Nicasio Morales

Nicky was in his first year of college in UP Diliman when martial law was declared. Many activists were arrested and most organizations were banned but that did not stop him and a few brave souls from registering their disapproval of the new regime. Small stickers with hand-written slogans like “Down with the Marcos dictatorship!” would suddenly get posted on the walls, or cats sporting like-worded banners would be let loose to roam about. Early in 1974, however, one after the other, Nicky and his father were arrested by the military. Both spent some time at the Ipil Rehabilitation Center in Fort Bonifacio.

Nicky resumed his studies after his release and even earned his degree in time. He took up graduate studies in Industrial Relations immediately after, and became the Grand Chancellor of the Alpha Phi Omega (APO) Fraternity UP Diliman chapter,of which he was a member since his undergraduate days. It was during his leadership that the now famous annual APO “Oblation Run” came about.

Nicky was in his first year of college in UP Diliman when martial law was declared. Many activists were arrested and most organizations were banned but that did not stop him and a few brave souls from registering their disapproval of the new regime.

With the help of friends, Nicky secretly made his way to Washington, DC, in the United States of America. Meanwhile, Julie Amargo wrote a letter addressed to the “missing” consumer activist and published it in her column on the Bulletin Today on Sept. 17, 1980, titled “Where is Nicky Morales?” To this, Nicky responded from his hiding place with an article called “Why I am where I am” (sent to KMPI in December, published in the Ms. & Ms. Newsmagazine on June 1981). In it, he affirmed his “politics of consumption,” that is, he believed the protection of poor consumers to be a movement for “liberation,” whereas the laboring classes would be united “under the banner of consumerism.” (Hilton, 2009, p. 88)

“The price of defending the low-income consumers is frightening only because it calls for the massive education and organization of the exploited majority which runs directly opposite to the interests of Big Business, Bureaucrat Dictators, or the exploiting minority who gain from every war, benefit from inflation and profit from docile labor and unorganized consumers… For wherever I may be… it consoles me to know that we have discovered the formula for the effective protection of consumers in the Third World, and I am confident that the people behind KMPI will apply the formula at whatever price…” (Nicky Morales, I Am Where I Am, 1980)

In the relative safety and anonymity of his new surroundings in the US, Nicky could have just kept quiet and worked or engaged in a business for himself. Instead, he took on the struggle against the dictatorship with renewed vigor, intent on telling the world what was really happening in his country. He first worked for a big ecumenical organization called Church Committee for Human Rights Campaign in the Philippines (CCHRP), headed by Dr. Dante Simbulan, Sr., which lobbied for the severance of military aid to the Philippines. He was one of the prime movers of the Alliance of Philippine Concerns (APC),and of the Washington Forum, organizations of Filipinos in the US and Canada active in the campaign against human rights violations and militarization in the Philippines.

Nicky kept up with this pace and even doubled his efforts in 1985, in the run-up to the dictatorship’s eventual fall the next year. He coordinated with the different anti-Marcos groups in the US, organizing simultaneous protest actions that caught the attention of the US media. He was a part of the leadership that sustained daily protests near the Philippine embassy in Washington. On February 26, 1986, Nicky, along with Filipino activists and American supporters, victoriously barged into the embassy and occupied it “in the name of the Filipino people.”

After EDSA, Nicky led the Alliance of Philippine Concerns lobby to the US Congress for Philippine interests to help the Cory Aquino government. He and his family went back home to the Philippines in 1990.