To Whom It May Concern This Violence

The deaths of University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD) Student Councilor Alyssa Alano and UP Open University student Maureen Keil Santuyo have ignited a wildfire of narratives that portray academic institutions as hotbeds of insurgency. Stories of alleged recruitment into armed movements within the campus, along with familiar past cases, have quickly been wielded like a gavel, too swiftly condemning names as enemies of the state. Yet within this framing, one thing becomes clear: the sheer longevity of this problem reveals a normalized violence rooted in the state’s failure to protect its people, not from bullets, but from the circumstances that push them toward armed struggle.


The ambiguity of the matter is as certain as the question of “why was she there?” to implicitly tell us that the academe should be bound by gates, of poor ventilation, and a knowledge produced by archaic scripts. This is where the same failure stems when scholars immersed themselves to the ground, amplifying the voices of communities to inform policies yet little to none have become proactive nor responsive directives to strengthen regulation and improve welfare of these communities. There is growing scholarship on indigenous people (IP) yet on one hand we have cases of intensified land grabbing backed by the state to push for the agendas of multinational companies.


In fact, the Dupax del Norte anti-mining protest earlier this year have led to dispersals and arrests after residents erected their human barricade to resist Woggle Mining Corporation’s exploration permit granted by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources Mines and Geosciences Bureau. Its lack of consultation was continuously cited by residents, fearing repercussions of the said operation on environment, health, and livelihood. Loryvic Aguada, president of one of the people’s barricade and Juan Dammay of the Cordillera Peoples Alliance–Kalinga, along with their communities, shared testimonies of this resistance that strongly highlighted the red-tagging and intimidation they have endured notwithstanding the temporary suspension of the permit.


These cases of redtagging often are most pronounced among young activists and advocates with data from Amnesty International notes that 456 red-tagging incidents occurred in the first half of 2024 alone, frequently impacting students and young activists. This climate of fear makes individuals highly vulnerable to trumped-up charges, intimidation by military forces through supposed summons and “home visitations,” and, in some cases, threats from paramilitary groups. Ironically and counterproductively, such practices unintentionally create the very problem they claim to prevent by fostering exclusion and insecurity, they turn repression into a gateway for identity, belonging, and protection, which are drivers that can pull people toward armed movements even beyond ideology.


If our problem centers on the role of institutions to produce critical students sliding into ideas firsthand and their propensity to turn against established ones, we have mistook universities as factories in assembly-lines. The spectrum of causes and the extension of means by which students engage to understand communities must not be dealt with the license of labels to brand them as targets, but should be understood in depth of the problem that entices them in vulnerable spaces.


The persistence of the country’s longest-running insurgency has long been disruptive, claiming innocent lives and often casting academic institutions as touchpoints to radicalization through exposure of transgressions in communities students are grounded into.


But if the state’s only response is to conduct military operations and cast suspicion on campuses rather than uphold communities’ rights to their lands, address historical grievances, and improve people’s overall welfare beyond security measures, we risk reducing violence to a mere tally of casualties from armed encounters. In doing so, we overlook the oppressive conditions communities endure each day and ignore the deeper truths embedded in the very movements we seek to suppress.


To be fair, deradicalization programs are in effect to include socio-economic components through immediate financial aid and livelihood programs of surrenderees, yet given the volatile living conditions and the ongoing vigilance in conflict areas, long-term economic stability remains precarious. Not to mention, stigma among these former combatants are underexplored.


Systemic gaps in fragmented coordination, ambiguity in the parameters of its effectiveness, agencies becoming instrumentalities of repression (e.g. National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict’s red-tagging spree), and long term sustainability marred the true essence of transitions in these programs.


Reintegration should not stop from disengagement (straying away from the skirmish) but must also touch on the ideological aspect of one’s entry. The complexity of the matter required the same degree of holistic intervention, from landmark legislations, reforming agencies, and transformative policies receptive to the challenges of communities. At the end of the day, there is no such thing as success in these bloody operations; it only engines ideas to reaffirm its long suit.


It is high time for the government to also be accountable, penalize red-tagging, and guarantee that welfare programs are not band-aid solutions reactive to specific conflicts, but must be genuinely serving communities as they should be intended in the first place.


Until then, ideas endure more than the shells and when students die for ideas there is a hard truth to accept that the fertile grounds of this struggle will not die in the mountains. Until the state fully recognizes that violence does not begin in warfare but in empty plates, in dissent framed as hostility, and lives reduced in the periphery— it is not the bullets that we should fear for our youth but the prevailing ideas that no longer sell. Because once justice becomes a mere slogan, it erases whoever that believes in it even before they have the opportunity to ask whether the state's protection really is for whom?



Written by Spider X