Candidates and the ‘revolutionary government’

When I was a college student, I, like my fellow students, romanticized revolutions. We read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Nicolas Poulantzas’ Power and Social Classes. Che Guevara was our hero. Communism was Heaven on Earth, and bourgeois capitalism, with its profit orientation at the expense of the welfare of the workers, was evil.

My dissertation was about the state, power and social classes in the Philippines, with focus on the inequities in the countryside. In the course of my research, I read articles about how members of the NPA assisted farmers and helped the sick.

This was in 1990. The books and articles available to me in Denmark, however, did not reveal everything.

Wrote a concerned citizen in Sunstar Daily (Cebu City) May 5, 1991: “. . . the CPP/NPA seems to have great difficulty in discerning just who their ‘enemies’ are. Their actuations these past few years have established a pattern of terrorist attacks and criminal assaults perpetrated against all sectors, especially the innocent and non-combatants.”

The NPA seems to be doing pretty much the same these days. Its extortion business is doing well with at least one telecommunications company reportedly paying about P40 million a year. A competitor spends about the same on securing its facilities from NPA attacks. A bus company in the Visayas allegedly gives the NPA P4 million a year.

But who is it who actually pays? Do these companies take the money they pay to the NPA from their profits? Or do they pass on the burden to consumers? Of course, imagine if the money had been used to pay higher salaries or employ more people. Instead the money is spent on weapons that kill Filipino soldiers.

This is the revolutionary movement, anno 2010. And because it is election year, the NPA is busy collecting fees from politicians who want to campaign in areas influenced and controlled by the NPA. Pay up or get killed. Of course, campaigning comrades, most prominent among them Satur Ocampo and Liza Maza, are exempted. Not that they don’t have any funds. Presidential aspirant Sen. Manny Villar has reportedly paid the two candidates between P30 and P100 million each.

“If the reactionaries want to campaign in the areas controlled by the revolutionary movement, they must recognize the revolutionary government,” the spokesperson of the National Democratic Front of Eastern Visayas said in a March 12 statement. “This is so because the revolutionary government is safeguarding the best interests of the people, ensuring law and order, and taking care that current programs and policies are not upset by the entrance of candidates in the reactionary election.” The NPA is “safeguarding the best interests of the people” and “ensuring law and order” through its extortion activities, occasional abductions and killings and continued recruitment of minors.

A 13-year-old girl in Boston, Davao Oriental, was killed last Valentine’s Day. She was a victim of indiscriminate firing. The NPA is very active in Boston—not in helping the farmers or attending to the sick—but in extorting money from the private companies that are constructing the road. Brothers Jamil and Jimboy Valiente were abducted in Maco, Compostela Valley, last March 12—their brother Felix Jr. was shot dead. The three are mine workers.

It is legitimate and logical for a politician to support his fellow candidates. Sen. Villar is not the only mainstream candidate who is campaigning for Maza and Ocampo and their party-list parties. The Communist party is legal and communism is a legitimate ideology. But we must ask ourselves if it is right for us to support candidates who we know help the NPA, directly and indirectly and who are helped by the NPA.

Some might dismiss this as military propaganda. Some will argue that if you are a mayor, governor, congressman, senator or president you are so for everybody, including the members of the NPA.

However, condoning and thus encouraging the NPA’s criminal activities could never be right. There is nothing revolutionary or progressive about extorting money from private companies and political candidates, killing and abducting those who refuse your demands, fabricating and planting land-mines, and using child combatants. The same goes for the deception and deceit so cleverly orchestrated and implemented by the legal fronts. The end does not justify the means. –MARIT STINUS-REMONDE, Manila Times

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