The Eye Of The Fish. Luis H. Francia

event attended by Lyndon B. Johnson. “It was a huge crowd. Some of us were inside the hotel grounds. The cops would order us to disperse, then march toward us, but we would sing the national anthem each time, and each time, they would stand still. Then they lost their patience and started swinging. Some shots were fired. One onlooker was killed, a bullet through the neck. He wasn’t even demonstrating.”

      The KM had set up study groups on Mao Tse-tung’s works, much to the dismay of the old guard in the PKP who were still in orbit around Moscow. In China, the Cultural Revolution had begun, had quickly started to get out of control, prompting debates within the left. A number of activists had left on study trips to China and to Japan. Inevitably, the KM and the PKP grew mutually suspicious. Roger sided with the Maoists and the KM. “The PKP identified with the Soviet model whereas Mao was of the Third World, and China, like the Philippines, was an Asian country and a feudal one.”

      But even within the KM there was a division, leading to the establishment of yet another new group, the Samahan ng Mga Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK), or Democratic Youth Association. Roger was among its leaders along with Nur Misuari, a Muslim intellectual and UP professor and the future head of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). According to Roger, Misuari was even then planning a war of secession from the rest of the country. “He later resigned from the UP faculty, convinced that teaching was out of place in a revolution.”

      Then came the First Quarter Storm of 1970, the historic January 30 attempt by throngs of demonstrators led by Manila student activists to storm Malacañang Palace, the presidential residence by the Pasig River. The huge crowds, their ranks swollen by workers, crashed through one of the gates and nearly succeeded in occupying the palace, giving the Marcoses a good scare, before soldiers and the police quelled the incipient revolution. Its near-success was due in part to a tactical alliance forged between the SDK and the KM. The most violent night in Manila’s postwar history to that point, the First Quarter Storm revealed to the country both the strength of the student move-ment and the depth of alienation running through Philippine society.

      Roger was at Malacañang Palace on January 30, 1970, but his name isn’t mentioned in the different accounts of that tumultuous night. As he was to prove over and over again, Roger’s value lay in his invisibility, in being near the center, but never in it. His going underground in 1971 to join the ranks of the CPP was, in that sense, a formal acknowledgement of what he already was. A year later, in September of 1972, Marcos declared martial law, citing the threat of a communist insurgency and using a staged assassination attempt on his defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile as a pretext. By then, Roger and other party members were putting out Liberation, the underground English-language paper of the movement. Two years later, Roger and several underground colleagues slipped out of the country, spending seven years studying and training abroad in a country he asks me not to name. In 1981, he slipped back into the Philippines and proceeded almost immediately to a New People’s Army guerrilla zone in Southern Luzon to be debriefed.

      By the time Roger returned, the NPA—founded in 1969 as the CPP’s military arm by Sison and an ex-Huk guerrilla commander and brilliant military strategist, Bernabe Buscayno (whose nom de guerre was Ka Dante, “Ka” short for kasama, the Pilipino word for companion or comrade)—had become a formidable force entrenched on the major islands and active in most provinces. Like the Huks, this Maoist guerrilla army started out in Central Luzon, in a single district of Tarlac Province, Ka Dante’s home turf, with only sixty men and thirty-five rifles. During its early years, the ragtag peasant army suffered heavily. Its propaganda units, the lead units to new areas, were often annihilated. Martial law, however, and the subsequent abuses of the Philippine military (which had grown from its pre-martial law size of fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand), proved to be a boon to the underground, forcing both urban-based, college-educated activists and peasant organizers into the hills.

      Maintaining their bases in the mountains and following the classic Maoist strategy of encircling the cities from the countryside, the NPA was operating in sixty-two out of seventy-four provinces by the time the Marcoses fled the palace by helicopter in 1986. It had between twenty thousand to thirty thousand armed regulars, depending on whom you were talking to. The CPP-NPA, along with the National Democratic Front (NDF, an underground umbrella organization made up of the different left-wing, anti-government groups and dominated by the CPP-NPA), had evolved into a serious alternative to mainstream Philippine society.

      Roger stayed in the guerrilla zone for six months and helped in the political training of recruits, and the documentation of human-rights abuses suffered by the peasants. He and the members of his small group would talk to victims or to their families. Others carried arms, but not Roger. “I refused. I have never liked bearing arms. I always told my companions, ‘It just slows me down.’” Again, the propensity to slip away, to not confront: the key to Roger’s survival. Later, the party leadership assigned him to Manila. There he worked with a cultural group. His task was to supervise the translations of the works of Mao, Marx, and Lenin into Pilipino—the national language based pri-marily on Tagalog. Mao, with his writings on a Protracted People’s War forming the basis of NPA strategy, was given special prominence in the shaping of the movement’s ideology.