‘Revolutionary Taxation’ and the Logistical and Strategic Dilemmas of the Maoist Insurgency in the Philippines 1

Introduction

Over the past few years, the Philippine news media have published a growing number of reports about trucks, heavy equipment and buildings owned by mining, agricultural, telecommunications and construction firms being burned or destroyed by the CPP-NPA-NDF in various parts of the country—Cordillera, Bicol, Samar, Negros and especially Mindanao. Military sources and the news media have attributed the CPP-NPA-NDF attacks to non-payment of revolutionary taxes. Other firms reportedly victimized by NPA revolutionary taxation include power plant operators, bus companies, illegal loggers, commercial establishments, and resort and hotel owners.

The extortion activities of the CPP-NPA-NDF have not been limited to the collection of revolutionary taxes. During election campaign periods, the CPP-NPA-NDF demands PTC fees from candidates wishing to enter and campaign in NPA ‘guerrilla zones’ or areas that the rebel group claims to be under its control. It also collects ‘permit to win’ (PTW) fees to ensure the victory of the candidate who has paid PTW charges. According to Maj. Gen. Jose Mabanta Jr., commander of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, the rebels were ‘making a killing selling permits’ during the 2013 election campaign, as candidates paid between P50,000 and P5 million to buy protection from NPA harassment (Ramos, 2013b).

Why has the CPP-NPA-NDF resorted to, and intensified, such forms of apparent extortion as revolutionary taxation and PTC/PTW? Has the CPP-NPA-NDF degenerated into banditry and crime? Has rebel greed, rather than socio-economic and political grievances, become the main motive or driving factor behind the CPP-NPA-NDF armed struggle? Does the CPP-NPA-NDF’s aggressive stance signify a resurgence of the Maoist insurgency in the Philippines? What does revolutionary extortion indicate about the Maoists’ logistical as well as strategic situation?

I raise the following points in my argument: (a) The CPP-NPA-NDF has intensified revolutionary taxation and PTC/PTW because other major sources of funds have shrunk, become uncertain or are now regarded as politically indefensible, and because favourable factors such as high levels of electoral violence and the upswing in mining and other extortion-vulnerable enterprises have made these operations most lucrative; (b) despite intensified extortion activities, the CPP-NPA-NDF has continued to be mainly an ideologically motivated revolutionary force, has not degenerated into banditry and has chosen to engage only in ‘criminal’ fund-raising activities that it can politically justify; and (c) far from really resurging, the Philippine Maoist insurgency remains stuck at the level of guerrilla warfare and strategic defensive, suffers from serious logistical problems and once again faces a strategic dilemma: sticking to Mao’s ‘protracted people’s war’, pursuing a different revolutionary strategy or shifting to parliamentary struggle.

Historical Background

The CPP was established in December 1968 by a small group of militants headed by a former University of the Philippines instructor Jose Maria Sison, who had earlier broken away from the pro-Soviet Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP). The party described itself as being under ‘the supreme guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought’. Characterizing the Philippines as being ‘semicolonial and semifeudal’, the CPP sought to overthrow the Philippine state, which it viewed as being ‘reactionary’ and a mere puppet of ‘U.S. imperialism’. For its revolutionary strategy, the CPP adopted Mao’s ‘protracted people’s war’, which the party regarded as a ‘universal truth’, that is, applicable to all semicolonial, semifeudal countries (Guerrero, 1979). In March 1969, the CPP set up the NPA, which soon launched guerrilla warfare against the state. The CPP formed the Preparatory Commission for the National Democratic Front (or NDF Prep Com) as a special party organ in April 1973, but the latter started to refer to itself as the NDF in the mid-1980s. ²

As stipulated in the CPP’s founding documents, the CPP-NPA-NDF would be guided by Mao’s tenet of ‘encircling the cities from the countryside’ in waging protracted people’s war. The revolutionary forces would build and develop the NPA and ‘stable base areas’ in the countryside. From these bases, they would ultimately advance to the cities wave upon wave and seize political power. The people’s war would pass through several stages—strategic defensive, strategic stalemate and strategic offensive—and would develop different forms of warfare—guerrilla warfare (during the strategic defensive), regular mobile warfare (mainly during the strategic stalemate) and positional warfare (strategic offensive). Apart from engaging in armed struggle, waged mainly in the rural areas, the CPP’s revolutionary strategy would include open, legal struggle (rallies, marches, strikes, etc.), centred in the cities. The principal stress would be on the revolutionary struggle in the countryside, and the secondary stress on the urban struggle.

The revolutionary movement experienced ups and downs during the rule of President Ferdinand Marcos. In the early 1970s, young Maoist radicals took to the fore during an upsurge of student activism, which soon burgeoned into a massive multi-sectoral movement against social injustice and Marcos’s growing authoritarianism. After Marcos declared martial law in September 1972, tens of thousands of alleged ‘communist subversives’ were rounded up and put into prison, some tortured or even killed. Many activists fled to the countryside and joined the NPA. In the early years of dictatorial rule, the Maoist movement suffered many setbacks in both the urban legal struggle and the rural armed struggle. By the late 1970s, however, it had become the biggest, best organized and most militant force within the broad anti-Marcos movement.

In 1981, the CPP Politburo assessed that the revolutionary war had entered ‘the advanced sub-stage of the strategic defensive’ and that the revolutionary forces were girding for a strategic counter-offensive (SCO) that would usher in the higher stage of strategic stalemate. The SCO was envisaged as being similar to the Vietnamese Tet offensive, combining regular mobile warfare, guerrilla warfare, insurrections and other mass actions, with regular warfare taking the prominent role.

In 1980–1985, the CPP-NPA-NDF chalked up major military and political advances, as the corrupt and ruthless Marcos’s dictatorship slumped into deepening crisis. With its development of larger formations such as companies, the NPA launched bigger tactical offensives, especially in Mindanao, and began to conduct trainings to ‘regularize’ the guerrilla army. After the assassination of the leader of the traditional opposition, former Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr., in August 1983, hundreds of thousands poured out into the streets in indignation. In 1984–1985, the left successfully spearheaded welgang bayan (general strikes) that paralyzed economic activity on certain red-letter days in Mindanao, Negros and Bataan and that were viewed as preludes to a nationwide welgang bayan (Caouette, 2004; Quimpo, 2008a).

In a desperate attempt to regain political legitimacy, Marcos called for a snap presidential election. The traditional opposition united under the candidacy of Corazon Aquino, the widow of the slain former senator. Believing that the United States would continue to prop up the dictator, the revolutionary left called for an election boycott. Marcos’s rigging of the election led to massive protests, then a military revolt and finally a People Power uprising that toppled the Marcos dictatorship in February 1986. Because of its boycott, the revolutionary left was left out of this historic event and of the post-Marcos government. Soon after, its open mass movements suffered a decline. Peace talks between the Aquino government and the NDF quickly collapsed. Already impaired by the boycott fiasco, the revolutionary left’s image was further tarred by revelations of bloody purges of hundreds of suspected government infiltrators particularly in Mindanao in 1985 and southern Luzon in 1988.

The People Power uprising of 1986 and the fall of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989–1991 triggered intense discussions and debates within CPP-NPA-NDF ranks on a wide range of issues—ideology, strategy and tactics, international line, vision of an alternative social system, internal democracy, etc. The debates turned acrimonious in 1991–1992, eventually ending up in a split between those who ‘reaffirmed’ the basic principles of Maoism, led by Sison, and those who rejected it. Winning over the majority of the membership, the ‘reaffirmists’ took control of the CPP-NPA-NDF.

Throughout the 1990s, the revolutionary movement was in the doldrums. The numbers of its open, legal mass actions dwindled even further. Candidates fielded or supported by the radical left lost badly in elections. The NPA’s tactical offensives were no longer as big or as frequent as before. Urban guerrilla actions virtually ground to a halt. Peace negotiations with the Ramos government proved fruitless.

At the turn of the century, however, the revolutionary movement experienced a bit of a revival, initially in the political arena. Open legal forces aligned with the CPP-NPA-NDF participated actively in the campaign for the ouster of the corrupt President Joseph Estrada. This culminated in another popular uprising, ‘People Power II’, which toppled Estrada and brought Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to power in January 2001. With the backing of Arroyo’s ruling coalition, Bayan Muna—the open, legal party aligned with the revolutionary left—topped the party-list vote in the May 2001 elections, allowing it to send three representatives to Congress. The resumption of peace negotiations, which had been suspended under the hardline Estrada, had itself been a political win for the CPP-NPA-NDF too.

When peace talks broke down again, the Arroyo administration intensified counterinsurgency operations against the CPP-NPA-NDF, even resorting to forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions of hundreds of leftist activists. Plagued by corruption and fraud scandals, however, it may well have served as a major if not key factor in the partial revival of the NPA in the 2000s. A 2007 survey of Pulse Asia showed that Filipinos regard Arroyo as the most corrupt Philippine leader in history, even worse than Marcos and Estrada. The CPP-NPA-NDF depicted her as the veritable symbol of a rotten political system.

Self-reliance in the Early Years

During its early years, the Philippines’ Maoist insurgency projected and prided itself as being a homegrown, bootstrap movement. CPP-NPA leaders repeatedly stressed to their members the importance of self-reliance. In ‘Our Urgent Tasks’, for instance, the CPP Central Committee (1976) stated:

Unlike the reactionaries, we stand on the basic principles of independence and self-reliance. Foreign assistance should only be supplementary to our independent and self-reliant efforts. Even without any foreign assistance, we should be able to fight on and advance step by step. As already pointed out, practically everything that we need can come from the people and from the battlefield.

Early on (as well as all throughout its revolutionary struggle), the CPP-NPA did acquire its arms almost entirely from local sources—captured or bought from the Philippine military, police or criminal syndicates. During the heyday of the radical youth and student movement in the early 1970s, the activists relied largely on small donations and street solicitations to mount their mass protest actions. In its first decade or so, the Philippine Maoist movement received very little financial assistance from abroad, mainly token assistance from the Communist Party of China (CPC).

The CPP-NPA’s hype on self-reliance was due at least in part to several botched attempts in acquiring arms and financial assistance from China. In 1971, CPP leaders sent a group of cadres to Beijing to procure Chinese military aid and to serve as Beijing-based CPP representatives. The CPC, which housed the CPP delegation in a well-furnished mansion for several years, quickly approved the latter’s arms request. The CPP-NPA used a former fishing trawler, Karagatan, to transport the very first shipment—1,200 automatic rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, rocket launchers, medical supplies and communications equipment—to remote Palanan, Isabela province, in northeastern Luzon in July 1972. Karagatan, however, was spotted by a logging company executive and reported to the Philippine military. The rebels managed to unload the arms and ammunition, but Philippine Army soldiers who greatly outnumbered them and were backed by F-5 jets, helicopter gunships and gunboats soon forced the rebels to retreat into the forest. The military captured most of the shipment. The CPP-NPA salvaged only about 200 M-14 rifles, some ammunition and a few rocket launchers (I-Witness, 2012; Jones, 1989).

The CPP-NPA’s second attempt also turned out to be a disaster. By December 1973, the Chinese military had already packed M-14 rifles, bazookas and ammunition into sealed plastic tubes at Sanya Naval Base, Hainan—all ready to be shipped. The CPP-NPA’s elaborate plan involved having the arms dropped into shallow waters off La Union province, brought to shore by scuba divers, hidden in beach resorts and eventually transported to guerrilla zones by trucks. The vessel supposed to pick up the shipment, Doña Andrea, however, never made it to China. Manned by a very inexperienced crew headed a seasick-prone captain, Doña Andrea ran aground on a reef near Pratas Island in January 1974. The crewmembers were rescued by a salvage ship and brought to Hong Kong, and eventually granted asylum in China (Jones, 1989).

In late 1974, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested a CPP courier at the US–Canada border. She had just picked up US$75,000 in cash—Chinese financial aid to the CPP—together with letters from the CPP group in Beijing, from the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, Canada. The FBI confiscated the dollars and the letters (Malay, 2005).

Notwithstanding the Karagatan and Doña Andrea fiascos, CPP leaders quickly came up with a third arms shipment plan. China flatly rejected it. After the death of Mao and the fall of the Gang of Four in 1976, China lost interest in funding Third World revolutions and stopped all assistance to the CPP altogether.

Neither the failed attempts to acquire arms from China nor the intensified repression under Marcos’s martial law deterred the Maoist movement from persisting in its people’s war. The CPP-NPA established ‘guerrilla fronts’ in strategic mountainous areas of major islands of the Philippine archipelago, relying mainly on contributions and other forms of material and intelligence support from peasants, agricultural workers and indigenous peoples living in these areas. Nemenzo (1984) describes how the NPA built its mass base among the rural populace:

NPA units were welcomed by the peasants because they were not there only to fight. They also taught the peasants new agriculture skills, herbal medicine, acupuncture, makeshift irrigation and so forth. More effectively than the local government and field agencies of national ministries, the NPA administered justice, maintained peace and organized small economic projects, ran adult education classes and, in the stable guerrilla fronts, even implemented a ‘revolutionary land reform programme’. NPA thus projected a more positive image; they were not seen as parasites who fed on the meager products of their farms.

To build up the NPA armory, platoons and squads of the guerrilla army seized guns of government forces during raids and ambushes and its ‘sparrow’ teams undertook agaw armas operations—grabbing guns from isolated soldiers or policemen, often killing or wounding them.

In the relatively more advanced guerrilla zones, the CPP-NPA began to exact revolutionary taxes from wealthy landowners and businesses, asserting that it had already established a ‘people’s revolutionary government’ in areas under its control. Although the revolutionary movement regarded big landlords and compradors as class enemies, it could not possibly wage open war against all of them. Hence, the rebels adopted a ‘soak-the-rich’ policy, punishing only those who refused to pay. Punishment meant destruction of property, disruption of operations or sometimes summary execution (Chapman, 1987). In the 1970s, however, revolutionary taxes constituted only a small part of the CPP-NPA’s income.

Drawing adherents to liberation theology among the ranks of priests, nuns and other church people, the revolutionary movement soon managed to tap funds from international donors for church-related but CPP-influenced programmes for, in Vatican II jargon, ‘the poor, deprived and oppressed’—peasants, workers, urban poor and indigenous peoples. In 1976, the movement started using church programmes such as ‘basic Christian community’ (BCC) organizing and community-based health programmes for guerrilla zone preparation (GZ-Prep). NDF international spokesman, Luis Jalandoni (2008), a former priest, explains how GZ-Prep worked:

[L]egal activists, often progressive Church people, would undertake legal organizing of peasants and later turn this over to revolutionary forces to develop guerrilla zones. This helped in the expansion of the guerrilla fronts to 29 by the end of the 1980.

Legal Projects and Revolutionary Taxation During the Insurgency’s Heyday

During the Maoist insurgency’s heyday in 1980–1985, legal projects, codenamed ‘Px’, became the CPP-NPA’s biggest source of finance outside of the small contributions in cash or in kind of peasants, workers and other marginalized sectors. Px generated tens of millions of dollars every year. Cadres and activists working in the church sector had by then managed to position themselves in secretariats of key church institutions that processed funding from Western donor agencies for various religious, humanitarian and development projects in the Philippines. They worked closely with Philippine solidarity groups in Western Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific that had supporters and contacts within the donor agencies. In seminars conducted throughout the country, the CPP’s finance commissions at the national and regional levels trained open, legal cadres and activists on how to write project proposals, set up and manage legal programmes and legal institutions (later called non-governmental organizations or NGOs), make reports, deal with donor agencies, etc. In terms of implementation, projects ranged from ghost projects, to ‘credible reality’ (up to 15 per cent implementation), partial implementation and full implementation. Project budgets were often inflated so that bigger amounts could be ‘centralized’ to the CPP’s national finance commission. Regional finance bodies set up ‘Px committees’ for the virtual mass production of project proposals. Implemented portions of Px funds directly served urban organizing and mass mobilization, as well as guerrilla zone preparation and consolidation. Half of the centralized part went to the CPP’s central fund and the other half, to the party’s territorial commissions (Caouette, 2004; Quimpo, 2008b). Documents seized by the Philippine military during a raid at the Social Action Center of the Catholic Church in Catbalogan, Samar, in September 1982 revealed how extensively the CPP utilized the church’s social action projects (Marks, 1996, p. 107), but the military’s subsequent exposé did not put a stop to the flow of Px funds to the revolutionary movement.

During the movement’s peak years, revolutionary taxation ranked as the second most important source of finance for the CPP-NPA. With their increased clout, the rebels now included bigger enterprises as targets for extortion: logging and mining firms and large plantations, including some multinational corporations. The revolutionary movement’s lofty claims to protecting the environment from degradation and the people from capitalist exploitation were easily compromised, as Vitug (1998, p. 127) points out:

To some extent, the presence of rebels in the mountains helped protect the forests but only in so far as this deterred loggers and settlers from penetrating the area. Once the logging companies were in, a relationship of convenience and coexistence evolved – logging companies cut the trees, paid up and let the rebels be. For the NPA, as long as the loggers did not hamper their operations, an unholy alliance prevailed.

NDF spokesman Satur Ocampo justified the revolutionary tax on big corporations, saying that ‘taxing them means expropriating part of the profits they got for the use of the people’ (Chapman, 1987, p. 154).

Increased revenues from legal projects and revolutionary taxation were supposed to be mainly for advancing the CPP-NPA’s armed struggle, the main form of struggle. In pushing towards a SCO leading to a strategic stalemate, however, the CPP-NPA miserably failed to solve a crucial but nettlesome logistical problem: ensuring the flow of arms and ammunition, especially more sophisticated weaponry, in large volume to its combatants. The CPP-NPA had painstakingly built up its weaponry through capture or purchase from the Philippine military, police or criminal syndicates. But by 1985, the high-powered rifles in the NPA’s possession totalled a measly 6,800, ³ and in some places, the guerrillas were often low on ammunition (Caouette, 2004). With such weaponry, it was impossible for the rebels to move up to regular warfare.

The CPP-NPA could acquire arms and ammunition in greater quantity and of more sophistication only from abroad. After the Karagatan and Doña Andrea fiascos, however, it appeared that the rebels had to some extent been taken in by their own self-reliance propaganda. Two party cadres who had been sent to Europe in 1976 mainly to procure arms for the NPA became tied down to ‘broad solidarity work’ and ‘diplomatic work’ instead. Because of the CPP-NPA’s Maoist line, its efforts to gain arms support from the Soviet bloc and from parties and liberation movements allied with the bloc proved fruitless (Quimpo, 2008b). In 1981, the CPP-NPA did manage to acquire 200 AK-47 rifles from the Palestine Liberation Organization, easily smuggling it in through a shipment of leather hides sent via South Yemen. This was supposed to be just a pilot undertaking, with more to come (Caouette, 2004; Kessler, 1989).

The successful arms smuggling operation must have inspired CPP founding chairman Sison, then in detention, to encourage allies of the revolutionary movement to bring in arms in a similar manner:

The key to our allies being able to form their own self-defense organizations and also help the NPA increase its rifles in a rapid manner is to import arms. If certain commercial goods can be brought into the country by various methods, there is no reason why arms cannot be brought in, using the same methods. The amount of arms imported can grow progressively as the ability to solicit, purchase, carry and receive them increases. The importation of ten to twenty thousand rifles in one, two or three years is a realizable and sufficient target. The world is wide open for acquiring the arms. These can be had from any friendly source abroad. At any rate, revolutionary or anti-imperialist countries, parties, movements or groups are the most reliable sources. The weapons of freedom can be acquired through grants, loans or purchase, especially from friendly revolutionary movements and organizations abroad. (Liwanag, 1983, p. 6)

But the CPP-NPA was never able to sneak in arms imports past customs again, or to acquire arms from abroad in any other manner during the twilight years of the Marcos dictatorship. Logistics-wise, it had raised arguably more than enough funds from legal projects and revolutionary taxation for the beans-and-bullets needs of guerrilla warfare and the mass movement. But it had woefully neglected establishing a network and system for the reliable sourcing, procurement and delivery of arms in large quantities from abroad for the greater demands of regular warfare.

A far bigger problem for the CPP-NPA was that its revolutionary strategy was no longer attuned to the times. The CPP-NPA somehow believed that the Marcos dictatorship would still be around for some time and that the latter’s downfall would coincide with the victory of the revolutionary forces. According to Maoist doctrine, the protracted people’s war would pass through several stages and develop different forms of warfare before revolutionary victory. With armed struggle as the principal form of struggle, the seizure of power would be achieved mainly through military means. However, even as the Marcos dictatorship was floundering in ever-deepening crisis, the CPP-NPA viewed itself as still being in the strategic defensive, as still needing to build stable base areas in the countryside and as still having to advance to regular mobile and positional warfare. Yet the broad mass movement against the dictatorship, centred in the cities, was burgeoning.

In internal CPP-NPA discussions and debates, a number of cadres at the national and regional levels raised questions about the Maoist protracted people’s war strategy, and advocated for shifts or adjustments in the revolutionary movement’s strategic framework. Some cadres called for a shift to the Vietnamese version of protracted people’s war, which had veered away from the ‘primacy of armed struggle’ doctrine and emphasized that both armed (or military) and political struggles were fundamental and decisive. Vietnamese people’s war had also moved away from the ‘encircling the cities from the countryside’ framework that put primacy on rural struggle, and had called for waging revolutionary struggle in three strategic areas—hill forests, plains and cities. Other CPP-NPA cadres proposed a Sandinista-style ‘insurrectional strategy’, which put principal emphasis on transforming the open mass movement into an insurrectional movement, with guerrilla forces playing only a supportive and secondary role. In 1981, the CPP leadership acknowledged the growing importance of political struggle (vis-à-vis armed/military struggle), urban struggle (vis-à-vis rural struggle) and international work (vis-à-vis domestic work). Over the next few years, however, it rejected the calls for a strategic shift and basically reaffirmed adherence to Maoist strategy (Rocamora, 1994; Tupaz, 1991; Weekley, 2001).

The CPP-NPA’s fixation with Maoist strategy soon had dire consequences for the revolutionary movement. When Marcos called for the 1986 snap presidential elections, CPP-NPA leaders were still talking about advancing towards SCO and strategic stalemate. They envisaged the fall of Marcos and of the reactionary state as still being much farther down the road. In the far-off strategic offensive, a militarily superior NPA would overwhelm the reactionary armed forces, achieve a decisive military victory and march into Malacañang Palace. People Power 1986 showed up the folly not only of the CPP-NPA’s boycott tactic but also of its outdated strategy.

The NPA’s more Aggressive Finance and Logistics Operations

Shortly after the collapse of short-lived peace negotiations between the government and the NDF, President C. Aquino declared ‘all-out war’ against the CPP-NPA-NDF. Apart from intensifying military operations against the NPA and cracking down on the CPP’s underground network, the government sought to dismantle the revolutionary movement’s elaborate finance machinery. Citing seized rebel documents, the military exposed the CPP-NDF’s legal projects operations and its international solidarity network (Executive Intelligence Review, 1987, 1988). Prodded by the government, leaders of the Catholic and Protestant churches undertook more stringent measures against ‘communist infiltration’ of their institutions (Kinne, 1990; Lorayes, 1988). The government and churches’ efforts, however, did not immediately stem the flow of Px funds to the CPP-NPA-NDF.

The decline of the revolutionary mass movement after People Power I did not deter the CPP-NPA from finally taking a more aggressive stance in addressing its longstanding logistical problems. Soon after its establishment in 1984, the NPA General Command (NPA-GC), under the leadership of Mindanao’s former top NPA commander, Romulo Kintanar, began deploying cadres overseas to find ways of acquiring arms from abroad. In 1987, the NPA-GC secured the commitment of North Korea and arranged for 50 tons of military hardware (including anti-tank missiles, land mines and Soviet-made light weapons) to be delivered by a North Korean ship to landing points in Samar, Bicol and the Zambales-Pangasinan area. To divert the attention of the Philippine military, there would be big mass actions conducted in the cities and NPA tactical offensives mainly in the countryside. As in Karagatan and Doña Andrea, the North Korean arms shipment failed. Due to security lapses of CPP-NPA cadres in Southern Luzon, the military captured important documents including a sketched map of one of the landing points. In August 1987, with the North Korean ship already in Philippine waters and US military ships suddenly patrolling one of the areas, the whole operation had to be called off at the last minute. The diversionary actions flopped too (Caouette, 2004; Jones, 1989).

Notwithstanding the North Korean arms fiasco, the NPA-GC maintained its focus on arms procurement. In the next few years, it achieved something the CPP-NPA had never accomplished before: building the infrastructure for the flow of arms from abroad. It established good cooperative relations with governments (or ruling parties) and revolutionary movements and groups that were potential arms sources or brokers: the ruling parties of North Korea, Cuba, Yugoslavia and Albania, the Libyan government, PLO (Habash, Jebril and Hamatweh factions), Japanese Red Army (JRA), Armenian Secret Army, Sandinista National Liberation Front, Communist Parties of El Salvador and Peru, Revolutionary Left Movement (Chile), etc. Some of these forces made commitments to extend support to the NPA—funds, arms and military training. The NPA-GC succeeded in getting its representatives based in Libya and Cuba and in setting up front trading companies in Hong Kong, Belgium and Yugoslavia. While the Communist Party of the Soviet Union snubbed the overtures of CPP Chairman Sison for friendly ties in 1988, the NPA-GC still managed to make ‘technical explorations’ for possible arm shipments in such Soviet bloc countries as Poland and Vietnam. Since the NPA-GC dealt with many armed groups, some tagged as ‘terrorist’ by Western governments, it maintained its own international network, separate from that of the CPP’s International Department and the NDF international office (Quimpo, 2008b; Revolutionary Workers Party, 1999).

Convinced that funds generated through legal projects would neither be sufficient nor sustainable for the growing demands of the revolutionary movement, the NPA also took a more aggressive stance in raising funds. Apart from intensifying the collection of revolutionary taxes, it engaged in ‘special operations’, such as kidnapping-for-ransom and bank ‘expropriations’, and in the collection of fees for ‘safe-conduct passes’ during elections—what later became more known as PTC. In 1984, the NPA-GC had already convinced the CPP leadership of the judiciousness of special ops, arguing that the Bolsheviks had resorted to ‘expropriations’ as one of the means for raising funds for the Russian revolution. But it was only after People Power I that the NPA managed to start operationalizing special ops. The NPA built an extensive network of urban guerrillas known as armed city partisans, which engaged in the assassination of ‘enemy agents’, agaw armas, revolutionary taxation of factory owners and special ops. Starting in 1987, the NPA stepped up its urban guerrilla warfare (Clad, 1987). The most well known of the urban guerrilla groups was the Metro Manila-based Alex Boncayao Brigade (ABB), whose operatives gunned down and killed Col. James Rowe, a US counterinsurgency expert involved in training the Philippine military, in a Manila suburb in April 1989.

By the CPP-NPA’s own admission, the NPA was responsible for the kidnapping of Japanese businessman Noboyuki Wakaoji in November 1986, collecting $10 million in ransom, and Bombo Radyo-Philippines president Roger Florete, P15 million (Rosal, 2003a). The Wakaoji affair, which dragged through four months of his captivity, greatly strained the relations of the newly installed Aquino government with Tokyo and was a major factor in the sharp drop in Japanese investment, aid and tourist inflow to the Philippines at a time when Japanese capital was pouring into Southeast Asia (Yu-Rivera, 2006). According to the Japanese National Police Agency, the JRA had been involved in Wakaoji’s kidnapping (Clutterbuck, 1990).

The NPA’s more aggressive methods of finance generation soon became controversial within the revolutionary ranks itself. Still smarting from the boycott fiasco, legal left forces were earnestly trying to regain credibility and to mobilize opposition to a government that had been brought to power by popular uprising. Kidnappings-for-ransom, bank hold-ups, extortion and gang-style assassinations did not quite help improve the left’s image. To compound things further, the NDF, which was now seeking international recognition, had to project itself as a responsible political force. In December 1986, during the peace negotiations with the Aquino government, the NDF representatives openly declared the NDF’s adherence to such internationally recognized instruments of the international humanitarian law as the Geneva Conventions (1949) and Protocol II (1977). A few years later, various human rights groups pointed out that certain finance-and-logistics operations of the NPA were in violation of the laws of war: kidnapping-for-ransom and hostage-taking; summary executions during certain agaw armas operations; violence or threats of violence in carrying out revolutionary taxation (Asia Watch, 1990; Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 1990). The CPP leadership put a stop to special ops in 1991, deeming them to be ‘too dangerous and politically risky’ and ‘increasingly hard to justify publicly’ (Caouette, 2004, p. 483). But it did not proscribe nor restrict revolutionary taxation and electoral safe-conduct passes.

Abroad, the NPA-GC conducted various finance-generation operations too. According to a US Secretary of State secret cable published by WikiLeaks, Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi gave at least $7 million to the CPP-NPA in 1987–1991 (WikiLeaks, 2012). The NPA-GC participated in a finance project of several ‘anti-imperialist’ groups that involved the laundering of hard-to-detect counterfeit dollars reportedly manufactured in North Korea. The operation, however, ended in a fiasco. A Dutchman associated with the NDF international office was arrested in Geneva, Switzerland, in January 1990 when he tried to deposit $1.5 million in his bank account. Some of the dollars were fake, as it turned out. The incident soon put the Interpol and the FBI tracking down the CPP-NPA’s international financial network (Bitter, 1998; Caouette, 2004).

The split of the CPP-NPA-NDF in 1992–1993 had an immediate and profound effect on the movement’s finance and logistics operations. Among the ‘rejectionists’ were the bulk of the members of the NPA-GC and the Manila-Rizal region. As revealed by documents of the internal CPP-NPA-NDF debates, they had favoured, among other things, a shift to the Vietnamese ‘politico-military’ variant of protracted people’s war. The exit of the NPA-GC resulted in the dismantling of the CPP-NPA’s elaborate and painstakingly built international infrastructure for arms procurement. CPP-NPA relations with most of the governments and armed groups that the NPA-GC had opened and/or maintained were effectively cut. The CPP-NPA-NDF closed down its office in Libya and ceased to have representatives in Cuba. The front trading companies were also shut down (Revolutionary Workers Party, 1999). The withdrawal of the Manila-Rizal regional organization, including the ABB, and some other urban committees, meant the loss of a large part of the movement’s urban guerrilla machinery.

New Mix: Revolutionary Taxation, PTC/PTW and Pork Barrel

As the revolutionary movement fell into the doldrums following the 1992–1993 split, legal projects declined as a source of CPP-NPA-NDF finances. The Px machinery was thrown into disarray as Px cadres and activists on different sides of the ‘reaffirmist’–‘rejectionist’ divide tried to outmanoeuvre the other side for control of particular legal institutions and programmes. The CPP-NDF’s solidarity network was greatly weakened, as the majority of the international solidarity cadres and activists joined the ‘rejectionist’ camp. In the wake of the exposés in 1987–1989 on fund diversions to the CPP-NPA, donor and church institutions adopted more stringent monitoring mechanisms. Lastly, many donor agencies removed the Philippines, a lower middle-income country, from among their priority recipient countries or narrowed the scope of their assistance. Although legal projects ceased to be the main lode of revolutionary income, the CPP-NDF still acquired substantial amounts from Px, especially through networks in the Protestant churches.

The post-9/11 ‘global war on terror’ created more finance headaches for the CPP-NPA-NDF. Government-NDF peace negotiations, which had been resumed in 2001, reached an impasse in 2002. With the support of the Arroyo government, the United States put the CPP and the NPA in its list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) in August 2002, making it illegal for Americans and US entities to give them material support and requiring US banks to freeze their assets. Later, the European Union, Canada, Australia and New Zealand also included the CPP-NPA in their respective terrorist lists. Inclusion in the FTO list did very little damage to the CPP-NPA in terms of freezing of assets (Quimpo, 2006), but it ‘crimped funding from abroad’ (Mercado, 2006).

The rebels’ situation, however, was no longer as bleak as in the years immediately after the split. Funds from other sources soon made up for the slack in the Px funds. Revolutionary taxation became the biggest moneymaker for the CPP-NPA-NDF. New ‘taxpayers’ had come into the picture. Starting in the latter half of the 1990s, telecommunication firms, which had to set up transmission towers in the hinterlands, became easy targets for extortion. Multinational mining companies, drawn into mineral-rich Philippines by soaring metal prices and a pro-mining government, ⁴ soon found themselves confronted with revolutionary taxation (Landingin, 2008). As in the case of loggers, the CPP-NPA initially tried to prevent the entry of foreign and domestic mining firms, but once they were in, it sought an arrangement of convenience and coexistence with them. Apart from the tax directly exacted from the mining companies, the CPP-NPA took huge cuts from royalties that the firms paid to the inhabitants of affected areas. When it ‘punished’ companies not paying the revolutionary tax, it took pains to explain that the these companies had caused environmental destruction, displaced farmers or indigenous peoples, paid pittance wages, provided terrible working or living conditions, or committed human rights abuses—charges that often did contain some element of truth. ⁵ According to the military, the CPP-NPA raked in at least P300 million from revolutionary taxation and destroyed P1.2 billion worth of property in 31 recorded incidents in 2013 (Jacinto & Depasupil, 2014). ‘Alejandro Ramirez’ (pseud.), a security analyst of an international organization operating mainly in Mindanao, however, believes that the figure is much too conservative, and he estimates that the annual income from revolutionary taxation runs into billions of pesos. ⁶ ‘The NPA threat has effectively become not just a security concern for mining firms, but also an additional operational and financial burden that has to be incurred if they want to continue operations in the Philippines,’ writes the risk consultancy firm Pacific Strategies & Assessments (Romero, 2011).

In intensifying its collection of revolutionary taxes, the CPP-NPA has become more strident in its assertions that it has established a ‘people’s revolutionary government’ in areas under its control and that its collects taxes as a function of governance. The taxes, it is argued, are used ‘to fund socio-economic, health, educational and cultural projects and activities of the masses in the revolutionary mass bases as well as to finance the operations of the revolutionary movement’ (Rosal, 2003b). Like many other insurgent movements in other parts of the globe, the CPP-NPA has been seeking recognition as a ‘legitimate’ coercive force and to delegitimize the ‘reactionary’ Philippine state. While its claims to legitimacy achieved some resonance during the Marcos dictatorship, they have had little impact now.

PTC/PTW emerged as another major source of funding. The CPP-NPA began to collect PTC more methodically in 2001, at the very same time as Bayan Muna’s electoral debut. The rebels viewed the PTC as giving them three benefits: recognition of the revolutionary government’s authority and power, alliance-building with politicians and financial resources (Conde, 2001). PTC could be paid either in cash or in kind (firearms, ammunition, communication equipment, computers, etc.). Those who refused to pay up were harassed, threatened or even killed. High levels of electoral violence, especially among rival clans of the political elite, provided a favourable atmosphere for PTC. According to NDF spokesman Madlos, the CPP-NPA earned P40 million from PTC fees in the 2001 elections (SunStar, 2003). Three years later, PTC collection went nationwide (Mallari, 2004) and the NPA started collecting PTW fees too (Tesiorna, 2004). The CPP denies engaging in PTW, claiming that this is merely the military’s psywar propaganda ‘designed to denigrate the revolutionary forces as engaging in and benefiting from vote-buying through extortion’ (Mallari, 2010). According to a top official of the Commission on Elections, the NPA raised P1.5 billion through PTC/PTW in the 2004 elections, and P2 billion in 2007. He estimated that PTC/PTW collections would be anywhere between P2 to P5 billion in 2010 (Philippine News Agency, 2010).

Pork barrel funds in Congress became the third bonanza. Starting in 2001, representatives of party-list groups aligned with the CPP-NPA-NDF availed of pork barrel allocations and other entitlements for members of Congress worth tens of millions of pesos per congressperson. In 2005–2009, pork barrel allocations to leftist party-list groups slowed to a trickle as President Arroyo, who was plagued with corruption and fraud scandals, blocked the release of pork to lawmakers supporting her impeachment. Under President Benigno Aquino, the leftist groups got their pork barrel again. According to Budget Department records, the party-list legislators of the leftist Makabayan bloc received a total of P851.856 million from the main pork barrel fund—Progressive Development Assistance Fund—from 2010 to the first half of 2013 (Cabacungan, 2013). Strongly anticommunist critics have charged that the leftist party-list groups have diverted pork funds to the NPA for the purchase of arms or ammunition (Cayabyab, 2012; Intengan, 2005). But they have not been able to back up their charge with solid evidence. The great bulk of the pork funds could very well have been utilized by open, legal ‘national democratic’ forces not for the purchase of arms, but for their own open, legal operations, which just happened to gibe with CPP-NPA-NDF base-building efforts.

Why has extortion through revolutionary taxation and PTC/PTW emerged as the CPP-NPA-NDF’s main source of income? As mentioned earlier, proceeds from legal projects have declined, and factors such as the mining boom and high levels of electoral violence have provided a favourable atmosphere for revolutionary tax and PTC/PTW, respectively. The prospects for pork barrel continuing as a major source of funds for the revolutionary movement are unclear. In the wake of the July 2013 exposé of a P10 billion PDAF scam, a broad array of forces has called for the pork barrel’s abolition and the Makabayan groups have taken a very active role in it. Other pork barrel or patronage-based funds will more than make up for the abolition of the PDAF, but in order to be able to tap these, the Makabayan bloc would have to strike up deals with the president and the ruling coalition.

Although revolutionary taxation and PTC/PTW are forms of extortion and the diversion of legal project funds is a form of fraud, the CPP-NPA-NDF should not be viewed as mere criminals or bandits. There may be much overlap between organized crime and armed insurgent groups, but the two are fundamentally different in that the former are profit driven, while the latter engage in crime in pursuit of political goals (Saab & Taylor, 2009). Neither should the CPP-NPA-NDF, however, be romanticized as a modern-day version of Robin Hood, ‘the international paradigm of social banditry’ (Hobsbawm, 1981, p. 19). Social bandits are ‘peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, as men to be admired, helped and supported’ (Hobsbawm, 1981, p. 17). Activists but not ideologists, they right wrongs and take from the rich to give to the poor, but they cannot conceive of such concepts as agrarian reform. Hobsbawm (1981, p. 24) clarifies that social banditry is ‘a phenomenon of the past’, occurring during the phase between tribal and capitalist societies, and that ‘[t]he modern world has killed it’.

The so-called greed thesis, which argues that economic motivations and opportunities are the main drivers of conflict, rather than political or socio-economic grievances (Collier, 2000), does not hold for the CPP-NPA-NDF. One hardly hears of reports of high-level CPP-NPA cadres living it up. The great majority of the membership and mass base of the Maoist insurgency continue to live in poverty and do not partake of the ‘loot’ from revolutionary taxation, PTC/PTW or Px. ⁷ Despite intensified extortion and fraud activities, the CPP-NPA-NDF has very much continued to be an ideologically motivated revolutionary force. Economic opportunities and even motives cannot be discounted in the CPP-NPA insurgency, but these interact, and remain subordinate to, economic, political and socio-cultural grievances. The greed thesis is overly rebel-centric; it tends to overlook the role of the state in the persistence or exacerbation of the conflict (Ballentine & Nitzschke, 2005). Political scientists have long been writing about entrenched oligarchic rule in the Philippines. Corruption and fraud scandals and human rights abuses especially during Estrada and Arroyo administrations helped bolster CPP-NPA propaganda claims about the rottenness of the political system and helped provide conditions conducive for the continuance of armed struggle.

Like other revolutionary armed groups, the CPP-NPA-NDF tries to engage only in ‘criminal’ activity that it deems as not being too politically costly. In a study on armed non-state groups in Colombia, Saab and Taylor (2009) note that political identity has been a major constraining factor in the involvement of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), one of the world’s oldest and largest guerrilla organizations, in criminal endeavours. While FARC developed ‘in-house’ capabilities in undertaking kidnapping-for-ransom and extortion, it made sure to circumscribe and mask its participation in the cocaine industry, not wanting its revolutionary credentials to be too tarnished. It forged tactical alliances with small- and medium-sized criminal organizations that produced and processed coca in FARC-controlled territory under its protection, but it let international criminal organizations take care of international distribution. Much more mindful of its political image, the CPP-NPA-NDF has forsaken kidnapping-for-ransom and bank robberies which it condemned as gangsterism and crime starting in 1992. ⁸ The Maoist movement apparently believes that it has managed to put enough of a propaganda spin on revolutionary taxation and PTC and to deny PTW and fund diversions satisfactorily, amid criticisms of human rights groups on its use of violence or the threat of violence in its extortion activities.

Logistical and Strategic Dilemmas

In celebrating its 45th anniversary in December last year, the CPP sounded as upbeat as always about the situation and prospects of the revolutionary movement. It stated that the NPA continues to carry out ‘extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare’, launching ‘annihilative offensives’ and ‘attritive actions’ against ‘enemy’ units and seizing their weapons. Without coming up with a specific figure, it claimed that the NPA has ‘thousands of full-time Red fighters with high-powered rifles’ (Central Committee, 2013). According to Madlos (2013), NPA tactical offensives in Mindanao increased from 250 in 2010, to 350 in 2011, 400 in 2012 and over 400 in 2013. The revolutionary movement expects to advance to strategic stalemate ‘in the next few years’.

The picture that the CPP-NPA-NDF presents is artful. The revolutionary movement has been waging guerrilla warfare—and been unable to progress to regular warfare—for the last 45 years. According to military estimates, the NPA’s strength has remained stagnant at around 4,000 over the last three years (Romero, 2014). Furthermore, the military claims that it has consistently gained more weapons from NPA guerrillas than it has lost to them every year in 1997–2007 (Santos & Santos, 2010). ‘Strategic stalemate in the next few years’ was a line the CPP-NPA-NDF kept saying just before the fall of Marcos. Of late, the Maoist insurgents have been at it again. Five years ago, the CPP vowed to strive to advance to strategic stalemate ‘within the next five years’ (Central Committee, 2009).

According to Ramirez, the development of the NPA in recent years has been somewhat lopsided. On the basis of the frequency and level of offensive actions, the NPA appears to have recovered to its early 1980s level in Mindanao (particularly the Davao and Caraga regions) and Bicol. In these regions, NPA fighters are once again learning the skills and gaining the experience in conducting company-size operations. NPA guerrillas in other regions, however, are lagging far behind. Furthermore, even in Mindanao, the NPA has tended to avoid major clashes with government forces. Its bigger offensive actions have been much more geared towards punitive actions against private corporations for non-payment of revolutionary taxation.

The stunted growth of the NPA is due in part to the steep decline of the urban mass movement in the 1990s and its limited recovery in the 2000s. The mass movement, especially the youth and student sector, has long been the main source of the CPP-NPA’s cadres. More importantly, however, the NPA has had serious problems in strategic orientation and logistics. Purportedly in ‘reaffirming’ basic Maoist principles, the CPP, under the leadership of chairman Benito Tiamzon and his wife, secretary-general Wilma Tiamzon, strove to keep a balance between political organizing and military work in pursuing ‘comprehensive work’ in the countryside. Tiamzon, who served concurrently as NPA chief, reversed Kintanar’s efforts in building an NPA national command structure distinct from that of the party and less burdened with revolutionary governance functions in the guerrilla areas. The results of ‘comprehensive work’ have been dissatisfactory. There are no palpable indications that the NPA is capable of moving from guerrilla to regular warfare anytime soon. The CPP-NPA has been unable to build relatively stable bases similar to the ‘camps’ set up and maintained by the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front in predominantly Muslim areas of Mindanao in the 1990s. Apart from developing lopsidedly as pointed out earlier, the NPA has been unable to develop military cadres beyond the regional level. In the assessment of Abinales (2007), ‘none of [the NPA’s] current commanders have the talent and capacity that Kintanar had in shaping the revolutionary army into a nationally potent force during the era of the Marcos dictatorship’.

While intensifying its tactical offensives and extortion activities purportedly in girding for strategic stalemate, the CPP-NPA still has not solved the longstanding and crucial logistical problem of ensuring a relatively steady flow of large quantities of arms and ammunition to its Red fighters. ⁹ Over two decades since the split in the revolutionary ranks, the CPP-NPA-NDF has not managed to rebuild the NPA-GC’s international network for arms procurement. Worse, possible arms sources have thinned. Many of the NPA’s potential arms suppliers or brokers of old have disappeared from the scene—the Soviet bloc, Yugoslavia, Libya (under Gaddafi), JRA, etc. Working out arms deals with Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups would be too politically costly. North Korea and the Maoists in India and Nepal are among the few revolutionary entities that remain potential arms suppliers or brokers. But even if the CPP-NPA-NDF does find an arms source, it still has to solve the vexing problem of slipping them into the country.

Once again, the Philippine Maoist insurgency is facing a strategic dilemma. As in the CPP-NPA internal debates on strategy of the 1980s, the current disagreements have to do with relationships between the armed/military struggle and political struggle (which includes the mass movement and electoral/parliamentary struggle), between the rural and urban struggles, and between the home front and international struggles, and the relative weight of each component in each dyad. Mao’s writings stress the primacy of armed struggle over the mass movement, and of rural over urban, and do not dwell much on international work. Sison, the chief ‘reaffirmist’ of basic Maoist principles in 1992, now appears to be in favour of giving the political, urban and international components more play than usual. He may have mellowed as a result of spending 25 years in exile in the Netherlands and being deeply involved as ‘NDF consultant’ in long-drawn peace negotiations between the government and the rebel forces. The political gains of the Maoists in Nepal after signing a peace agreement with the Nepalese government may also have influenced him (see Sison, 2008). Until recently, Sison, who remains the CPP’s chief ideologist, was up against the formidable Tiamzon couple, who had become the top guardians of Maoist fundamentalism and had effective command over the revolutionary forces in the ‘home front’. The International Crisis Group (2011, p. 8) described the Sison–Tiamzon debate:

Current tensions lie, as they have before, in disagreements over dabbling in electoral politics and pursuing peace talks with the government as opposed to focusing on the ‘protracted people’s war’ waged from the countryside. Although Sison reasserted the armed struggle to consolidate the party in the early 1990s, participating in elections provides an opportunity for the party to raise funds and build support. While the Tiamzons and other adherents to CPP orthodoxy believe elections are only to be used opportunistically to support the armed struggle, others within the organization consider they have revolutionary potential in their own right. Several former CPP cadres and others familiar with the peace process suspect Sison has shifted to the latter view and may even be fashioning negotiations as another component of the ‘protracted people’s war’.

The capture of the Tiamzon couple by Philippine military operatives in March 2014 is a big blow to the CPP-NPA. The Tiamzons were among the few veteran CPP cadres still operating in the revolutionary underground in the home front. Following the couple’s arrest, the military has intensified counterinsurgency operations in eastern Mindanao. It may seem that with his main rivals in the leadership behind bars, Sison now has a firm hand in (re)charting the CPP-NPA’s direction. But the Tiamzons’ adherents may still be very much entrenched in the regional leaderships, and, from thousands of miles away, Sison may not be able to sway them.

Prospects

The accessibility of revenues from mining, plantation and logging resources, writes Le Billon (2006), can prolong wars by allowing rebels to continue fighting. But resource revenues can have the opposite effect if the government succeeds in portraying the rebels as mere bandits or criminals driven more by greed than by legitimate grievances and the latter lose political support. In the case of the CPP-NPA-NDF, revenues not just from the above resources (through revolutionary taxation) but also from PTC/PTW and pork barrel are having a prolonging effect, as the rebels seem to have come up with enough justification or denial to weather the political flack.

Entrenched oligarchic rule in the Philippines could provide sufficient conditions for the CPP-NPA for persevering with its insurgency. In the years ahead, revolutionary taxation and PTC/PTW are likely to continue as the main sources of revenue for the revolutionary movement. It will be virtually impossible, however, for the CPP-NPA—with its outdated strategy, logistical incapacities, plus an inhospitable global environment—to be able to advance to regular warfare or to strategic stalemate. The current CPP-NPA internal debate may or may not lead to any major change in strategy anytime soon. But the incarceration or passing of even a few more of the CPP’s aging leaders, some of whom are ailing, could open things up considerably.