Red, still

“WE SHOWED here in Pampanga one of our victories against the 45 years of insurgency in the country. We have had the insurgency problem for so long, and so many died and suffered, and many families were broken because of that. Now it is time to end the culture of violence. It is time for us to unite and abandon the armed struggle and time to live in peace and prosperity.”

So hailed last week Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff Gen. Emmanuel T. Bautista, and immediately thereafter signed a memorandum of agreement with Gov. Lilia “Nanay Baby” Pineda declaring Pampanga “peaceful, insurgency-free an ready for further development.”

The “end of the insurgency,” Bautista said, was the “fruit of the AFP’s people-centered attitude ((that) made more Filipinos believe in the real intention of the military to push progress, peace and stability.”

It was utter naivete to expect the other side of the ideological divide to take this quietly in stride.     

It was a relief though that instead of the New People’s Army issuing a “standing order”  – as in the “sampling” of an urban cop or a rural CAFGU as in the olden times – the Communist Party of the Philippines released a statement to remind one and all that: No, Pampanga is not by any chance  insurgency-free.

“The fact is, since 2010, the NPA in Central Luzon tactically shifted its forces to focus on building its guerrilla base areas in the mountainous areas of the region. Its forces in the Pampanga plains were temporarily redeployed, not so much as a result of AFP operations, but as a planned course of action in line with building the base areas.”  The CPP said in its statement.

“The workers and peasant masses of Pampanga province continue to suffer from intolerably oppressive and exploitative conditions in the big haciendas, sugar centrals, in the lahar quarrying areas, as well as in the so-called special economic zones,” said the CPP. “Tens of thousands of peasant masses are being displaced as a result of widespread land grabbing by big landlords and so-called developers who are in league with the ruling Aquino regime.”

And thereby damned the AFP’s statement that “Pampanga is ready for further development” as tantamount to “inviting foreign companies and their local partners to grab land, exploit, take advantage and oppress the working class and peasantry.”

Providing proof, thus: “A case in point is that of Hacienda Dolores in Porac town where thousands of peasant families are being driven away from their land by the big comprador-owned Ayala Land and its cohorts by using the military and police to suppress the peasant masses.”
Insurgency feeds on oppression. That is a basic revolutionary tenet. So long as poverty, inequity, injustice exist, so does insurgency.  The cause is what matters most. 

Here’s my peso worth of thought excerpted from an old short essay on the primacy of causes over personalities in revolutionary movements.

History shows that successful movements, even revolutionary ones, are solidly grounded on causes. It is the cause that solely makes the rallying point. The personalities serve as the coordinate points.
Not even so charismatic a revolutionary as Che Guevara succeeded in fomenting the Bolivian revolution with him as the rallying point. Che failed in rousing the Bolivians not so much for their lack of faith in him as for the absence of a cause to rally them.
Everyone in Bolivia in1967 was poor. There were no oligarchs from whose stranglehold the people should be emancipated. There were no large landowners whose lands needed to be distributed to the people. Even the military government was not as repressive, as corrupt nor as unpopular as its civilian predecessor. So assessed an American political think tank at the time.
Now, think why and how the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army managed to survive through all these years, despite the government’s mailed fist approach to the insurgency, its all-out war against the “communist terrorists;” despite all those land reform programs to “emancipate” the peasants, thus dissuading them from joining the insurgents; despite the capture and subsequent “rehabilitation” of the CPP-NPA leaders, from Dante Buscayno to Rudy Salas to Romy Kintanar to Popoy Lagman; despite the extrajudicial killings of militants.
The answer: the primacy of the cause. Personalities subsume themselves to the cause. Never the other way around. The fate and fortune, especially the misfortune, of the personalities feed, nay, nurture the cause. Here, we are reminded of Che: “Wherever death may surprise us, it is most welcome. Our funeral dirge will be the staccato sound of machine guns and the cries of battle and victory.”
Of all the movements in the country today, only the insurgency can lay claim to that age-old truism that “nobody is indispensable.”
Again Che: “What do the danger and sacrifices of a man or a nation matter, when the destiny of humanity is at stake.”

Insurgency-free then shall assume a meaning radically different from that of the military’s.