ARTICLE ON THE PHILIPPINES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP87M00539R001502120002-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 21
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 1, 2010
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: December 2, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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ROUTING AND RECORD SHEET
SUBJECT: (Optional)
Article on the Philippines
C/PPS
3 D 01 Hqs.
TO: (Officer designation, room number, and
building)
DCI
7 E 12 Hqs.
OFFICER'S
INITIALS
FORWARDED '~M1
DATE
2 December 1985
COMMENTS (Number each comment to show from whom
to whom. Draw a line across column after each comment.)
In case you missed it,
attached is an outstanding
article by Ross Munro of
Time on the Communist
Party of the Philippines
and the New People's
Army.
cc: DDO
C/EA
FOR
j-79 m M [ O uSEEDITIONS-RE VIOUS
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Commentary
The New Khmer Rouge
Ross H. Munro
ARIL 13, 1974. Three U.S. Navy officers
are riding in a jeep along a new road
hugging the boundary of the Subic Bay naval base
in the Philippines. All three are Seabees-Navy
construction men-and their destination is a half-
mile farther north where a Seabee battalion is con-
tinuing work on the road. Suddenly shots ring out.
One officer is killed instantly. A moment later, the
two others, badly wounded, are finished off with
shots to the head fired at point-blank range. Later,
Philippine intelligence- informs U.S. authorities
that the Navy men had been ambushed by mem-
bers of the still fledgling Communist guerrilla
group, the New People's Army (NPA). The guer-
rilla leader responsible for the attack, as he had
been for previous attacks on U.S. military person-
nel stationed in the Philippines, is a twenty-six-
year-old former engineering student who calls him-
self Commander Bilog. His real name is Rodolfo
Salas.
RoDOLro SAGAS has long since graduated from be-
ing the leader of a five-man NPA hit squad. Now
thirty-seven, he is the ruthless and brilliant leader
of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP),
presiding over the fastest growing, most threaten-
ing, and arguably the most brutal Communist in-
surgency in the world today. U.S. analysts believe
that if the corrupt and exhausted regime of Presi-
dent Ferdinand Marcos remains in power and the
situation in the Philippines continues to deterior-
ate at its current pace, Rodolfo Salas could one
day be leading the People's Democratic Republic
of the Philippines, the name the Communists have
already chosen for their new state.
Yet only a tiny minority of Filipinos has ever
heard of Salas and only a handful of non-Com-
munist politicians has met him during the eight
years he has been chairman of the CPP. Most
politically-minded Filipinos, if asked, will say that
the leader of the Communists in the Philippines
is Jose Maria Sison, who founded the CPP in 1968.
But Sison, a poet, university teacher, and Maoist
Ross H. MuNRO has been reporting on the Philippines since
1978 as a Time correspondent in Southeast Asia and in
Washington, D.C. His most recent visit to the Philippines
took place this past July. Currently, he is New Delhi bureau
chief for the Time-Life News Service.
ideologue, has been languishing in jail since 1977,
his influence largely eroded. It has been Salas the
engineer who has turned Sison's vision of a nation-
wide Communist insurgency into a full-fledged
reality. From a few thousand party members and
guerrilla fighters who were at most a serious nuis-
ance in Sison's day, Salas has been instrumental in
building the Communist movement into a for-
midable force. Today, the CPP credibly boasts
that it has "way over" 30,000 members, while the
NPA has "way beyond" 20,000 guerrillas, now
fighting in at least 59 of the nation's 73 provinces.
In news reports from the Philippines, nearly all
the responsibility for the Communist upsurge is
being given to Ferdinand Marcos. And indeed he
has played an essential role. During his twenty
years in power, the country has suffered from co-
lossal mismanagement of its economy, corruption
akin to looting, and the near destruction of the
nation's basic political institutions. Without all
this help from Marcos, it seems, the Communists
would have remained about as inconsequential as
they are today in, say, Indonesia or Thailand.
Yet by trashing the Marcos regime and blaming
it alone for the Communist upsurge, we fail to
give proper attention and credit to the Commu-
nists themselves. For it has been their fanaticism,
bequeathed by Sison, combined with their increas-
ing ruthlessness and opportunism since Salas be-
came leader, that have also proved essential to
their success.
While Salas shares Sison's original radical goal
of transforming the Philippines into a Communist
dictatorship, he seems to be far less concerned
than the party's Maoist founder about what
methods are used to achieve that goal. Under
Salas, the Communist guerrillas are waging a
largely unreported campaign of terror, assassina-
tion, and torture in the Philippine country-
side. As a radical but independent leftist who
knows both the CPP and the NPA well says: "I'm
afraid we might be staring at a Pol Pot future."
In the cities, the working style of the CPP is so
paranoid, rigid, and totalitarian that even left-
wing nationalists have quit anti-Marcos alliances
controlled by the Communists. The most respected
of these independent nationalists, former Senator
Jose Diokno, states: "They [the Communists] feel
they're so close to victory that they only need two
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20/COMMENTARY DECEMBER 1985
or three of us." Abroad, the once Maoist CPP has
dropped its pro-Chinese stance and, with Salas tak-
ing the lead, is avidly courting the Soviet Union
for official recognition and for financial and mili-
tary aid.
MOST chilling of all is the rapidly
mounting evidence of the NPA's
reign of terror, rivaling the Khmer Rouge in sav-
agery if not yet in scale. Most of the reports come
from the countryside, where the more than 20,000
Communist guerrillas, with far less than one mod-
ern rifle per man, have a largely demoralized, cor-
rupt, and ineffective Philippine military tied up
in knots. From the foothills of the Cagayan Valley
in northern Luzon to the city slums of southern
Mindanao, the NPA continues to tighten its hold.
That its primary means of accomplishing this is
terror seems well known among leftists, civil-rights
lawyers, rural parish priests, and others whose anti-
Marcos credentials give them rare access to infor-
mation about how the NPA really operates.
Typical is a leftist professor in Manila whose
radical teachings have helped inspire many stu-
dents to join Communist-front groups like the
League of Filipino Students. Recently, several of
his students won much-sought-after invitations to
visit NPA strongholds in various parts of the coun-
tryside m d view the revolution first-hand for a
couple o weeks. But, recounts this professor, many
returned; sickened and appalled by what they had
witnessed They watched as Communist guerrillas
killed "suspected informers" before an audience
of villagers. "But it's not just an execution. It's
cruel, slow, painful." The professor demonstrates
how the guerrillas stab the victim in the legs, but-
tocks, back, shoulders, and stomach before plung-
ing a dagger into his heart. "Is this happening in
a articular region of the country?" the professor
is asked. "All over," is his pained reply.
"Suspected informer" is a phrase heard again
and again in accounts of how the NPA holds sway
1over t4ousands of villages. The NPA readily ap-
plies the condemnatory label to a villager who
turns down tF a "invitation" of a newly arrived
NPAvsquad to a lecture in a nearby hot on the
evils of capitalism. Or to a minor local official who
speaks out against the Communists. Or to a peas-
ant who resists paying NPA "taxes."
In a village in southern Luzon this spring, a
Philippine journalist accompanying an NPA band
witnessed a man being led away for execution,
again on grounds that he was a suspected informer.
The journalist, vaguely sympathetic to the NPA,
pointed out to a guerrilla that the case against
the man, a recent arrival in the village, was a cir-
cumstantial one, and flimsy at that. The guerrilla's
response was a dismissive shrug. The journalist ac-
companied the NPA to several villages in the area
and discovered that in every one, no matter how
small, the NPA had executed people. -
Desperate for more funds to feed and arm their
burgeoning ranks, NPA units are applying their
terrorist methods to extorting money from rich
and poor alike. No one seems exempt anymore.
Early this year, for example, when Philippine
Protestant missionaries in the province of Surigao
del Norte resisted NPA demands for a hefty share
of their Sunday collections, an NPA squad in-
vaded their chapel during Sunday services where
they shot and killed one pastor in front of his
congregation, beat up a "deaconess" at another
chapel, and, that night, tracked down and killed
another pastor.
As law and order continue to deteriorate, NPA
hit squads (the foreign media have adopted the
NPA's slightly heroic-sounding name, Armed City
Partisans, for such groups) are operating with in-
creasing ease in urban areas. Recent targets have
included unsympathetic Philippine journalists
(whose deaths draw little attention compared with
those of anti-Marcos journalists). In the city of
Cebu, the NPA issued statements taking credit for
shooting and killing two outspokenly anti-Com-
munist radio commentators. The Communists are
also turning their guns on the leaders of demo-
cratic trade unions. According to Ernesto Herrera,
the courageous general secretary of the Trade
Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), the
Communists began killing rival labor leaders last
year. "We've lost nine [TUCP leaders killed by
the Communists] in the last ten months," he
reports.
THERE is also a steady stream of official
accounts of NPA atrocities from the
Philippine military that are carried mainly in pro-
government newspapers. Such reports have little
impact because the credibility of the military and
the pro-Marcos media has long since been squan-
dered. But independent sources say that the gov-
ernment accounts hardly do justice to the full
horror of the violence perpetrated by the NPA in
the countryside.
Here are a few of the more recent military ac-
counts of NPA violence, confirmed by secondary
sources:
? In trying to establish its control over a remote
gold-rush site in the province of Davao del Norte,
the NPA executed at least 45 people in a period
of less than five months, ending this March. Most
of the victims were retrieved from a body pit.
Many showed signs of having been tortured; and
indeed, eyewitnesses confirmed that the NPA had
tortured many of the victims before killing them.
? On June 15 of this year three NPA guerrillas
grabbed Corazon Pacana Coloso, a minor munici-
pal official in northern Mindanao who had the
misfortune of being the provincial governor's
sister. The guerrillas told the hastily assembled
townspeople that they were convening a "people's
court." They accused her of corruption, pro-
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.nounced her guilty, and then shot her in the head.
She died instantly.
? The military's statistics show that the NPA
killed 138 local Philippine officials in 1984. And
the number of such killings this year is running
ahead of last. No one appears to be challenging
these numbers, even though a good case can be
made that they understate the reality. Some of
the local officials being executed are undoubtedly
corrupt by Western standards. But because the
aim of the killings is not to clean up corruption
but to terrorize officials and villagers alike into
knuckling under to the NPA, strong and popular
local officials are being killed also. Says a U.S.
official saddened by deja vu: "It's just like Viet-
nam. The guerrillas are killing the worst and the
best local officials. They don't worry about the
mediocre ones; they know they'll go along."
? Inevitably, the increasingly violent NPA is
turning on itself. Intelligence sources say the NPA
recently executed several of its own members in
southern Luzon in the belief that they were gov-
ernment agents. They discovered, too late, that
they were mistaken. In the Davao area of Min-
danao, Brigadier General Dionisio Tan-Gatue
claims the NPA killed 28 or 29 of its own men
who had been wounded in an encounter May 14
and were slowing down the escape of the other
guerrillas.
ALTHOUGH the NPA's reign of terror is
largely ignored by foreign corre-
spondents and the anti-Marcos media, it is no
secret among Communist-party members. On the
final day of my most recent trip to the Philippines,
I told a key member of the CPP that I had re-
peatedly heard horror stories about NPA terror
and violence directed against civilians in almost
every part of the Philippines. He offered not a
word of argument, not even a suggestion that the
stories might be overblown. "It is the biggest
problem we have right now," he conceded. Yet
evidently only a minority of his fellow members
agree that it is a problem. The issue of NPA
brutality toward civilians was raised at a clandes-
tine meeting of national CPP and NPA cadres in
late 1984. The outcome then was inconclusive.
The belated response of Salas and the top CPP
leadership came in the CPP's official, underground
newspaper, Ang Bayan ("The Nation"), this spring.
Charges of NPA abuses amount to "slander," Ang
Bayan stated, because everyone knows that the
NPA has "iron discipline."
Few but the most naive city-bound party mem-
bers would believe such a claim. Instead, typical
party members seem to have accepted the fact that
they are players in an increasingly violent drama.
These days, the phrase "blood debts will be paid
in blood" rolls off the lips of party members as
easily as it does off the pages of Ang Bayan. Such
members have stopped making distinctions among
the people who are murdered by the NPA. As three
party members made clear in a discussion with me,
by definition anyone killed by the NPA must be
a "demonyo"-a term that the NPA initially used
to describe enemy spies but which has evolved into
a label for anyone the NPA decides to execute.
A Guide to Establishing a Mass Base in the Rural
Areas, a manual prepared for the exclusive use of
party cadres inside the NPA, makes it clear that
the guerrillas have party approval to kill virtually
anyone they want. Among the broadly defined
categories of people who can be executed are
"enemies of the people, spies, and unreformed
elements who hinder the development of the
revolutionary movement in the barrio."
The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP)
claims that the NPA is currently killing more
than 130 civilians a month, not including local
government officials. Most of the civilians are
victims of so-called liquidations, meaning mur-
ders, assassinations, or executions. Although the
Marcos regime's statistics are often suspect, these
numbers seem to be "clean." For one thing, the
same military reports that tally these civilian
deaths contain other statistics on NPA gains that
are remarkably consistent with claims that the
NPA is making in its underground publication,
Pulang Bandila ("Red Flag"). And dissidents in the
armed forces who are otherwise critical of how the
military conducts its business say the reporting of
NPA killings is carefully corroborated by death
certificates or eyewitness accounts.
B UT while these numbers are apparently
"clean," they fall far short of the truth.
Without doubt, the actual number of civilian
liquidations carried out by the NPA is much high-
er, quite possibly four or five times higher,
than the military claims. The explanation is
that NPA killings in remote barrios where its
power is greatest are rarely reported, particularly
not to the untrusted military. A peasant who
journeys into town to tell officials of a Communist-
ordered execution in his barrio is inviting, at best,
a clumsy military raid on his village or, much
worse, an NPA accusation that he is an informer.
If one ventures into areas in the Philippines
where NPA guerrillas are active, the story is al-
ways the same. Where the NPA prevails, a code
of fearful silence prevails: even if the NPA kills
your brother or your best friend, you do not
report it. When the NPA killed one of those
Protestant missionaries in his home in Surigao del
Norte, the guerrillas told his wife that she too
would be killed if she reported the killing to the
authorities. The civilian killings that do become
widely known are usually those that the NPA
wants widely known-where the guerrillas make
an example of a victim by staging a pre-execution
"trial" or by simply leaving his bullet-ridden body
in the town square.
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But usually only the local villagers hear about
the killing. In a small city in Bicol, the southern
tail of Luzon, a young and well-informed lawyer
who often defends dissidents says that an NPA
unit was killing civilians in a village just a few
miles from his home for more than three years
before he or anyone else in the city heard about
it. The villagers were simply too frightened, he
says, to report the deaths.
In the province of Davao del Norte, where the
NPA controls much of the population, I asked
Father Eligio Bianchi why he and other church-
men in the area had not reported the many
killings by the NPA as diligently as they had re-
ported the relatively few killings by the military.
Bianchi replied that, while he believed all kill-
ings were equally wrong, he rarely heard from
frightened villagers about NPA killings. "Now
and then you might hear someone whisper that
somebody had been killed by the NPA, but that's
all. They didn't want to talk about it."
This fearful silence prevailing in the country-
side wherever the NPA is active is almost com-
pletely overlooked by middle-class Manilans and
other Filipinos who still live far from the everyday
insurgency. Filipinos, they themselves readily con-
cede, are traditionally a garrulous lot, chronically
unable to keep a secret, and they still take it as a
given that they are the recipients of a free and
plentiful flow of information. Manila's upper
classes in particular pride themselves on knowing
what is happening in their family's home province
on the basis of an occasional visit from a retainer,
relative, or friend. But the visitor probably lives
in the provincial capital and knows less about
what is going on in the surrounding countryside
than the Bicol lawyer.
B UT the prevailing silence only partly
explains why NPA brutality is largely
ignored by the foreign-press contingent in Manila
as well as by the independent or anti-Marcos news-
papers that have been thriving in the Philippines
during the past two years. Another important part
of the explanation is that the media can learn
nothing about NPA atrocities from Philippine or-
ganizations that claim to be committed to civil
liberties and human rights.
By far the most prominent of these groups is
Task Force Detainees (TFD). In an almost incred-
ible feat of public relations, the openly pro-Com-
munist TFD has become recognized as the leading
defender of human rights in the Philippines. Its
accounts and statistics regarding "political prison-
ers" and the frequent abuses committed by the
Philippine military are cited by Amnesty Inter-
national, the Lawyers' Committee for Internation-
al Rights, and even the U.S. State Department.
And its claims and statistics find their way into
innumerable articles by foreign correspondents re-
porting from the Philippines.
Despite its international standing, the TFD has
consistently ignored NPA killings and other abuses
of civilians. It resolutely refuses to investigate, re-
port, or act on killings by the NPA. In my visits
to the TFD offices in Manila over several years,
officials have offered several explanations for their
one-sided view of what constitutes a human-rights
abuse. TFD spokesman Fidel Agcaoili made it
clear in an interview this summer that the TFD is
interested in exposing only those human-rights
abuses that reflect badly on the military. "Defi-
nitely our main line of inquiry [is] human-rights
abuses being committed by the government."
Agcaoili referred in a dismissive tone to "the
alleged abuses being committed by the NPA,"
then quickly caught himself and said, "No, I won't
say any more." But as far as the TFD's position
on people who take up arms and join the NPA is
concerned, Agcaoili readily volunteers that "we
respect their right to do so."
That Task Force Detainees has a benign view
of the New People's Army should surprise no one;
the TFD has never made a secret of its politics.
A visit to its offices in suburban Manila finds ac-
tivists, widely reputed even by leftists to be Com-
munists, wandering in and out and being treated
by the TFD staff with everyday familiarity. Staff
members talk about their plans to attend rallies
organized by a Communist-front group. The head
of the TFD, Sister Mariani Dimaranan, has re-
mained on the executive board of BAYAN, one of
the most tightly controlled of those fronts, even
though virtually every independent leftist on the
executive has quit, in protest against the CPP's
heavy-handed domination. Gerardo Bulatao, for
several years the key administrator of the TFD's
parent organization, the Association of Major Reli-
gious Superiors, was sentenced this year to twenty
years in jail after the government made a strong
case that he had played an important role in the
Communist insurgency on the island of Samar. The
TFD's fortnightly publication, Political Detainees
Update, usually devotes its front page to highly
favorable reports of the activities of BAYAN and
other Communist-party fronts, like KMU, the
labor alliance. Headlines use CPP terminology-
"U.S.-Marcos Dictatorship"-to describe the re-
gime.
The rFl) takes its heavy ideological baggage
along in pursuing its main task, which is chroni-
cling the human-rights abuses committed by the
Marcos regime and the Armed Forces of the Philip-
pines. The pursuit is relentlessly well-organized.
The TFD currently has a staff of 280 and a large
budget. Most of the money comes from foreign
church-related organizations, but the TFD refused
to answer both oral and written questions this
summer about the origin and amount of the dona-
tions and the size of its total budget.
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As countless news reports from the Philippines
have made clear, the TFD has no shortage of
raw material to work with in building its case
against the Marcos regime. There are many
documented instances of the Philippine military
and other government security forces abduct-
ing, torturing, and killing Communist suspects.
But even here, the TFD constantly plays
with the facts. Victims of the military are regu-
larly portrayed not as members of the NPA or the
CPP who are trying to overthrow the government
by force but merely as "farmers, . . . fishermen,
. . students" implicitly innocent of any wrong'
doing. In many cases, the most cursory investiga-
tion would reveal that a victim of the military's
mistreatment was an NPA guerrilla or a key NPA
informer. Crucial facts such as these could not
possibly justify a killing by the military. But the
TFD's omission of such facts represents a conscious
attempt to suppress an important part of the story
for political reasons.
This was so when the TFD portrayed an ugly
mass killing that occurred on the island of Negros
in 1980 which, more than any other single inci-
dent, marked the Marcos regime internationally
as brutal and murderous. In the spring of 1980,
in the rural municipality of Kabankalan in the
province of Negros Occidental, several peasants
were killed by military units acting at the behest
of a local political boss. In the protests and pub-
licity emanating from the TFD and other human-
rights organizations, two of the victims came to
symbolize the injustice. Alex Garsales and Herman
Moleta were portrayed as simple farmers who had
been murdered because they were active members
of the local branch of Basic Christian Commu-
nities, which in turn was portrayed as a Christian
form of community organization for the poor. Yet
a left-wing but non-Communist priest in Negro';
told me that it was well known in Kabankalan
that the two men were key figures in the NPA
organizational structure in their mountain village.
Another leftist, with close ties to the CPP and first-
hand knowledge of the situation in Negros, said it
was taken for granted that the Basic Christian
Communities of Negros formed "the basic infra-
structure for the NPA." (This is by no means true
everywhere in the Philippines. For instance, Basic
Christian Communities in Bukidnon province in
Mindanao that were begun under the leadership
of Bishop Francisco Claver are wary of both the
regime and the NPA.) But there was never a hint
of this either in TFD literature, or in a 1982 Am-
nesty International pamphlet that described the
incident, or in a New York Times article (January
29, 1981) about the case.
In addition to suppressing crucial information,
the TFD's reports also artificially inflate the extent
of political violence for which the authorities are
responsible. The TFD does this by refusing to make
clear distinctions between persons killed by the
military for political reasons and those killed by
a variety of armed groups because they are in-
volved in criminal activities, economic disputes,
or even personal quarrels. Agcaoili conceded, for
instance, that the TFD would define as political
the killing of a peasant involved in a land dispute.
After grouping together a wide variety of killings
in a countryside beset for centuries with rampant
violence, the TFD then suggests that all the vio-
lence is somehow connected to the regime's cur-
rent counterinsurgency efforts.
What discredits the TFD's reports even more is
that, even where there are virtually no facts avail-
able, it is ready to blame a murder on the authori-
ties. This is particularly true in the TFD's tally of
"salvagings," a uniquely Philippine term for an
incident in which the military kills a civilian in
cold blood because he is a suspected Communist.
Here, for instance, is the TFD's full account
(in Political Detainees Update, May 15, 1985) of a
recent case it classified as a salvaging:
Butuan City-An unidentified man was found
dead along KM 8 of the National Highway in
Ampayon at 5:30 A.M., March 17. The victim
was approximately 30 years old, 5'4" and of fair
complexion. He was wearing denim pants and a
red T-shirt. The victim suffered stab wounds all
over his body.
The TFD has less opportunity to manipulate
the statistics concerning "political prisoners."
Here, each prisoner is a confirmed resident of a
prison detention center. The TFD's own statistics
show that the number of political prisoners
peaked in 1983 and has been declining ever since,
from 851 on January 1 of this year to 695 on July
15. It is important to understand that many of
these prisoners are picked up in raids on guerrilla
strongholds and held for only a short period. The
majority of the 695 prisoners have been in jail for
less than one year, many for just a few days.
It is appropriate to call these people "prisoners
of war" rather than political prisoners. There
seems to be universal agreement in the Philippines
that virtually all the long-term prisoners are NPA
guerrillas or Communist-party members actively
involved in trying to overthrow the regime. The
TFD itself implicitly conceded this by distributing
a statement this July saluting "the political pris-
oners who dare risk their freedom for the sake of
our people's liberation." In other words, these are
prisoners of war captured in the midst of a fierce,
nationwide insurgency.
W HAT the TFD's tally really tells us is
how pitifully ineffective the Armed
Forces of the Philippines have become. After
fighting Communist guerrillas for more than a
decade, they have succeeded in capturing only
some 200 CPP and NPA members important
enough or threatening enough to keep in jail.
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Nor, by the standards of rural insurgencies else-
where in the world today, is the Philippine mili-
tary particularly brutal. The language used in
TFD reports ("state terrorism . . . escalating
military abuses ... alarmingly rampant salvaging
...") and the tenor of some news reports suggest
that the Philippines is akin to military-ruled Ar-
gentina or Guatemala. That is far from the truth.
Even if the TFD's inflated statistics are used, the
rate of political killings and disappearances over
the past decade is no more than one-fiftieth that
of Guatemala.
In fact, the Philippine military is no longer
marauding much around the countryside. Mostly
the soldiers are huddling in their barracks, demor-
alized and on the defensive, while the NPA ex-
tends its reign of terror. Many so-called combat
units no longer have the gasoline or even the
boots to move around. One statistic sums up the
portrait of an almost defeated military: a minus-
cule 2 percent of the clashes between the AFP and
the NPA during the first half of this year were
initiated by the military. Two-thirds of the clashes
were initiated by the Communist guerrillas. The
remaining incidents were classified as "encoun-
ters," a catch-all term that includes incidents
where the soldiers of the two sides stumble into
each other.
Significantly, the Philippine military units most
often on the offensive against the NPA are the
very units most trusted and respected by the peo-
ple in the countryside-the Marines and Scout
Rangers. But these groups are a minority within
the AFP; the majority of the armed forces is com-
posed of passive, corrupt, and demoralized units.
It is these units that are driving rural Filipinos
into a sullen alienation that makes continuing
Communist gains almost certain. They are led by
officers who siphon off defense-ministry funds,
sell their units' services to provincial political
bosses or land-grabbers, or use their power to
muscle into local business. The enlisted men, un-
derstanding full well the connection between their
officers' wealth and their own lack of adequate
food and clothing, run petty but vicious protec-
tion rackets in the towns, steal chickens in the
villages, and, at checkpoints on the roads, demand
payoffs from farmers bringing their produce to
market. Shunned by civilians, the enlisted men
express their frustration in drinking and fighting.
When a demand for action against the guerrillas
comes down the command structure, a hapless
lieutenant is dispatched to a village where he
may grab the first two young men in sight and
threaten to beat them unless they reveal the iden-
tity and whereabouts of the local NPA. Even vil-
lagers terrorized by the NPA and inclined to give
information to the military know that the lieuten-
ant will not be there the next day to help protect
them from an NPA death sentence for being an
informer. In short, the people are learning every
day that the military cannot be trusted or relied
upon. An army like that cannot win a guerrilla
war.
THE roots of that guerrilla war can be
traced to the mid-1960's when a group
of young radicals began coalescing at the Univer-
sity of the Philippines. At their center was Jose
Maria Sison, first a student and then a lecturer at
the university, who had joined the old Moscow-
line Communist party, then as now referred to as
the PKP.
In late 1964, Sison founded Kabataang Maka-
bayan (KM, or Nationalist Youth). Although KM
was organized as the PKP's youth wing, it was
first and foremost Sison's organization. The in-
tense, brilliant, energetic, and disputatious Sison
recruited and trained a phalanx of loyalists who
formed the hard core of KM. Almost from the be-
ginning, it seems, Sison chafed under PKP leaders
he viewed as old failures. The heady politics of
China's cultural revolution energized and legiti-
mized his discontent and, by 1967, Sison had com-
pleted his first draft of a history of the PKP that
incisively dissected and condemned the party's
failure since 1942 under the leadership of the
three Lava brothers. This draft, Rectify Errors and
Rebuild the Party, became one of the founding
documents of the originally Maoist CPP. Polem-
ical and one-sided as it is, it remains the best avail-
able history of the PKP.
In April 1967, the Moscow-oriented PKP leader-
ship expelled Sison and his supporters from
the party. Almost immediately they formed their
own provisional Politburo and issued a May Day
statement hailing China's cultural revolution. But
it was not until the day after Christmas 1968,
when Sison and ten trusted comrades secretly gath-
ered in Pangasinan province and opened what
they called a "Congress of Reestablishment," that
the new Communist Party of the Philippines was
formally founded. The name given to the CPP's
first meeting underlined Sison's contention that
the old PKP was no longer a legitimate Commu-
nist party.
By now the CPP might have been a defunct
and forgotten Maoist sect if Sison had not found
Bernabe Buscayno. Commander Dante, as he is to
this day better known, was the leader of a small
group of guerrillas who were among the remnants
of the 12,000 Huks who had challenged the Phil-
ippine government in the late 1940's and early
1950's. Dante had an apparently well-deserved rep-
utation as a ruthless and well-practiced killer but,
by all accounts, he wanted to devote his talents to
revolution, not to serving the criminal syndicate
into which the Huk hierarchy had degenerated.
When the two would-be makers of revolution
joined forces, Dante had his ideology and Sison
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THE NEW KHMER ROCGE/25
had his army. The New People's Army was
founded on March 29, 1969, with 35 rifles and
handguns, the discipline code of China's Red
Army, and Mao's strategy of protracted people's
war.
There was a slavish quality in the Maoist cant
("punish the evil gentry ... establish firmest rela-
tions with Albania") that was woven into the
CPP's founding manifesto, Programme for a
People's Democratic Revolution. But the "central
task" of the CPP then as now was straightforward:
"Seizing political power through armed revolu-
tion."
Amid the Maoist jargon and formulas in the
CPP's early documents there was only a hint of
Sison's analytical and visionary mind. That be-
came more evident in 1970 in Philippine Society
and Revolution, his comprehensive Marxist cri-
tique of what ailed the Philippines, which con-
tained a hint of the Maoist prescription that he
had in mind for its cure.
SISON'S most important contribution to
the literature of the Philippine revo-
lution was published in 1974. With Specific Char-
acteristics of Our People's War, Sison presented
his fellow Philippine Communists with the stra-
tegic game plan they have been following ever
since. At that time, Marcos was at the peak of his
power and the CPP and the NPA together num-
bered no more than 3,000. But Sison saw victory
ahead. He believed that the NPA could defeat the
Philippine military slowly but surely by creating
guerrilla strongholds in the mountains and hills
of every major island. "In the long run," he re-
assured his doubting comrades, "the fact that our
country is archipelagic will turn out to be a great
advantage for us and a great disadvantage for the,
enemy. The enemy shall be forced to divide his
attention and forces not only to the countryside
but also to so many islands."
Sison believed that the Huks under PKP leader-
ship had seriously blundered by effectively con-
fining their guerrilla warfare to the island of
Luzon. This allowed the Philippine military to
concentrate its counterinsurgency forces there. It
was Sison's idea to establish guerrilla fronts in all
the major islands of the Philippines, dispersing the
armed forces throughout the archipelago and then
gradually grinding them down.
Sison had a special role in mind for the largest
island in the south. "The long-term task of our
Mindanao forces is to draw enemy forces from
Luzon and destroy them." The supremely con-
fident Sison issued this master plan at a time when
not a single NPA guerrilla band was active in
Mindanao. With fanatic dedication, the Commu-
nists would try again and again and finally suc-
ceed in achieving Sison's goal of turning Min-
danao into the military meatgrinder it is today. In
early 1971, the CPP dispatched a lone student
radical, Benjamin de Vera, to the city of Davao in
eastern Mindanao. By the end of that year, de
Vera had sworn in three party members and they
had recruited 30 candidate members. A few
months after Marcos declared martial law on Sep-
tember 21, 1972, the CPP put together a small
guerrilla unit to test the revolutionary waters in
the countryside between Davao and the city of
Cotabato. By the end of 1973, party documents
reveal, this unit had been virtually wiped out.
But the CPP and the NPA persevered. More
former student radicals were sent to Mindanao to
"integrate with the masses" and to organize small
villages. The NPA began over again, but pain-
fully slowly. By July 1975, again according to
party documents, the NPA in Mindanao consisted
of only seven men with seven guns. It seemed that
most of the young, educated Communists who
carne from the cities ended up dying. By mid-1976,
300 of the first 370 party members in Mindanao
had died, dropped out, defected, or been detained.
Elsewhere in the Philippines-in Isabela province
and the Cagayan Valley in northern Luzon, and
on the islands of Negros and Samar-the former
student activists, along with the few members of
the rural lumpenproletariat they could recruit,
were doing only a little better. One pro-Commu-
nist account of the guerrilla fighting in northern
Luzon reported that the life expectancy of an
NPA member in those days was three years.
I T WAS during this period-the early to
mid-1970's when the Philippine econ-
omy was booming and Marcos was at the height
of his power-that the highly favorable image of
the New People's Army became fixed in the minds
of the many middle-class- Filipinos outside the
guerrilla zones. The image was grounded partly,
in reality but to a substantial extent, even in those
days, in myth. The fact that countless student
radicals with comfortable backgrounds and prom-
ising futures were dying or going to prison for
their cause made a deep impression on many
middle- and upper-class Filipinos. Adrift in an
increasingly cynical and materialistic society,
privileged and educated Manilans often viewed
the fanaticism of the Communists as an enviable
virtue. To this day, an upper-class Manila dinner
party seems incomplete until a guest, who invari-
ably has no first-hand knowledge of how the guer-
rillas operate, begins speaking in admiring tones
of the.young Communists in the hills and prisons.
The other guests nod knowingly and approvingly
as dollar-a-day servants hover over them. Even
politically moderate activists like Agapito (Butz)
Aquino, brother of the assassinated political lead-
er Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino, see something to ad-
mire in the fanatic dedication of the Communists.
"I have always been impressed by the conviction
of these guys. . . . I envy these guys ... they're
struggling for a philosophy they believe in...."
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Many Filipinos came to think that if the Com-
munists' fanaticism was selfless then it must also
be benign. So they were instant believers in the
myths surrounding how the NPA operated: guer-
rillas were idealistic students who won over the
peasants by providing them with medical care
(heavy on the acupuncture) and with political
instruction that opened their eyes to their oppres-
sion. Now and then the guerrillas might shoot
someone but the victims were all bad people-
cattle rustlers, rapists, sadistic policemen-who
should have been punished by the authorities.
The peasants were so delighted that they referred
to the NPA as the Nice People Around.
This myth may have overlapped with reality in
some parts of the Philippines for a brief period in
the 1970's. It is difficult to say because there are
virtually no independent accounts available of
how the NPA operated a decade or more ago. Cer-
tainly some radical leftists who are appalled by
the NPA's actions today insist that there was a
golden era. But even if that were true, the tarnish
was already visible. As early as 1970, about one-
third of the ranking NPA members belonged to
liquidation squads. And the most upwardly mo-
bile of all the NPA guerrillas during this supposed
golden period was Rodolfo Salas, who was riding
his reputation as a gunslinger to greater power
and status inside the CPP.
C ONTRIBUTING to the myth of a benign
NPA was the growing awareness
among educated Filipinos that many priests and
nuns were becoming deeply involved with the
Communists. Many Filipinos, who are more than
90-percent Roman Catholic, seem to believe that
if nuns and priests support the Communists, then
Communism must have many commendable qual-
ities.
But very few Filipinos appreciate how deep the
involvement of many members of the Catholic
clergy has become. Nowhere else in the world, it
seems, have so many priests and nuns been so com-
mitted to the Communist cause. As a Philippine
leftist puts it: "Liberation theology has gone much
farther in the Philippines than in Latin America.
In Latin America, it justifies collaboration with
the Communists. Here it means joining the Com-
munists."
Although a great deal of publicity has been
given to a handful of priests who have become
gun-toting NPA guerrillas, these clerics turned
killers form just a small and unrepresentative
minority of the Communists inside the Church.
In the Philippines, hundred of priests and nuns
effectively become Communist-party members by
joining a highly secretive, possibly unique, organi-
zation called Christians for National Liberation
(CNL). The CNL's members include some Cath-
olic lay workers and some Protestants, but its core
consists of an estimated 1,200 priests and nuns
who form secret cells inside the Catholic Church
and its many organizations. The CNL constitution
mandates a secretive, highly disciplined structure
"based on the principle of democratic centralism,"
the organizational principle of Marxism-Leninism
The policies of the CNL are also explicitly Com-
munist; its constitution requires members to
pledge support for "protracted people's war" and
the "armed struggle and the underground move-
ment." The key task is "to overthrow the U.S.-
Marcos dictatorship."
The first program adopted by the CNL all but
announced the Communists' intention to establish
Task Force Detainees under the control of the
CNL. The wording left no doubt that the aim
was not to protect human rights but to aid the
NPA. The program declared that "the CNL must
develop a massive, sustained, and militant protest
movement against militarization. This seeks to
block the full escalation of military activity
against the guerrilla fronts. . . . We denounce
military atrocities." In 1974, about a year after
the CNL program was written, Task Force De-
tainees came into existence. To this day, all of
TFD's 13 regional and subregional directors are
priests or nuns and most, if not all, are members
of the CNL.
For priests and nuns, joining the CNL amounts
to a secret rejection of the Roman Catholic Church
.
Their acceptance of the CNL's unqualified call for*
revolutionary violence represents a philosophical
break with the Church, but they also break with
it in an organizational sense by endorsing a con-
stitution that rejects the Church hierarchy from
the local bishopric to the Vatican. Besides requir-
ing members to fight for democratic decision-
making in the Church, the CNL constitution says
another aim of the organization is "to fight for
truly self-reliant and self-determining Filipino
churches against the interventions of foreign
Church bodies and institutions." Presumably that
includes the Pope.
What is particularly insidious about the CNL's
presence within the Church is its secrecy. Bishop
Francisco Claver, a left-wing critic of the Commu-
nists, has often said that he objects not so much
to the presence of Communists inside the Church
as to their dishonesty and deceit. Priests will
live in the same residence or work in the same
Church organization as other priests for years
without telling them they are CNL members.
There is no open and honest debate because they
never reveal to their fellow priests precisely
what they stand for or where their ultimate loyal-
ties lie.
Partly because virtually no Filipinos outside the
CNL know anything of substance about the group,
its constitution, or its program, it is still widely
believed that the presence of priests and nuns in-
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I HL NL%V KHMER RoLGL;27
side the Communist movement is a force for
moderation and mercy. Such comforting thoughts
are promoted by people like the nun who told me
that she knew guerrillas who, after being exposed
to some of the Communists in the Church, began
carrying Bibles in their packs. Yet the evidence
suggests that the CNL members are more radical
and rigid than other Communists. In statements
commenting on the Aquino assassination that
were issued within days of each other in the fall
of 1983, the CPP endorsed all forms of protest,
both violent and nonviolent, against the Marcos
regime while the CNL called only for armed
struggle.
I T is not only the rhetoric of the CNL
that is radical. Any curious visitor to
provincial conventos where priests live and work
will soon discover that many of them harbor clerics
who are working virtually full time for the revolu-
tion. CNL members find shelter for wounded
guerrillas, help party cadres move through their
towns on the way to NPA base areas, and serve as
message drops.
For a period in the middle to late 1970's, in
some areas where the NPA's existence was still
tenuous, the help of CNL priests and nuns was
probably essential in permitting the NPA to hang
on. In other areas, the CNL and its allies hastened
the growth of the Communists. In Mindanao, for
instance, the Communists took virtually complete
control of the day-to-day running of the Min-
danao-Sulu Pastoral Conference, the organization
that the bishops of Mindanao and the Sulu archi-
pelago had set up to administer social programs.
The bishops eventually conceded that the only
way they could regain control of their own orga-
nization was to abolish it. After much agony and
delay, that is exactly what they did.
On the island of Negros, leftist sources confirm
personal impressions that some priests were in-
volved in organizing sugar workers for the Com-
munists. Years before, the PKP, the old Commu-
nist party, had tried to organize these workers but
had been quickly thrown off the isolated haciendas
where the sugar workers lived. Said one partici-
pant in that old struggle: "We failed completely."
But the new CPP succeeded: "When priests come
to organize the workers under the banner of relig-
ion, better yet when the priests are Australian or
Irish, it's easy. The landlords will never think that
this is a Communist organization. But that is what
happened; the Basic Christian Communities [orga-
nized by the priests] in Negros became the infra-
structure of the NPA."
One account of how the CPP has infiltrated and
seized control of Church organizations in the Phil-
ippines is the testimony of the late Father Edgardo
Kangleon. Father Kangleon was deeply involved
in the Communist-party network operating inside
the Roman Catholic Church on the island of
Samar. After being arrested, he had a change of
heart and consented to have a dialogue with De-
fense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile in front of three
Catholic bishops.
Kangleon talked freely about how the Commu-
nists and a few trusted members of front groups
had taken virtually complete control of the
Church's social-action programs in Samar. Church
programs ostensibly aimed at helping peasants,
fishermen, and illiterates were in reality initiated
and controlled by the Communist party, said
Kangleon. "We geared these programs toward our
own motives." Applications for financial help
from Philippine and foreign agencies were passed
through a regional organization, the Visayan Sec-
retariat for Social Action, where other Commu-
nists forwarded them with a favorable recommen-
dation to potential donor organizations.
The same thing is happening today to a greater
or lesser extent in every region of the Philippines.
It seems that no one in the Marcos regime or
even in the CPP has a good estimate of the total
amount. But no one doubts that hundreds of
thousands, quite possibly millions, of dollars from
abroad are flowing into Communist-controlled or-
ganizations and projects in the Philippines. One
intelligence analyst estimates that Church-related
organizations in Western Europe alone last year
donated $750,000 to Communist-controlled orga-
nizations under the umbrella of the Roman Cath-
olic Church. But that is only a semi-educated
guess.
Despite the great inroads that the Communists
have made in the Catholic Church since Christians
for National Liberation was formed in February
1972, the Church as a whole is still far from being
pro-Communist. Less thgn 10 percent of the coun-
try's 14,000 priests and nuns belong to the CNL;
most, if asked point blank, would say they are
opposed to Communism. But this rank-and-file
majority, now deeply disillusioned with the Mar-
cos regime, has failed to come up with any coher-
ent political stance that is both anti-Marcos and
anti-Communist.
Thus the majority is easily cowed by the pro-
Communist minority; even most conservative bish-
ops now try to ignore pro-Communist activism
among their priests, just as they themselves refrain
from making anti-Communist statements. In fact,
the Church majority has been bullied into such a
flaccid neutrality regarding the Communists that
it was an unusual, newsworthy event this summer
when the Archbishop of Zamboanga, Francisco
Cruces, pleaded that publicity given to NPA atroc-
ities be as extensive as publicity given to military
atrocities.
There is little immediate prospect that the
Church will come to grips with the Communist
challenge. Instead, the implicit policy of the
Church hierarchy, from the Archbishop of Manila,
Jaime Cardinal Sin, to the lowliest provincial
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28/COMMhti I nxI Lt.?r..lUtr. 1965
bishop, is to maintain a state of ignorance about
the CPP presence inside the Church. Cardinal Sin,
in particular, is known to place the survival of a
unified Catholic Church above almost everything
else. If he were to launch a comprehensive exami-
nation of the CPP presence in the Church, he
would, to borrow a Marxist term, be heightening
the contradictions within the Church, and pos-
sibly precipitating a crisis.
B ACK in 1976, the Communists did not
seem to pose much of a threat to the
Church, or to any other institution in the Philip-
pines. On June 25, 1976, after the CPP leadership
had spent months analyzing the failure of the
party and the NPA to make significant gains, the
CPP issued a cautious new position paper. Al-
though it has apparently been circulated only
clandestinely and in mimeographed form, Our
Urgent Tasks remains one of the key documents
in the CPP's history. It would also prove to be the
last important party paper written by Sison before
his arrest.
Although Tasks brimmed with Sison's rhetorical
optimism ("the soil for the revolutionary anti-
feudal movement and armed struggle in the coun-
tryside is more fertile than ever before"), the over-
all message was glum. The Marcos regime was
killing or arresting NPA guerrillas and CPP
cadres at a rapid rate. There had been hardly any
net growth in party membership since 1973. The
party remained a small organization, perhaps
3,000 members, who were almost all one-time stu-
dent radicals and other educated Filipinos from
the middle and upper classes. In fact, most party
members then seem to have been former members
of KM, the radical youth organization, or had
been recruited by KM members. The party of the
masses it definitely was not. As Tasks almost plain-
tively stated: "We must increase the number of
party members who are of worker and peasant
status. In this regard, we must keep in mind that
we do not wish to be an exclusively cadre party."
With false bravado, the Tasks paper declared
that "in no year [since 1968] has the enemy struck
down more than 5 percent of the party." Even
taken at face value, this was an admission that as
many as two-fifths of the Filipinos who had joined
the CPP since 1968 had been killed. But few of
these deaths occurred among the large number of
party members who had remained in the towns
and cities. What Sison was really admitting was
that the many party members fighting with the
NPA were dying like flies.
One of the key problems then faced by the
NPA was its lack of modern rifles. On that score,
the party document was more hortatory than help-
ful: "We make sure that at the core of such
weapons as bolos [a machete-like knife], spears,
bows and arrows, and homemade explosives are
good guns." And if that is not possible, then "a
full enemy squad ... caught by surprise ... can
be easily overpowered by our militia with bolos
or even with bare hands."
The bottom-line advice Our Urgent Tasks had
for the NPA was to avoid military action as much
as possible and, instead, return to the task of con-
solidating control over rural base areas in remote
parts of the country. Only after there is "pains-
taking work" and "solid organizational work," said
Sison, should the NPA attempt military action.
Cautioned the CPP strategist: "We can advance
only step by step."
The NPA proceeded to build those secure base
areas with a vengeance. "Solid organizational
work" soon came to mean the total mobilization
and control of the people in the base areas. This
is how the Communist-party publication, Ang
Bayan, described what was happening to civilians
in NPA areas by the late 1970's:
In the guerrilla fronts, the day-to-day work of
the masses includes giving material support to
the people's army, keeping the enemy under
surveillance, and helping to safeguard the secu-
rity of the revolutionary forces. The people also
participate in military operations carried out by
the guerrilla units. They also play an important
role in exposing and punishing enemy spies.
Many such "civilians" forced by the NPA into
semi-combatant roles were among the first victims
when the military came hunting the guerrillas. It
was classic guerrilla-warfare strategy: coopt civil-
ians and put them between you and the govern-
ment's armed forces. Their deaths have continued
to provide grist for the mills of groups like Task
Force Detainees. -
But there was another reason why the NPA had
concluded by the mid-1970's that it had to be ruth-
less in asserting control over the guerrilla base
areas. In Mindanao Party Situation and Policies,
another CPP document issued about the same time
as Our Urgent Tasks, guerrilla leaders blamed
their losses on their failure to kill "bad elements"
and "local government informants." What the
NPA had to confront was the fact that, unlike
virtually all Communist guerrilla movements that
had ever achieved victory, it had no completely
secure base area or sanctuary. There was no friend-
ly foreign territory just across an international
boundary where its guerrillas could flee when the
fighting got particularly heavy. Nor did it have a
remote base inside the country like Mao's Yenan
that government troops could not penetrate. In-
stead, to this day, there is no NPA base area any-
where in the Philippines that a large contingent
of government troops could not penetrate and oc-
cupy if it wished to. Since the NPA cannot depend
on territory, there is nowhere the enemy cannot
come, the NPA has to make certain there is no one
who might talk to the enemy when he arrives.
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The literally terrifying solution that the party
and the NPA came up with was to demonstrate
their willingness to kill anyone who might possi-
bly hinder the consolidation of their base areas.
A defender of the NPA might say that, forced by
military realities, the NPA terrorized the rural
population. The NPA killed real, possible, and
even, in its view, potential informers. It killed at
the slightest pretext just to demonstrate its power
and coldbloodedness. In Bukidnon province, for
instance, we have first-hand accounts of the NPA
killing a man solely because he once bragged that
he had no fear of the NPA and, in another town,'
killing two men because, the guerrillas announced
afterward, they had maintained mistresses. There
are also countless second-hand accounts that make
it clear that the NPA is less interested in whom it
kills than in demonstrating to a cowed populace
that it is ready to kill.
The NPA's new ruthlessness was endorsed by
the top CPP leadership. The party in effect told
the NPA that it should feel free to kill anyone it
felt it was necessary to kill. By including on the
death list "unreformed bad elements who hinder
the development of the revolutionary movement
in the barrio," the CPP was giving the NPA vir-
tual carte blanche. If that was not subjective
enough, Ang Bayan (December 31, 1980) seemed
to suggest that any killing was permissible if a vil-
lage mob approved:
What kind of criminals are meted out the death
penalty by the revolutionary movement? The
masses clearly express the answer to this by their
feeling of relief every time a "demonyo" (enemy
spy) or some other bad element is given capital
punishment by the NPA. . . . The crimes of
these bad elements vary but these are all so
grave as to warrant death as a just penalty.
In this period of reconsolidation, NPA guer-
rilla bands gravitated neither to the poorest areas
in the Philippines nor to those areas where mili-
tary abuses were necessarily the greatest. Instead,
the NPA sunk new roots into remote and isolated
areas where the government and the military had
little if any effective presence and authority. The
interior of the island of Samar was one of these
vacuum areas; Davao del Norte, a province in
eastern Mindanao, was another.
I T WAS in Davao del Norte that I learned
what the NPA had become. By the
late 1970's, the NPA was well on its way to taking
effective control of much of the province. The
center of NPA strength was the municipality
(equivalent in size to a large U.S. county) of San
Vicente, still known to its inhabitants by its previ-
ous name, Laac. There, in late 1981, the Philip-
pine military finally reacted to the NPA's gains
by setting up variations of strategic hamlets. They
forced farm families in small settlements to dis-
mantle their houses and rebuild them in the
municipality's larger towns where small military
units were posted to stand guard. The military's
aim was to isolate the NPA guerrillas from their
support base. The move, which appeared to be a
pilot project, alarmed the Communist party;
clandestine CPP publications had long warned
that hamletization represented a dire threat to the
NPA.
So the Communists decided to launch a con-
certed propaganda campaign aimed at portraying
the hamlets as a rank injustice foisted on an un-
willing population. The first two journalists in-
vited, indirectly by the Communists, to visit San
Vicente, where they could be expected to write
unfavorably on the hamlets, were a good-hearted
missionary-journalist, who had great sympathy for
the far Left, and myself.
By then I had reported several stories from the
Philippines that reflected harshly on the Marcos
regime, several of which had been attacked by
the pro-Marcos press in Manila. The best-known
article, provocatively headlined by Time "Pacific
Powderkeg" (September 24, 1979), may have been
the first comprehensive portrait in a major U.S.
media outlet of the decay that was besetting the
Marcos regime and the country at large. Reports
of this kind had given me substantial access to
Communists and their fellow-travelers. They
seemed to think that I was their sort of reporter.
Not, as it turned out, in Davao del Norte. This
was so despite reporting conditions heavily skewed
in favor of the guerrillas. A pro-NPA group ac-
companied me virtually everywhere. The inter-
preter for all my interviews with local farmers was
very close to, probably a member of, the Commu-
nist party. (An unqualified statement of CPP mem-
bership is hard to come by; membership status
is so secret that fellow members are forbidden
to acknowledge membership to one another un-
less they have been directed to work together.)
But one advantage I did have was that many of
the peasants I talked to addressed me as "father,"
believing I was a Catholic missionary in whom they
could, presumably, confide. The peasants were not
parroting anybody's line: they were obviously re-
lieved that the guerrillas had fled, but they seemed
wary of the military who were the new powers-
that-be. All conversations were held well out of
sight of military personnel.
Everywhere we went, the story was the same.
The area was relatively well off; most farmers
worked their own small landholdings. Until a few
months before, there had been no significant mili-
tary abuses; in fact, the area had generally been
ignored by the authorities. There was no real gov-
ernment presence except in the poblacion (central
town) of San Vicente. Roads were no better than
dirt tracks, increasing the isolation of the area.
The NPA had moved in just a few years before
and had already killed scores of people. In the
sitio of Linumbaan, a small village of 83 families.
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an NPA supporter and resident told us, the NPA
had killed 20 people in the village and immediate
surrounding area. The killings he described were
aimed at demonstrating the NPA's power more
than anything else. The NPA, he said, had killed
people who had spoken out against the guerrillas.
It had killed a woman, whom the villagers re-
ferred to simply as Tomboy, solely because she
was a reputed lesbian. At another sitio that was
home to 72 families, the NPA had killed two local
people in the past two years. Villagers said the
NPA had steadily raised "revolutionary taxes"
that were paid in cash and food.
The NPA had set up forced-labor plots in some
locations; local farmers had no choice but to work
a three-day stint on them every few weeks. Nearly
all the produce from the plots was appropriated
by the guerrillas; a small amount was apparently
put in collective storage for the entire village.
In three separate interviews, local farmers
summed up the NPA's methods by slicing their
hands across their throats, graphically conveying
their firm belief that they would have been killed
if they had not complied with the NPA's demands.
WHILE the NPA was resorting to in-
creasingly brutal methods in the lat-
ter half of the 1970's, an almost complete turn-
over was not so coincidentally under way in the
Communist-party leadership. Starting in the mid-
1970's, members of the KM generation of leaders
began to be killed or captured. Names well known
in Philippine radical circles-Ocampo, Corpuz,
Jopson-fell one by one. And on November 10,
1977, the party chairman himself, Jose Maria
Sison, was captured. Sison's comrade and top mili-
tary man, Bernabe Buscayno, had been captured
more than a year earlier.
During this period, a gloating President Marcos
publicly declared that the elimination of the top
party leaders had broken the Communist move-
ment. Even today, Marcos is fond of rolling out
statistics on how many CPP and NPA leaders have
been killed or jailed. He apparently still does not
understand that the ability of the CPP and the
NPA to survive these repeated setbacks and then
to continue growing under a new corps of leaders
is compelling evidence of the Communists'
strength, discipline, and resilience.
At a central committee meeting in January
1977, ten months before Sison was captured, Salas
had reportedly already been designated as Sison's
successor. In any event, he was quickly and form-
ally elected party head in early 1978, capping a
meteoric rise in the ranks of the CPP.
Born in the province of Pampanga on Decem-
ber 23, 1947, he went to high school in Angeles
City, the prosperous next-door neighbor of Clark
air-force base. He arrived on the campus of the
University of the Philippines (l1P) in 1965 where
he studied mathematics and then chemical engi-
neering. Soon caught up in radical student poli-
tics, Salas is said to have been recruited into the
Communist orbit by Sison himself. Technically
this made Salas a member of UP's KM generation
of radicals. But Salas's contemporaries on the UP
campus in the 1960's now say that he was an un-
assuming fellow who was never part of the inner
circle of student leftists. By most accounts it was
only after leaving the university and going under-
ground that Salas became important in the party.
Even today, as the undisputed leader of the
Communist insurgency, Salas does not leave a
vivid impression with Filipinos outside the CPP
who occasionally meet with him surreptitiously.
They describe him as a man of ordinary appear-
ance ("except for his ears, which stick out and
make him look like Alfred E. Neuman," said one
opposition politician). He speaks quietly and
exudes self-confidence.
With no claims to being an intellectual like
Sison, Salas developed a reputation as a good un-
derground organizer and a daring military tac-
tician. He was conducting military actions like
the Subic Bay ambush at a time when the NPA
nationwide had only a few modern guns. Al-
though he was arrested in June 1973, he soon es-
caped. Salas was given the powerful post of party
chairman for Central Luzon and was reportedly
already in charge of party-building nationwide
when he became the leader of the entire CPP.
Once he was chairman, Salas immediately began
putting his stamp on the party. Sison, the poet,
Maoist intellectual, and grand strategist, had
placed great emphasis on ideological correctness
and procedural purity. But Salas, the engineer
and military tactician, though no less radical than
Sison in his ultimate political goals, seems from
the beginning to have been much more concerned
with ends than with means. Whatever was re-
quired to win the struggle for power was justified.
It was Salas, for instance, who wrote or at least
authorized those party statements, issued since the
late 1970's, which establish and defend the party's
carte-blanche policy toward the killing of civil-
ians in NPA guerrilla base areas.
The first whiff of the new opportunism came in
1978 when a CPP directive authorized local party
leaders to jettison strict procedures set up during
Sison's leadership for the careful screening and
training of prospective party members before they
were admitted to the CPP. For the sake of party-
building, the new directive stated, instant member-
ships could now be granted in areas where the
party was just starting to organize.
In the late summer of 1980, members of the
Communist party's central committee gathered at
a temporary hideout in the foothills near the
Bicol town of Daet. It was a typical central-com-
mittee plenum, with intense discussion lasting for
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THE NEW KHMER ROUGE/31
weeks. The meeting ended with agreement on a
growth plan that reflected Salas's ambition to
speed up the revolution. Party membership, then
totaling 8,000, was to be tripled and NPA strength,
then just a few thousand, was to be doubled over
the next three years. The party's plans for Min-
danao were particularly ambitious. The number
of guerrilla fronts on the island was to be in-
creased to 14 by 1984, even though there were only
five in existence at the end of 1980.
For the party, the timing of the decision to
launch a major expansion effort could not have
been better. The Philippine economy had begun
to unravel in 1979 due in part to the second oil
crisis that hit Third World oil importers like the
Philippines particularly hard. Unlike the after-
math of the 1973 crisis, the Philippines could not
borrow or export its way out of its problem. There
was no new flood of credits for economies as badly
managed as the Philippines and there was no new
surge in commodity prices. In fact, the prices of
sugar and coconut oil, two key exports for the
Philippines, were in the basement.
But the lion's share of the credit for the eco-
nomic collapse was due to the corrupt and waste-
ful economic policies of the Marcos regime that
were finally coming home to roost. Businesses run
by Marcos cronies and propped up by billions of
dollars in government loans went bankrupt, some
because of incompetence, others because the cro-
nies had looted their own companies. Institutions
that might have helped the Philippines weather
the storm had been crippled by Marcos. The leg-
islature had been abolished, the judiciary deeply
compromised, the military politicized, the inde-
pendent business sector cronyized.
With no jobs luring Filipinos from the country-
side to the cities and newly unemployed Filipinos
returning to the villages where there was a better
chance of eating regularly, the agricultural labor
force suddenly began to balloon. There was an
increase of at least three million, or 34 percent,
from 1979 to 1984, according to government statis-
tics. Suddenly, the NPA was awash in potential
recruits, but they were a new breed. For years, the
core of the NPA had been young educated Com-
munists from the cities who completely dominated
the local recruits, best described as members of
the rural lumpenproletariat. The newcomers
flooding into the NPA were acting primarily out
of economic necessity, not ideological commit-
ment, but they were able to feel right at home.
Under Salas the CPP and the NPA had been pay-
ing less attention to ideology, and more to achiev-
ing victory; to collecting more money and guns
to make that victory possible: and to cutting down
anyone who might stand in the way.
I NEVITABLY, the new circumstances
created a new kind of guerrilla leader.
No one personifies this change better than Rom-
ulo (Roily) Kintanar, who today is the single most
powerful guerrilla leader in the Philippines. The,
party dispatched Roily Kintanar to Mindanao in
late 1974 or early 1975, about the time the NPA
on the island had been reduced to a pitiful hand-
ful of seven men with seven guns. Kintanar was
initially charged with giving military training to
new and existing NPA guerrillas. But he quickly
emerged as the key military tactician and com-
mander in the NPA, building up NPA forces in
Mindanao from a total of seven gun-carriers in
1975 to about 100 by the end of 1976.
It was Kintanar, according to some reports, who
perfected the NPA's solution to its critical shortage
of guns: he created and trained small hit squads,
which assassinated policemen and military person-
nel, often on crowded streets, and stole their guns.
When the economic crisis hit the Philippines, it
hit commodity-dependent Mindanao the hardest.
And no guerrilla leader was more ready than
Kintanar to exploit the new circumstances, and
transform the insurrection from an ideological to
an economic one. Today, Mindanao is home to
several thousand NPA guerrillas and, thanks more
to Kintanar than to anyone else, the island has
become the nemesis of the Armed Forces of the
Philippines just as Sison envisioned.
Kintanar's success did not immediately endear
him to the national party leadership. He was re-
peatedly passed over for top party positions in
Mindanao and was not even admitted to the cen-
tral committee until 1979, when Salas was firmly
in control. There is no mystery about why the old
generation of party leaders in particular were not
eager to embrace their military genius in the
south. The most positive comment heard about
Kintanar in leftist circles is that "he's a first-rate
military commander who doesn't know anything
about political ideology." Others are not so char-
itable, describing him as "a warlord who's operat-
ing a massive protection racket" and "a psychotic
... who loves to put a bandanna around his fore-
head and then go out and kill people."
The number of would-be guerrillas needing to
be equipped and fed has continued growing faster
in Mindanao than in other parts of the Philip-
pines. This created an economic crisis for the NPA
because it was already coming close to exhausting
its traditional "tax base." For years, the NPA's
rural guerrillas had been demanding what
amounted to protection money from the operators
of mines, logging camps, plantations, and ranches.
Those refusing to pay had either to hire their own
private armies to keep the NPA at bay or to wait
for the guerrillas' tax-enforcement bureau to show
up and drive ore-carrier trucks off cliffs, burn log-
ging equipment, or rustle cattle.
Most businessmen paid, reluctantly but without
any great sense of outrage. After all, in Mindanao,
payoffs to political leaders, military officers, and
sometimes criminal bosses had long been consid-
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ered part of the cost of doing business. But as
NPA "taxes" rose, some of the taxpayers said they
were being driven out of business. A few of the
more reasonable NPA leaders actually sent ac-
countants who were CPP members to examine the
books of some of the businessmen who were plead-
ing poverty and waived taxes if it was shown they
were losing money.
Kintanar's solution was to start collecting taxes
in Davao, the sprawling city of an estimated mil-
lion people on Mindanao's east coast. Business-
men who did not comply might be kidnapped;
storeowners risked having their stores bombed or
vandalized in the night. Kintanar dispatched NPA
gunmen into Davao to enforce tax collection and
to collect a commodity even more precious to the
NPA than money-guns to arm the countless
would-be guerrillas in the area. Over the past few
years, dozens of policemen have been shot and
killed in the streets of Davao by NPA hit men
who grab their guns and race away.
To kill policemen and enforce his protection
rackets, Kintanar has drawn around him a bunch
of thugs who are a world apart from the campus
Maoists who launched the revolution seventeen
years ago. In their hideouts, the walls sport posters
not of Mao but of Charles Bronson, for them a
symbol of macho violence. Says a Davao City resi-
dent with leftist sympathies: "These people aren't
good Communists." But the national Communist-
party leadership no longer seems to care. Kin-
tanar's boys are doing their job: Davao continues
to slip slowly out of the Marcos regime's control
and business is grinding to a halt.
All the available evidence suggests that Kintanar
launched urban guerrilla warfare in Davao City
despite the deep misgivings, if not the outright
opposition, of the CPP's national leadership. Un-
derground party publications long ignored what
was happening in the city. Then they began run-
ning the occasional article endorsing urban guer-
rilla warfare in principle but stressing that the
time was not yet ripe.
Some Filipinos on the Left argue that Kintanar
at that time was ignoring CPP directives and was
on the verge of becoming an independent war-
lord or bandit leader. But recently the national
party leadership seems to have decided that, thug
or no thug, Kintanar is one of them. Kintanar
has been promoted; he was recently named head
of the NPA's central military staff and of its na-
tional operational command. CPP publications
are now endorsing urban guerrilla warfare in
general terms and are reporting favorably on what
they have dubbed the NPA's Armed City Parti-
sans (ACP's). The ACP's are essentially hit men
and saboteurs. Previously, the euphemism used by
the NPA for its assassins in both city and country-
side was "sparrow units." In the good old days,
they were simply members of "liquidation
squads."
.- t the same time, party leaders may be trying
to cut Kintanar off from his power base. While
the new job titles sound impressive, it is uncertain
how much real power they carry with them. The
jobs could keep him in metropolitan Manila, or
the provinces just north of the capital, where the
underground headquarters of the CPP and the
NPA are believed to be located. Either place is
far from his base in southern Mindanao. The
party also seems to be trying to reduce the inde-
pendence of Kintanar and any other would-be
guerrilla warlords by ordering that large Manila-
based companies with logging, mining, or other
business operations in the provinces pay their
"revolutionary taxes" to representatives of the
party in Manila and not to local NPA leaders.
T HESE efforts by the national party lead-
ership to maintain strong central con-
trol are consistent with the entire history of the
CPP. Although the party encourages local CPP
and NPA leaders to use their initiative in formu-
lating tactics and carrying out operations, it has
always acted like a classic Communist party in de-
manding total adherence of its members to the
party hierarchy and to official party policy.
This insistence on unity and discipline helps
explain the marathon meetings where top party
leaders will often spend weeks thrashing out policy
and personal differences before reaching an iron-
clad consensus which, from that point on, is con-
sidered unbreathable. It also explains why the
CPP commits substantial resources to maintaining
an extensive courier network so that party com-
munications can flow quickly from one end of the
archipelago to the other. In addition, the party
leadership is constantly reassigning party cadres
to various parts of the country to counter the re-
gionalist tendencies that are historically so strong
in the Philippines.
Because the CPP is secretive to the point of
paranoia about its internal affairs, and because it
almost never gives its leaders any public exposure,
many otherwise well-informed Filipinos strongly
doubt that a cohesive national Communist party
even exists. This was the consensus, for instance,
of a group of Philippine legislators, representing
both the government and opposition parties, who
recently visited Washington. Their collective view
was that the NPA guerrillas in various parts of
the country are effectively autonomous groups that
have, at best, tenuous ties with each other.
Only a few Filipinos are better informed. An-
other recent visitor to Washington, Jaime Ongpin,
the chief executive of the Philippines' leading min-
ing company, Benguet, has no doubt about the
centralized nature of the party. He said that guer-
rillas harassing his company's operations in Min-
danao knew precisely how Benguet had handled
similar harassment at another company operation
in northern Luzon, several hundred miles away.
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1 tit. NEW kll.\tkR RUt (,L,33
THE Philippine Communists are not
waging revolution only through the
outlawed New People's Army. They are also step-
ping up their efforts to topple the Marcos regime
by using an ever-changing network of tightly con-
trolled but legal front groups. And as Communist
power grows both underground and aboveground
in the Philippines, the front groups are making
less and less of a secret of their Communist affilia-
tion. This past spring, a coalition of CPP fronts
called a general strike aimed at shutting down the
Mindanao economy and creating political havoc.
A pamphlet issued by the coalition calling for such
actions as "the putting up of barricades" on
Davao's main streets left no doubt that the strike
organizers were calling for an urban insurrection:
The primary objective of the Welgang Bayan
[national strike] is to paralyze the economic, po-
litical, and social machinery of the dictatorship.
. The Welgang Bayan will develop from par-
tial to sustained strikes, from temporary to com-
plete paralysis.... This will result in the paral-
ysis of the economy and political foundation of
the U.S.-Marcos dictatorship and facilitate its
downfall.
Shortly after the strike, the key publicly identi-
fiable organizers were arrested. One of those was
Davao lawyer Laurente Iligan. His incarceration
has become a minor cause cflebre among human-
rights activists. However, news reports, including
one in the New York Times, have failed to indi-
cate the declared goals of the strike.
The granddaddy of all the CPP fronts is the
National Democratic Front (NDF). In the Pro-
gram of the National Democratic Front of the
Philippines, the NDF grandly describes itself as
a broad coalition "made up of Filipino national-
ists, democrats, progressive christians [the NDF
uses the lower-case c] and church people, national
minority autonomists, women's emancipationists,
socialists, communists, and other genuine patriots
here and abroad, representing a wide variety of po-
litical and ideological trends." And within this
coalition, promises Liberation, the NDF's own
publication, "no single party ... will be allowed
to dominate...."
This is all fiction. The NDF has been the total
creature of the CPP since 1971 when a central-
committee directive ordered its creation. It was
formally founded on April 24, 1973, but only after
CPP members had established the Christians for
National Liberation and other front groups that,
in turn, were designated as the founding members
of the NDF "coalition." Other founding groups
in this ostensibly broad alliance were the NPA
and the CPP itself, as well as CPP captive organi-
zations like KM, the Communist youth group
founded by Sison.
Not only is the NDF completely controlled by
the Communists; so, apparently, are all its con-
stituent or};.tnizations. Some, like the CNL., are
effectively part of the CPP. There are other con-
stituent organizations of students and workers-
a good example being the kMU labor alliance-
in which the majority of members are not Com-
munists but the leaders are.
The NDF is organized into secret cells, similar
to those of the Communist party. Apparently most
of the NDF's membership is composed of CPP
candidate members and of CNL members who
do not want to take that final step of formally
joining the party. The CPP administers the NDF
through its National United Front Commission.
The key roles in the NDF are filled by senior party
members. Recently, the NDF's leading clandestine
spokesman has been Tony Zumel, who not coin-
cidentally is the CPP's propaganda chief.
A few years ago, the CPP faced the fact that the
NDF had failed to develop into a classic Commu-
nist front, that is, a political umbrella organiza-
tion with a program broad enough so that a
respectable cross-section of non-Communist left-
ists and nationalists would be willing to endorse
it. So recently the party set up a new generation
of legal fronts-a good example being the Na-
tionalist Alliance for Justice, Freedom, and Demo-
cracy-meant to draw in non-Communists. But
the CPP's control of such organizations has been
so obvious and heavy-handed that they have failed
to develop broad bases. The Communists also in-
filtrated groups they had not started-like the
August Twenty-One Movement, or ATOM,
founded by Butz Aquino. But here again, any
hope that the Communists might have had to
influence a popular, grass-roots organization was
destroyed by their seemingly compulsive need for
total control. This summer ATOM split in half,
with the Communists going one way and Aquino's
people another.
For a while this spring, the Communists ap-
peared to some anti-Marcos activists to be genu.
inely willing to participate in the creation of
BAYAN, a broad opposition alliance in which
they would not have automatic control. In the
original Communist proposal, BAYAN would have
three equal voting blocs: "national democrats,"
i.e., the pro-Communist group; social democrats;
and "liberal democrats," i.e., moderates.
But once preliminary meetings got under way,
recalls Butz Aquino, the Communists repeatedly
and successfully demanded that the voting form-
ula be changed in their favor. When the found-
ing congress began on Saturday, May 5, it soon be-
came obvious to Aquino that the Communists
were determined to manipulate and control the
entire event. The Communists orchestrated work-
shop discussions, broke standing agreements by
slipping the names of trusted party members into
the nomination lists for the executive, and re-
ferred every major decision to top Communists
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not even at the meeting. Recounts Butz Aquino:
The people outside the hall who we didn't even
see were calling the shots. . .. Party members
were giving the orders. Whenever there was a
crucial decision to be made, they'd ask for a re-
cess. Then they'd come back with their hard
position.
Angered by the CPP's manipulative approach,
virtually every respected and independent polit-
ical figure in the anti-Marcos opposition-from
moderates like Aquino to left-wing nationalists
like former Senator Jose Diokno-have ' quit
BAYAN. After working on and off with the Com-
munists for the two years since his brother was
assassinated, Aquino concludes: "You can't trust
these guys." But how could it be otherwise when
the CPP's explicit policy toward all front-group
activity is one of deceit? This is how the basic
party directive on front groups described the need
for secret party control:
These concentric circles [anti-Marcos elements,
NDF members, party members] are expressive of
our efforts to have the party ... committee al-
ways at the center of anti-fascist and other legal
activities, leading those activities without being
clearly visible to the enemy.
To many it seems that those hurt most by the
Communist machinations inside BAYAN were the
Communists themselves. Today, BAYAN is known
as just another CPP front. If the Communists had
restrained themselves, they would today be a
strong, perhaps decisive, influence within a popu-
lar, broadly based, anti-Marcos alliance. The ex-
planations being advanced for this seemingly self-
defeating behavior are all rather ominous. Aquino
offers two reasons suggesting that we are merely
witnessing a totalitarian party in action. The first
is a paraphrase of the CPP directive: "their want-
ing to dominate completely any organization they
join . . ." The other, "their feeling that they're
the only ones who have the answers to everything."
Jose Diokno suspects the explanation lies in the
Communists' growing belief that they are so close
to taking power that they no longer need to make
significant compromises with the non-Communist
opposition.
C ERTAINLY there were few real compro-
mises evident in the new National
Democratic Front program that was issued at the
beginning of this year. Although Communists
have repeatedly described the program as a mod-
erate appeal to non-Communists, in reality it is
overtly Marxist and covertly Leninist. The heart
of the program is a call for the establishment of a
People's Democratic Republic of the Philippines
(PDRP). The program is like that of most other
nations with names that start out "People's Demo-
cratic Republic of...." The United States is, of
courses, the enemy. The program promises that
the PDRP's "revolutionary army as well as the
people shall be constantly in a state of readiness
to repel any act of intervention and aggression
from foreign forces, including the United States."
Furthermore, "the United States must leave its
military bases in the Philippines...." And "as a
rule, direct investments and profit-making assets
of the U.S. and other big foreign capitalists, es-
pecially those in the vital and strategic industries,
shall be nationalized."
In addition to Americans, a lot of Filipinos
might feel unwelcome in the new People's Demo-
cratic Republic of the Philippines:
Upon victory, a people's tribunal shall be
created. This tribunal will have jurisdiction to
try and punish enemies of the revolution and
their collaborators who have committed crimes
against the people, and to escheat (sic] proper-
ties and ill-gotten wealth amassed by the ruling
elite of the old order.
The program also promises "severe punishment
of those with grave crimes (i.e., those who owe
the people blood debts) and reeducation of those
who deserve leniency......
The NDF program repeatedly states that the
PDRP will be run by a "democratic coalition"
government. What is most unsettling about that
statement is the NDF's assurance that the coalition
will be as pluralistic as the NDF is today. "As in
the course of the people's war, no political party,
group, or individual shall be allowed to monop-
olize the decision-making processes and the execu-
tion of state affairs." If there is any remaining
doubt about the CPP's concept of a coalition, it
should halve been dashed by NDF spokesman
Tony Zumel who said earlier this year that the
NDF rejected the suggestion that the Communists
in the National Liberation Front of South Viet-
nam had overwhelmed the front's non-Communist
reformers.
While the "democratic-coalition" government
the Communists are promising through the NDF
cannot be described as a coalition, neither should
it be described as democratic. The NDF program
declares that "all the basic democratic rights shall
be embodied in the constitution of the People's
Democratic Republic. These shall include the
right ... to free speech and the free press...."
But the CPP's underground monthly, Ang Bayan,
confided to party members this year that, contrary
to what its front organization is promising, free-
dom of the press will be tightly restricted:
Under the People's Democratic Republic, press
freedom shall be enjoyed by the toiling classes
and the strata of the bourgeoisie allied to them
-in short by the overwhelming majority of the
people who are at present exploited and op-
pressed. But should we allow the same freedom
to be enjoyed by those who would seek the res-
toration of imperialist, landlord, comprador,
and fascist rule? Democracy will be enjoyed by
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THE NEW KHMER ROUGE/35
the majority composed of the nationalist and
democratic classes, while their class adversaries
shall be suppressed-that is, prevented from re-
gaining power.
This sort of duplicity could not possibly be sur-
prising to any student of Communist history, but
there are few such people in the Philippines.
There is a whole generation of young, vaguely
leftish Filipinos who view the NDF program as a
completely credible document deserving of serious
discussion.
T HE Communists' intention of crushing
a free press while their totally con-
trolled front group, the NDF, promises otherwise
is simple and straightforward duplicity. But the
CPP's leadership is also quite adept at complex,
multi-layered duplicity. Nowhere is this more evi-
dent than in how the party leaders are handling
the emotional and controversial issue of the U.S.
military bases on Philippine soil.
At first glance, the Communist position seems
unambiguous. The NDF program declares that
"the United States must leave its military bases in
the Philippines...." In fact, says the NDF, "no
foreign power shall be allowed to set up military
bases on Philippine soil...." For years, the CPP
has ridden this issue, using it to mobilize students
and other nationalists to demonstrate in front of
the U.S. embassy in Manila. Yet simultaneously,
CPP leaders have been repeatedly signaling U.S.
officials that they are willing to make a deal with
the United States whereby the U.S. bases could
continue operating after the Communists came to
power.
The CPP began sending such a signal as early as
1981 when Horacio (Boy) Morales told a journal-
ist that, despite the NDF's clear-cut pledge to re-
move the bases, all the NDF really wanted was to
negotiate their future status. This year, people
who have spoken with Salas and other figures in
the Communist movement say that they also have
expressed their readiness to junk the NDF pro-
gram and make a deal on the bases.
But this is not necessarily the final word on
where the Communists really stand on the issue.
This is because Philippine nationalists who are
strongly opposed to the bases say that Salas has
been reassuring them this year that his offers to
make a deal are a tactical ruse aimed at nothing
more than lulling the United States.
This is consistent with the NPA's apparent de-
cision a few years ago to avoid military action
aimed at the bases or at U.S. military personnel.
Long gone are the days when Salas was a hit-squad
leader ambushing U.S. Navy personnel at Subic.
Today the areas immediately adjacent to Clark
and Subic are among the most peaceful in the
Philippines. Instead of attacking U.S. military of-
ficers and heightening Washington's alarm over
the deteriorating situation in the Philippines, the
NPA is quietly collecting "revolutionary taxes"
from the businesses that prosper at the periphery
of the bases.
HE logical question to ask about the
Tissue of U.S. military bases, or any
other major issue, should he: what is the official
position of the Communist Party of the Philip-
pines? In fact, what is the official program of the
Communist Party of the Philippines? Every Com-
munist party on earth, after all, has an official
program. But ask any rank-and-file member of the
CPP what his party's program is and watch the
uncertainty flicker over his face. When he recov-
ers, he always has an answer. The trouble is that
every CPP member seems to have a different an-
swer.
Answer One: "The CPP's program is that of
the founding document, Programme for a People's
Democratic Revolution, issued in 1968." Obvi-
ously not, say other party members. And with
good reason: the 1968 program, with its praise of
Mao and Albania and its attacks on institutions
that no longer exist, has long been out of date.
Answer Two: "Our Urgent Tasks [1976] was an
update of the party program." This answer was
offered only by Jose Maria Sison, in a written re-
sponse to questions I relayed to him this summer.
The document he refers to was the last party docu-
ment he wrote before being jailed.
Answer Three: "The party has no program."
This answer, volunteered by more than one party
member, is not credible. It is true only in the
very narrow, technical sense that the CPP has
apparently not held a full-dress party congress, at
which party programs and the like are formally
ratified, since the founding meeting in 1968. But
this does not prevent the top CPP leadership from
having its own program that it keeps secret from
party members.
Answer Four: "The CPP program is the same
as the program of the National Democratic
Front." That sounds like a confession of what we
know is true-that the Communists completely
control the NDF. But the fact that the CPP con-
trols the NDF does not mean that the public NDF
program is the same as the secret CPP program.
With its promises of reeducation camps, sweep-
ing nationalization of private business, and an
anti-American stance in foreign policy. the NDF
program by most yardsticks earns a Communist
label. But the NDF's parent, the CPP, is telling
its members that the NDF program represents
only the beginning of the revolution in the Philip-
pines. Says the CPP's Ang Bayan:
In essence, the [current] people's democratic rev-
olution is a bourgeois democratic revolution and
not a proletarian revolution.... What will be
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the direction of the democratic coalition gov-
ernment, of the people's democracy that will be
established? Depending on the class composition
of the revolutionary coalition, it could lead
toward socialism or toward capitalism.
In other words, when the NPA is marching
down the streets of Manila, the real struggle has
just begun: "The party of the revolutionary Fil-
ipino proletariat [i.e., we of the CPP] will bend
every effort to advance Philippine society toward
the correct path of socialism...." Said a member
of the central committee in an interview this
summer: "That [the NDF program] is the mini-
mum program. The maximum program is Com-
munism."
So what are the constituent parts of the CPP
program? In informal conversations this past sum-
mer, CPP members talked loosely about a second,
radical stage of the revolution that would push
the Philippines to the far Left of the Communist
world. Evoking memories of the Khmer Rouge's
forced evacuation of Phnom Penh, one CPP mem-
ber said that "most probably" the population of
Manila would have to be significantly reduced.
"We can't support Manila the way it is."
Another said that the NDF promise "to distrib-
ute land to the landless tillers" represents only a
halfway house on the road to the total communi-
zation of agriculture. "There will be a transition
period of land reform and cooperatives. . . . We
will invite them [the peasants] to join coopera-
tives and try to show them the benefits of collec-
tive labor. Collectivization will be implemented
step by step." And how long will all this take? "A
few years," said one. "Easily ten to twenty years,"
said another.
In truth, none of these relatively low-level party
members really knows what the CPP program is.
They were simply repeating the kind of talk they
had been hearing inside party circles. Like the
low-ranking Khmer Rouge soldiers who entered
Phnom Penh not knowing that the next day they
would be ordering the populace to evacuate, these
good soldiers of the CPP are ready to carry out
the second stage of the revolution when their
leaders unveil the plan. Among the thousands of
members of the Communist Party of the Philip-
pines, it seems that only the estimated half-dozen
members of the Politburo's executive committee
share knowledge of the secret program.
THE party leadership's ultra-elitist style
was evident as early as 1981 when Ro-
dolfo Salas and a small group around him secretly
decided to seek aid from the Soviet bloc. The de-
cision was a momentous one. Since Sison had
founded the CPP as a classic Maoist party, all the
basic documents of the CPP and the NDF had
denounced the foreign policy of the Soviet Union
as social-imperialist. This was still the party's posi-
tion when Salas approved a scheme to smuggle
arms from Eastern Europe into the Philippines
through South Yemen, which is firmly within the
Soviet bloc and has Soviet and East German mili-
tary personnel based on its soil.
For the record, the arms were donated to the
Philippine Communists not by the Soviets but
by a branch of the Palestine Liberation Organiza-
tion. But this was a veneer that even Horacio
Morales, a key figure in the smuggling operation,
had difficulty in treating seriously. In a one-on-
one courthouse interview after he had been ar-
rested, I asked Morales why the CPP had decided
to accept aid from the Soviets. "It's a few steps
removed from the Soviets," he said with a nervous
laugh, adding, "but it's still considered separate,
no?"
Long after the arms (AK-47's and Makharov
pistols) were aboard a freighter and on their way
to the Philippines, the CPP leadership continued
to suggest to rank-and-file members that there had
been no change in the party's antagonism toward
the Soviet Union. The August 1981 issue of Ang
Bayan, for instance, denounced "Soviet social-
imperialism." When the smuggling operation was
later exposed and a few angry party members ac-
cused Salas and others of secretly acting contrary
to party policy, the leadership lamely replied that
the arms smuggling was the work of the CPP's
National Democratic Front and not of the CPP
itself. The fact that the NDF did not drop the
anti-Soviet planks from its program until the year
after the arms arrived was never explained. Nor
was the fact that it was party leader Salas who
gave final approval to the Soviet arms shipment.
The CPP leadership did not go public with its
swing to a pro-Soviet position until January 1982,
when it authorized the NDF to issue a new draft
program that dropped all the Maoist jargon and
the attacks on the Soviets. The party's Maoist
founder, Jose Maria Sison, who had been watch-
ing developments in the CPP under Salas with in-
creasing unhappiness since being captured in
1977, was enraged. In an exchange with me of
questions and answers from prison in mid-1982,
he contemptuously referred to the new NDF pro-
gram as "this supposed draft." He also suggested
that anyone in the CPP or the NDF who had ap-
proached the Soviet Union for aid was a rene-
gade: "I do not believe that the National Demo-
cratic Front as a whole has ever approached the
Soviet Union for assistance. Nobody wants a bear
hug. It can be fatal." He added that "China's dip-
lomatic line is correct."
During this period Sison several times signaled
his opposition to the changes under way in the
CPP. But it soon became obvious that the found-
ing father was being ignored. By mid-1983, the
CPP had turned the corner and was openly lean-
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ing toward the Soviets while almost completely
ignoring the People's Republic of China. Ang
Bayan began praising developments in Cambodia,
Vietnam, Mozambique, and Angola and dropped
its earlier attacks on Soviet and Cuban aggression.
Except for the occasional reference to "antagonis-
tic contradictions" between Vietnam and Cam-
bodia, the CPP's statements on foreign affairs are
completely consistent with Soviet policy. And this
summer, in the exchange of questions and an-
swers, Sison himself seemed to have accepted in
principle the idea of the CPP's receiving Soviet
aid.
MEANWHILE, using the National Demo-
cratic Front as its vehicle, the CPP
is actively courting the Soviets in Europe. Luis
Jalandoni, a Filipino and former priest who serves
as the NDF's international representative in Am-
sterdam, is successfully tying the NDF, and by im-
plication the CPP, ever closer to the Soviet bloc.
Jalandoni was a delegate to last year's Interna-
tional Conference on Nicaragua and for Peace in
Central America held in Lisbon. There he con-
ferred with Vietnam's education minister. Jalan-
doni also worked hard at identifying the NDF and
its European supporters with the movement op-
posed to the deployment of U.S. missiles in West-
ern Europe.
Jalandoni's most important task has evidently
been raising funds for the Communist movement
back home in the Philippines. He seems to have
been very successful. As far hack as the summer of
1981, according to unchallenged affidavits, Jalan-
doni provided $30,000 for travel and transporta-
tion to the CPP arms smugglers who passed
through Europe on their way to South Yemen.
Today, the amount of money flowing into the
Philippines from Western Europe each year is es-
timated by Philippine and U.S. analysts to be at
least in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. As
already noted, the lion's share of this money seems
to be flowing from Church-related bodies in Eu-
rope to Communist-dominated organizations with-
in the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines.
At least some members of the European Church
organizations know precisely what is happening
to their money. Ang Bayan reported some time
ago that "a number of foreign Church people ...
have also visited the NPA guerrilla zones."
Another, increasingly important, source of funds
are the so-called Philippine "solidarity groups"
that Jalandoni has been instrumental in setting up
in Europe. Such groups exist in Sweden, Norway,
West Germany, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, and
apparently several other countries. Some of these
groups appear to he the offspring of small, radical
splinter parties. Recently, several of them sent
envoys to the Philippines to see first-hand how
their donations are being spent by the NPA. A
U.S. journalist who spent several days this sum-
mer at an NPA camp said a Norwegian woman
was in the camp for discussions with the NPA
guerrilla leader about giving financial help that
would enable the NPA to obtain additional arms.
Several German and Japanese radicals have also
spent time with the NPA.
The financial help that the CPP is receiving
from abroad does not seem to have increased to
the point that it is making a huge difference. But
it is already substantial, a fact that is almost uni-
versally ignored by the U.S. media. In August
alone, the Washington Post reported that the NPA
is receiving "negligible foreign support" while the
Washington Times flatly stated that "there is
no evidence of any material foreign support."
In fact, the CPP has been openly acknowledg-
ing since 1974 that it is actively seeking and often
receiving material aid from abroad. As recently as
this spring, Tony Zumel declared in an NDF news
release that
we have made an appeal to all freedom-loving
peoples around the world for political and ma-
terial assistance and the response has been
heartening. Such assistance comes from revolu-
tionary, progressive, and democratic organiza-
tions, institutions and individuals who care
deeply for our people's liberation struggles and
welfare.
The question left hanging is whether the So-
viets are involved in the flow of foreign assistance
to the Philippine Communists. Since the 1981
arms shipment, which embarrassed both the So-
viets and the CPP leadership when it became pub-
lic, not a single well-documented case of Soviet
aid has surfaced. Rumors abound that Vietnam is
helping the NPA. but no hard evidence seems to
exist. A strong circumstantial case is made by
some that at least a few of the radical and Church
organizations funneling money from Europe to
the Philippine Communists must be controlled or
bankrolled by Soviet agents.
But the most persuasive case that the Soviets
have begun aiding the Philippine Communists
was made by two Filipinos in separate interviews
this summer in Manila. Both are very knowledge-
able about what is going on inside the Communist
party. One is hostile to the CPP; one is very sym-
pathetic. Both said that Moscow is split over how
to handle the CPP.
On one side, according to both these sources,
is the International Department (of the Central
Committee) of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union (CPSU). This organization usually takes
the leading role in the USSR's relations with
foreign Communist parties. But afflicted with
bureaucratic inertia, the International Depart-
ment today is run by conservatives who are com-
fortable with their decades-long ties to the old,
pro-Moscow Communist party in the Philippines,
the PKP (which since the expulsion of Sison and
his supporters in 1967 has been declining in size
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~????.c...u. I UL l a .ubLn I70J
and influence in comparison with the CPP and
whose existence today largely depends on Mos-
cow's recognition of it as a fraternal Communist
party). According to this analysis, the Interna-
tional Department bureaucrats have resisted the
CPP's repeated requests that they withdraw their
recognition of the PKP and recognize the CPP in-
stead.
Though a reading of CPP and PKP statements
suggests that the International Department has
been trying to convince the PKP to negotiate a
modus viviendi with the CPP, hopes for any such
agreement seem to have collapsed. By early this
year, the CPP had escalated its attacks on the
PKP's leaders, calling them "professional political
swindlers (who] are trying to sneak into the ranks
of the revolutionary Left." The CPSU's Interna-
tional Department responded in June by inviting
the PKP's general secretary, Felicisimo Macapagal,
to Moscow where the CPSU and the PKP, accord-
ing to Tass, pledged their "fraternal solidarity."
But the more pragmatic and energetic KGB
shares neither the old loyalties nor the new qualms
of the International Department, according to my
informants. Recently, they say, the KGB has de-
veloped close relations with the CPP. The two
sides are in frequent contact with each other both
in the Philippines and abroad, but precisely what
kind of business they are transacting is unknown.
Both sources assume that the KGB is assisting the
CPP but they have no proof.
C LEARLY the CPP's new generation of
coldly opportunistic leaders would no
longer hesitate to accept substantial aid from the
Soviets if it were offered. And just as clearly the
CPP currently needs a generous foreign backer.
For in the last year, the Communists' successes
have brought them to a critical juncture where the
issue of outside aid is more and more pressing. The
guerrillas of the New People's Army are increasing
rapidly in number. Moving in ever larger units,
they have a soaring demand for arms, food, and
equipment. The NPA also has enough potential
recruits to double in size if it had the money to
equip and support them as well. But the economic
depression that helps produce so many potential
recruits also makes NPA "tax collecting" increas-
ingly less lucrative, no matter how much extor-
tionate violence is applied.
If the future brings no substantial flow of money
to the Communists from abroad, and if Marcos
were to die or be toppled and succeeded by a com-
petent, reformist government, it is quite conceiv-
able that the current rapid growth of the Com-
munists could stall. But if the money were to start
flowing in substantial amounts and Marcos, who
has lost the moral authority necessary to fight the
Communists, were to hang onto power, then it is
highly likely that Rodolfo Salas will be heading
the People's Democratic Republic of the Philip-
pines sometime in the 1990's and unveiling "a Pol
Pot future."
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