Remember When LFS Celebrated its NPA Alumni?

“Proud kami na ang aming mga alumni ay maging NPA.”

When Kara Lenina Taggaoa, then a leader of the League of Filipino Students (LFS), proudly wearing the Kabataang Partylist T-shirt, made this statement during a protest, she put an uncomfortable question before the Filipino public: Why would a leader of a supposed “legal” student organization openly express pride in former members who joined an armed underground movement?

This was not an ordinary statement about their alumni succeeding in their chosen careers. The New People’s Army is an armed organization engaged in a decades-long conflict with government forces. Joining it means moving beyond rallies, campus discussions, and street protests into an armed struggle that has cost lives and brought violence to peasant and indigenous peoples communities.

For years, student activism has provided a space for young Filipinos to organize around tuition fee increases, workers’ rights, poverty, corruption, and other social problems. But there is a fundamental difference between demanding change through peaceful political action and taking up arms against the government. No slogan about serving the people can erase that difference. When joining the NPA becomes a source of pride, the public deserves a clear explanation of what that pride means and how the organization views the decision to enter armed struggle.

This concern is not based on speculation alone. Neither is it an outright redtagging. There are documented cases of prominent student activists who later joined the communist underground and the NPA. Rendell Ryan “Perper” Cagula, who served as Chairperson of the UP Mindanao University Student Council and became involved in the LFS in Davao City, later joined the NPA and was killed in an encounter with government forces in Sarangani in November 2014. The Communist Party of the Philippines’ own Southern Mindanao Regional Committee (SMRC) published an account describing his path from student and youth organizing to membership in the underground party and, eventually, the armed movement. His story was not invented by government investigators. It was publicly recounted by the movement itself.

Another case is Charisse Bernadine Bañez, a former national chairperson of the LFS. In June 2025, she was arrested in Agusan del Sur and identified by former rebels and the Philippine Army as “Ka Nikki,” secretary of the Southern Mindanao Regional Committee of the NPA. Her earlier position in the student movement and her subsequent identification as an NPA leader raise serious questions about the path she took from campus organizing to the armed underground.

Then there is Jamm Saguino, a former student activist at UP Visayas in Iloilo who later became a senior CPP-NPA cadre in Davao de Oro and Davao Oriental before surrendering. Saguino has publicly recounted being recruited into the LFS in 2007, followed by involvement in Kabataang Makabayan and the underground communist movement. His experience provides a firsthand account of how student organizing can become a path toward underground membership and eventually armed participation. His account has also appeared in Philippine News Agency and other mainstream media reporting and legal records.

These cases expose a reality that should not be brushed aside: the movement from student activism into the communist underground has happened, and former participants have spoken publicly about how it happened. Parents who worry about the organizations their children join are therefore entitled to ask questions. Authorities also have legitimate reasons to be concerned about recruitment into an armed movement. Treating these concerns as inherently malicious does nothing to help young people understand the risks or make informed decisions about their future.

This context is relevant to the current controversy involving Heroine Fernandez, the LFS-Davao coordinator whose mother was reportedly contacted by someone claiming to be a soldier. Anakbayan Southern Mindanao Region described the incident as harassment, surveillance, and intimidation by the state. But important questions remain unanswered. Has the person behind the account been identified? Was he actually a soldier? Was the contact officially authorized? Has the authenticity of the entire conversation been independently verified, or could the account or its messages have been manipulated?

These questions must be answered before responsibility can be assigned. If a genuine military personnel used his authority to threaten or intimidate the family, he should be held accountable. If the person falsely represented himself as a soldier, that must also be exposed. And if the conversation was fabricated or manipulated, the evidence must establish that as well. No political camp should be allowed to replace an investigation with a convenient conclusion.

But the unresolved allegation does not erase the wider question raised by Taggaoa’s statement. If a prominent LFS leader publicly expressed pride in alumni who joined the NPA, the organization should be prepared to explain what that statement meant. The public should not be expected to ignore such words simply because questions about the armed movement are politically uncomfortable. Nor should every discussion of recruitment be automatically dismissed as redtagging or an attempt to silence student activism.

When an LFS leader says, “Proud kami na ang aming mga alumni ay maging NPA,” the public deserves an honest explanation of why an organization that denies links to the NPA would take pride in its former members joining the armed movement.

The Filipino youth deserve honest political education, not romanticized accounts of armed struggle that leave out its human cost. Parents deserve answers, and the public deserves to understand the relationship between campus organizing and the underground movement.

If joining the NPA was once publicly celebrated as a source of pride, the question remains: what exactly was being celebrated?