A fellow journalist asked me the other week what I did with “the letter” I received as a student of the University of the Philippines in the early 80s. “What letter?” I asked, and he looked at me as if I had just made a joke. “The letter from the NPA (New People’s Army) activating you into active duty and telling you where to report,” he said. I think he assumed that because I was a UP student, and because I am now a journalist, and perhaps because I wear my anti-establishment heart on my sleeve, then I must have been an activist in my college days and a candidate for “mountaineering” – pamumundok, or going out to the mountains to become a rebel.
I hated to disappoint my colleague, but I had to tell him that I never received such a letter. I never even made it to the LFS or KM or any other similarly oriented youth group, although I entered UP fully intending to be part of that scene. After all, it was 1983, and Marcos was still the dictator calling the shots, but God intervened early on and recruited me for the cause of Christ (for which I am still an “activist” up to now). Oh, I was involved in the issues of the day – as my colleague said, no one can be a UP student at the time and not be an activist in one way or another – especially when Ninoy Aquino was assassinated two months into my freshman year, and even more so during the snap presidential elections in February 1986 and the subsequent People Power uprising later that month. But to say I was an “activist” in the way it was and still is used is to stretch the truth a little.
I asked my colleague what he did with his letter, and he said someone at home had misplaced it and he missed his chance of doing active NPA service. Which is just as well, he said, because he would have joined during the time of the purge that went on in the NPA in the 80s, during which hundreds of rebels were killed because of “a wave of paranoia that swept the rebel movement” at the time. “Divine intervention, I guess,” he said of his not making it to the mountains.
That conversation stands in the background of my musings on the recent slew of press releases from Bantay party-list Rep. Jovito Palparan and ANAD party-list Rep. Pastor Alcover. Of late their statements have become more and more rabid against communists and so-called communist front organizations, and I can’t help thinking that if things had not gone the way they did in the 80s, I would have been among the direct targets of their tirades.
As it is, however, I and many other Davaoeños are only indirect targets: apparently, we are coddlers of rebels since Davao City is known to be something of a safe haven for groups that, in their words, are front organizations for the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). A recent Mirror story quoted Alcover as accusing Mayor Rodrigo Duterte’s of “favoring the New People’s Army when he made a call to national government to re-open peace negotiations with the New People’s Army and its political wings, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the National Democratic Front (NDF).”
Maybe I missed Alcover’s point, but I’ve always believed that talking is better than shooting each other. In Duterte’s own words, it is better to talk for a hundred years than to fight for a single day; if we are talking, then we are not firing our guns at each other. Laymen like us — those who do not claim to understand what pushes the men and women of the NPA to the mountains, or what keeps government running after them — tend to believe that the negotiating table is the best place to settle differences, and so for Alcover to criticize Duterte, and by extension the rest of the city, for calling for a resumption of peace talks is beyond comprehension.
Of course all this could be simply political. Bantay and ANAD are both built on anti-communist stands, and so it is reasonable to expect Palparan and Alcover to train their sights on areas where they feel the rebels have a foothold. But to say that Davao City is a hotbed of the communist insurgency is, to repeat an expression I used in the second paragraph, to stretch the truth a little.
Even the chief of the 10th Infantry Division, Brigadier General Carlos Holganza, said the city is not an election hotspot. Former Davao City police director Senior Superintendent Ramon Apolinario said Paquibato and Marilog — two areas mentioned by Palparan and Alcover — are classified only as “category 2″ in the determination of hotspots, meaning they are included in the Commission on Elections (Comelec) watch list as breeding grounds of the NPA. Hotbeds they’re not, and the city is far removed from the image the two party-list representatives are painting.
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