New People's Army

The New People's Army (NPA) is the Maoist-inspired, armed wing of the Communist Party of [Page 427]the Philippines; it has been fighting a guerrilla war against the Philippine government since 1968.

Communism has been well established in the Philippines since the Huk Rebellion in the early 1950s. By the mid-1960s, however, Philippine Communism was in decline. Following the election of Ferdinand Marcos as president in 1965, a group of young Communists, many of them former student radicals, broke away from the old Philippine Communist Party to form the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in 1968. The CPP at once began to recruit and organize clandestinely, and it founded the NPA in 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 guerrillas established in the countryside until major cities are encircled by besieging guerrilla forces. The guerrilla siege cuts off supplies and prompts collapse and surrender.

The CPP laid extensive groundwork for the movement, giving the NPA a strong and resilient base of support that served it well in later years. For instance, rather than recruit directly into the NPA (or the party itself), citizen militias would first be set up in sympathetic villages. The cream of the militia corps would then be selected for recruitment into the NPA, and only after a number of neighboring villages had established such militias would they be selected to field a NPA Fighting Front, which might include several dozen guerrillas, although sizes varied widely. A local Fighting Front was, in turn, under the control of its district command, of which there were several on each island.

In 1972, partly in response to the NPA threat and partly in response to the threat of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), President Marcos declared martial law across the country and began to greatly increase the size of the armed forces, which more than doubled in numbers. The crackdown, combined with an economy that worsened throughout the decade (compounded by the massive corruption of the Marcos regime) worked to increase support for the guerrillas. By the mid-1980s, the NPA had an estimated 26,000 members active throughout the country, in particular on the island of Luzon, the country's largest and home to the capital, Manila.

The NPA, however, was unsuccessful in establishing true “liberated zones” in its areas of operation, and the army was still able to move freely about the country. Frustrated with its inability to achieve strategic parity with the army, the NPA began to use other strategies, one of which was the establishment of an urban terror division called the Alex Boncayao Brigade in the early 1980s. Its leadership also began to break into factions. The NPA's internal problems, in part, prevented it from being a major player in the 1986 Philippines rebellion that replaced Marcos with Corazon Aquino.

Aquino began peace talks with the guerrillas, in the hope that the prospect of an amnesty would undermine their support, and a two-month cease-fire was declared in December 1986. Hard-liners within the NPA used the cease-fire as an opportunity to eliminate their political rivals and consolidate their support; war resumed more fiercely than ever the following year. The injustice and corruption of the Marcos regime had been a major factor in attracting recruits to the NPA; when the guerrillas saw their party resisting the democratic Aquino with the same fervor, many of them abandoned it. Between 1986 and 1995, NPA membership dropped from about 26,000 to about 6,000, and the Philippine army began to gain ground.

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