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Communism in the Philippines: On the Defensive
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16303 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1989 |
2,269 Words |
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Roger Fontaine
Roger Fontaine is Washington correspondent for Tiempos del
Mundo, a Buenos Aires-based newspaper. He was a member of the
National Security Council, responsible for Latin America, from
1981 to 1983. |
Few people in Manila talk about the communist New People's Army (NPA) and its struggle against the Philippines republic. Instead, the gossip is about the boom in real estate prices as Chinese gold rolls in from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
A year ago, this town was on edge. NPA gunmen called "sparrows" hunted their prey, bagging a daily toll of policemen and soldiers as well as occasional bystanders. And this was not happening in some distant, dusty province, but in Metro Manila.
But like it or not, Filipinos still face a bear of an insurgency. The tenacious NPA seems to bet settling in for the long haul. The strategy of the prolonged war has always been in their kit bag--they learned that art from Mao Tse-tung, who struggled for more that two decades before seizing power in 1949.
The NPA celebrates its 20th year in the field in March. Its parent body, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), was founded on December 26, 1968--Mao's birthday--and is still going strong.
NPA armed combatants are now estimated at about 23,000, 8,000 of them hard-core regulars. The NPA operates in all of the country's 73 provinces, including Metro Manila, and controls perhaps 20 percent of the barangays the basic unit of government in the Philippines.
The NPA's military strength is matched by its political organization and international network of support. The NPA and the CPP have over the years set up a myriad of interlocking front organizations, which are not
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