The Youths As Pawns

Source: Captured enemy-documents

In August 7, 2019, news reports coming from the Senate sent shockwaves to the nation. Emotional mothers spoke of how Leftist groups recruited their daughters, who eventually ran away from home to work for the organizations full time.

One mother, Relissa Lucena, recounted how her then 16-year old daughter was recruited by Anakbayan, a militant youth organization of the CPP-NPA-NDF. Lucena said her daughter stopped attending senior high school at the Far Eastern University to focus on the organization. Despite her many warnings, her daughter remained active. In one instance, she left home for three days. The worried Lucena, a founding member of Hands Off Our Children (HOOC) group that advocates for preventing recruitment of youth and students to the CPP-NPA- NDF and to its front organizations, reported it to the police. When her daughter came back and realized what her mother had done, she tagged her mother as an “enemy” (Ager, 2019). 

“She said I was an enemy. She said I should think that I no longer have a child. I kneeled in front of my child. I begged her to stay and for us to fix the situation,” Lucena said on national television.

Despite her constant begging, her daughter left.

“She left a letter. In it, she said I was a bad parent. That letter crushed my heart to the point that I almost committed suicide,” Lucena said.

A week later, two of the missing students went public on social media and decried their parents’ allegations. They said they ran away from their homes because of family issues not because they were forcibly recruited (Madarang, 2019). Of course, they spoke under the banner of the militant groups they now represent, the same militant groups that refused to let another “missing” child go (Tuquero, 2019).

The news seemed shocking to some, but for Victor it was quite reminiscent of his own recruitment and his recruitment of other youth. Victor’s memories came rushing back. 

--THE WARS WITHIN (2020)