From Feb. 1-9, 1971, students, faculty and residents of the University of the Philippines staged a barricade around the Diliman campus to protest the oil price hike.
The Diliman Commune is hailed as the first ever display of mass resistance from the UP community during the Marcos administration.
1971 UP Dean of Student Affairs Armando Malay on the Diliman Commune:
“The UP barricades remain to this day, in the” minds of the timid and the fearful, an awesome thing. If conditions in the Philippines do not improve immediately, the barricades will remain an awesome thing for a lot of people for sometime. But if the barricades would contribute even a bit to the improvement of our society — as this writer hopes they would — then the Filipinos of the future would be beholden to those youths who risked lives to set them up and to defend them. History, a better judge than any one of us, will vindicate the barricades and the barricaders.”
Photos from Arkibong Bayan collection.
