New People's Army

The New People's Army (NPA) is the Maoist-inspired, armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines. It has been fighting a guerrilla war against the Philippine government since 1968.

Communism has been well established in the Philippines for more than 50 years; in the early 1950s the country experienced the communist-inspired Huk Rebellion. By the mid-1960s, however, Philippine communism was in decline. Following the election of Ferdinand Marcos to the presidency in 1965, a group of young communists, many of them former student radicals, broke away from the old Philippine Communist Party forming the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in 1968. The CPP at once began to recruit and organize clandestinely; it founded the NPA the same year. Members of NPA believe in a Maoist “people's war” strategy, in which the revolution is led by rural peasantry, with “liberated zones” controlled by the ...