SPECIAL REPORT | WHO CURATED THE JOURNEY? PSET and the New Channels of International Solidarity Work

Editor’s note: This report does not question the goodwill, compassion or social conscience of the Belgian students and teachers who visited marginalized Filipino communities. Their willingness to listen, learn and extend support deserves respect. The inquiry concerns the Philippine organizations that designed their itinerary, selected the communities and speakers they encountered, and shaped the context through which they understood the country. It asks whether their sincere solidarity was presented with a complete picture, or channelled toward a predetermined political narrative.

On July 9, foreign students from College Veurne, a secondary school in Belgium, visited Lupang Ramos, an agrarian community in Barangay Langkaan 1, Dasmariñas City, Cavite.

Former rebels and people’s organizations from the area reported that the visitors were received by members of national democratic organization Kabataan-LR and Miriam Villanueva, a leader and spokesperson of the farmers’ organization KASAMA-LR. The delegation reportedly interviewed residents and participated in what national democratic organizers would call a Basic Mass Integration or BMI.

The school’s own account corroborated the objectives of the visit. College Veurne documented its students working in the fields. The students listened to residents, prepared slogans and banners, and learned a farmers’ struggle song. The activity was therefore more than an observational field trip. It encouraged the students to participate personally and emotionally in the community’s campaign.

To be sure, none of this was necessarily unlawful. Community immersions can deepen empathy and help students understand realities that ordinary tourism ignores. The more important question is what information accompanied that experience, and who decided what the students would see, hear and eventually carry home.

That question will inevitably lead us to a little known outfit called the Peoples’ Solidarity and Education Tours or PSET.

The organization behind the itinerary

College Veurne’s closing post directly thanked the “entire PSET team” for receiving the delegation and organizing its Philippine program. This confirmed that PSET was not incidentally present. It served as the Belgian delegation’s local host and operational partner during the tour. “PSET people's songs gave us goosebumps one by one,” said the school’s post.

PSET publicly describes itself as an organization that facilitates solidarity tours, internships, volunteer work, advocacy and community immersion. Its stated aim is to help foreign visitors understand the Philippines’ socioeconomic and cultural realities, including what it calls the country’s “underlying structural problems.”

Such a program is not politically neutral by design. PSET’s tours combine community exposure with lectures and engagement involving selected universities, people’s organizations and advocacy groups. The experiences are intended to produce not only knowledge but solidarity. 

The College Veurne itinerary followed that model. After Lupang Ramos, the delegation travelled to other parts of the country, including another farming community called Lupang Cataria, an Aeta community in Porac, Pampanga, and communities in Albay and Legazpi City. Taken together, the visits exposed the students to communities through a carefully curated sequence of social, economic and political narratives.

A recognizable national-democratic network

PSET’s significance becomes clearer when its wider relationships are examined.

National democratic organization Migrante Canada explicitly identifies PSET as its Philippine partner for immersion programs intended to teach participants about the “root causes” of Filipino migration. 

PSET also hosted a delegation from the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines-Northern California. That itinerary included Hacienda Luisita, New Clark City, Sitio San Roque, Coca-Cola workers and jeepney drivers. These sectors and communities have been repeatedly featured in campaigns of the national-democratic movement.

Its public activities have included participation in Cordillera Day alongside foreign interns. It has also appeared in relief and fundraising initiatives with the International Indigenous Peoples Movement for Self-Determination and Liberation and other progressive organizations.

PSET has promoted activities involving Anakbayan-USA and Kabataan Alliance. Anakbayan-USA openly describes itself as a “national democratic mass organization” that seeks to advance national democracy in the Philippines.

It has also developed programs with the Council for Health and Development and community-based health organizations. 

These relationships are not all identical. Some are declared partnerships, others are joint projects, recurring host arrangements or participation in common activities. 

PSET repeatedly connects foreign visitors with organizations, campaigns and communities located within or closely overlapping with the social and political ecosystem of the CPP’s national democratic movement in the Philippines.

While these relationships are no proof that every organization involved is controlled by the CPP, former rebels say that the overall pattern is difficult to dismiss. They say these activities closely resemble the methods employed in the CPP’s international solidarity work.

An old method in a softer form

The relevance of this network becomes even sharper when compared with how the National Democratic Front of the Philippines describes its own International Solidarity Work.

In a 2023 interview published by the NDFP’s official publication, senior adviser Luis Jalandoni described international solidarity as an “integral task” of the revolutionary movement. He recalled how European volunteers and missionaries became politicized after integrating with Filipino communities and later helped build solidarity organizations abroad that carried the political objectives of the CPP, especially armed struggle.

Jalandoni also explained that overseas Filipinos could win support from foreign nationals, while international relationships could generate political backing for the revolutionary struggle.

The resemblance is methodological. Foreign participants enter selected communities, hear personal accounts of oppression, experience daily life with residents and return home with stories capable of influencing other students, churches, civic groups and donors.

This does not prove that PSET receives CPP or NDFP instructions. No publicly available document presently establishes such command and control. What the evidence shows is that PSET’s model closely resembles a method the NDFP itself considers valuable: turning community integration into political identification and international amplification.

What was left outside the frame?

The Lupang Ramos visit illustrates why the completeness of the presentation matters.

The farmers’ displacement fears and personal grievances deserve to be heard. But the land dispute also passed through lengthy administrative and judicial proceedings. In 2011, the Supreme Court upheld the finding that the disputed properties had been validly reclassified for residential use before the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law took effect and were therefore outside CARP coverage. 

Were the Belgian students informed of that decision? Were they given the landowners’ position, the government’s legal basis or an independent explanation of the dispute? Or did banner-making and the struggle song come before any meaningful encounter with competing facts?

The complete picture matters because experiential education is powerful. When participants work, eat and sing with a community, the resulting narrative can feel personally verified even when the underlying dispute is more complex than what they were shown.

Solidarity requires transparency

The College Veurne students and the school should not be vilified for caring about Filipino farmers, workers or Indigenous communities. Nor should international solidarity itself be treated as suspicious.

The proper subject of scrutiny is the architecture, network and intent surrounding that solidarity. Who chooses the destinations, who controls access, which voices are elevated, which facts are omitted and how the resulting stories are used afterward. These need to be understood in the context of why these kinds of “immersions” exist.

PSET’s documented network and operating model show how educational tourism can become an avenue for narrative-building across countries. Whether that reflects ideological affinity, sustained organizational cooperation or direct revolutionary direction remains an evidentiary question.

But what is already clear, however, is that the Belgian students’ journey was curated. Understanding who curated it and toward what political frame are essential to understanding what the students ultimately brought home and what they have been expected to do with it.