[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…