Only One Network of Youth Organizations Keeps Burying Its Own

There is a point at which coincidence collapses into pattern, and pattern hardens into responsibility.

Philippine law has long drawn a careful line between dissent and criminality. Activism, protest, and radical critique are protected spaces in a democracy. But those protections are not limitless. They weaken, and eventually fail, when legal organizations repeatedly produce the same lethal outcome for its members, while no comparable youth organization does.

This is the uncomfortable question that continues to haunt Kabataan Partylist, and all its allied youth organizations..

A pattern no one else shares

From the perspective of former rebels, peace advocates, and grieving families, one fact stands out with grim clarity: no other youth organization in the Philippines has consistently produced members who later surface—and die—as combatants of the New People’s Army (NPA). No other group systematically recruits through student grievances and social issues, encourages exposure or immersion in conflict areas, facilitates ideological integration with armed units, and then publicly honors those killed in armed encounters as political martyrs.

That uniqueness matters. To be sure, law does not operate against ideological leaning, much less on slogans or intentions. It operates on patterns, foreseeability, and causation.

In Southern Tagalog alone, Buklod Kapayapaan documents at least seven deaths which involved youths who were once members of national democratic organizations, including Kabataan Partylist. In Occidental Mindoro, at least two cases have been recorded in Sablayan and Abra de Ilog since 2022, that of Queenie “Ka Kira” Daraman and, of course, Jerlyn Rose Doydora, both of whom died in armed encounters.

These are not abstractions. These are young lives that passed through a legal youth organization and ended in the armed underground.

Foreseeability changes everything

In law, repetition creates foreseeability. Once harm becomes predictable, actors can no longer credibly claim surprise or innocence through ignorance. At that point, the question is no longer whether leadership intended harm, but whether it continued a model that predictably produced it.

When recruitment rhetoric, grievance-based organizing, and immersion in guerrilla-influenced areas repeatedly result in youth transitioning into armed units, and tragically dying there, the risk is no longer theoretical but operational.

Crucially, the argument here is not that every activist becomes a rebel, nor that dissent should be criminalized. It is that when only one group of youth organizations consistently generates this outcome, the burden shifts. The claim that “this happens everywhere” collapses under the weight of evidence.

The worst part of it all is the reflexive blame-shifting and hand-washing that follows every death. Instead of confronting the organizational pathways that led these youths into armed units, responsibility is routinely displaced onto the Armed Forces of the Philippines or the Philippine National Police, as if the act of enforcing the law were the original sin. 

There is also a silence that speaks volumes.You will hardly ever hear Kabataan Partylist or its allied organizations condemn the NPA directly for delivering death blows to government soldiers and police, even in cases where there are indications of overkilling or clear violations of the laws of armed conflict. 

This selective outrage is almost always an organizational reflex, and former rebels know this all too well.  The state force must relentlessly be scrutinized and condemned, while insurgent violence should at all cost be rationalized, contextualized, or even quietly ignored. But this also means that some lives are grievable only when they serve a narrative, and that accountability is demanded exclusively of the State, never of the CPP-NPA that these youths ultimately joined and died for.

Tragically, this posture also denies grieving families the dignity of an honest reckoning, obscures failures that were preventable, and normalizes a perverse cycle in which deaths are loudly mourned in public but never examined at the level of structure, practice, and responsibility. Now that the families have spoken, especially Jerlyn Rose’s mother, it remains to be seen whether Kabataan, Karapatan and all other national democratic organizations will desist from using her  death for their propaganda.   

Neither the AFP nor the PNP are beyond reproach, and scrutiny of state conduct must always remain part of our democracy. But placing the blame solely on the AFP  for performing their constitutional duty should not absolve those who created and sustained the conditions that led to these deaths. It merely ensures that those same conditions remain unchanged, waiting to claim the next recruit.

Hero-worship is not neutral speech

Public memorialization of fallen NPA fighters, especially those who came from the youth and other vulnerable sectors, is often defended as free expression. But in legal analysis, speech is assessed not only by its content but by its function and effect.

Hero-worship performs three critical functions in this context. First, it normalizes armed death as a desirable or even noble political end, and reframes lethal participation in an insurgency as sacrifice (weightier than Sierra Madre in this case, apparently) rather than loss. Second, it signals legitimacy to armed participation, which implicitly affirms that taking up arms is an acceptable (and honored) extension of activism. Third, it lowers the psychological barrier for the next recruit, making the transition from legal organizing to armed involvement appear less exceptional, less frightening, and ultimately more permissible.

When this speech operates alongside recruitment and immersion practices, it ceases to be merely expressive. It becomes instrumental, and part of a radicalization pipeline rather than protected commentary. That is the essence of terror grooming.

The question facing Rep. Renee Co

For Kabataan Partylist Rep. Renee Co, the issue is not immediate criminal guilt. It is duty of care.

That duty is heightened by the fact that she is not only a sitting party-list representative but also a lawyer, someone supposedly trained to understand foreseeability, causation, and the legal consequences of institutional conduct. When an organization linked to her political mandate repeatedly produces the same lethal outcome for its youth members, the standard of responsibility cannot be reduced to plausible deniability. A lawyer in public office is expected to recognize when harm is no longer incidental but foreseeable, and when leadership demands intervention, repudiation, or reform rather than silence.

Criminal liability may require proof of overt acts. But accountability does not. It begins the moment a pattern becomes undeniable and preventable.

This is not red-tagging. It is not guilt by association. It is accountability by outcome. If only one youth organization keeps producing dead combatants, the hard question is unavoidable: what is it doing that others are not—and why does it refuse to change?

No democracy is strengthened by sacrificing its youth on the altar of ideological purity. No movement for justice should require young people to die before it admits that something is structurally wrong.

The dead of Mindoro and Southern Tagalog are not propaganda. They are evidence. And evidence should, sooner or later, demand reckoning. Are we there yet?