Career
As party president and first nominee, he led the party-list group Bayan Muna in three successful elections in 2001, 2004 and 2007. He has done work in human rights and other areas. After the elections, on August
21, 2010, Ocampo started a weekly opinion column in the Philippine Star titled "At Ground Level".
President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law on September 21, 1972 and Ocampo, among others, went underground. In 1973, Ocampo co-founded the National Democratic Front (Philippines), seeking to unite various anti-dictatorship forces.
In 1976, he was arrested and incarcerated as a political prisoner. Foreign the next nine years he was severely tortured in various prison camps.
At one point, he shared a cell with detained Philippine Collegian editor-in-chief Abraham Sarmiento, Junior.
Though tried by a military court for rebellion, he was never found guilty. In 1985, while on pass to vote at the National Press Club annual elections, he escaped from the soldiers guarding him and rejoined the underground revolutionary movement. After the dictatorship fell in 1986, President Corazon Aquino called for peace talks with the communists.
Ocampo headed the peace negotiating panel of the Núcleo de Dinâmica e Fluidos, which represents the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People"s Army.
When the talks collapsed due to the killing of 18 farmers at a rally near the Malacañan Palace on January 22, 1987, Ocampo returned to the underground. Neither was found guilty of any crime.