Vol. VI, No. 02 - 31 January 2024

A few days ago, Col. Francel Margareth Padilla started her work as new spokesperson of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) by repeating the annual AFP announcement that the fascist military “will eliminate the New People’s Army by the end of the year.” She issued her statement just days after Marcos, their commander-in-chief, declared that “there are no more NPA fronts.”

The NPA will make sure that it will outlast Marcos, just like it outlasted his father and all the US-supported governments of the past 35 years who all bragged of crushing the NPA.

If Marcos’s declarations were true, why is it then that around 60-70,000 military and police combat troops (or around 150 battalions of AFP and PNP counterinsurgency units) remain deployed against the NPA across the country? With his claims, Marcos should answer why is it that the AFP continues to be focused and deployed mainly against the NPA, instead of gearing up to defend the country against US-China armed conflicts?

Why is it that the AFP continues to eat up a large portion of the national budget only to squander hundreds of millions of pesos to fly their jet fighters and drones, drop 250lb bombs and fire their howitzers? Why is it that they continue to spend hundreds of millions of pesos to maintain a 50,000 strong paramilitary force and set up camps in hundreds of villages across the country?

Marcos Jr is daydreaming when he claims there are no more active NPA guerrilla fronts. The NPA remains active in 14 regional commands across the country each with several guerrilla fronts. The CPP’s rectification movement has filled the NPA’s Red fighters and commanders with renewed revolutionary energy to serve the people.

Marcos wants to project the Philippines as “insurgency-free” in his desperate desire to entice foreign capitalists at a time of global crisis, with promises of full access to land and resources.

There is creeping demoralization within the AFP, especially among their rank-and-file, who are well too aware of their failure to defeat the NPA and the continuing deep and wide support that the NPA enjoys among the peasant masses and people. They are further dispirited by the corruption of their higher officers who mulct and pocket millions of pesos of public funds, and by the in-fighting among the generals who are deeply loyal to rival politicians and bureaucrat capitalists.

They are utterly dejected by the fact that they are used as cannon fodder to defend a rotten system while their commander-in-chief enjoy a high-style living using public money to have helicopters ferry him from concerts and late-night parties.

The CPP anticipates steady growth of the NPA during the rest of the year and succeeding period. Amid Marcos’ corruption, policies that favor foreign capitalist interests and a few big bourgeois compradors and big landlords, the Filipino people have no other recourse but to intensify their revolutionary mass movement and armed resistance.