It was the night of January 30, 1970, and the Battle of Mendiola was in full swing: on one side, the state’s fascist forces, and on the other, inspired young radicals motivated by their vision of a just and free society. The carnage extended on to the early hours of the next day, as the furious students besieged Malacañang. The state responded decisively, and in the end, four students died at the hands of state forces.
Earlier that day, though, as a foreshadowing to the night’s bloodbath, another group of idealistic students were meeting with the chief tyrant. Their leader: Edgar Jopson, President of the Ateneo Sanggunian and President of the National Union of Students of the Philippines. But Jopson got himself in trouble in the meeting: he had the gall to persuade the eventual dictator to declare in writing that he wouldn’t seek another presidential term.
Incensed, the president picked on Jopson for the way he spoke, and famously derided him as a mere “son of a grocer.” So much for belittlement, though—Marcos didn’t know then that this bold student leader, then a Management Engineering undergrad in the Ateneo, would eventually end up as a highly effective and committed cadre of the underground resistance to the regime.
Jopson, in fact, stuck to his convictions to the very end, and like many in his generation, paid the ultimate price for it. On September 21, 1982—exactly 10 years after the signing of Martial Law—Jopson, then head of the underground Mindanao Commission, was killed during a military raid in Davao.Forgotten freedom fighters
Sanitized heroes
Asked if he knew any Atenean heroes, Mark*, a sophomore, readily names Jose Rizal and Ninoy Aquino. Asked, however, if he knew Edgar Jopson and the other Atenean martyrs of Martial Law, Mark simply says no.
Mark doesn’t remember having been told about them in school. In contrast, he says Ateneo played a big part in his knowledge about Rizal and Ninoy.
“I knew [from my old school] that Rizal wrote novels, and Ninoy died for the country,” Mark says, “but the importance given to [the two heroes] wasn’t as great as compared to [the importance given here in] the Ateneo.”
Lisandro Claudio, Loyola Schools Valedictorian for 2007, and a lecturer on leave for the History Department, recognizes this situation.
“We love heroes associated with the Philippine Revolution,” he says. “Since we cannot easily connect their radicalism to ideologies and organizations that are visible today, it’s easy for us to remember them in a sanitized way.”
“[That’s] not something you can do for Jopson, who was a cadre of the Communist Party of the Philippines,” he explains.
“I suspect the case of [downplaying Jopson’s heroism] is not just the typical anti-Communist red-baiting,” he says. “I suspect it reflects a deeper apprehension on the part of [University President Bienvenido] Nebres about a certain form of national engagement.”
Commemoration
The Atenean martyrs and heroes of Martial Law have actually been honored and recognized by the school in different occasions. According to Nebres, the Ateneo Heroes Memorial Committee has already enshrined the radical activists and underground fighters from the Martial Law era. Also, back in 2007, a book was launched to celebrate the lives of Ateneo’s 11 Martial Law martyrs, remembering their time in the school and in the movement.
Nevertheless, as the case of Mark and other interviewed students demonstrate, there is no wide knowledge of Jopson and of the other heroes from his generation among Ateneo’s students today.
Differing views
For Claudio, the lesser prominence ascribed to Jopson and his contemporaries results from a change in the institutional paradigm for nation-building.
“Fr. Nebres has come to regret the activism of the 1970s,” he says. “He doesn’t like forms of activism that directly challenge the state…The emphasis [now] is on working with the government instead.”
“This tendency of Fr. Nebres manifests in multiple ways. First, he has a predisposition for direct and immediate—for me, stopgap—interventions, the most obvious of which is Gawad Kalinga (GK),” he says. “There is a sad irony in all of this. For many student activists in the ‘70s, Fr. Nebres was an inspiration.”
Nebres, however, defends his change in outlook over the years.
“Why put an emphasis on building homes, jobs for the poor, rather than on advocacy and protest, the activism of the 1970s?” he poses. “Perhaps the best answer would be to look at China…If you visit China, what you envy today is not the revolutionary movement of the earlier decades, but a China that is building roads, railroads, jobs, prosperity for its people.”
“China has moved on,” he says. “If I have changed perspective, it is because we too have to move on.”
Nebres also counters Claudio’s views on GK. “[GK] is a step towards a more cost-effective and more wide-ranging housing program for the poor in conjunction with government,” he contends.
Cultural changes
During Martial Law, Nebres distinguished himself from some Jesuits and administrators who collaborated with the regime. In fact, Claudio says that the Office of Social Concern and Involvement (OSCI) was Nebres’ pet project as College Dean.
Claudio highlights a change in OSCI, however, and says that the OSCI of the ‘70s and ‘80s was more radical than today’s OSCI. “They not only took people to places where there was suffering; they took people to places where there was systematic injustice,” he says.
Nebres, on the other hand, asserts the necessity for this change. “Times change and the challenge of every generation is to recognize, articulate, and respond to the challenges of its time,” he says. “In the 1970s, we faced a repressive martial law regime and resistance and protest were the proper and heroic response…But by the early 1990s, [we] realized that we had fallen far behind [our neighbours] and the times challenged us to build.”
This is exactly the nation-building paradigm that Claudio blames for the downplaying of Ateneo’s Martial Law freedom fighters.
“What I call Fr. Nebres’ GK mentality reflects on how we remember heroes,” Claudio explains. “We don’t like heroes who’d probably be predisposed to challenging GK politics. Because definitely, Bill Begg, Edgar Jopson, Manny Yap, etc., would say you cannot just build houses. Band aid lang ‘yan. (That’s just a bandage).”
Social cancer
This is all very unfortunate for Claudio.
“It saddens me,” he says, “because who we remember and how we remember them has an impact on how our students think. I read someone write on the Ateneo website, ‘the makibaka politics of the ‘70s are now over.’ Aray.”
“But what is ‘makibaka politics,’ anyway?” Claudio poses. “For me, it’s an acknowledgement that change in our country relies in challenging the system.”
As a reply, Nebres says, “Many of the leaders of the 1970s who challenged the system had the opportunity in 1986 to transform [it]. If there is one lesson we learned, it is that transforming the system and making it work is much harder than simply challenging it.”
Still, Claudio emphasizes the presence of a social cancer that Rizal articulated. “That cancer exists until today,” he says. For him, the activism of Jopson, Begg, Yap, and other similar Ateneans is the appropriate response to combat such a cancer.
Men for others
In a book about Ateneo’s experiences under Martial Law, former Academic Vice President Antonette Palma-Angeles admits, “Student activists were not always well received in the Ateneo, for they questioned our traditions, disturbed our complacency, and even set us against each other while they were with us.”
“But now, 30 years or so after the declaration of Martial Law, we see with a clarity enhanced by time,” she says, “that these young men did indeed absorb the best of our lessons to them, giving [their lives] up for justice, truly living as men-for-others.”
Today, such a debate still rages on. Indeed, how do you best engage a suffering nation? The answers vary, the approaches diverge, and people tend to get lost in the rhetoric and forget the dramatic events of a few decades ago.
It has been 28 years now since a son of a grocer paid with his life for challenging a dictator. It is so easy to take the efforts of this man and his comrades for granted, and yet, if not for their great sacrifices, we would not be enjoying any of the freedoms we have today.
*Name has been changed to protect the individual
[…] when I was an editor of The GUIDON (Ateneo’s official school paper), we did a story on Ateneo’s “Forgotten freedom fighters.” Today’s students know little of the university’s Martial Law heroes. Lisandro […]