At the end of last school year, The Nightly sat down with students from Anakbayan UW, a Filipino-American student group fighting for national sovereignty and genuine democracy in the Philippines and building unity with the Filipino community at the University of Washington. The organization is currently working on several campaigns on and off campus—you can learn more here. 

Philippine Revolutionary History

What follows is an interview with a member of Anakbayan UW. Skip ahead to the section titled Anakbayan UW, to read more about the student organization.

Marcos Sr. (Pre-1986)

Ferdinand Marcos Sr. comes from a northern province, Ilocos Norte, and a wealthy background. He was a prominent lawyer before he ran for the presidency. It was the late 60s when he became president, and it was amidst a growing fervor not just in the Philippines but worldwide against imperialism. In that decade we saw so many revolutionary movements appear in various countries around the world including the Philippines. It arose because of this heightened and more explicit stage in this world crisis: inflation was skyrocketing, the US was in the middle of the Vietnam War and plunging the country into debt. Before Marcos even became president there was this burgeoning anti-imperialist movement, revolutionary movement in the Philippines that was largely active in the intellectual and academic circles where they started study groups. At the time of the recent developments in China, a lot of these movements were taking inspiration from that because they had defeated the capitalists. Their domestic forces that were subservient to the US and Britain and the colonial countries were defeated. And so they were given a lot of inspiration.

While that was happening, Marcos, with the backing of the US as all the previous presidents, became president. Within a couple of years of taking office, he declared martial law in 1972 on September 21st. There was a red herring or false flag, there was a bombing that happened when he was president. He scapegoated the growing revolutionary movement at the time which was the National Democracy movement … He used that as an excuse to declare martial law. The essence of martial law is military rule, curfew was implemented, habeas corpus was suspended, so anyone could be arrested without any due process and held indefinitely. Thousands of people during that time, especially activists, both legal activists and revolutionaries who were waging armed struggle were captured, tortured, and killed. These were tactics to quell this growing movement to achieve sovereignty from decades of US control and hundreds of years of Spanish colonization.

How did the US support Marcos I?

The most direct method (which continues today) was military aid. There were millions of dollars in gifts and loans from both the US and financial institutions controlled by the US, so that Marcos could buy weapons. There were also fake infrastructure projects that gave this facade that we were advancing as a society. Many of those projects never even got completed. And support even came in the form of weapons: guns and tanks and military equipment. And also there’s the diplomatic support, the US acknowledging the legitimacy of the puppet government.

What did it take to oust Marcos I?

It took what it continues to take today to oust any figurehead or representative of what we call the 3 basic problems: imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism. What will get these puppets or these lap dogs, as we call them tutas, out of office is organizing!

You need to really integrate into the community. You can have this really comprehensive analysis of the system and the international situation, but it's not really going to serve you unless that information is wielded by the community and by the people. So to organize is really taking that information, these objective truths about the way that things work and the way that things are and disseminating them among as many people as possible. Because the fact is that whether you support a fascist or imperialist or whatever, the majority of people are negatively impacted and exploited under this system, under imperialism, under capitalism, and in the Philippines primarily feudalism which continues to be the dominant economic system there.

It’s also partly a cultural war as much as it is a political battle. Going out to the community and not just confining yourself to a small group that calls for revolution. Meeting everyone where they are at and having the patience to do that education and actually learn from the people which is actually more primary. Because in order to communicate things effectively you need to know what people’s lives are like, the particularities. So that’s what I mean by integrating with communities. Like being out there and producing people’s propaganda. Be with the most exploited people and unite with all the other oppressed peoples, even intellectuals, even academics, and to some extent even smaller capitalists that have to compete with the monopoly capitalists who have a stake in sweeping changes. You need to do that kinda organizing work, humble yourself and be where the people are at and help realize the fact that things can only change if ppl band together with political unity and a shared vision. Maintaining that optimism because it’s really easy to be disheartened when you learn about the actual truths about exploitation and oppression.

Marcos Jr.

In May of 2022, Ferdinand Marcos’ son Bongbong Marcos Jr. took power as President of the Philippines. At the same time, Sara Duterte became Vice President. Duterte is the daughter of the previous president who opened up indigenous land to extractive industries and prosecuted his opposition as ‘terrorists.’ In all ways, this presidency is set up to be the continuation of their parents’ regimes. The election results are still highly contentious and there are multiple accusations of election fraud that remain up in the air.

How did Marcos II Get Elected?

To my knowledge it is true that a lot of people did vote for him, so the question is like why did people vote against their self-interest. It relates to the importance of realizing people’s power and their collective ability to create change, but first they need to see that change is needed. Basically activists have to get to people first and win this information war.

To my knowledge Marcos won because of many reasons, but a big one is that after his father and his family was ousted, they still maintained a lot of wealth. There was a state agency that was created to reacquire a lot of their stolen wealth like artifacts, and high value objects and properties, they still maintained much more wealth than any person in the Philippines or any person in the world will ever make.

Since the 80s when their family was ousted they were able to use those resources to fund disinformation campaigns, the form of which with all this technology also evolved. In recent decades, that looked like hiring troll armies to go on Facebook and spread all this disinformation. Facebook is actually where a majority of Filipinos, especially older Filipinos are active. And actually in the Philippines, across all age groups Facebook is the most common platform. I don’t mean to go into statistics, but the Philippines is in the top 4 or 5 highest number of Facebook users. Because of limited access to media sources, they get a lot of information and news from Facebook which is as we know monopolist.

So they have troll armies, there are tons of videos and content creators revising history, saying “oh the Marcos’ wealth wasn’t stolen, they actually inherited it from this golden bullion that was gifted to them when Marcos was a lawyer, before he was president.

For decades, they have been able to put that money into disinformation in a lot of different forms. Not just online but even personnel and in local government, propagating and putting out messages in support of the Marcoses and revising history in person.

I think one maybe more discreet way that he was able to win and continues to go unchallenged by the institutions in the Philippines by the government itself or like internally is when Lenny lost, she basically you know okay she mobilized so many people. When she lost she basically demobilized her supporters, saying, ‘it was a fair fight let's not fight anymore’ and she went off and started her own, you know non-profit basically.  I think that's a more discreet way than kind of allowing Marcos’ presidency and administration to go unchecked at least by you know those in the government who might be opposed and also everyday people who didn't want him there. It’s nothing against the supporters of Lenny but yeah anyway.

One last thing I want to mention which is actually more important than the money part is the US acknowledging the legitimacy of the elections and not questioning or making any effort to validate the votes. If you're a president who is legitimized by the US, you have diplomatic immunity. Clearly Biden, and his whole administration has an interest in keeping the Philippines where it’s at, and even worsening it.

What has Marcos Jr. done since being elected?

What we have seen, since he's taking office, is skyrocketing inflation. There was this kind of media trend about the price of onions, and I'm forgetting the figures, but it cost more to buy onions than it did even more basic items. With inflation like there are constant mobilizations from people who are acknowledging and speaking out against this and demanding change, but there's also the devaluation of the Philippine peso prior to his election it was in the 50s for US dollar, and now it's obviously weakens the purchasing power and their ability to buy the things that they need to survive.

The way that the economy is set up, a lot of products, like rice, are actually imported. The Philippines is a huge exporter of rice but actually what people are able to afford or like what they're able to buy comes from other countries in the region.  It's what we call export-dependent import-oriented. It’s been designed so that the economy and the people's needs are completely dependent on foreign goods and companies. Which obviously doesn’t allow the country to feed itself and gives kickbacks to the big capitalists, landlords, and the politicians who are enacting such policies.

We've seen increasing violence against activists and revolutionaries in the countryside and even more egregious violence against peace negotiators. Those representing the revolutionary movement waging armed struggle in the countryside were under a previous agreement called the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law, which is an international humanitarian law agreement basically saying you know peace negotiated should be untouchable. Many of these negotiators are older and they are all unarmed. These are non-militants even though they represent the interests of the revolutionary movement. There has been an increase in their capture and torture and murder. There was Eric Sinacosta last November who was in the middle of consulting with peasant organizers in the countryside. Amidst negotiations the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) busted in, captured him, tortured him, and murdered him. This is following years of on and off arrests of him and the cold-blooded murder of his wife who was also a revolutionary. 

He (Marcos) continues to expand the NTF-ELCAC, the National Taskforce to End Localized Communist Armed Conflict, which is the enforcement agency that consolidates all civil institutions in the country to enact its counter-insurgency program against not just militants and armed revolutionaries, but also legal activists, even against Bayan, Anakbayan, Gabriela and Migrante. We have been experiencing constant attacks in the Philippines, but also overseas here.

When we conducted the interview in Spring of 2023 Marcos was visiting the US. We asked about this.

Marcos is in New York to peddle our people and our resources to the US and those transnational US corporations. BBM’s father Marcos Sr. enacted what is called the Labor Export Policy, which is the institutionalization of the literal exportation of our people’s labor. Nursing and caregiving are some of the biggest occupations that people are systematically sent out of the country for. There are kickbacks within these agencies and the remittances that those family members send back to their families back home, who are hungry, are taxed. Remittances are actually a huge percentage of the GDP in the Philippines coming from remittances.

BBM is in the US to expand and further root the labor export policies, his father’s policy, to export our people. Saying ‘we’ll send more nurses,’ and ‘we’ll privatize more of our public utilities,’ is a very cyclical thing, because as the conditions in the Philippines worsen, more of our people see no other option but to leave the country to send money back home. Many will go to school for nursing and these occupations that are seen as promising subsidence.

Could you tell us more about the US military bases in the Philippines?

For multiple reasons, economic and military (we all know of the rising tensions between the US and China) the US has established new bases (in the Philippines.)

(US presence exists) under an agreement signed in the 90s after Marcos was ousted, (and later through) EDCA, the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. It was after there was a mass uprising that kicked US Military bases out, at least on paper. But EDCA followed it, which allowed the US to utilize facilities in the Philippines for whatever they want. In practice it’s basically military bases.

The negative impacts on the people are continuing violence against women. A very well known example is the murder of Jennifer Laude, a trans woman who was murdered by Joseph Pemberton who was a US marine. Wherever you see US military presence, especially around their bases you’ll see violence against women.

The US has for a long time sent military advisors if not troops on the ground in the conflict zones. There will be US military trainers and advisors. Even in a town hall, Adam Smith talked about his visit to the Philippines. He said why would we want to cut military aid, we need to be there, so we can train the AFP to fight ‘terrorists.’ He’s talking about the people, land defenders, and the active armed struggle being waged by the CPP and the NPA. That’s another form of negative impact on the people because it’s a direct attack on a people’s movement waging a just war for change to kick out the imperialists and the local rulers.

Could you tell us more about armed resistance in the Philippines?

Armed resistance is a huge part of our people’s history and identity, even dating back to Spanish colonization. Most of them were not successful, because they were not national movements, they were really broken apart and easy to divide and defeat. It’s important to know that in the context of the ongoing armed struggle now being waged by the CPP, because it comes from a long tradition and lessons learned from these past revolutions and uprising. The current armed struggle just had its 54th anniversary, and a lot of people who are adverse to armed struggle will say, “why don’t they just give up, so many people have died for this, and it hasn’t won,” even people who used to be part of it and have turned away, understandably for different reasons.

In response to that, the way I think we should look at protracted armed struggles is that, it’s not 54 years of defeat, it’s 54 years of resisting relentless attacks by an advisory that is armed by the most powerful and financed military in the world. The current armed struggle has been able to continue to grow, and it has had a lot of mistakes in its early development. Trying to unite millions of people to coordinate across 7000 islands to kick out the ruling class is not a straightforward task. A lot of people carry into whatever space they enter (whether that’s an armed force or a student organization) everyone carries baggage that they learned and inherited from the existing system. That’s not something that changes overnight. The armed struggle has been able to persist through all the attacks and also internal battles. Many people have died, and it’s also for a just cause and the NPA and the CPP are completely voluntary organization and the majority of them are composed of peasantry, the most exploited class in the Philippines, which is to say, it continues because the issues remain, and they’re worsening, and more and more people are joining and participating in many different ways because the situation has not gotten better it’s gotten worse.

Armed struggle is the decisive factor. You can’t overthrow a centralized force such as the ruling class without armed struggle. Because, throughout history, the ruling class has always armed themselves and amassed immense wealth to fund those arms and their military, by stealing from the people. It’s not like they're just going to say “millions of people are unhappy, ok, let’s give them what they want,” right! It’s never worked that way.

Overseas Workers, the Filipino Diaspora, and Supporting Campus Workers

In our analysis, the reason why our diaspora exists in the first place is because either ourselves or somewhere along our lineage we were forced out of the Philippines due to the conditions. Because despite the immense wealth of resources, to feed the world several times over, people haven’t gotten access to that. It's always been exported or used to serve very few people. 

Going back to your question of what it takes to oust Marcos, just because we aren’t in the Philippines doesn’t mean we don’t have any power. There’s over 4 million Filipinos in the US, it’s one of the highest concentrations of overseas Filipinos in any country and there’s 160k Filipinos in Washington State (which is to say there’s a lot of Filipinos here who have a stake in National Democracy in the Philippines) to change the conditions that forced them out in the first place, why many of them are thousands of miles away from their families.

We believe that it’s through building unity between all sectors of our people, that we can build collective power to support the movement, the National Democratic Struggle in the Philippines. One of the places it starts is integrating with the exploited peoples. In our area, it’s those who are our compatriots (or what we call kababayan) who are working highly manual jobs and being highly exploited.

As we found out at UWMC in the food service in the cafeteria, there are all sorts of labor practices that don't just affect Filipinos, but do affect a lot of Filipinos (the majority of older Filipino workers are migrants and OFW’s, or overseas Filipino workers)

We need to build political consciousness and link the exploitation (workers) are experiencing to the larger system at play, which is way larger than any single workplace. That takes a lot of time and relationship building.

Anakbayan UW

A Philippine flag flies over UW’s Red Square at an Anakbayan rally.

“This launch of ABUW, for us, is our commitment to defending the rights of welfare for all Filipinos at the University of Washington. Whether it’s the health care workers, the food service workers, or the custodians, that came here for a better life and continue to experience the exploitation that they came here to escape. We are committed to advancing the anti-war movement, the anti-imperialist movement and call on all Filipino and non-Filipino youth to join us in this fight for the Filipino working class but really for all the working class in the United States and Around the world.” -  ABUW Chapter President at Chapter launch event in spring of 2023.

In our next interview with the ABUW Vice Chair, we talked about what ABUW does and what it hopes to do in the future.

So as far as what’s next for ABUW, I think, campaigns! One of our major campaigns and that's actually a campaign that's being waged nationally by Anakbayan USA is called, take back our education. The campaigns are essentially in response to the increased neoliberal privatization of our education and the increasing costs of education for us and decreasing services that are making it less and less accessible to get an education. Neoliberal privatization also makes the education that we get less mass oriented and less pro-people.

So what’s next for ABUW is really looking for ways to take back our education and do that on the UW campus. Recognizing the ways on this campus that we face the negative outcomes of the privatization of our education and fighting back against those so that we can achieve education that’s pro-people and mass oriented, for Filipino students but also for all students at the University

It’s important to note that this take back our education campaign seeks to address the daily issues that we here are facing as Filipino and non-filipino UW students, but we need to keep in mind that this neoliberal privatization is the manifestation of a larger system that also affects our homeland it’s not separate. So we, as Filipino UW students we’re not separate from our Kababayan, our compatriots back home, who are facing US imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism as they manifest themselves in the Philippines.

At our launch we talked about how since the early 2000s the percentage of UW’s budget that has come from the state has decreased from 2/3rds in 2003 to just 1/3rd in 2018. That corresponded to a 66 percent increase in tuition adjusted for inflation. That’s the state sending less of our money to services for the people and instead to other things. And of course as we know our state sends money to things like war with subsidies for Boeing, etc.

Methods

There’s like book leftists like people who read a lot of theory and then they sort of go talk about it. I think that reading theory is great, yes read theory! But there’s no substituting going and just being with the workers. Just going and saying hi and building relationships with the workers. Because they understand the problems that they are facing that’s deeper than just reading it from a book. Not to say that they understand maybe this crazy theory, but I’m trying to say that there’s a certain baseline love for the people that’s oftentime unlocked when you integrate with the workers and is hard to unlock too. And ultimately it’s a big prioritization for us to go be with the masses as ABUW organizers. And so we bring that love for the people and a lot of us are workers as well, we bring that to any discussion that we have. 

What that means for ABUW, is that it’s not just students who are in ABUW, it’s also workers, we’re all youth, but we’re also workers. We do a lot of work to talk to workers and integrate with workers. Because historically student movements do not succeed unless they are deeply integrated with workers and if you’re in the Philippines the peasants as well. So we understand as ABUW that we need to be integrated in the lives of the workers and to uplift their struggles and see that our struggles as students and workers and oftentimes student workers (because we have to make money to survive) are deeply interconnected and ultimately one and the same. 

How is ABUW planning to implement direct mutual aid into organizing efforts?

It might seem like ABUW is focused on a high level struggle, struggle against capitalism, imperialism, and the military and stuff like that, which is true. But also we understand that to build a mass movement that can effectively challenge those big systems is to build community and to build a mass movement, build organizations, and build a culture within those spaces that is capable of challenging those systems and meeting the everyday needs of the people. I’m thinking about various revolutionary movements that ultimately their focus was on bringing down some big system but really on the day to day it looked like doing mutual aid, serving the people, and building consciousness along the way, and people power. I don’t think it’s something that we’ve explored on a programmatic level yet, but I do think that mutual aid in various definitions of the word is something that ABUW will consider.

I haven’t thought a lot about it but any sort of mutual aid that we do is also going to be a chance to build people power. We’re not just gonna be doing mutual aid without building a movement. I’m thinking through our campaigns right now, and I can think of a way that mutual aid and serving the people in a very literal sense would be important. 

We’ve engaged in various forms of serving the people and also at the same time raising consciousness, building connections and building a mass-movement through the conduct of mutual aid and the networks that form out of mutual aid. As students, we come from all sorts of backgrounds, there are students who are workers, there are students who experience a lot of student debt and have to pay their way through college. There are thousands of working class UW students and hundreds of Filipino working class UW students. And as students from various backgrounds we want to serve each other but also serve the workers. I’m thinking of various things we’ve been involved in in the past like the UW Custodian project. It’s not something that I’ve thought about a lot or the org has a lot either because you’re right there are so many definitions of what people consider mutual aid and I don’t wanna speak for our whole organization. But in general it’s one of our core tenets to serve the people and not in an abstract way, in a concrete way, and build a mass movement doing it.