Subversive Lives. Susan F. Quimpo

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СКАЧАТЬ to it seemed natural since I was doing mathematics. After joining a few of their study sessions, however, I dropped out. I was not able to relate to the unstructured meetings that wandered from commentaries on dialectical materialist principles to such practical matters as the preparation of a more powerful “pillbox” (homemade bomb) for the self-defense of fellow activists.

      The National Democrats appeared fearsome to Catholic school students and teachers, yet they posed a great attraction. They were the radicals in the protest movement. The gospel they preached, namely, a national democratic revolution supported by people’s war and led by a new Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), presented a dilemma to people like me. So impressed were my parents with Americans and the American way of life that they named me after an American GI, a Texas oil millionaire who had become a close family friend during WWII. They had fond hopes that my siblings and I would someday find our way to the United States and pursue the American dream. How could I get involved with a movement that was communist-inspired? Stories I had read about communists in my younger days still horrified me, stories of Joseph Stalin’s bloody pogroms and purges and graphic references to communist persecution of Christians. How could I get involved with a movement with a godless ideology that ate Christians for breakfast?

      AS THE MONTHS PASSED and the national crisis deepened, it appeared increasingly urgent for an activist like myself to be part of a political organization with a winning strategy. I needed a push, and a priest provided it: Fr. Edicio de la Torre, SVD. His following was growing among priests, nuns, and seminarians because of his lucid essays and lectures about politics from a Catholic viewpoint. I could relate to his arguments. His revelatory essay, “Christians in the National Democratic Revolution,” provided reassurance that radical involvement was justified, as liberation theology argued, in order to bring about God’s kingdom on earth.

      I read him and wanted to hear him speak. I made it a point to attend when he came to give a talk at Ateneo. The audience in the main biology lecture room was abuzz with anticipation. When Father Ed began, his words about Christian involvement in the struggle were a refreshing breeze. He showed that deeply felt anger against injustice and compassion for the oppressed was rooted in the Catholic faith. But what sticks most in my mind was how he challenged the audience, made up mainly of the middle class and petit bourgeois. One cannot be sure, he said, that people like you will remain faithful to the cause of radical change, much less provide resolute leadership in the struggle. The middle class was marked by two failings: “mahina ang tuhod at malabo ang isip (weak in the knees and confused in thinking).”

      He promptly dismissed fears of the communists. The time to join the struggle for national liberation was now, he said, to muster more forces and enrich the variety of the united front. The NatDem program was a political program to get control of government. As a Christian, one could accept it without becoming a communist. Would a red regime later turn against and oppress the Church? One had to postpone such worries; being part of the struggle would provide some insurance against being attacked as a reactionary force, though one always needed to be vigilant about one’s faith.

      What about the use of violence and the talk of people’s war? It took time for me to realize that this was no big deal. The issue was often raised in a classroom, coffee shop, or beerhouse, but that was taking it out of context. In the streets in 1970, the question could not be pondered in an academic way. If you participated in the parliament of the streets, sooner or later you would be involved in a bloody confrontation with the police. And if Manila was a battleground, in the countryside there simmered a continuing, if undeclared, class war.

      This war was an extension of centuries of agrarian conflict. Peasants fighting for land rights, or lower rent, or simply against eviction, have been confronted by landowners and their allies or hirelings: local governments, local police, the courts, the Philippine Constabulary, hired thugs, private armies, even other farm workers who had been bought off. Who could cite a case where courts, sheriffs, policemen, or militia went out of their way to support a peasant’s grievance? Do you wish to organize peasants to help them win concessions? Then you can be certain that your work at some point will be met with violence.

      The middle classes heard about confrontations between landowners and tenants on one or two specific estates but were shielded from the full scope of the violence. We should not have been asking, “Shouldn’t Christians turn their backs on violence?” but rather, “As Christians, you’re called to do your share in uplifting the sad lot of the poor and the oppressed. If you decide to go—out of your usual way—to help them, are you prepared to defend yourself and them?”¹

      THOUGH MY FEARS of the NatDems were fading, I did not want to join KM or SDK. They were still too red for me. Even with a KM member living in our apartment, my own brother Jan, I was in awe of them, seeing them as battalions of communist organizers seasoned by labor struggles.

      Thus, when I heard of some activist Protestants who were friends of Father Ed, I did not think twice about meeting them. Some of us in Catholic schools might have hesitated to work with Protestants, but it was only a fleeting obstacle for me. My father’s siblings were all Protestants; I had spent my childhood years in the neighborhood of Central Philippine University, founded by Protestant missionaries, and my best friend came from a devout Protestant family.

      At the office of the Student Christian Movement of the Philippines, the local chapter of an international youth organization affiliated with the World Council of Churches, I met Jurgette Honculada, Bernie’s friend from her days as a campus editor. It was just the right time to connect with this organization. An ecumenical group of its members, including Father Ed, Carlos (Caloy) Tayag, Elmer,² and some others, had begun to realign it to join the activist mainstream. A significant step they took was to change the name of the organization to the Tagalog translation of the original: Kilusang Kristiyano ng Kabataang Pilipino (3KP).

      I was surprised to discover how far ahead of Catholics local Protestants were in considering questions of faith and politics and translating their conclusions into action. They had been exposed to the ideas of liberation theology, imported from Latin America, long before Catholic religious in the Philippines heard about it. Chapters of the Student Christian Movement in Latin America had been deeply involved with victims of the repressive military governments of the time, and some of their members were being hunted by the military. There was no interest in liberation theology in other quarters in the Philippines until the 1970 student protests.

      I had met Jurgette’s husband, Ibarra (Bong) Malonzo, who was also part of the ecumenical group, in 1966 at the Silliman University Summer Writers Workshop. Bong was in Dumaguete to do work for KM (as I learned later) and wandered into an early session of our workshop, the event of the summer at the university, to see if he could get into some stimulating discussion on global political issues, such as the Bomb and the danger of nuclear winter. However, we workshop fellows were remarkably naïve about world affairs; we were concerned only with the structure of poems and the plots of short stories.

      When I met Bong again at the organization that was to become 3KP, I was awed by the depth of his and Jurgette’s experience and theological commitment. They explored the Christian-Marxist dialogue in earnest and were living their lives according to their beliefs. Apart from being an early KM member, Bong had experienced working with unions—his father was a veteran labor leader. He had been beaten by police at a picket and had spent time in jail. It was enough to convince me to join their organization.

      Since there were few warm bodies around at the start of the reorganization, I was put in charge of the education department. We drew up a curriculum for new members, including readings and discussions of Renato Constantino’s essays, SND, and articles on liberation theology. We started a newsletter called Breakthrough, which Jurgette edited expertly. One of the articles it carried, a primer on liberation theology by the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, was my constant companion in the days that followed. Breakthrough offered its readers an activist perspective. It published, more than a year before martial СКАЧАТЬ