Red Revolution

Inside The Philippine Guerrilla Movement

Gregg R. Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000309256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is about the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its guerrilla army. Its objective is to offer the reader a close-up look and analysis of the revolution and serves as a case study of the inner workings of one of the most successful communist revolutionary movements.

1
A Resilient Revolution

The revolution began in the fertile mind of a college English literature teacher fond of poetry and philosophy, but ultimately drawn to the writings of Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, and Mao Zedong. Indeed, the latter's works provided José María Sison with the framework for an armed revolution, a "protracted people's war" in which, he envisioned, historically oppressed Philippine peasants would form the nucleus of a communist army. From the countryside, the rebel army would gradually "encircle the cities" and advance "wave upon wave," as he put it, at the vanguard of a social and political revolution that would sweep to power.

The Philippine revolution was a product of the classical Third World fusion of peasant unrest and nationalism, and it was shaped by a convergence of forces at work in the 1960s: the war in Vietnam, humiliating inequities in the relationship between the Philippines and the United States, the political radicalism that was sweeping college campuses from Michigan to Manila, and the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China.

Sison began in Manila in the early 1960s by organizing small groups of students and workers around nationalist political and economic issues. While most leading Filipino intellectuals of the day dismissed him as a harmless crackpot, Sison was training a fanatically loyal and dedicated cadre of followers. By coopting a succession of nationalist issues, Sison and his protégés gradually built a radical student movement that gained thousands of adherents amid the social and political decay of the Philippines in the late 1960s. The exhortations of Mao and the Cultural Revolution attracted and inspired the newly converted Filipino radicals, thereby providing the fledgling movement with its ideological cement. By early 1969, Sison had secretly formed a tiny revolutionary party from among his most trusted followers. Within a few weeks, the students forged an alliance with a few dozen peasant rebels who were remnants of previously failed communist-led rebellions in Central Luzon (the country's rice bowl), and a guerrilla war was launched.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of radical students by then had come to accept Sison's argument that an armed revolution was necessary to "liberate" the Philippines from the forces of imperialism and feudalism. By the time Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and moved to crush dissent in September 1972, Sison's Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) had grown to nearly 2,000 members, and poorly armed New People's Army (NPA) squads were launching hit-and-run ambushes in Central Luzon, the Sierra Madre of northeast Luzon, and a few other pockets of the 1,000-mile-long archipelago.

In their zeal to emulate Mao's Red Guards, the student revolutionaries were given to excesses. They forbade the use of English, banned all music except for revolutionary songs, and even executed members who violated the movement's strict code of discipline. "When we joined, our strength and inspiration were what Mao told us," one veteran Party leader recalled years later, able now to laugh at the early movement's rigidity. "We were like kids, but we were able to survive."

Martial law marked the first critical test of survival for the struggling revolutionary movement. Hundreds of activists and Party members were arrested in Manila and other cities. In the countryside, coordinated assaults by government troops nearly wiped out the rebel armed forces. A misguided attempt in the northern Luzon province of Isabela to replicate Mao's self-contained Shensi province stronghold resulted in heavy losses and the dispersal of the few hundred guerrillas and supporters who survived. Similarly amateurish attempts to adopt Chinese and Vietnamese communist tactics ended in demoralizing failures. The key to survival, however, was the scattering of remaining Party cadres and guerrillas across several islands. By the late 1970s, military abuses against peasants in the countryside, worsening poverty, and unprecedented levels of official corruption had resulted in the steady growth of the CPP and its army.

For years, Marcos as well as the U.S. State Department arid Pentagon had dismissed the NPA as little more than a nuisance. But by 1984 U.S. officials had been jolted from their lethargy by the spectacular expansion of guerrilla operations in the countryside and communist political activities in the cities. Dire assessments from Washington raised the specter of the CPP seizing power or forging a coalition government with moderate opposition forces. At the same time, government forces were spread dangerously thin by small, mobile rebel units scattered throughout 60 of the country's 73 provinces. Marcos and his political allies were discredited; the nonviolent political opposition was fragmented and lacked an alternative vision for governing.

In contrast, the revolutionary forces were well organized and well disciplined. The rebel movement offered a clear vision of the future, and its leaders were some of the brightest and most dedicated Filipinos who had come of age since the 1960s. By the eve of the February 1986 presidential election pitting Marcos against a political neophyte named Corazon Aquino—who offered herself as "the complete opposite of Marcos"—the forces of the Party-led National Democratic Front (NDF) seemed to be close to victory.

The communists had always smugly described Marcos as their best recruiter, arid his sudden exit in 1986—and the rise of the popular Aquino—threw the movement into disarray. Recriminations about the Party's decision to boycott the 1986 presidential election resounded through the ranks of the CPP and the rebel army. A significant number of Party leaders and cadres argued that the revolutionary movement should cooperate with the new government and try its hand at legal politics. Yielding to pressure from the public and within the movement, the CPP leadership entered into cease-fire negotiations with the Aquino government. Four months of contentious talks led to a 60-day cease-fire, and when that lapsed in February 1987, the war resumed. By that time, the CPP leadership had dropped its conciliatory stance and had adopted a new, critical posture toward the Aquino government. Aquino's movement to the Right, brought about by her attempt to placate a restive military, made it easier for Party leaders to convince their forces of the correctness of the tougher line.

By 1989, as the guerrilla war entered its twentieth year, the revolution had reached a crossroads. CPP officials conceded that victory, either military or political, was at best years distant. Aquino's popularity and the CPP's unresolved internal debates about ideology and strategy stood as formidable challenges to the movement. Military-backed anticommunist vigilantes posed new problems for communist forces attempting to expand in the countryside, and in some areas the NPA had even been rolled back from former strongholds. Buoyed by the arrests of several top communist leaders and persistent rumors of wrangling over revolutionary strategy and tactics, Aquino boasted that 1988 would be remembered as the year the insurgency was broken. Armed forces strategists suddenly began talking of defeating the rebels by 1992, the end of Aquino's term.

For all the optimistic talk emanating from the government, the CPP and its armed and political forces were far from beaten and in fact remained a formidable long-term challenge to the government. By the military's estimates, in early 1989 the NPA had about 24,000 guerrillas, with an arsenal of more than 10,000 high-powered rifles, grenade launchers, and a few mortars—virtually all captured from government forces. The rebels controlled or influenced more than 8,000 of the country's 41,000 barangays, according to the military.¹ In Manila and other cities the communists had succeeded in gaining varying degrees of control over hundreds of labor unions and in establishing slum bases for urban guerrillas. The movement had succeeded in integrating a significant number of Catholic Church elements—priests, nuns, lay-workers, and even one or two bishops—into the National Democratic Front, a crucial development in a nation that is 85 percent Catholic. The participation of Church elements in the revolution had helped the movement overcome to some extent strong anticommunist sentiments imbedded in the psyche of most Filipinos. More practically, radical Church elements were providing support services to the guerrilla army in the countryside, while building links with middle-class, business, and professional elements in the cities.

From the beginning, the CPP had stressed political organizing over military action, and that still held true in early 1989. Lacking heavy weapons, the NPA remained incapable of challenging the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in a conventional sense. After 20 years of war, the movement had to be content with ambushing army convoys and patrols and overrunning isolated town halls, police stations, and small military detachments. The total number of deaths attributed to the guerrilla war in 1988 was approximately 5,000 soldiers, civilians, and rebels, which was modest when compared to other modern conflicts.

For years, the Philippine communists had proudly waged an indigenous revolution and had relied primarily on arms and materiel captured or bought from the AFR In the early days of slavish Maoism, the revolution received token aid from China. But the aid pipeline was cut in 1975-1976 with the opening of diplomatic relations between Manila and Beijing and the death of Mao, leaving the NPA to survive by its own devices. The rebels pioneered a campaign called agaw armas (literally, grab guns), which relied on small unit attacks and assassinations to painstakingly build the communist arsenal gun by gun.

Building the revolution without foreign aid became a point of pride with the rebels, and it also gave the movement the flexibility to make its own decisions without having to worry about how a foreign benefactor would react. The indigenous nature of the revolution also had a soothing effect on many middle- and upper-class Filipinos, who argued that the absence of foreign involvement was proof that the movement was "uniquely Filipino" and not really a classic Marxist-Leninist revolution.

But communist leaders had mapped out a strategy that called for an escalation of the war in 1989-1990, with the hope of forcing a military stalemate by 1992. Virtually every Communist Party official and guerrilla commander with whom I spoke emphasized that the NPA would have difficulty attacking larger military camps and advancing the war to a stalemate without mortars, bazookas, and even surface-to-air missiles. But without heavier weapons, the guerrilla war could stagnate, and as a result the NPA would find it difficult to convince more peasants to support a movement that did not seem to have a chance of winning. So for the first time in the movement's history, CPP leaders were appealing openly to communist countries and radical movements to aid the Philippine revolution. There were hints by some rebel officials that a source of heavy weapons had already been arranged and that NPA officers were abroad being trained to use the weapons.

North Korea, rather than China or the Soviet Union, loomed as the most likely source of aid for the rebels. The CPP had developed cordial ties with the communist regime in Pyongyang. (The Soviet Union and China, on the other hand, had worked hard to improve relations with the Philippines and appeared as of early 1989 to have little to gain by aiding the NPA.) The rebel movement had also developed close relations with Nicaragua and to a lesser extent with Cuba, Libya, and elements of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The acquisition of heavy weapons by the NPA would dramatically change the complexion of the war and rapidly bring the guerrillas close to parity with government forces. As of early 1989, the AFP had only an estimated 70,000 combat-effective troops with which to oppose the NPA and the Muslim insurgents in the south—far less than the 10 to 1 ratio deemed necessary to wage a successful campaign against a guerrilla army. The infusion of heavier military hardware into the conflict would also raise the stakes for the United States, and with two prized military bases on the line, the Pentagon would likely respond by supplying the Philippines with even more sophisticated U.S. weaponry and other forms of support.

The talk of heavy weapons drew attention away from the realm in which the rebels were most dangerous and had advanced the farthest in 20 years of struggle—the political front. The broad extent of the communist political network became apparent to me as I journeyed inside the revolution, in urban areas and the countryside. The CPP cadres I met represented a cross-section of Philippine society: government bureaucrats, parish priests, labor organizers, human rights workers, journalists, teachers, lawyers, farmers, fishermen, and students. Even more astonishing in its breadth was the revolution's support network of allies—some of them reluctant—and sympathizers, which included members of congress, provincial governors, Catholic bishops, mayors, wealthy businesspeople, and powerful landowners.

Aquino had frustrated the rebel movement's inroads with the urban middle-class, students, labor, and other key groups in Manila and other major urban centers. But in one of the most striking and little-noticed developments I observed, in the smaller cities and towns of the countryside—where NPA influence was far more pronounced, yet hardly noted by the Manila press—communist forces were enjoying remarkable success in weaving a web of alliances with the middle and upper echelons of power. That point was driven home to me during a bizarre encounter in March 1987.

Escorted by four or five Party cadres and peasant guerrillas, I arrived one day at noon in a small town only 60 miles from Manila, At a busy restaurant within sight of the town hall and police station, we were joined by an elderly woman with fair Spanish features who was clearly a member of the local aristocracy. Waving a silk fan to ward off flies and the sultry noonday heat, the old woman chatted gaily with my guerrilla guide, a woman named Damit, and the young communist in turn affectionately addressed the matron as "grandmother." Later, Damit explained that the woman was matriarch of the town's wealthiest and most politically powerful family. The family owned all the prime agricultural land for miles around, the town's only pharmacy, and the only bus company traveling the only road linking the town to the outside world. Indeed, this family represented everything the NPA guerrillas had been fighting to destroy, and yet, Damit told me, the family was providing food, money, medicine, and other assistance to the rebels. As the encounter in the restaurant illustrated, neither side was making any effort to hide the fact. "How had this 'feudal ruler' been persuaded to support her sworn enemies?" I asked Damit.

"We talked to her," the young guerrilla replied with a knowing smile. "We explained the movement to her."

Damit and her companions never had to threaten the family. By then, everyone in the Philippines knew that the rebels were capable of killing their enemies. Everyone also knew it was far easier, far safer, and certainly far more profitable—at least in the short term—to make peace with the rebels and give them what they wanted, up to a point.

By the late 1980s, such arrangements were hardly isolated, as I was reminded repeatedly. Politicians, landlords, businesspeople, even Catholic bishops, were reaching accommodations with the rebels and supplying them with money, shelter, and weapons in exchange for protection from criminals, guarantees against assassination, support on election day, the right to travel through communist-dominated areas, and unhampered business activities. In much of the countryside and even in some major cities, those Filipinos who would have the most to lose after a triumphant revolution had come to view support of the rebels as a price of doing business.

Through a skillful blend of coercion and persuasion, the rebels are weaving themselves into the fabric of Philippine society, stitching together thousands of relationships and arrangements that are slowly neutralizing members of the traditional economic and political elite. The scenes of cooperation between the communist underground and the nation's elite, as represented most vividly to me in the person of the fastidious provincial matriarch with her silk fan, raise the possibility of a time, perhaps years in the future, when the revolutionary movement will have consolidated a position of influence over large portions of the establishment in areas of the countryside. Spanish, U.S., and Japanese conquerors all used the cooptation of the Philippine elite to maintain power, and the NPA in its drive to seize power appears to be applying with some success the same strategy from below. The extent to which such cooptations could be a factor in the revolution's success or failure was not clear by the late 1980s, but the phenomenon seemed potentially disturbing for those who viewed the revolution as an isolated rural movement estranged from the establishment. How have the Communist Party of the Philippines and its NPA guerrillas reached the point where some of the Philippines' richest and most powerful figures are paying homage? The answer lies in the history and inner workings of this independent and innovative revolutionary movement.

Having demonstrated considerable resiliency and prowess throughout two decades of guerrilla warfare and political struggle, the CPP and New People's Army have established a position as long-term players for political power in the Philippines. The movement has weathered many crises since 1969—periods of intense doctrinal debates and internal disputes among the leadership, arrests, political blunders, and military failures—and has emerged each time to flourish. Although the 1988 arrests of several rebel leaders hurt morale within the ranks of the revolutionary movement to some extent, the loss of national Party leaders had little or no effect on the ability of the regional communist commands to continue the revolution. The period of rapid expansion that the CPP and its army had enjoyed from the late 1970s until the mid-1980s had been stalled, but there was little evidence the movement was in strategic decline. Rebel losses—in personnel, weapons, and territory—in many cases were offset by corresponding gains in other areas. The stunning rollback of the communists on the island of Mindanao in 1986 and 1987, for example, was answered by dramatic NPA expansion on the main island of Luzon.

From what I witnessed in the countryside, the NPA has become a significant national movement not so much by terror and killing— although these tactics are selectively employed—but by the painstaking forging of bonds with an impoverished, landless peasantry that has been ignored by a succession of governments. The rebel movement has expanded its base by addressing a number of key issues that the government has either been unwilling or unable to resolve. Agrarian reform, social services, rudimentary health care, law enforcement, justice, and other local services are being provided in an effective, if sometimes brutal, fashion by the rebels. To the average peasant who has never known a government to do much more than collect taxes, these are all dramatic developments. By early 1989, the revolutionary movement had succeeded in sinking deep roots throughout the archipelago, and it had altered, perhaps irreversibly, Philippine politics and society.

The revolution was in its tenth year when it reached the rugged hills of southern Quezon province in 1979, and like most of his neighbors, Dante vividly remembered the day. It was nearing nightfall when eight weary looking young men and women armed with pistols and one-shot derringers walked into the hilltop clearing Dante had carved from the coconut palm forest and approached the peasant's bamboo-and-palm hut.

"I'm Comrade Boy," one of the men announced, holding out his hand in greeting. "We are from the New People's Army."

Since the early 1970s, Dante had heard occasional rumors about the rebel army and its activities in other provinces. The guerrillas were said to be helping poor farmers in Central Luzon and Bicol by punishing robbers and thieves. Dante invited the NPA squad into his hut to share a dinner of rice and dried fish, and by the light of a small homemade lamp, he and his wife listened as the young rebels explained their reasons for taking up arms against the government. They were fighting to improve the lives of poor farmers like Dante, Boy said. The revolution was against the big landlords, the "oppressors" and "exploiters" who, he said, got rich from the labor of peasants such as Dante. Later, the rebels e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 A Resilient Revolution
• 2 Launching the Struggle
• 3 A People's Army Takes Shape
• 4 Collapse and Retreat
• 5 The Ghosts of Plaza Miranda
• 6 Prisoners in a Gilded Cage
• 7 Shaping the Revolution
• 8 Indigenizing "People's War"
• 9 Martial Law and the Urban Underground
• 10 The Manila Rebellion
• 11 The New People's Army Tastes Success
• 12 The Battle for Davao
• 13 The Elusive United Front
• 14 The Election Boycott and Strategic Debates: 1985-1987
• 15 Talking Peace While Preparing for War
• 16 "Land to the Tillers"
• 17 Barangay Rose: Life in a Communist Village
• 18 Revolution in the Church
• 19 Inside the Labor Front
• 20 Inside the New People's Army
• 21 People's War: The Third Decade
• 22 The Faces Behind the Revolution
• 23 "A Terrible Time"
• 24 "People's Republic of the Philippines"
• 25 Red Christmas
• 26 Facing the Future
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index