Heroes of Press Freedom: The underground press in the time of Marcos
Heroes of Press Freedom
The underground press in the time of Marcos
Silent Warriors of the Pen
By Carolina S. Malay
Shortly after the declaration of martial law in 1972, underground newspapers popped up everywhere. Crudely printed and sharply critical, they angrily called on their readers to rise up in revolutionary resistance to the “U.S.-Marcos dictatorship.” (Everyone agreed that it wasn’t “US” but “them” and so it was always “U.S.” That was indeed a time when it was easy to agree on what to say and do.)
The existence of the underground press indicates that organized resistance to martial law went into action right away. There was no circumspect waiting to see where the chips would fall or which way the wind was blowing.
The underground press then was made up of young people with nothing to lose but their lives. Packed into UG (underground) houses in Metro Manila and other urban centers, these eager volunteers for deployment to various guerrilla zones in the countryside poured their energies into composing poetry when they were not reporting, writing, and distributing the news and opinions that were forbidden stuff in the country’s “mainstream” print and broadcast media.
They were sent wherever they were needed, preferably in places where they spoke even just a little of the language and where there were people they were probably related to. Once there, they would link up with other local activists, many of them students, too. For self-defense, there were old pistols and rusty rifles, maybe a hand grenade or two.
These “armed propaganda units” (also known as SYP) roamed the villages, moving from one safe place to another, engaging the people in give-and-take dialogues on their problems and the nation’s problems, eating what was on the table, sleeping under the same mosquito nets, helping out in the fields or inside the house, playing with the children. They helped thresh out what needed to be done, and how.
In the process, these teams acted as reporters from the field, feeding stories to the regional underground newspaper while distributing copies of the newspaper and discussing their contents. In time, the papers were being run by small editorial staffs, some of them rural-based.
Changing the world
In the urban centers, too, there were territory-based publications (e.g., in Manila, Cebu, Davao) and those that were sector-based (factory workers, college teachers, students, artists, liberation theologians, etc.). In Manila, professional journalists and campus writers put together a news service.1
All these, we knew, were part of the vast undertaking that was the effort to politicize the masa, and make them self-aware, organize and empower them to “change the world” while bringing about the protracted version of “regime change” from below.
Since higher education deprived many Filipinos of literacy in their own language, a handful of titles were published in English. But Tagalog/Filipino, Ilokano, Bikol, Bisaya, Samarnon, and Ilonggo were considered equally important, if not more so. Practical considerations, not intellectual debates, decided how language was to be used. Each one freely borrowed new words and adopted modern spellings. Underground journalists had to make themselves understood and supported by their audience— for after all, as “full-timers” in the movement, they depended completely on the masa to feed and protect them.
You took care of your portable manual typewriter (Olivetti was the best), but when electric typewriters came around—the ones that did automatic right-margin align-ments and made very little noise—you loved them, not knowing that computers that did everything else better would be available in less than 10 years.
Because we were so low-tech, I guess so many of us learned to be patient and painstaking. Imagine cutting wax stencils on a portable typewriter, trying to avoid typing mistakes because “serving the people” included being the most skillful typist possible. Imagine stippling each masthead by hand. Try using the silk-screen (“V-type” or Vietnam-type) to print hundreds of copies and hanging them to dry. Meanwhile, houses in middle-class subdivisions also served as secret editorial offices and mimeographing plants.
Reams of paper had to be procured, as well as boxes of stencils, blue film for the silk-screening, and tubes of mimeographing ink. Fathers were pressed into service as drivers for delivery vans carrying the contraband papers. Mothers went from mailbox to mailbox, dropping a few envelopes at a time. In these days of text messaging and e-mail, such details now sound quaint.
The spirit survives
But even after bigger and more mainstream papers started to appear (the ones that were printed on industrial presses like Joe Burgos’s We Forum), the underground media continued to serve its audience. In fact, there was synergy between it and the “alternative” press, whose audience was mainly urban and middle-class. After 1986, the “alternative” joined the mainstream and consequently, the latter is not simply a restored version of the pre-martial law press.
The spirit of that time has managed to survive today—in the refusal of the press to take the establishment at its word and the impinging of people’s issues on story line-ups—even as we resent the fluff of infotainment and the sweet temptations of a corrupt system.
What also survives, unhappily, is the tendency for the lives of crusading journalists to be short. During martial law, torture and even death awaited those caught while typing away at night, or who carelessly allowed copies to peek out of their bags while being subjected to a spot inspection. Statistics would show, however, that more journalists today than in the past are being killed in the line of duty. Truly, every inch of the democratic space that we have won through sacrifice and struggle needs to be defended continually, even at tremendous cost.
One can see the names of some of these journalists engraved in stone at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani memorial site in Quezon City. They include Joe Burgos, Babes Calixto, Jack Peña, and Ditto Sarmiento. Others honored there as martyrs also wrote, although writing was not their principal contribution to the anti-Marcos resistance: Tony Tagamolila, Voltaire Garcia, and Letty Ladlad. Then there are the relatively better-known names published by the alternative media.
Nieva and the great escape
But there were so many in the underground press whose real names we never even knew, for anonymity was the rule. And then there were those who learned their “5Ws and 1H” on the run (eventually a manual was put together just for this purpose).
I will always remember Roz Galang, former Manila Times reporter, who immersed herself with passion among the workers and their communities. And I must mention Tony Nieva who, as president of the National Press Club in 1985, played a significant role in Satur Ocampo’s successful escape from over nine years of detention by the military. In many quiet ways, Nieva kept the flame of resistance alive among colleagues in the media.
At a time when many of us are under the impression that we are stuck with the same old problems from the dark ages of our history, it is a source of pride to observe that the best journalists of today come from a long tradition of critical partisanship that makes Philippine media a major player in the attainment of democracy for the many. And, as democracy indeed demands, being critical and being partisan don’t rule each other out.
1 – A comprehensive listing of these publications still needs to be done, and for purposes of this article I have decided not to attempt constructing one from my own faltering memory. The National Library should still be keeping archives gathered by the late librarian Carol Afan. The UP Main Library also has materials in a special collection, the Philippine Radical Papers.
After spending years with the underground movement during the Marcos regime and the subsequent Aquino administration, Carolina S. Malay taught journalism at the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication.
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