If the Armed Forces of the Philippines and other security agencies of the national government are to be believed, the armed rebellion by the communist-led New People’s Army is nearing its end after 55 long years.
According to AFP spokesman Col. Medel Aguilar, the number of active NPA guerrilla zones is now down to zero: “Yes, they are weak, scattered and on the run.”
The AFP describes a “guerrilla front” as consisting of three or more platoons of regular guerrillas capable of launching periodic “tactical offensives” against government forces.
At its height in the late 1970s to the 1980s, the NPA operated in the three main islands.
By the onset of the 1990s, however, the rebel group had begun to experience a gradual decline because of battlefield losses, the split in the ranks of the leadership due to internal ideological and political debates, and the purge of thousands who were suspected of being deep-penetration agents of the military.
The death in 2022 of Jose Ma. Sison, founder of the re-established Communist Party of the Philippines in 1969, and the arrest and/or neutralization of other rebel leaders could have been a big factor as well in what the military considers the government’s “strategic victory” over the insurgency.
The National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) echoes the AFP’s assessment that there are no more active guerilla fronts in the NPA which it said are “on their last leg.”
According to NTF-ELCAC, there are only 14 “weakened” guerilla fronts left in the communist armed group as six more guerilla fronts were totally dismantled recently.
“Ensuring their total dismantling will be our prerequisite for us to initiate our next steps in ensuring peace,” the agency said.
Meanwhile, the National Security Council condemned the CPP’s statement on its 55th anniversary in December that vowed “to strengthen the NPA and the revolutionary armed struggle, and carry forward the revolutionary mass movement, and the people’s struggles against the US-Marcos regime.”
The NSC noted that instead of calling on the rebels to abandon armed struggle in its anniversary statement, the CPP even urged them to exert greater efforts to intensify it.
Amid ongoing exploratory peace negotiations between the two sides, the NSC slammed the CPP description of the proposed peace talks as ‘an additional battlefield to advance the national democratic cause.’
“The use of the word ‘battlefield’ is telling,” it said, as this only means that the CPP has no intention to give up armed struggle.
Even as the AFP claims to have achieved “strategic victory” over the CPP-NPA-NDF triumvirate, the end-goal is “total victory,” which will perhaps be achieved through a combination of peace negotiations and battlefield victories.