew when I was there were worried about a paper due or an exam scheduled. They cared about their class standing and if they would see their crush in the lobby--communists, in your dreams.
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