was at Malacañang Palace on January 30, 1970, but his name isn’t mentioned in the different accounts of that tumultuous night. As he was to prove over and over again, Roger’s value lay in his invisibility, in being near the center, but never in it. His going underground in 1971 to join the ranks of the CPP was, in that sense, a formal acknowledgement of what he already was. A year later, in September of 1972, Marcos declared martial law, citing the threat of a communist insurgency and using a staged assassination attempt on his defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile as a pretext. By then, Roger and other party members were putting out Liberation, the underground English-language paper of the movement. Two years later, Roger and several underground colleagues slipped out of the country, spending seven years studying and training abroad in a country he asks me not to name. In 1981, he slipped back into the Philippines and proceeded almost immediately to a New People’s Army guerrilla zone in Southern Luzon to be debriefed.
By the time Roger returned, the NPA—founded in 1969 as the CPP’s military arm by Sison and an ex-Huk guerrilla commander and brilliant military strategist, Bernabe Buscayno (whose nom de guerre was Ka Dante, “Ka” short for kasama, the Pilipino word for companion or comrade)—had become a formidable force entrenched on the major islands and active in most provinces. Like the Huks, this Maoist guerrilla army started out in Central Luzon, in a single district of Tarlac Province, Ka Dante’s home turf, with only sixty men and thirty-five rifles. During its early years, the ragtag peasant army suffered heavily. Its propaganda units, the lead units to new areas, were often annihilated. Martial law, however, and the subsequent abuses of the Philippine military (which had grown from its pre-martial law size of fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand), proved to be a boon to the underground, forcing both urban-based, college-educated activists and peasant organizers into the hills.
Maintaining their bases in the mountains and following the classic Maoist strategy of encircling the cities from the countryside, the NPA was operating in sixty-two out of seventy-four provinces by the time the Marcoses fled the palace by helicopter in 1986. It had between twenty thousand to thirty thousand armed regulars, depending on whom you were talking to. The CPP-NPA, along with the National Democratic Front (NDF, an underground umbrella organization made up of the different left-wing, anti-government groups and dominated by the CPP-NPA), had evolved into a serious alternative to mainstream Philippine society.
Roger stayed in the guerrilla zone for six months and helped in the political training of recruits, and the documentation of human-rights abuses suffered by the peasants. He and the members of his small group would talk to victims or to their families. Others carried arms, but not Roger. “I refused. I have never liked bearing arms. I always told my companions, ‘It just slows me down.’” Again, the propensity to slip away, to not confront: the key to Roger’s survival. Later, the party leadership assigned him to Manila. There he worked with a cultural group. His task was to supervise the translations of the works of Mao, Marx, and Lenin into Pilipino—the national language based pri-marily on Tagalog. Mao, with his writings on a Protracted People’s War forming the basis of NPA strategy, was given special prominence in the shaping of the movement’s ideology.
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