Streetwise
By Carol Pagaduan-Araullo

Back where I started

The revolutionary ferment in the late sixties and early seventies reached a
historic peak in the First Quarter Storm of 1970. Students, many of them
from UP and the University Belt or U-belt in Manila, made up the huge bulk of
the demonstrators who massed in front of Congress against President Ferdinand Marcos' state of the nation address on January 25, 1970. Their brutal
dispersal by the police sparked a pitched battle in the streets leading up to
Malacañang wherein scores of fearless demonstrators rammed a fire truck into
the gate of the presidential palace in raging protest.

My brother, former Engineering student at UP who had just transferred to the
University of the East, was one of them. A UP freshman at the time, I
marveled at his youthful audacity even as I quailed at the thought that he
could have perished that night for a cause that was as yet nebulous to me.

The military and police armed assault on the UP campus in Diliman in February
1971, as students protested centavo increments in fuel prices and the “Seven
Sisters” international oil cartel, shattered all my remaining illusions about
the university’s ivory tower existence and the inviolability of academic
freedom. The experience of the Diliman Commune led to the opening up of my
mind and heart to revolutionary ideas and corresponding action.

A UP student’s possible reading selection included essays by various
progressive and liberal authors in the Philippine Collegian, Renato
Constantino’s nationalist writings, Jose Maria Sison’s Struggle for National
Democracy, Amado Guerrero’s Philippine Society and Revolution, Marxist books on political economy and philosophy and, of course, the staple of the
seventies activist, Selected Works of Chairman Mao. Most of this reading
fare, however, could not be found in the ordinary class syllabus.

Teach-ins, rallies, demonstrations and strikes on a whole slew of issues from
student welfare and democratic rights to the hottest issues of the day in the
national scene as well as “DGs” or discussion groups on the deeply-rooted
problems of the country – imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism as
the radical activists named them -- abounded.

By the time I ran for university councilor with the slate of the Sandigang
Makabansa in 1971 and again as vice-chair in 1972, I had left behind the
comfortable confines of UPSCA and its brand of half-baked political activism
as well as my notions of scholarship insulated from social realities.

Campus politics then became inevitably framed in the "moderates" vs “radicals”
contradiction. Most traditional organizations such as the Greek-letter
fraternities/sororities and well-entrenched groups like UPSCA aligned
themselves along these lines versus the national democratic or “nd” student
organizations. A political party or coalition’s stand not just on campus
issues but on national, especially political, issues became critical and
defining.

The government’s intelligence agencies, especially their psychological warfare
and dirty tricks departments, directly and indirectly intervened in campus
politics. They used red-scare and smear tactics that resulted in their
covertly-supported candidates winning the chair and vice-chair positions in
the hotly-contested 1971 elections but failed miserably the following year
when the “nd” activists scored a landslide victory just before the declaration
of martial law.

 

All these things were happening as the crisis in Philippine society further
developed and ripened, until the ruling elite, unable to rule in the old way
and led by an ambitious, wily and ruthless politician in the person of UP
alumnus Marcos, set up a US-backed fascist dictatorship with the declaration
of martial law on September 21, 1972.

Many student activists went underground or to the hills. Student councils,
school papers, all student organizations were banned. Students were not
allowed to congregate more than three at a time and college buildings were
literally fenced off with chicken and barbed wire. Security guards and
plainclothes military agents made sure that there would be a tight lid on any
rumblings of protest and activists were promptly apprehended if they dared
undertake any kind of mass action.

Some, like me, were arrested after a stint in the underground. In June 1973,
I had actually reenrolled after my mother had presented me to then UP
president S. P. Lopez, as a chastened student leader reconciled to the reality
of martial rule and the harsh constraints it imposed on everyone, including an
academic institution like UP, tagged as the hotbed of student radicalism.
Unfortunately, my family’s initial attempt to reintegrate me into a humdrum
existence in a suppressed UP was interrupted by arrest, interrogation, torture
and detention at the hands of the military.

After my release came the inevitable crossroad: go back to the underground or
back to school. My parents won out and even talked me into entering medical
school. They said I could be an activist in an acceptable way by becoming a
doctor; I could even have more than the humanitarian doctor’s usual share of
indigent patients. I thought about it in a slightly different way. I could
do revolutionary organizing among the poor while I went about my work as a
harmless-looking physician ministering to her patients.

In medical school, it was a struggle to keep one’s revolutionary political and
philosophical moorings and pass yet another grueling exam in human anatomy or physiology. For all medical students, it is a struggle to keep one’s
humanity; to be reminded that one is more than an empty vessel to be filled
with the lore of medical science by diligently attending classes and poking
one’s nose in one’s books or peering into our patients’ orifices.

For the truly humanitarian, and more so the activist, it was a struggle to
sustain one’s pro-people orientation and one’s ties with the masses. So that
you never forget what it all is for: service to the people. A key activity
was doing social immersion, i.e. living and working in rural and urban poor
communities, every opportunity we had, particularly during summer breaks.

Until graduation time and we reached yet another decision point: to go on for
another 3-5 year residency training program in a specialty and work in a
hospital or jump into general practice and do community-based public health
work. I chose the latter. I would fulfill my original reasons for becoming a
physician: to go back to working with, among and for the exploited and
oppressed and fight the dictatorship shielded by some kind of professional
credentials.

It didn’t take long before I found myself doing more political – i.e.
activist-political – work than work as a clinician. No matter. In UP medical
school and in the Philippine General Hospital, I learned firsthand that the
physical ills of our people will never be decisively healed without healing
first and foremost the ills of our chronically debilitated and crisis-ridden
society.#

 

Home