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Alan Robles

Raissa Robles

The mountains of the Philippines are quieter now.
The jungle bases that once sustained Asia’s longest-running communist insurgency are mostly emptied out. Its tens of thousands of guerrilla fighters have been reduced, by the military’s account, to something “very, very negligible”.
After 56 years, the Philippine military thinks the fight is almost over – and that conviction is transforming the armed forces from the inside out.
Commanders are overhauling training and strategy, moving away from the small-unit counter-insurgency missions that defined five decades of jungle warfare. The enemy they are preparing for now is not a Maoist guerrilla in the hills.
Officials say this shift is only possible because the New People’s Army (NPA) – the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines – is a spent force.
Not everyone believes it.

‘Near the finish line’
Military officials announced the dismantling of the final NPA guerrilla front last month.
A “front” is not merely a band of fighters. It is, according to Philippine Army commander Lieutenant General Antonio Gustilo Nafarrete, a self-contained structure combining armed combatants, political leadership and a civilian support “mass base”.
Dismantling the last one, in the military’s view, marks the end of the NPA as an organised territorial force.
“We’re already near the finish line,” Nafarrete said on February 16. He declined to give a figure for the NPA’s current strength but said it was “very, very negligible”.
We want to sustain the gains
Antonio Gustilo Nafarrete, Philippine Army commander
The strategic implications are already being felt in training priorities. “Training and capability build-up will be more on large-scale operations,” Nafarrete said.
“Before, we used to do small unit exercises because of our ISO [internal security operations], but now we are already doing brigade to division-size operations in consonance with our territorial defence operations.”
He was careful to add that hard-won ground would not be abandoned. Even as the army pivoted outward, “the position of our forces will stay the same”, Nafarrete said.
“We want to sustain the gains.”

To truly appreciate how dramatically the NPA has contracted, it helps to remember how formidable it once was.
At its height in the mid-1980s, during the dying years of Ferdinand Marcos Snr’s dictatorship, the communist rebellion fielded roughly 20,000 armed guerrillas and claimed the sympathy of more than a million Filipinos.
The movement had grown powerful enough that then defence minister Juan Ponce Enrile conceded publicly in 1986 that communist forces were approaching a point where they could threaten Manila itself.
But there was always more to the insurgency than just the guerrillas in the hills.
In 1973, the Communist Party created the National Democratic Front (NDF), a coalition of leftist organisations straddling the legal and the clandestine, to give the revolution a civilian face.

That structure did its job for a long time. As recently as 2018, party founder Jose Maria Sison claimed, from exile in the Netherlands, that the NPA still operated more than 100 guerrilla fronts across 73 of the Philippines’ 81 provinces, with a party membership of around 100,000.
Shortly before his death in exile in 2022, he insisted that the movement would “outlive” him and said it had planted deep-penetration agents inside the military.
The government designated the NDF a terrorist organisation in 2021.
The NDF’s representatives in the Netherlands did not respond to a request for comment from This Week in Asia.
For all its reach, however, the movement never managed to translate this into lasting territorial control. Despite decades of guerrilla warfare from mountain and forest bases, the NPA never held a province, or even a city.

Anatomy of defeat
Ronald Llamas, a former presidential adviser on political affairs and now chairman of Galahad Consulting Agency, offered a three-part diagnosis of the insurgency’s undoing.
The first was political. “Armed struggle grows or weakens depending on democratic space,” he said. “If there is democratic space, then the logic for armed struggle vanishes.”
As the Philippines consolidated its democratic institutions post-Marcos Snr, the NPA’s core recruiting argument – that the system could not be changed from within – grew steadily harder to sustain.
The second reason was ideological. “Their ideological construct, which is Maoism, isn’t even in China any more,” Llamas said. “The ideology has been dramatically weakened.”


A movement that once drew its legitimacy from a global revolutionary current found itself adrift as that current dried up.
The third is technological – and this has been the most lethal. Satellite imaging, facial recognition software and electronic surveillance have granted the Philippine military a precision it never previously possessed.
Suspected NPA chief Benito Tiamzon and his wife Wilma, the communist party’s apparent secretary general, were killed in a military operation in 2022.
For an organisation whose survival depended on secrecy and mobility, the loss of both has proved fatal.

Not dead yet?
But the insurgency has defied being administered its last rites before.
Satur Ocampo, 86, co-founded the NDF, negotiated its first peace talks with the government and spent more years in a Marcos Snr-era prison cell than any other political detainee.
If anyone has earned a view on whether the insurgency is dying, it’s him. His verdict? It isn’t.
“You can’t say it’s nearly dead,” he told This Week in Asia. “It’s true that they have practically massacred the top leadership some time ago. But a movement like this is rooted in several areas that have been fully cleared. They’ve declared a lot of areas cleared of insurgency. But again, particularly in Negros, there’s a resurgence.”
You can’t say it’s nearly dead
Satur Ocampo, National Democratic Front co-founder
In a protracted conflict, no one side could unilaterally declare it finished, said Ocampo, who described himself as “a progressive social-political activist since the 1960s”.
“You cannot definitely say [it’s over] until the revolutionary forces declare whether they are giving up or are really wiped out.”
He was candid, too, about the movement’s own costly miscalculation: its misreading of ex-president Rodrigo Duterte, who had cultivated ties with the NPA over decades before unleashing an all-out military campaign once in office.
The communists had been “nakuryente”, Ocampo said – fooled. “I realised that this guy is balimbing (a turncoat) with no deeply held principles,” he said.

The logic Duterte offered was simple, if brutal: past friendships had limits. He was now president. The law would be enforced. “It’s no longer the same as before,” Ocampo said.
As for the future, Ocampo’s prognosis was bleak for those hoping that the silence in the hills would hold.
So long as “exploitative and oppressive” conditions persisted – in the countryside, in the mining zones where indigenous communities were being pushed from their land – he said there would be people willing to fight on.
“Particularly the youth,” he said. “Armed, unarmed, legal and underground, then let the course proceed until the issues are resolved.”
Still, Ocampo said the movement would be open to a negotiated peace, if the government of President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr showed any appetite for talks.
The Philippine Communist Party’s Central Committee said in a statement posted to its website on December 26 that conditions were “excellent for further advancing the people’s democratic revolution” – citing a deepening economic crisis, the continuing repression of farmers and factory workers and the militarisation of the countryside.
The movement had “reviewed our experiences and critically identified our weaknesses and errors”, it said.

Even within the Philippine military, there are those who acknowledge that guns can only do so much.
One general who agreed to speak to This Week in Asia on condition of anonymity was frank about his feelings towards the NPA: they had tried to kill him in the southern Philippines and the memory had not faded.
But personal animosity was not a strategy, he said.
“Misgovernance by local government officials is rampant in areas where rebels thrive,” he said. “The military tries to do what it can in fulfilling some of the people’s needs, like drinking water and roads. The military can easily take over governance, but we don’t want to do that. That’s not our constitutional role.”
The solution, he concluded, had to be political.
In the end, it is the one point on which soldier and revolutionary can agree.
The mountains may be quieter now. But silence, as five decades of Philippine history have shown, is not the same as peace – and an insurgency that has already outlasted seven presidents may yet have more patience than the people trying to end it.


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The Philippines

New People’s Army (NPA) guerrillas stand in formation at a base in the Sierra Madre mountain range, east of Manila, in 2017. Photo: AFP

A Filipino soldier watches a resident pass by on Thitu Island in the South China Sea last month. The Philippines has been pivoting away from internal security towards territorial defence. Photo: AFP

Fighters of the New People’s Army (NPA) conduct a training drill at an undisclosed location in the mountains of Sierra Madre, the Philippines, in March 2019. Photo: EPA-EFE

Supporters march in Quezon City to pay respects to the late communist leader Jose Maria Sison on December 19, 2022, two days after his death aged 83. Photo: AFP

Filipino soldiers march in formation in December 2017, after then president Rodrigo Duterte had ordered the military to suspend operations against communist rebels over Christmas. Photo: AFP

Communist rebel leaders Benito Tiamzon (left) and his wife Wilma raise clenched fists after a rally in 2016 outside the gates of the police headquarters in Manila. Photo: AFP

Then president Rodrigo Duterte salutes the troops at a military camp in Bulacan province in November 2017, a day after he had signed a proclamation formally terminating peace talks with communist rebels. Photo: EPA-EFE

Members of the NDF hold a rally in Manila calling for peace negotiations and socio-economic reforms in 2016. Photo: AFP

Indonesia is getting an aircraft carrier. The Philippines isn’t. Does it matter?

The Italian aircraft carrier Giuseppe Garibaldi pictured in 2016. Photo: AFP

A Philippine Navy AW159 Wildcat helicopter is secured on the helipad of the BRP Jose Rizal, a Philippine frigate, during a maritime cooperative activity in the South China Sea last year. Photo: AFP

Thai transport ship HTMS Chang (front) accompanies HTMS Chakri Naruebet (back) on patrol. Photo: Royal Thai Navy

A Philippine Navy AW159 Wildcat helicopter is seen in flight while the Royal Australian Navy destroyer HMAS Brisbane sails during a maritime cooperative activity last year. Photo: AFP

Members of the Philippines’ Naval Special Operations Group march during a parade to mark the country’s 127th Independence Day in Manila last year. Photo: AFP

Filipino sailors stand on the deck of the BRP Miguel Malvar, a newly acquired corvette from South Korea, in Subic town, Zambales province, in April last year. Photo: Philippine Navy/AFP

The Philippines’ communist rebellion is Asia’s longest-running insurgency

Fighters of the New People’s Army. Photo: EPA

TO GO WITH: Philippines-UN-military,FOCUS by Joel Guinto In this photo taken on September 11, 2014, Filipino peacekeeper trainees march past a national flag during a drill simulating a hostile environment in a peacekeeping mission at the peackeepers training center in Capas town, Tarlac province, north of Manila. To help guard the world's war zones, the Philippines plucks soldiers from the frontlines against Al-Qaeda-linked militants and communist insurgents. But battle-hardened as these "warrior peacekeepers" are, they are also trained to turn on the charm when deployed to UN missions in Syria, Haiti and Liberia. AFP PHOTO/TED ALJIBE

epa07190739 President Rodrigo Duterte speaks during a water supply constraction ceremony in Davao city, Philippines, 26 November 2018. According to Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered to increase government forces in southern Philippines, but it will not lead to a nationwide martial law. Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Maria Sison alledged that sending more soldiers to the Mindanao island was a preparation for the formal declaration of the military rule across the country. EPA-EFE/CERILO EBRANO

Villagers huddle around two armed communist New People's Army (NPA) guerrillas (C and L) after the rebels released a captive army general at Suawan village outside of Davao city in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao 16 April 1999. From its peak strength of 26,000 fighters in 1986 the communist rebels have dwindled to about 6,000 to 8,000 following leadership struggles and bloody purges and the retreat of communism worldwide. AFP PHOTO

Mao more than ever: Filipino communists mark a half century of armed struggle

New People's Army guerillas raise their firearms to mark a previous anniversary in 1998. Photo: AP

DAV04:PHILIPPINES-REBELS:DAVAO CITY,PHILIPPINES,16APR99 - Filipino communist rebels take a break at the foot of the mountain in Davao, southern Philippines where they released an Filipino Army General and his aide after two months of captivity April 16. Members of the New People's Army (NPA) abducted General Obillo and his aide Capt. Eduardo Montealto in February for supposedly conducting anti-revolutionary activities. rr/Photo by Romeo Ranoco REUTERS

New People's Army guerillas. Photo: AFP

epa07209255 Filipino children beg for money at a street in Manila, Philippines, 05 December 2018. According to a new study by the Philippine Institute Development Studies (PIDS), inflation and natural disasters threaten to sink more Filipino households into poverty if the government fails to implement needed interventions. PIDS researchers said the government's scope for poverty assessment needs to be broadened so that programs can both pull the poor out of poverty and protect the vulnerable population from sinking into poverty. EPA-EFE/FRANCIS R. MALASIG

Reelectionist President Ferdinand Marcos, seated beside his son Ferdinand Jr [Bong Bong], is fanned by a bodyguard during a campaign rally, January 14, 1986, in Naga city south Manila on the vote-rich Bicol region. The rally attended by 15000 people, was held under a hot noonday sun. REUTER PHOTO

epa06005003 Filipino government troops on a truck maneuver at a deserted street as fighting between Islamist militants and government forces continues in Marawi City, Mindanao Island, southern Philippines, 02 June 2017. According to news reports, at least 174 people have been killed in ongoing clashes between militants linked to the so-called Islamic State (IS or ISIS, ISIL) militant group and the Philippine Army in the southeastern city of Marawi. The clashes began on 23 May when a military operation failed to capture Isnilon Hapilon, the leader of the extremist group Abu Sayyaf who was being safeguarded by members of the Maute Group, both groups pledged alliance to IS. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law for the island of Mindanao on the same day that the conflict emerged. EPA/FRANCIS R. MALASIG

Timeline

Former chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, Jose Maria Sison (R), labour leader Orlando Olalai (C) and Bernabe Buscayno (L), alleged head of the New People's Army, the military arm of the communist party, stand at the ceremony, August 30, 1986, formally launching their new political party called "Partido ng Bayan" or People's Party at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines. AP PHOTO

Badges, plates and pins with images of Mao Zedong are pictured in a showroom of a ceramics company in Changsha, capital city of Hunan province. Mao Zedong's 120th birthday falls on Dec. 26, 2013. 10DEC13 == Photo by Simon Song ==

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte gestures as he speaks during a press conference in Davao City, in the southern island of Mindanao on February 9, 2018. Duterte on February 9, declared himself beyond the jurisdiction of an International Criminal Court probe into thousands of deaths in his "drugs war", claiming local laws do not specifically ban extrajudicial killings. / AFP PHOTO / -

Jose Maria Sison has lambasted "the fake, the phony communists in China now". Photo: Reuters

A female New Peoples Army (NPA) guerilla tries to cover her face with an M16 armalite rifle inside a thickly forested training camp in Cordillera Mountain Province, Monday 05 January 2004. The NPA guerillas, together with their revolutionary leader Gregorio Rosal ( a.k.a Ka Roger ), revealed that their group will definetely pull down President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's government and her ambition to run as president again. He added that they will not support or endorse any candidates running for the presidency because they believe that these politicians have large debts to the Filipino masses. EPA/MIKE ALQUINTO

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The Philippine military claims the 56-year insurgency is near the finish line. But veteran rebels say the roots of rebellion remain


The Philippine military claims the 56-year insurgency is near the finish line. But veteran rebels say the roots of rebellion remain.


Philippines insurgency

War and conflict

Ferdinand Marcos Jnr

Rodrigo Duterte

The Philippines says its communist rebels are defeated – but are they?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The Philippine military claims the 56-year insurgency is near the finish line. But veteran rebels say the roots of rebellion remain

The Philippine military claims the 56-year insurgency is near the finish line. But veteran rebels say the roots of rebellion remain