[OPINION] Twilight time for the CPP-NPA’s forever war

After the split in the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in 1993, many doubted that the communist insurgency waged by the CPP and its New People’s Army (NPA) would ever recover. But it did, even surpassing the peak armed strength achieved in the 1980s, first in 2005 then again in 2017. Since then, however, the CPP-NPA, reeling from the government’s intense counter-insurgency operations, has fallen into a slump, in fact, into the most serious crisis in its entire 58-year history. Is it twilight time for the CPP-NPA insurgency? From very modest beginnings, the CPP-NPA grew into a powerful nationwide rebel force during the era of President Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. When the NPA launched its Maoist-style “protracted people’s war” in 1969, it started out as a ragtag band of about 60 fighters, nine automatic rifles and 26 single-shot rifles and pistols in Central Luzon. During the period of martial law, the NPA established guerrilla fronts in all of the country’s strategic mountainous areas outside of the Moro areas. NPA guerrillas engaged the Philippine military in tactical offensives, and built up its armed strength. In the early 1980s, some CPP cadres advocated adjustments to the party’s revolutionary strategy, arguing that its Maoist strategy, which involved “encircling the cities from the countryside” was much too weighted in favor of military over political struggle and rural over urban struggles. They put forward such alternative strategies as the Vietnamese version of “protracted people’s war” which regarded both military and political struggles as fundamental and decisive, and the “insurrectional strategy” of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, which had asserted the primacy of the “insurrectional mass movement” over the military struggle. Because of the CPP’s boycott of the 1986 presidential election, the CPP and the open “national democratic” (ND) movement were left out of the “people power” uprising. But apart from being a tactical mistake, the boycott fiasco also showed up the flaw in the CPP-NPA’s revolutionary strategy. While its forces were still struggling to develop its military struggle along the stipulated stages of Mao’s “protracted people’s war,” the Filipino masses had toppled the Marcos dictatorship through an unarmed insurrection. Peace negotiations between the government of the late president Corazon Aquino and the CPP’s politico-diplomatic arm, the National Democratic Front (NDF) in 1986-87 quickly collapsed. The government had demanded that the CPP-NPA-NDF lay down its arms, while the NDF had insisted that the talks address the roots of the country’s problems. (The NDF conducted peace talks with each of the post-authoritarian administrations, but did not reach a comprehensive political settlement with any of them.) Beginning of a decline For a while after the boycott fiasco, the NPA continued to grow, reaching its highest level in 1987. The NPA was widely reported to have swelled to 25,000 fighters, although CPP founding chair Jose Ma. Sison later belied that the NPA ever reached that number in the 1980s. The CPP-NPA measures its armed strength mainly in terms of high-powered rifles (such as M16, M14, AK-47 and M1 Garand). According to Sison, the NPA’s armed strength “increased to 6,100 automatic rifles in 1986 and still further increased by some hundreds in 1987,” its highest level up to that time. Then the decline started. The political fallout from the boycott fiasco started impacting on the CPP-NPA. This was compounded by the revelations about the killings of hundreds of suspected government spies in the CPP-NPA’s anti-infiltration purges in 1982-89. The fall of the socialist states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union raised questions about the very rectitude of the revolutionary left’s socialist project. Disagreements within the CPP leadership related to revolutionary strategy, analysis of the contemporary situation, alternative social order, intra-party democracy and other major questions reached a boiling point in the early 1990s. Sison wrote up “Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Rectify the Errors,” in which he lashed out at those critical of the party’s Maoist tenets, accusing them of propagating a line of “military adventurism” and “insurrectionism.” The CPP split into “reaffirmists” and “rejectionists,” with the “reaffirmists” emerging as the legatee CPP. Through most of the 1990s, the CPP-NPA suffered an ebb. At the turn of the millennium, however, the CPP-NPA started to recover. NPA guerrilla attacks picked up in many regions. The CPP-NPA intensified its collection of “revolutionary tax” from mining, agribusiness, telecommunications and construction firms, as well as of “permit-to-campaign” fees from politicians campaigning in or near NPA zones during election periods. In 2005, the NPA armed strength, it was claimed, surpassed the earlier 1987 peak by a few hundred high-powered rifles. Various counterinsurgency measures undertaken during the administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, however, soon took their toll on the CPP-NPA, which then suffered a decline. In 2002, following the 9-11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., the CPP and the NPA had been included in the list of “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTOs) of the US, the European Union and Australia. The next year, as government-NDF peace talks seemed to be going nowhere, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo added the CPP-NPA to her government’s counter-terrorist Oplan Bantay Laya, which originally targeted the Abu Sayyaf only. The Oplan strategy combined combat, intelligence and civil-military operations, and emphasized the “neutralization” of communists. Scores of open ND leaders and activists were arrested, tortured, disappeared or summarily executed. In 2006, Arroyo declared an “all-out war” against the CPP-NPA and the extrajudicial killings of leftists worsened. NPA armed strength was said to have dropped by 21.6% over 2006-2009. Starting in 2010, however, the CPP-NPA recovered again. NPA guerrilla operations intensified all over the country. In Mindanao, where the NPA was strongest, tactical offensives reportedly increased from 250 in 2010, 350 in 2011, 400 in 2012, more than 400 each in 2013 and 2014, and more than 500 in 2015. The NPA’s arena of operations, it was further claimed, expanded to 110 guerrilla fronts in 73 of the country’s 81 provinces. According to Sison, NPA armed strength “surpassed the previous 2005 peak by 3 per cent” – that is, to over 7,000 high-powered rifles. Storm clouds But storm clouds were brewing. In late 2018, President Rodrigo Duterte adopted a “whole-of-nation” approach in combating the CPP-NDF insurgency, a year after it had terminated peace talks with the NDF. The approach, which sought to mobilize and synchronize civilian government agencies, local government units, and military forces in counterinsurgency efforts, combined barangay development projects (roads, water systems, other infrastructure, schools, health stations and livelihood assistance) with localized peace engagements (including local integration of former rebels) in conflict-affected areas. To implement such a strategy, Duterte created a multi-agency National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), headed by the president himself. President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. continued Duterte’s “whole-of-nation” approach. From the government’s viewpoint, the “whole-of-nation” strategy has been a tremendous success. In 2024, Marcos claimed that no NPA guerrilla fronts remained active across the country. The NTF-ELCAC added that the NPA had been reduced to only 785 “remnants.” In the light of many reports of clashes between the military and the NPA over the last two years, the government’s exultant claims are not credible. But the CPP-NPA has indeed suffered grave setbacks. Since the launching of the “whole-of-nation” approach, NPA numbers have dropped considerably, and guerrilla attacks have declined. The International Crisis Group (ICG) estimates that the NPA has shrunk to between 1,200 and 2,000 fighters. The CPP-NPA no longer provides figures of NPA tactical offensives, but the number of clashes between government forces and Red fighters are indicative of the CPP-NPA’s decline. According to the international NGO Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), only 106 clashes occurred between government forces and the NPA in 2025 versus 273 in 2020 – a 61% decline in five years. Mindanao, as a whole, is no longer the main NPA flash point. The main areas of armed encounters have shifted from Western Visayas and Northern Mindanao to Eastern Visayas and Caraga. Over the past eight years, many top CPP-NPA leaders have been killed by the military – in combat or through summary execution. Among them are CPP chairman Benito Tiamzon and secretary-general Wilma Tiamzon, as well as Julius Giron, Antonio Cabanatan, Jorge Madlos, Menandro Villanueva, Maria Concepcion Araneta, Eugenia Magpantay, Randall Echanis and Mariano Adlao. Some other top leaders, such as Victor Ladlad and Rey Casambre. have been arrested and incarcerated. The Philippines’ “all-of-nation” approach has been widely criticized for thousands of human rights violations – illegal arrests, detentions, torture, extrajudicial killings and disappearances. Many open, legal progressive activists have become easy targets of government harassment and repression. Obsessed with its counterinsurgency drive, the government has largely ignored the criticisms and denunciations of human rights groups. According to the ICG, the CPP-NPA is at its lowest ebb in decades. Will it be able to recover as it has in the past? Massive losses One factor that will make recovery difficult is that the CPP-NPA has lost many of its most experienced leaders over the past eight years or so. Apart from top leaders killed or arrested and imprisoned by the military, some senior, long-serving leaders have passed away peacefully, among them Sison himself, Jose Luneta, Fidel Agcaoili and Luis Jalandoni. A few other veterans have been incapacitated by health problems. The loss of the likes of Sison, Jalandoni and Madlos has also left a big gap in the CPP-NPA’s public-facing spokespersons. The CPP-NPA may partially recover for a while, but one thing is definite: it will never be able to achieve the total military victory that it has long aspired for. Its fundamental Maoist principles stipulate that before the revolutionary forces can triumph, the “protracted people’s war” has to progress from guerrilla warfare to regular mobile warfare and eventually to positional warfare; and from strategic defensive to strategic stalemate and eventually to strategic offensive. All through nearly six decades of fighting, the NPA has been stuck in guerrilla warfare and the strategic defensive. Endeavoring to extricate the CPP-NPA from its guerrilla warfare rut, NPA chieftain Romulo Kintanar had pushed for the establishment of bigger NPA formations and for “regularization” in the 1980s. Sison accused him of “military adventurism” and had him expelled from the CPP-NPA, then assassinated. Kintanar had established extensive international linkages for the NPA, knowing that only external sources could provide a sizeable and steady supply of arms and ammunition needed for moving up to regular warfare. This international network withered away after the takeover of the NPA by the “reaffirmist” CPP leadership. (It must be noted here that the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, during their wars for secession, did manage to secure arms from external sources, but still did not achieve military victory against the government.) The CPP-NPA’s “protracted people’s war” has gone on much longer than any of America’s “forever wars.” As defined by Cambridge Dictionary, a forever war is “a war that never ends because it cannot be won.” It is a prolonged, open-ended armed conflict without a clear, achievable endpoint or decisive victory. The war without end between the government and the CPP-NPA has already claimed between 40,000 to 60,000 lives. Yet, each year, on the NPA’s anniversary on March 29, it celebrates the protraction of its “people’s war.” It’s twilight time for the CPP-NPA’s forever war. Mao’s rural and peasant-based “protracted people’s war,” employed in “semicolonial, semifeudal” China a century ago, simply has been a bad fit for an urbanizing Philippine society with a middle income economy that has shifted away from agriculture and is increasingly dominated by wage labor and the service sector. Communist insurgencies are on the wane worldwide. The CPP-NPA insurgency is one of a handful of major communist insurgencies still surviving in the contemporary world. Two of them, both Maoist, have not fared any better than the CPP-NPA. India’s Naxalites (Communist Party of India – Maoist), who have waged a 59-year-old “people’s war,” are dwindling, reduced to isolated pockets and struggling with recruitment and funding, with a leadership severely degraded. Peru’s Shining Path (Communist Party of Peru), whose founder, Abimael Guzman, was captured in 1992 and died in prison in 2021, has been all but dismantled, with a few splinter groups financing themselves mainly through cocaine trafficking. If the CPP still hopes to come to power, it should work out a comprehensive political settlement with the government and strive to turn its still appreciable mass base into an electoral base. All of the government-NDF peace negotiations have come to naught. The CPP-NPA-NDF has only been interested in eking out tactical gains – propaganda, release of political prisoners, immunity for “NDF negotiators,” so-called “belligerency status” – while still obdurately aiming for total military victory. Protracted negotiations was merely a tactic in its “protracted people’s war.” The CPP could take the cue from the its counterparts in Nepal, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist, now Maoist Centre), which signed a peace agreement with the Nepalese government in 2006 and became the ruling party through democratic elections in 2008–2009 and has been in the ruling coalition several times since then. Back in 1991, writing under the pseudonym Omar Tupaz, I commented on the CPP-NPA’s Maoist “protracted people’s war” strategy: “It will be difficult, if not impossible, to win a revolution in the 1990s by continuing to adhere to a basic strategic framework of a bygone era.” Unfortunately for the CPP-NPA, this seems to be coming to pass. – Rappler.com Nathan Gilbert Quimpo authored Contested Democracy and the Left after Marcos and co-authored Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years. In the 1980s and 1990s, he penned critiques of the communist party’s revolutionary strategy under the pseudonym Marty Villalobos and Omar Tupaz.