Volume V, Number 07. April 15, 2023.
Last 29 March 2023, the toiling Filipino masses, revolutionary allies, Red commanders and fighters in the countryside celebrated the 54th anniversary of the New People’s Army (NPA) by honoring hundreds of heroes and martyrs who exemplified wholehearted service to the people and the cause of national liberation and democracy.
For more than five decades now, the NPA has waged intense and relentless people’s war against US imperialism and its oppressive client-state of big bourgeois compradors and big landlords. This attests to the iron will and determination of the Filipino masses to put an end to centuries of colonial subjugation and semicolonial domination that has oppressed and exploited generations of Filipinos in the country, and which continue to condemn them to a permanent state of multiple crises and hardship.
From its humble beginnings in 1969, the NPA has spread and grown into a nationwide force of several thousand Red fighters deeply rooted to the broad masses of peasants, workers and toiling people. The NPA is the most powerful weapon of the Party for waging the people’s democratic revolution by carrying out protracted people’s war along the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside.
By adapting to the particular conditions of an archipelagic country as the Philippine islands, it has achieved great successes in carrying out guerilla warfare, building guerilla zones and base areas, and establishing Red political power covering vast areas in the countryside. Every day, the seeds of the people’s democratic government are sown in thousands of villages across the country.
With a US-Marcos government in place, the NPA faces ever greater tasks ahead. It must surmount the defeat the intensified campaigns of armed suppression carried out by the US puppet army and accumulate strength by crushing the AFP to bring the people’s war to even greater heights.
The objective conditions of abject poverty, widespread joblessness and persistent oppression of the peasant class provides a clear prospect for a new period of revolutionary surge in the Philippines. These factors combined with the correct leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines, guarantees continued growth and ultimate victory. More and more of the Filipino toiling masses are joining the armed revolution further spreading the flame of the people’s war from the countryside to the cities.