MANILA, Philippines—The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was established by trade union leader Crisanto Evangelista in November 1930. Leaders and members came mostly from workers’ ranks.

The Commonwealth government legalized the party in 1937. The next year, it merged with the Socialist Party of the Philippines (SPP), which was formed in 1932.

Following the outbreak of World War II in 1942, the CPP-SPP movement suffered a crisis in leadership when the Japanese invaders captured and executed its principal leaders.

On Dec. 26, 1968, English professor Jose Maria Sison reestablished the CPP to “rectify errors” committed by the previous leadership of the Lava brothers Jose and Jesus.

In March 1969, the CPP formed the New People’s Army (NPA) as its armed wing with Bernabe Buscayno (alias Kumander Dante) at its helm.

The CPP advocated a “national democratic revolution against US imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism” and adhered to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist principles.

With armed struggle as the main form of revolutionary struggle, the strategic line called for encircling the cities from the countryside over a protracted period.

The revolution aims to rid “the nation of US domination, particularly in the political, economic, military and cultural” arenas, as well as to “free the peasant masses and the entire people from feudal and semi-feudal conditions.”

The party regarded itself as “the genuine continuation of the Communist Party established in 1930.”

With only a few scores of members to begin with, the CPP rapidly grew after President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972.

The NPA started with only 60 fighters armed with nine automatic rifles and 26 single-shot rifles and handguns in the second district of Tarlac, which then had a peasant base of about 80,000.

Armed strength

Accumulation of weapons became possible through tactical offensives. By the organization’s own estimates on its 20th anniversary, during their first year (1969-1970), the NPA was able to accumulate some 200 rifles.

By 1977, the NPA had about 1,000 rifles and a mass base of a million people in both urban and rural areas.

Tactical offensives became frequent and widespread on Samar island by 1979 and in Mindanao by 1981.

By 1983, the NPA had accumulated almost 5,000 high-powered rifles. By 1988, the number of high-powered rifles in NPA possession was around 10,000, and NPA units operated in at least 60 guerilla fronts in 12,000 villages—or significant portions of 800 municipalities and 63 provinces in the country.

Estimates from the military put the NPA strength at over 5,000 as of last year.

While this was still a notable increase compared to about four decades ago, these numbers are considerably less, compared to the 1980s, when the NPA membership peaked at more than 25,000, still according to military estimates.

Witch-hunts

In the 1980s, the CPP launched campaigns to identify and arrest suspected military spies or “deep-penetration agents” in its ranks, which resulted in the imprisonment, torture and killings of scores of cadres by their comrades.

The Cadena de Amor campaign in 1982, for instance, claimed the lives of 32 people in the Quezon-Bicol zone. The Takip Silim campaign three years later, though confined to a district in southern Quezon, left some 30 people dead.

The Kampanyang Ahos in Mindanao in 1985 to 1986, described by Sison as the “very worst of the bloody witch-hunts,” resulted in the deaths of from 400 to slightly over a thousand people.

Operation Missing Link in Southern Tagalog, implemented in 1988, killed over 60 people.

Sison partly attributed the purges to an “erroneous” line of thought among some party leaders who “espoused quick victory at the expense of painstaking mass work and solid organizing.”

Party splinters

The CPP founder’s attacks on the leaders supposedly espousing “insurrectionist” lines of thought led to the party’s breakup into the “rejectionist” (RJ) and “reaffirmist” (RA) factions in 1992.

The reaffirmists stayed with Sison’s group while the rejectionists broke away.

In August 2002, the CPP and the NPA were designated as “foreign terrorist organizations” by the United States in a move described as an important step in the US “continuing efforts to combat global terrorism.” The European Union followed suit in November.

Under Philippine laws, the CPP is a legal organization.

In 1992, Republic Act No. 7636 repealed the old Anti-Subversion Law (RA 1700), which was enacted in 1957 at the height of the communist insurgency in the country. RA 1700 punished membership in the CPP and any organization with the same purpose.

Peace talks

The Philippines’ failure to lift the terrorist tags has been partly blamed for the interruption of peace talks between the government and the National Democratic Front—the umbrella organization for communist groups and their allies—in 2004 and is until now considered an impediment in the peace negotiations.

Peace talks have been held “on and off” since they formally began in Belgium in June 1995.