CPP-NPA facing post-election split

MANILA, Philippines – The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA), are facing a split as a result of the recently-concluded national and local polls.

Captured CPP-NPA documents in the hands of the military showed that the decision of CPP founding chair Jose Ma. Sison to allow the Makabayan Party to join the political contest is now being challenged by Mindanao-based NPA leader Benito Tiamzon.

Tiamzon, the documents showed, has maintained that Sison’s decision to support a presidential candidate as well as putting up their own national candidates was in direct contrast to the CPP-NPA’s ideology to install a communist regime via the armed overthrow of the democratic state.

“The party leadership took a huge gamble when it decided to join the political contest and align with Manny Villar and the Nacionalista Party (NP). It was a gamble that did not prove beneficial to us, most obviously in the electoral realm,” said the NPA’s three-page post-election paper, now undergoing continuous intelligence evaluation by the military’s intelligence community.

Tiamzon was apparently referring to left-wing party-list Reps. Satur Ocampo of Bayan and Lisa Maza of Gabriela who ran for the Senate under Villar’s NP.

A hardliner, Tiamzon, has been advocating for the continuance of the armed struggle to defeat the government while Sison has adopted the political side of battle by way of political participation of party members.

The documents were among the bundles of documents seized in recent combat operations against the communist insurgents in Southern Philippines.

Villar has already conceded defeat to presidential front-runner Sen. Benigno Aquino of the Liberal Party (LP).

Ocampo and Maza, believed to be the CPP’s candidates, also lost in their bid to land a Senate seat.

Another document also in possession of the intelligence community showed that before aligning with the NP, the CPP leadership reportedly negotiated but failed to get a deal with the LP.

The negotiation that happened between the second and third quarters of 2009 did not push through after then LP presidential aspirant Sen. Mar Roxas declined the CPP’s offer of three million votes, vote denial capabilities through the NPA’s 8,000 to 10,000-strong armed force, in exchange for P400 million, two senatorial candidates and four Cabinet posts.

“While the Liberal Party rejected the CPP’s terms, it is also safe for us to assume that the NP-CPP had similar terms, although in one of the CPP’s newsletters it only reported that the party was only able to cut a deal in the amount of P60 million,” a Camp Aguinaldo insider said.

He added that the CPP-NPA captured documents, aside from its “high intelligence value,” also highlighted the ongoing internal debate that could lead to a major split.

“Tiamzon was correct. The 2010 elections marked not only a temporary moment of weakness (with the CPP-NPA) but possibly the start of a long-term institutional decline within the party,” a senior military intelligence officer said.

He added that the election results also disproved the CPP-NPA’s claim that it could deliver the winning votes and thus weakened its bargaining position in any future political exercise.

“While the CPP claims to have up to four million command votes, its party-list groups only received approximately two million votes, which can be also deduced that a sizeable chunk of this two million are market votes. It is now evident that the CPP can only reasonably claim a command vote of approximately 1.5 million or less,” the intelligence official said.

Although he admitted that the 1.5 million votes is still big enough, compared to the entire 90 million Filipinos, he said the number is minimal. –Jaime Laude (The Philippine Star)