Marco Valbuena | Chief Information Officer | Communist Party Of The Philippines
January 14, 2024
Like many of his past declarations, Marcos’ claims today that the New
People’s Army (NPA) has no more guerrilla fronts leave the people and
their revolutionary forces incredulous.
If Marcos’s declarations were true, why is it then that around
60-70,000 military and police combat troops (or around 150 battalions of
AFP and PNP counterinsurgency units) remain deployed against the NPA
across the country? With his claims, Marcos should answer why is it that
the AFP continues to be focused and deployed mainly against the NPA,
instead of gearing up to defend the country against US-China armed
conflicts?
Why is it that the AFP continues to eat up a large portion of the
national budget only to squander hundreds of millions of pesos to fly
their jet fighters and drones, drop 250lb bombs and fire their
howitzers? Why is it that they continue to spend hundreds of millions of
pesos to maintain a 50,000 strong paramilitary force and set up camps
in hundreds of villages across the country? Why is it that Marcos
inserted ₱6 billion to further increase the AFP’s budget?
Marcos Jr is in dreamland when he claims there are no more active NPA
guerrilla fronts. In truth, the NPA remains active in 14 regional
commands across the country each with a number of guerrilla fronts.
Despite having suffered from setbacks over the past years, the NPA is
far from defeated. Under the guidance of the Party, the NPA has learned
its lessons and is determined to frustrate the AFP’s brutal offensives.
The CPP’s rectification movement has filled the NPA’s Red fighters and
commanders with renewed revolutionary energy to serve the people.
Amid the grave economic crisis and worsening oppression under the
semicolonial and semifeudal system, the NPA and the people’s war remains
politically superior to the AFP and its US-supported war of state
terror. The NPA represents the aspirations of the peasants and workers
who comprise the vast majority of the Filipino people, while the AFP
represents the interests of a small minority of big bourgeois
compradors, big landlords, and corrupt bureaucrats who continues to
defend the rotten ruling system. Under the leadership of the Party, the
revolutionary mass movement and broad united front continues to be
strengthened to fight the US-Marcos regime.
The NPA continues to carry out guerrilla maneuvers to break out of
the AFP’s encirclement, to steadily build a bigger mass base and expand
its guerrilla fronts. It will continue to mount tactical offensives to
strike at the enemy’s weak points where they will least expect it. The
NPA will make sure that it will outlast Marcos, just like it outlasted
his father and all the US-supported governments of the past 35 years who
all bragged of crushing the NPA.
Marcos declarations were made to play to the desires of foreign
investors whom he desperately wants to entice with promises of unlimited
access to the country’s land and natural resources.
To serve the interests of foreign big capitalists, the AFP has spent
hundreds of billions of pesos over the past six years to carry out a
bloody campaign of state terrorism, particularly in the countryside. It
has mounted aerial bombings and artillery shelling, and committed
hundreds of cases of extrajudicial killings, abductions and torture.
This campaign has been most brutal in areas where big mining companies,
plantations, ecotourism and infrastructure projects are most aggressive
in taking away the peasant farmland and ancestral land.
Despite this, or more precisely, because of this, the Filipino
people, especially the peasant masses and their youth, continue to
support and join the NPA knowing that only by waging armed struggle can
they defend their economic and political rights. The majority of
oppressed peasants and farm-workers who suffer from land grabbing,
economic dispossession and political repression, know that without the
NPA, they have nothing.
Maoche Legislador | Spokesperson | Negros Island Regional Operational Command (Apolinario Gatmaitan Command) | New People’s Army
January 9, 2024
With boastful victory declarations in 2023, the Armed Forces of the
Philippines Visayas Command (AFP-VISCOM) inadvertently admits that the
Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), New People’s Army (NPA), and
the entire revolutionary movement on Negros Island and the rest of the
Visayas region remain undefeated.
According to VISCOM’s fake news factory chief, Lt. Gen. Benedict
Arevalo, in 2023 they initiated 82 encounters in Central and Western
Visayas, but in reality these are mostly fake encounters aimed at
justifying their crimes, including the brutal murder of National
Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) peace consultant Rogelio
Posadas and cold-blooded killings of peasant families. Along with this,
Arevalo boasted of clearing communities and dismantling organizations
which meant de facto martial law in the countrysides.
However, Arevalo could not hide the truth of the failure of his
leadership and tried hard to sugarcoat their frustration by claiming
that “there is still much to be done” and that “focused military
operations will continue…as long as there are still unresolved issues,
the threat of resurgence will remain.”
In fact, the other side of maintaining costly military operations
purportedly to quash the NPA is that this is a source of military
corruption. The AFP will lose a huge milking cow, not to mention endure
utter humiliation, if they declare “total victory” over the NPA.
As the AFP is pressured into becoming cannon fodders for the
increasing threat of an inter-imperialist war on Philippine shores, it
is to be expected that Arevalo will continue shoving similar
hallucinations. And yet, their unspeakable crimes against the people,
under superficial terms of “internal security operations” and the like,
will continue to wreak state terrorism. Unwittingly, however, this will
only make the people’s war persevere. While the socioeconomic crisis
continues to worsen day by day, the people will fight. Crisis generates
resistance, and oppression fuels the revolution.
