Inside the Communist Insurgency

By Jill Smolowe

His fellow guerrillas call him Ka Victus--Ka being short for kasama, or comrade, in Tagalog. He is like many of the Filipinos who have joined the New People's Army in the past few years. An activist since his student days, Victus, 36, became disillusioned with the political system after losing an election for town councilor in 1980. Dressed in a yellow T shirt and sporting a mustache and small beard, he speaks earnestly about Philippine Communism. "In central Luzon, many Communists like me are not direct victims of Marcos," Victus acknowledges, "while in Mindanao, many join the party because they have been victims." Disciplined and ideologically committed, Victus is the sort of man the N.P.A. likes to put forward to train raw recruits and promote its movement.

When Victus and his comrades decide to extend their Communist campaign to uncharted territory, they typically select a remote group of villages that have received little largesse from the central government. The first step is to dispatch an advance team to live in the home of a local family. Unlike government soldiers, whose own legacy to the village may be a trail of stolen chickens or worse offenses, the guerrillas try to behave courteously, listen sympathetically and pay their way. A nun or priest often adds a reassuring presence. They begin by organizing teach-ins and drawing out the villagers about their complaints.

As the N.P.A. presence grows, so does its level of activity. Is a local landlord demanding too high a percentage of his tenant farmers' harvest? The offender is ordered to reduce his take. If he refuses, he is executed. Is a village drunk harassing the peasant population? He is warned to reform, and if no improvement is noted he is shot. Is a local official corrupt? He too is killed. All the while, the guerrillas distribute food and help with the farming. For some, this image of the N.P.A. as a band of benign vigilantes takes hold. But for many others, it quickly tarnishes. Some villagers balk because the advance team has already pushed on to the next villages, leaving in its wake a "shadow government" that coerces support and suppresses criticism. Others are shocked when the guerrillas destroy businesses belonging to people who have refused to pay N.P.A. "taxes." Most important, many who may initially welcome the "instant justice" guerrillas apply to abusive individuals change their minds as vengeance turns capricious and arbitrary. Salve Regalario, a guerrilla who surrendered to the military in September 1983, described the interrogation of Elmundo Serrano, a farmer accused of complicity with the military during a raid. "He would not admit he was an informer, so he was beaten. Finally he had so many wounds that I shot him." Regalario later found out that the farmer had not been in the area during the raid and was the victim of a personal grudge held by a party member.

According to a study released in December by the U.S. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, the N.P.A. is responsible for a steady increase of "human rights abuses" over the past two years, including kidnapings and assassination by gun, ax and club. The Philippine government says that 1,203 civilians and 144 officials were killed in encounters with rebels last year.

The specifics may vary from village to village, but the N.P.A.'s calculated combination of blandishment and brutality has been repeated in thousands of villages since 1981. According to U.S. officials, the guerrillas move freely in 20% of the archipelago's 41,615 villages. Although the Philippine government says the figure is only 5%, it concedes that Communist insurgents now operate in 60 of the country's 74 provinces. They are a strong presence throughout the central island of Negros and in most of resource-rich Mindanao. Estimates of regular N.P.A. troop strength range from the Philippine military's count of 12,500 to Washington's 16,500 and the Communists' own claim of 20,000. Although the 230,000-strong Philippine armed forces enjoy an overwhelming numerical edge, their resources are stretched thin as they attempt to combat insurgents in 59 separate areas. Moreover, as Marcos admitted in a recent TIME interview, by early 1985 the combat troop-to- guerrilla ratio had effectively deteriorated to 4 to 1. To raise the ratio to 10 to 1, the level that military theorists commonly suggest is necessary to control an insurgency, the government is training and deploying eleven new combat battalions, each with about 670 men.

The N.P.A. has a valuable ally in its political alter ego: the illegal, 30,000-member Communist Party of the Philippines. The C.P.-N.P.A. combination is one of the 22 organizations in the National Democratic Front, an outlawed coalition of community, labor, church and leftist groups that boasts a total membership of 1 million and has an executive committee dominated by Communists. In addition, many moderate opponents of Marcos have accused Bayan, a federation of leftist groups that claims 1.5 million members, of also being Communist infiltrated.

The rebels and their political allies stress "simple living and hard struggle." Before a person can join the party, says Ka Victus, "we must change him entirely, re-educate him and indoctrinate him." Once inside the party, he continues, "if you want to court a girl, you must submit her name, and she will be investigated." On matters of internal discipline, the guerrillas can be ruthless. If a rebel discredits the insurgency, says Victus, "the N.P.A. will kill its own member."

Yet in urban areas where the insurgency is trying to attract the middle class, attitudes toward capitalist life-styles are more flexible. Front men in Manila, dressed in business suits and traveling in shiny cars, some equipped with phones, often make contacts in trendy restaurants or respectable offices. So enamored are most Filipinos of Western culture that the Communists have had to find a justification for "bourgeois pleasures." Argued an article in the Communist youth magazine Collegian Folio: "Boy George and break dancing . . . are minor questions in the category of fads that do not exert deep and long-lasting influences."

Philippine Communism has its roots in the Moscow-oriented Partido Komunista Ng Pilipinas, founded in 1930, which enjoyed a blaze of glory during the early years after the country achieved independence in 1946. The P.K.P. resurfaced briefly in the 1960s, attracting Marxist students, but the marriage proved tenuous. Impressed by the Cultural Revolution's gaining momentum in China, eleven young theorists who had been expelled from the P.K.P. announced the birth of a rival Marxist party in 1968. It defined its ideology as "Marxism- Leninism, Mao Tse-tung thought." By the following year the new Communist Party of the Philippines had a guerrilla wing, the N.P.A. During the nine years of martial law, military drives against the rebels, as well as constraints on interisland travel and free assembly, thwarted the insurgency's growth. But the rebels used the time to map out battle tactics. Lacking a Ho Chi Minh Trail for receiving foreign supplies, or a remote base camp like Mao's Yenan, they devised a strategy for encircling the cities from the countryside. It emphasized self-sufficiency and autonomy in the field. In the jargon of guerrilla movements everywhere: "The dominant factor of Philippine Communism is flexibility, the ability to adapt to conditions," says Carlos, a Communist political organizer in the southern Visayan islands.

The guerrillas also devised the agaw armas (seize arms) strategy, which stresses the central importance of capturing enemy weapons in any military operation. Not surprisingly, the current N.P.A. arsenal closely resembles that of the armed forces: U.S.-made M-14 and M-16 rifles, M-1 Garands, Browning automatic rifles and M-79 grenade launchers. U.S. and Philippine officials agree there is no evidence that the insurgents receive arms from the Soviet Union or any other Communist country. "More than once we have turned down aid offered by foreign governments," says Romy, a guerrilla on Mindanao. "We want to avoid outside influences."

As economic conditions deteriorated in the early 1980s, the insurgency gained ground. Its biggest break came with the murder of Opposition Leader Benigno Aquino in August 1983. Suspicions of government complicity touched off a wave of anti-Marcos sentiment and cynicism about the political system. The Communists have taken advantage of this by preaching the overthrow of what they call the "U.S.-Marcos dictatorship."

In response, the armed forces are not only waging a more aggressive campaign in the field but are now sending teams into N.P.A.-influenced barrios to denounce Communism. One favored tactic is to show The Killing Fields, a ( film that depicts the atrocities committed by Kampuchea's Khmer Rouge. The film's impact, however, is often blunted because the troops soon disappear, leaving the villagers unprotected against the insurgents.

The N.P.A. bases its plans on classic Maoist theory, which sees three stages in a protracted war: the "strategic defensive," during which a Communist base is built; the "strategic stalemate," during which guerrilla forces achieve equal footing with government troops; and the "strategic offensive," when rebels force government troops into a defensive posture. According to both the military and the Communist Party, the insurgency is now nearing the end of the first stage. A stronger military response could forestall the next phase, but the best guarantee against further N.P.A. gains would be economic prosperity and the renewal of credible democracy.

With reporting by Sandra Burton/Manila