NPA: Insurgents or Bandits?

The New People’s Army (NPA) started out as a band of armed peasants led by Bernabe Buscayno better known as Kumander Dante. This group emerged from the past Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP)-Huk actions in the late 1960s. The residuals of the old Hukbalahap guerillas played significant roles in the establishment of this peasant armed group. Meanwhile, the communist party experienced a problem during its inception, it has no peasant base to complement its supposed peasant-led and Maoist inspired revolution. After a few months, the CPP found an ally in the Tarlac-based peasant armed group and what followed was the birth of the CPP-NPA.

After over forty years of armed struggle, the NPA has slowly lost its significance as its numbers are slowly dwindling from a peak of more than 20 thousand fighters in the mid 1980s to its present strength of just over 4,000 regular fighters, mostly new recruits. In their 2009 year-end assessment, the CPP leadership acknowledged the lack of potential political cadres as one of the major factors that led to the decline in the recruitment of regular members. Added to this, the issues that triggered the mass exodus of members and political cadres in the countryside during the Marcos regime already became non-existent in the present political situation. The general public’s awareness about the deceptive strategy of the CPP-NPA has also been more pronounced more than ever. Thanks to our soldiers, the anti-communist party-list groups and non-government organizations who continue to educate and inform the public about the communist party’s ulterior motive which is to destroy our democratic way of life and seize political power. 

 

And to ensure the survival of its guerilla units, the NPA has been engaged in atrocious criminal acts like arson, extortion (a.k.a. revolutionary taxation), and bombing of important establishments. These are done under their party line of “advancing the revolutionary struggle”. Many hardcore NPA cadres have made a profitable business and money-making scheme out of the so called “revolutionary taxation”. While the ordinary red fighters sacrifice their lives and limbs in miserable daily conditions in the countryside, their top cadres are enriching themselves while living in luxury and comfort in the cities and a few top CPP leaders abroad. Today, the CPP-NPA is no different from other syndicated crime groups who prey on big businessmen and innocent civilians to raise the needed funds and sustain their illegal criminal activities. To whether the present day NPA can still be considered an insurgent group or not is already out of the question. What is clear now is that the NPA has already mastered the art of banditry.

So what is your take people?