A storm in January
A country at war. One day in 1966, students from the University of the Philippines and other schools demonstrated in front of the US Embassy, denouncing the American war in Vietnam and the presence of US bases in the Philippines. I don’t remember now the slogan on the placard I was holding aloft.
Only three years earlier, I had been inside the fortress itself, a guest of the very affable Cultural Attaché for a briefing, before I was to fly off to New York as a starry-eyed 16-year-old recruit of the Free World, representing my country at the World Youth Forum. Intervening events and the power of discernment and ideology had transformed an Amboy into activist.
Four years before the First Quarter Storm of 1970, and six years before the declaration of martial law in 1972, Manila was already a battleground between militant Filipino youth and a regime that was described by radicals as a “client state of US imperialism,” one of several countries which formed a pre-9/11 Coalition of the Willing that took part in a regional summit conference in Manila in October, 1966. The heads of state of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, South Vietnam, South Korea and the Philippines — with the exception of South Korea all members of the anti-communist SEATO alliance — were meeting to “formulate a common stand on the Vietnam War, and to ratify their commitment to economic, social and cultural cooperation among the Asia-Pacific countries.”
Our demo outside the embassy was peaceful, if a bit rowdy, with shouted slogans and appeals to the riot police to respect our rights. An order to disperse must have been given. The police began beating us with truncheons and pushing us back with their shields. Then the first shots rang out. It was my first demo, and what happened next seemed surreal to me.
As I raced across Roxas Boulevard, towards Luneta and away from the US Embassy gates and the pursuing phalanx of Manila’s anti-riot police and soldiers, I saw some of my fleeing companions stumbling, then falling hard and rolling on the road, picking themselves up right away, while from behind us came the loud crack of gunfire like deafening claps of thunder. The asphalt was getting ripped up by bullets fired only a few meters away from us. I continued running through the cloud of teargas, turning right on T. Kalaw Street to try and find the rest of my comrades, so that we could either regroup or seek safety in numbers from the rampaging trigger-happy storm troopers of the regime.
The placards that we had so defiantly waved moments earlier in the afternoon, which we banged against the fence of the embassy and on the white helmets of the police as they surged forward, were now strewn all over the boulevard, some of them lying face down, others in shreds but lying face up still proclaiming their brave slogans for all the world to see.
By this time, I was already a member of the Kabataang Makabayan, which was barely two years old. The KM or “Ka Eme” was established in 1964, using symbols borrowed from the Katipunan of Andres Bonifacio who led the revolt against Spain in 1896. During that demo in front of the US Embassy to denounce “Lyndon B. Johnson’s War,” 41 rallyists were arrested and charged with assault and disturbing the peace. Those who got away that day could have died, if not in the hands of the law then from the sheer exhaustion of running for their lives. Yet, we went back to the streets countless times in the months and years that followed, and for such heroic efforts, we suffered casualties, all the while barely aware of the reign of terror taking shape on the drawing board in a war room of the presidential palace.
Fast-forward to Jan. 26, 1970. Both radicals and moderates are massed in front of the old Congress, waiting for President Ferdinand Marcos to emerge after delivering his State of the Nation Address. A papier-maché crocodile, symbolizing the greed of the ruling class personified by Marcos, his family and his fellow politicians, and a cardboard coffin, signifying the death of democracy, are thrown at him and his wife as soon as they appear, and then all hell breaks loose.
Once again, the ranks of demonstrators are dispersed by truncheons and gunfire. For several days, youth groups would launch a series of rallies protesting police brutality, without losing sight of the basic issues that had brought them together against the US-Marcos regime.
Four days later, on Jan. 30, one of the biggest demos in Philippine history is staged to denounce the rise of a new specter: “state fascism.” The places of protest are now forever etched in our memories: Plaza Miranda, Plaza Lawton (now Liwasang Bonifacio), Congress, Embassy, Malacañang and Mendiola Bridge. By midday, thousands of us have been unloaded by a fleet of buses and jeepneys and some private cars from several campuses or have come on foot from all points in and around Manila.
Once more gathered in front of Congress, we listen to articulate, hoarse-voiced, brilliant speakers deliver well-phrased, highly informative, and often expletive-laced discourses on the “isms” that plague the country. From Congress, we march to the Embassy, and from there to Malacañang via Mendiola Bridge. We are not aware that inside Malacañang, a dialogue is going on between President Marcos and moderate student leaders led by Edgar Jopson of the National Union of Students of the Philippines.
As night falls, thousands of us find ourselves outside the gate of the Palace. A fire truck has been commandeered by the students and used to ram the gate. A street battle ensues long into the night. Exhausted, and having failed to take over the Palace (which was never the intention, in the first place), the demonstrators are chased out of the war zone, with the bravest holding out for some final skirmishes. These encounters rage on until March, indeed the resistance against the de facto dictatorship becomes more intense up to the eve of Sept. 21, 1972, the day Marcos signs Proclamation 1081 putting the entire country under martial law.
The First Quarter Storm of 1970 was a watershed in Philippine political history. Bringing together various sectors of society in organized resistance against an incipient authoritarian regime, the FQS was the culmination of decades of social unrest in a classic setting of Third World underdevelopment, an explosion of protest whose catalyst was a student movement that began to be politicized in the early ‘60s by both national and international developments.
There was a growing awareness of mass poverty and the widening gap between the elite and the rest of society, the entrenched corruption in the political class, the unresolved agrarian question with deep roots in the colonial past, the repression of workers who were compelled to go on strikes to fight for their basic rights. At the University of the Philippines, as early as the 1950s and 1960s, students were chafing against academic and religious conservatism, and resisting the anti-communist witch-hunt initiated by the Inquisition-sounding House Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities (CAFA), which was reminiscent of and definitely inspired by the McCarthyist persecution of American liberals and progressives in the United States.
Internationally, the biggest issue and starkest political phenomenon of those times was the Vietnam War, which was not only dividing the American people in a way that would never be seen again until the Bush-Kerry political contest 40 years later, but was raising — and radicalizing — the consciousness of people around the world, who saw the war not as the crusade for democracy it was touted to be, but an aggression committed against the deeply nationalistic and patriotic Vietnamese people struggling to free themselves from Western colonialism and the tyranny of corrupt elite rule.
The moderate forces of the NUSP, led by Ateneo student leader Edgar Jopson, was calling for an end to corruption in government, and for a non-partisan Constitutional Convention that was going to take place in two years’ time, while the more radical KM and its allied left-wing groups were calling for no less than an overhaul of the political structure of Filipino society, railing at what it described as the “basic evils of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat-capitalism.” It had already defined the ideology and society that was being proposed as alternative to the status quo: National Democracy, where the “basic masses” comprising 80 percent or more of Filipino society would be politically empowered and economically emancipated, and the oligarchic rule of political dynasties finally brought to an end.
The moderate Jopson would later undergo, as it were, a Damascene conversion, turning radical and taking to the matuwid na daan (righteous path) of revolution.
Anak ng Katipunan. One of the era’s prominent figures was playwright, cultural activist and future screenwriter Bonifacio Ilagan, who wrote landmark historical plays such as Sigaw ng Bayan (Cry of the People, a paean to the Katipunan) and Pagsambang Bayan (People’s Mass, an oratorio about the Philippines under martial law). He was one of the founders of the KM chapter in UP. In 2001, he was elected first president of the First Quarter Storm Movement, whose aim is to keep alive the legacy of that high tide in political awareness and social involvement, which led thousands of Filipinos to contribute the best part of their youth, for a cause that traces its origins to the revolutionary struggle of the Katipunan.
A seasoned participant in the early student movement of the ‘60s, the FQS of the ‘70s, and the underground resistance during the martial law years and even beyond, he was detained for several years at Camp Crame during the Marcos regime, enduring intermittent torture even while already in detention. His younger sister Rizalina had been a student activist at UP Los Baños.
In July 1977, together with several activists, Rizalina was abducted by a military security unit, reportedly led by a young and ambitious PC lieutenant who would later become a successful politician in northern Luzon. The version of then Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile on the disappearance of Rizalina was that the 23-year-old activist had joined the New People’s Army. Years later, the shallow graves of two of Rizalina’s companions were discovered, but no trace of her was ever found. One of the claimants in the human rights case filed against the Marcoses would testify that she had witnessed the abduction of the activists by an MIG or military intelligence group (similar to today’s operatives suspected of silencing activists like Jonas Burgos, Sherlyn Cadapan, Karen Empeño and many others).
Boni’s recent films, Dukot and Sigwa, both directed by Joel Lamangan, pay homage to the bravery of Filipino activists of the FQS, and serve to remind us that a new generation of idealistic youth has not given up on the possibility of a better society — a national democratic society — for the Filipino people.
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Adapted from “Life in the Time of the Storm,” The Country in the Heart, NCCA Writer’s Prize 2007.
