NOT ON OUR WATCH: Martial Law really happened. We were there.  EDITOR: Jo-Ann Q. Maglipon; WRITERS: Angie Castillo, Calixto V. Chikiamco, Jose Dalisay Jr., Manuel M. Dayrit, Jaime FlorCruz, Jay Valencia Glorioso, Diwa C. Guinigundo, Sol F. Juvida, Victor H. Manarang, Al S. Mendoza, Jack Teotico, Roberto Verzola, Vic A. Wenceslao; ILLUSTRATOR: Edd Aragon 

 

From the Prologue.  On October 10, 2010, members of the League of Editors for a Democratic Society (LEADS)—College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP), circa 1969 to 1972, held their first reunion in forty years.

       The reunion brought back memories of their involvement in the life-and-death struggle many Filipinos waged against the Marcos dictatorship during that period. They recalled how, amidst the worldwide student protest movements of the 1970s, Filipino students staged their own revolt. Linking arms with other sectors of Philippine society, they launched a series of protest actions that reached the proverbial tipping point from late December of 1969 to the early months of 1970. That historical watershed came to be known as the First Quarter Storm, or FQS.

This book is partly an answer to a member's lament that her children do not know her. She told the gathering how surprised her children were upon knowing that she had been editor in chief of her college newspaper, and at a time, too, when campus papers were in the thick of the national ferment.

…We decided to publish this book so that our children would know of us. Our children know us, certainly, but not many of them know how, during our tender years (some of us not past seventeen), we put our lives on the line and fought a deadly struggle with the Marcos dictatorship. How, as editors and writers of our college papers, we vigorously confronted martial rule and its excesses. How, as callow as were in years, many of us paid for our convictions by being jailed, with a number of us suffering unspeakable torture under interrogation. And how, just having stepped into our twenties, some of us were already made to pay the ultimate price--life itself.