The New People’s Army Will Outlast The US-Marcos Regime

Marco Valbuena | Chief Information Officer | Communist Party Of The Philippines

January 14, 2024

Like many of his past declarations, Marcos’ claims today that the New People’s Army (NPA) has no more guerrilla fronts leave the people and their revolutionary forces incredulous.

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? Why is it that Marcos inserted ₱6 billion to further increase the AFP’s budget?

Marcos Jr is in dreamland when he claims there are no more active NPA guerrilla fronts. In truth, the NPA remains active in 14 regional commands across the country each with a number of guerrilla fronts. Despite having suffered from setbacks over the past years, the NPA is far from defeated. Under the guidance of the Party, the NPA has learned its lessons and is determined to frustrate the AFP’s brutal offensives. The CPP’s rectification movement has filled the NPA’s Red fighters and commanders with renewed revolutionary energy to serve the people.

Amid the grave economic crisis and worsening oppression under the semicolonial and semifeudal system, the NPA and the people’s war remains politically superior to the AFP and its US-supported war of state terror. The NPA represents the aspirations of the peasants and workers who comprise the vast majority of the Filipino people, while the AFP represents the interests of a small minority of big bourgeois compradors, big landlords, and corrupt bureaucrats who continues to defend the rotten ruling system. Under the leadership of the Party, the revolutionary mass movement and broad united front continues to be strengthened to fight the US-Marcos regime.

The NPA continues to carry out guerrilla maneuvers to break out of the AFP’s encirclement, to steadily build a bigger mass base and expand its guerrilla fronts. It will continue to mount tactical offensives to strike at the enemy’s weak points where they will least expect it. 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.

Marcos declarations were made to play to the desires of foreign investors whom he desperately wants to entice with promises of unlimited access to the country’s land and natural resources.

To serve the interests of foreign big capitalists, the AFP has spent hundreds of billions of pesos over the past six years to carry out a bloody campaign of state terrorism, particularly in the countryside. It has mounted aerial bombings and artillery shelling, and committed hundreds of cases of extrajudicial killings, abductions and torture. This campaign has been most brutal in areas where big mining companies, plantations, ecotourism and infrastructure projects are most aggressive in taking away the peasant farmland and ancestral land.

Despite this, or more precisely, because of this, the Filipino people, especially the peasant masses and their youth, continue to support and join the NPA knowing that only by waging armed struggle can they defend their economic and political rights. The majority of oppressed peasants and farm-workers who suffer from land grabbing, economic dispossession and political repression, know that without the NPA, they have nothing.

Source : https://philippinerevolution.nu/statements/the-new-peoples-army-will-outlast-the-us-marcos-regime/