ABSTRACT
By 1970, the New People's Army could field about 300 lightly armed guerrillas, most of them concentrated in Central Luzon and a few dozen in Isabela. Proselytizing by KM and SDK activists was producing a modest flow of recruits to the struggling communist army in the countryside. The First Quarter Storm of 1970 had been a turning point, the demonstrations and the government's violent response having pushed the entire student-labor protest movement toward the ranks of the radicals. "Morale was so high at that time that people were volunteering for the armed struggle," a student leader recalled years later. "They wanted to be sent to the countryside, though a number of KM people died because of lack of training." The problem for the communist leadership was how to transform the student protesters into savvy guerrillas.
