[OPINION] The activism of Alyssa Alano

The painful demise of Alyssa Alano, her comrades, and several of their New People’s Army (NPA) hosts has sparked a fierce propaganda war between the Left and the Right. They clash over why these activists were in Toboso, Negros Occidental (to do research on rural poverty vs. taking the first steps to join the maquis), the nature of the military clash (legitimate encounter vs. massacre), and what the consequences should be (State and civil society investigation vs. praise for a counterinsurgency operation).

The exchanges have been sullied by trash talk and irresponsible insinuations, especially from the Right. The Left, too, is quick to conclude and condemn. The middle, as always, is confused and bemoans the deaths, while imploring the government to investigate (assuming the State is truly objective, which it is not), and criticizing the Left’s hasty inferences.

The Left has the moral high ground in these nasty exchanges since it was young people, not aging revolutionaries, who were killed by government bullets. Alyssa’s death has become symbolic, serving as a flashpoint for discussions about youth engagement in activism and the costs of political conflict.

For many, Alyssa and the others are not just statistics; they are the embodiment of a generation’s hopes, fears, and political choices. Only the most callous would relish their deaths.

However, by insisting she was only an innocent researcher, exercising her right to explore social issues, the Left also refuses to acknowledge the possibility that she was at Toboso to deepen her political commitment.

Opportunity missed

Instead of becoming the Lorena Barros of her generation, Alyssa is now tagged as just a dutiful UP student applying her research skills to a worsening rural world. Rather than being the Nona del Rosario or Nanette Vytiaco of her era, she is cast by her admirers as a merely socially curious activist. And instead of being the radical luminary of her time, Alyssa is seen as a witty, ordinary Joan, indistinct from other Diliman habitue.

The Left has missed the chance to present Alyssa as a hero, a symbol of the movement for social change.

This tentativeness to call Alyssa what she was — an activist possibly deciding between returning to academia and going to law school, or someone thinking of joining the maquis — reflects real fears of being red-tagged. However, avoiding this acknowledgment muddies their message and weakens the movement’s public narrative.

MORE ON THE TOBOSO 19

• In the Public Square: Understanding Toboso
• [OPINION] On the Toboso encounter, Alyssa Alano, and the question of justice
• [OPINION] After the Toboso encounters: The discourse this nation needs
• [Pinoy Criminology] Radicals and extremists: Is there a distinction?

The Left even contradicts itself, which makes things further confusing. On May 1, for example, activists celebrated Workers’ Day with portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao displayed before their marches. Academics and students praised Jose Maria Sison by delivering lectures in forums and commemorations about the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founder. No “progressive” or militant has criticized the NPA’s killing of a 74-year-old spy in Negros weeks before Toboso, nor suggested there are ways other than armed struggle to seize power.

The Left cannot have its cake and eat it too.

It likewise raises another set of questions: why allow the Right to dominate propaganda when the CPP-NPA professes to represent the interests of the poor and proletariat? Alternatively, why not act on Marx and Engels’ demand in the Manifesto, that communists “disdain to conceal their views and aims” and openly “declare their belief in overturning all existing social conditions by force”?

Looking back at the storm

There is precedent here. After the bloody street battles of the First Quarter Storm of 1970, hundreds of moderates and apolitical students turned radical. They embraced the new communist party’s national democratic revolution and eagerly read Philippine Society and Revolution’s (PSR) first editions (then titled “On Our Current Crisis”) in the Philippine Collegian. They called for “people’s war” inside campus and in marches and demonstrations. They even renamed UP buildings after CPP leaders Amado Guerrero and Kumander Dante.

All these they did despite the objective fact that the CPP was still small, organizationally weak, and largely limited to the petit bourgeois.

This was optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect, at its utmost — something that would have made Antonio Gramsci proud.

And when Lorena Barros, Nona del Rosario, and Nanette Vytiaco decided to join the nascent NPA at a young age (Lorena was in her late 20s) and died, their grieving comrades praised their revolutionary commitment. There were no excuses nor feigned allusions that they loved the masses and just wanted to study their conditions.

So it comes as a surprise that today’s generation appears ignorant of this precedent, where their elders “disdain[ed] to conceal their views and aims,” and “openly declare[d] that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”


Debates about combatant status distract from the real issue: honoring what her activism meant to her. And there is likewise reason to suspect  that Alyssa and her comrades were in Toboso not just for research or to engage in guerrilla tourism.

The Quitoriano interview

The February 7 interview by Rappler host John Nery of former Mindanao NPA guerrilla Eddie Quitoriano raises that possibility. As Quitoriano puts it, the Party’s urban committees send students to the guerrilla zones to boost their militance, while the NPA welcomes them in the hope that some will join the guerrilla unit.

We do not know if Alyssa was invited or entertained the idea of staying in Negros. Maybe she really needed to study the dire state of Toboso’s communities. But as Quitoriano tells Nery early on in the interview, if one wants to just know the conditions of the poor, one immerses herself with the communities inside. If one spends quality time with the maquis, then it is most likely to be made aware of the mechanics of the armed struggle. And if one accidentally meets an NPA unit while doing social investigation of communities, this should only be fleetingly for obvious security reasons.

Reducing her to an activist/civilian innocently caught in the middle of a firefight diminishes the meaning of her radical commitment. Alyssa, like an earlier student activist who also met the same fate, Rachelle Mae Palang, had already committed herself to fighting for the poor, the deprived, and the oppressed. The NPA honored Palang by naming a command after her. I am not sure if Alyssa will be granted the same stature after she has been classified as just a quotidian undergrad.

And there is nothing more pleasing to the eyes of the blood-thirsty elements of the State than to deny the nobility of her act.

Revolution@2026

Perhaps there is merit in keeping her confined to that narrow role. For there are several features that distinguish today’s generation of activists and radicals from their ancestors.

This generation is the product of a split and is engaged in reviving a movement that has never returned to its prime. They are products of sectarian infighting and rely on Sison’s exiled summations about the 1980s and 1990s, which led to the CPP’s near downfall. They have not produced new intellectuals to assess a changing Philippine political economy since Sison wrote PSR. The Revolution’s “bible” is outdated, analytically weak, and obsolete as political guidance.

The grandsons and granddaughters of the FQS generation confront a political system that may still be anchored on the three “isms,” but now has an entirely different corporeal form.

The political economy is a re-empowered cacique democracy, dominated by resilient, hegemonic regional and provincial clans (not just landlords), old Marcos elites, and an economy powered by the service sector — partly based abroad, and partly serving American consumers by night. Agriculture now contributes only 7–9 percent of GDP; not much of a “social base of imperialism” or a reliable “rear base” for the NPA. Japanese, Singaporean, and South Korean capitals are the faces of “imperialism” in the country, not the United States.

Technology and new tactics have improved the counterinsurgency. Drones, night vision, and stronger rural intelligence give the Armed Forces of the Philippines an edge over an NPA whose top technological “breakthrough” remains the improvised explosive device (IED). The former proved to be very effective in dismantling the guerilla bases in Mindanao, once the host to the CPP’s largest NPA units. The guerrilla army’s Mindanao Command is now narrowly based in North Cotabato and environs, some of whose safety is being guaranteed by the Islamic MILF.

‘Tatak UP’

Even the University of the Philippines (UP) — the supposed training ground of revolutionaries — has changed. Its liberal side is dying as fraternities, who now rule UP, push STEM and economic service, sacrificing humanities and social sciences (the College of Arts and Letters, home to UP’s largest program, English, has lacked a building for over a decade). Even contemplative intellectual life has withered: the main library, Gonzalez Hall, stays closed and won’t reopen until 2030.

No less than the current UP president is at his most honest best when he declared on July 15, 2025: “I stake my presidency on the College of Engineering,” calling the College of Engineering the future “powerhouse of transformative research and national development.” Any one of his fans and former comrades should disabuse themselves of the belief that this ex-activist is still inspired by the radical critical thinking he learned from his humanities and social science professors.

It does not help that its academics and alumni continue to brag about the “critical thinking” that is the “tatak UP.” It is not.

For every radical Alyssa, there are hundreds who appreciate the logic and method of becoming rich and corporate. Enrollment in departments teaching, say, Marxism or even nationalism, is minuscule compared to that in business and economics. The preferred economic thinking in the State University is Keynesianism and enroll in a course on the Philippine Business Environment. Students flock to Engineering not to become the next Rodolfo Salas (the CPP chairman after Sison) but the next Isidro Consunji.

The clash of ideas that UP, as a supposedly academic marketplace, is supposed to nurture is equally nonexistent. Each discipline sticks to its lane, and each ideological position prefers talking to its converts rather than inviting contrarian views into its symposia.

UP is less like the anarchy of Divisoria market and more like the new sanitized, well-manicured Dili-mall, where the different stalls are comfortably segregated from each other.

The last time there was a “debate” of sorts was after Marcos fell from power, when the Third World Studies Center hosted government officials (including the military) to discuss policies, only to face intense, respectful criticism from students and faculty. Further back, the Philippine Collegian once sponsored an exchange between hardline class-trumps-everything-else and a small group of Makibaka feminists.

UP as a marketplace of clashing ideas from whence students can learn and make choices is a myth. 

The need for heroes

All this comes at a time when the State is on the offensive — with the seamless integration of Duterte-like violence to counterinsurgent strategies, to the NTF-ECLAC’s idea that zones (red and white) need to be neutralized and its constituents forced out or executed, to the deadly power of “red-tagging.”

But as painful as it is, this is also the time to hope for the best, to inspire.
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In an interview about her novel on the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, writer Hilary Mantel mused that each generation must wage its own revolution. I think today’s radicals must figure out how to wage their own war as they confront a system that has proven more resilient. But they cannot do this without having their own heroes and martyrs.

By all means let us all mourn Alyssa’s death. But let us also give her the proper due she deserves for possibly considering committing to change society beyond the usual, banal sloganeering at the steps of UP’s Palma Hall. – Rappler.com

Patricio N. Abinales retired from teaching Southeast Asian and the Philippine politics at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa. He is working on a book on the University of the Philippines and martial law.