Did the SCMP chairperson just imply that Ceeka is an NPA combatant?

On March 29, the founding anniversary of the New People’s Army, a young activist named Ceeka Garzon was captured in San Jose, Occidental Mindoro. Authorities said she had been part of an armed encounter between government troops and NPA fighters.

However, certain groups say that she was a member of Panday Sining, an artist-activist, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In the days that followed, conversations on whether she was a combatant, or was a civilian became a hot topic in social media.

Into that debate stepped Kej Andrés, national chairperson of the Student Christian Movement of the Philippines. In a social media post adapted from an article he had written months earlier for Pinoy Weekly, Andrés set out to defend Garzon. But the defense he offered took an unexpected turn.

Rather than contest the circumstances of her arrest, Andrés reframed the conversation entirely.

There was no attempt to argue that Garzon had not been with an armed unit. No claim that she had been engaged solely in artistic or advocacy work. The question of what exactly she was doing at the time of the encounter was left unaddressed. Instead, Andrés wrote about choice. About young people “going to thecountryside” and offering their lives to the marginalized.

Within activist circles, that phrase carries a particular meaning. “Going to the countryside” often refers to integration with armed guerrilla forces operating in rural areas. The argument, then, was not built around denying the allegation, but was instead built around justifying the path.

He wrote, “We are proud of Ceeka for her decision.” What decision? Across the piece, only one decision is consistently described and defended – the decision of young people to take part in revolutionary struggle. It is portrayed not as a mistake, but as a response, a necessary one, to the country’s social realities.

If the intention was to establish that Garzon was not a combatant, the emphasis might have been different. It might have focused on her work as an artist, her role in legal activism, or the possibility that she had been misidentified. But those arguments are absent.

What appears instead is a discussion on the morality of armed struggle and the youth who choose to participate in it. Why dedicate an entire defense to the legitimacy of taking up arms, if the person being defended is being presented as someone who did not take that step?

To be clear, Andrés does not explicitly state that Garzon is a member of the NPA. There is no direct acknowledgment, no categorical statement. But the structure of the argument, what it emphasizes, and what it leaves out, creates a glaring implication.