Old grit meets new blood in fight vs tyranny

FIRST QUARTER STORM Playwright and former political detainee Bonifacio Ilagan addresses young activists and his fellow veterans of the First Quarter Storm of 1970 in a forum on the contributions of the student-youth movement to the resistance to the Marcos dictatorship at the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication on Sept. 19. —CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

What Bonifacio Ilagan saw that day opened the floodgates of memory.

At the Sept. 19 inaugural forum for the 50th anniversary in 2020 of the First Quarter Storm (FQS) movement at the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Mass Communication, UP activists young enough to be his children wielded their placards and raised their voices against fascism: “Never again to martial law!”

They raised their fists in a show of resistance, while Ilagan stood as a veteran torchbearer for the cause that has continued to fuel UP’s radical tradition over the decades.

As a 17-year-old political science freshman in 1969, Ilagan became integrated with radical youth organizations such as the Kabataang Makabayan (KM) and the Student Cultural Association of the University of the Philippines, which facilitated the incubation of student activism in the state university.

‘A ruckus’

“There was a notion during my time that UP was a ruckus of large activist groups. In reality, there was only a small population of organized youth activists. The organized forces were small, but the influence was tremendous because the student leaders were committed,” he said.

It was indeed a small turbulence, a brewing storm that no weatherman had predicted, as writer and former political prisoner Pete Lacaba wrote in “Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage.”

But the corruption, rampant inflation and the spoils of neocolonial economy inevitably stirred the FQS, when thousands of student activists from UP, Ateneo de Manila University and other universities rocked the Marcos regime with a series of mass protests during the first three months of 1970.

“The FQS of 1970 was a big school for my generation where we imbibed a sense of justice for our rebellion. We realized at that time that we were rebels. We were rebelling against the system,” said Ilagan, who as a student spent more of his days in the streets than in classrooms.

Ilagan, now 67 and a notable playwright, believes their commitment remained strong in the midst of repression.

Culture as weapon

The choice to rebel was also committed in art forms where poems and protest songs became part of their arsenal.

“We had so many songs and every activist knew every song. So when one started singing, everyone else will follow,” he said.

Culture became their weapon, that even decades after the simple melody with loaded verses still flowed naturally from their lips: “Ang masa, ang masa lamang/Ang siyang tunay na bayani/Ang masa, ang masa lamang/Ang siyang tunay na tagapaglikha/Ang masa, o ang masa/ Tagapaglikha ng kasaysayan.”

“The song was so simple, but the message was clear: History is not made by a few.  History is made by the multitude,” Ilagan said.

After 1970, there was no turning back for Ilagan and his comrades. By that time, he was already the chair of the KM chapter in UP Diliman.

In February 1971, UP students rose up in what has been called the Diliman Commune to protest against the policies of President Ferdinand Marcos. It led to the destruction of some school property and mass arrests of student activists.

In 1974, two years after Marcos declared martial law, military men raided Ilagan and Lacaba’s safe house and beat them for an hour before locking them up in a cell at Camp Crame, the headquarters of the now defunct Philippine Constabulary.

Tortured, detained

Ilagan was tortured and detained until 1976.

UP Professor Sarah Raymundo had a different first encounter with UP as a student in the 1990s.

She graduated from the all-girls St. Scholastica’s College high school whose teachers, she said, “were very active and progressive.”

When she came to UP, she was welcomed by some influential academics who espoused a “left melancholy” over the failure of socialism in Europe.

“It didn’t sit well with my experience as a person. I remember my parents being part of Edsa 1, and my history was aligned with the national democratic movement. We were pushing for national industrialization and for the redistribution of land, but the academics who came from abroad were pining over a colonial history that didn’t even speak to us as Filipinos,” Raymundo said.

In Kasaysayan 1 class, she learned that democracy was about giving land to the tillers. That core principle has brought Raymundo closer to radical movements in the university.

Growth of youth orgs

She studied UP’s history of activism that flourished in the 1960s. She discovered that the growth of student-youth organizations like the KM and other groups in the Philippines coincided with growing student unrest around the world. The 1960s became an important historical marker.

“It was the beginning of what we are now witnessing as a movement against tyranny and dictatorship,” Raymundo said.

As lead convener of the “No Erasures, No Revisions” movement, Raymundo has been organizing activities to prevent the Marcoses’ return to power.

“UP’s contribution to the resistance is ever more valuable today, because nowadays we really feel the intensified neoliberal attacks in terms of social policies and economic policies. Of course UP is funded by the taxes of the people so you could never detach the university from the fundamental problems of society,” she said.

For Ilagan, the exercise of freedom was very much rooted in UP: A free campus with its own charter.

Consequence of staying neutral

But both he and Raymundo believe that in times of political repression, neutrality would only abet oppression.

“Freedom is very precise,” Raymundo said. “It’s not freedom to be neutral, but freedom to protect the people from abuse of state power in any form.”

For Ilagan, asserting this freedom to serve the people and fight tyranny in the midst of historical revisionism did not end 30 years ago. It is a continuing struggle.

“We were bold enough even at that time to propagate the idea of a revolution, even if not many of us knew what it actually meant back then. Our generation has removed the fear of the word itself. We have taken the blinders off,” he said.

After all, it was a generation that toppled a dictatorship, a testament to one of their popular slogans: “Dare to struggle. Dare to win.”