The Communist Party of the Philippines on 2 June denounced the “farcical numbers” reported by the Duterte government’s National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) of New People’s Army rebels who have surrendered. CPP Chief Information Officer Marco Valbuena said the report is a “desperate bid to make the public believe Duterte is winning the war against the revolutionary movement, in the hope of securing billions upon billions of pesos more funds for the military.”

The NTF-ELCAC announced on 30 May that 17,958 ‘rebels’ have surrendered since 2016, of which 3,684 are regular members of the NPA. On the same day, National Security Adviser Gen. Hermogenes Esperon reported that NPA members are down to 4,000.

“Using the AFP’s concocted figures,” Valbuena said, “one can only conclude that the NPA has been able to replenish its ranks with 3,984 new fighters over the past 4 years, or around 1,000 new members a year. This contradicts their repeated claims that the NPA has been ‘weakened and is on a decline’.”

Valbuena said, “The real aim of these figures is to secure more and more funds for the anomalous counterinsurgency programs of the AFP and the NTF-ELCAC, now that budget deliberations are soon to open. These military-controlled programs include the much assailed Barangay Development Program (BDP) and the Enhanced Community Livelihood Integration Program (E-CLIP), which are all cash cows serving as the military’s pork barrel.”

Under the E-CLIP, each ‘surrenderee’ is supposed to receive ₱65,000. However, the ‘surrenderee’ typically receives only a grocery bag of rice and canned goods.

“Gen. Esperon is puffing up his numbers with the ambition of securing ₱44 billion for the BDP in the 2022 budget to serve as election war chest for the Duterte-Duterte tandem,” Valbuena said, referring to the daughter and father, Sara and Rodrigo, running for president and vice-president in 2022.

He stressed that the 17,000 who ‘surrendered’ are unarmed peasants “who have been subjected by the military to relentless harassment and suppression.” They are “victims of false and baseless accusations”, forced to ‘cooperate’ under pain of being arrested on trumped up charges or killed, Valbuena insisted, “which has become the norm in the conduct of the AFP’s dirty war.”

The CPP affirmed that despite the brutal war of suppression being waged by the Duterte regime, the NPA and all revolutionary forces “remain determined to resist and surmount the fascist onslaught of the Duterte terror regime.”