In 1985, Leif Rosenberger noted that the CPP was active in all seventy-two Philippine provinces. Because of the insular nature of the country, the regional party units had considerable relative autonomy.[862]
The CPP after the Marcos Regime
Ferdinand Marcos had been elected president in 1965. He stayed in office for the next twenty-one years, using martial law and other devices to maintain himself in power. However, in 1986, after his “re-election” in a process that was widely viewed as fraudulent, Marcos was ousted by a popular uprising during which the military “stayed neutral.” He fled into exile on February 25, 1986. He was succeeded by Corazón Aquino, the widow of a murdered leader of the opposition, who had been “counted out” in the recent election.
During the final crisis of the Marcos regime, the insurgency of the CPP declined. Soon after taking office, Mrs. Aquino released 300 political prisoners, including José Sisón and other CPP leaders. A few months later the CPP’s guerrilla effort was renewed.[863]
During the post-Marcos period, the Communist Party of the Philippines and its guerrilla forces clearly had less popular support than they had enjoyed under the dictatorship. Richard F. Fisher, Jr., reported in 1991 that “Asia’s largest communist insurgency, the CPP, in 1990 showed signs of continued deterioration and reduced political support. … The CPP took advantage of the government’s distraction by military rebels to continue NPA military attacks and experiment with an insurrectionary strategy designed to grab power in the capital city. … Despite embarrassing setbacks the CPP appeared to increase overseas solidarity work, especially in Western Europe.”[864]
The changed political conditions after the fall of the Marcos regime apparently engendered controversies within the ranks of the CPP and its guerrilla forces. As early as 1988, General Fidel V. Ramos, then Secretary of National Defense (and later President), said that “substantial numbers” of guerrillas had been surrendering to the government and that “more moderate” elements within the CPP were “insisting on adoption of political rather than military action.”[865]
The existence of internal tensions within the CPP in the post-Marcos period is indicated by a “message” sent to the CPP on the party’s twenty-fifth anniversary by the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the international organization of the orthodox Maoist supporters of the Gang of Four. That December 1993 document noted that “the CPP is engaged in the serious task of carrying out a rectification campaign on the basis of raising high the great red banners of Marx, Lenin and Mao. The CPP comrades are intensively studying the works of Mao in order to uproot a series of errors that arose in the 1980s that departed from Mao’s line and repudiated previous correct verdicts of the Party. … RIM expresses the deeply felt wishes of all the comrades… that the CPP carries this rectification campaign through to the end, that it succeeds in revitalizing the Party and through it the New People’s Army.”[866]
The Philippine Maoists and China
Although the CPP remained Maoist in orientation and ideology, it did differ with the Chinese leadership on some issues, particularly after Mao’s death. For their part, the Chinese party’s and government’s enthusiasm for the CPP-NPA appeared to diminish substantially by the late 1970s, and by the end of the next decade there was considerable evidence of rapprochement between the Philippine Maoists and the Soviet Communist Party.
In the early 1970s, José Sisón, under the name Amada Guerrero, published a book, Philippine Society and Revolution, that was used in indoctrinating CPP and NPA members and recruits. It set forth CPP doctrine at that time, closely modeled on that of China.
Justus M. van der Kroef noted that Sisón’s book “envisages the establishment of a ‘new democratic republic’… which, harmonizing the interest of all revolutionary classes, will be neither a ‘bourgeois dictatorship’ nor a ‘dictatorship of the Proletariat.’… To achieve this objective, ‘revolutionary bases’ must be established even though the reactionary ‘landlord-bureaucrat state’ has not as yet been wholly eliminated. Such bases could be created in the rural areas first, since the guerrilla forces will be drawn mainly from the peasantry.”
This volume set forth the importance of the Mao regime for the hoped-for triumph of the Philippine Maoists. Van der Kroef noted that the book stated that “the Filipinos are very fortunate to be so close to the center of the ‘world proletarian revolution’—People’s China, the ‘iron bastion of socialism.’”[867]
In 1976, it was reported that the Chinese media were “providing vigorous propaganda support… to the Philippine Maoists,” as well as having a “hostile anti-Marcos tone.” The Chinese media were also disseminating “CPP-NPA policy declarations.”[868]
However, in 1975 Justus M. van der Kroef noted that excerpts from the articles in the CPP’s journal Ang Rayan (The Nation) “or other statements of the Maoist wing of the Philippine Communism have appeared much less frequently in Peking Review and other People’s Chinese media than was the case three years ago.”[869] The Peking Review did publish a statement of the CPP on its ninth anniversary in 1977 in which it denounced imperialism and social imperialism, and said that it was adapting the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao to the Philippine national situation.[870]
An Australian Trotskyist observer commented in 1984, “Since its formation, the CPP has gradually moved away from the loyal adherence to the views of the Chinese CP. Following its détente with Washington, Peking withdrew support… and came out in favor of the maintenance of U.S. bases in the Philippines—positions the CPP rejects.”[871]
Among other issues on which the Chinese and Philippine parties took different positions was that of the relative “menace” of the USSR and the United States. In March 1980, Ang Rayan wrote that “in recent years Soviet social imperialism was behind open aggression and occupations carried out in Africa and in eastern and western Asia. … But, on the other hand, U.S. imperialism is still the real immediate enemy that peoples in many parts of the world must confront. … The two superpowers—U.S. imperialism and Soviet social imperialism—are the principal enemies of the peoples of the world today.” Of course, by 1980, the Chinese were insisting that Soviet “social imperialism” was by all odds “the principal enemy of the peoples of the world.”
The CPP also differed with the Chinese over Iran. Whereas the Chinese regime strongly supported the Shah’s regime in its last years, the CPP welcomed the Shah’s overthrow, and declared that it was “big step forward in the world struggle against imperialism.”[872]
In 1988, Leif Rosenberger noted “the gradual evolution of the CPP-ML from a Maoist, pro-Chinese party into one that, while still formally independent, has increasing links with the CPSU. To be sure, the CPSU and the CPP-ML assiduously perpetuate the myth that they have no links.” Rosenberger noted that Soviet periodicals rarely discussed the CPP’s guerrilla activities, and the CPP seldom if ever discussed Soviet activities in the Philippines.
862
Leif Rosenberger, in
863
David Rosenberg, in
864
Richard F. Fisher Jr., in
865
Interview with Fidel V. Ramos, Secretary of National Defense of the Philippines, New York, May 19, 1988.
867
Justus van der Kroef, in
869
Justus van der Kroef, in