Central Committee,
Communist Party of the Philippines

March 3, 1972

Tanging Palathala

The Communist Party of the Philippines has correctly adopted the general line of people's democracy. In carrying out this line, we are waging armed struggle as the principal form of revolutionary struggle and we are working hard to fulfill thde main content of the revolution which is peasant struggle for land. By waging armed struggle and agrarian revolution, we can establish and consolidate revolutionary base areas from which to advance to win nationwide victory. In a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country, there is no other place but the countryside where to build the people's army, develop the main force of the revolution and have enough space to maneuver in before uprising can be successfully staged in the cities. We, therefore, have to apply Chairman Mao's line of using the countryside to encircle the cities and finally capture them.

The Party and the New People's Army have already establish 735 barrio organizing committees and 60 barrio revolutionary committees. These people's committees govern a total population of about 400,000 and are found in a total of eighteen provinces: seven in Northern Luzon, five in Central Luzon, four in Southern Luzon and two in Western Visayas. We have been able to reach so many provinces by two methods of expansion: 1) by advancing wave upon wave and using border areas of several provinces, and 2) by leaping over White areas and sending single cadres or teams to separate strategic points. Northern Luzon has 515 barrio organizing committees and 50 barrio revolutionary committees and Central Luzon 150 and 10 respectively. Southern Luzon has 60 barrio organizing committee and Western Visayas, 10.

The establishment of a barrio organizing committee signifies that a regular squad or an armed propaganda team of the New People's Army has already conducted thorough social investigation, has held general meetings for pouring out grievances and discussing problems along the people's democratic line and has already grouped together the relatively most advanced elements among the masses for committee membership. The barrio organizing committee is a preparatory committee for setting up the barrio revolutionary committee; it is an instrument for transforming an unstable area into a stable area. Under the barrio organizing committee, the reduction of land rent, the elimination of usury and the practice of simple forms of cooperation are achieved. The people support the annihilation of enemy troops and the elimination of landlord despots, enemy spies and such bad elements as cattlerustlers, extortionists, robbers, murderers, arsonists and the like. The officers and members of the committee serve as the embryo of the organization, education, economic, defense and health committees of the future barrio revolutionary committee and can initiate the creation of these committtees and also of the local mass organizations for peasants, workers, youth, women, children, cultural activists and the like.

The barrio revolutionary committee is inaugurated to replace the barrio organizing committee when the peasants are well assured of their ownership of land and continue to engage in simple forms of cooperation, when the people's armed forces are already well developed and the barrio has been cleared of the enemy, when the various mass organizations have been actively performing their tasks, when the five committees which are actually governmental departments of the barrio revolutionary committee have been fully organized and when a local Party branch and several Party groups have already arisen from the mass movement. The single most important task of the barrio revolutionary committee is to train the people in self government and develop the barrios into political, economic, military and cultural bastions of the revolution. So far, we have been most successful in building the barrio revolutionary committees in areas that are hilly and forested or are remote from concentrations of enemy strength. But they have also arisen to some extent in plains.

The main instrument of the Party in establishing the barrio organizing committees and the barrio revolutionary committees is the New People's Army. We started to establish the barrio organizing committees when within the months of March and April 1969 we were able to form nine squads and field them over the entire second district of Tarlac and certain limited parts of Pampanga, Zambales and Nueva Ecija which were all adjacent to Tarlac. During tdhe same period, we also started to dispatch cadres to Northern Luzon and other strategic points in the country. From the outset, we were keenly conscious of the fact that the faggots were extremely dry in Northern Luzon and a single spark here would kindle the fire of the people's democratic revolution. At the same time, we were also concerned with preserving and expanding our forces and source of means in Central Luzon.

After three years, we now have in the New People's Army the strength of 72 regular squads or 800 regulars armed with modern weapons. These should be equivalent to eight full regular companies. But we are still in the general process of bringing squads into regular platoon formations. There are now ten regular platoons. Apart from these platoons, we have one regular company and are in the process of building another one. It is only a matter of a short period that we shall be able to adequately put up commands at the company level. In Northern Luzon, we have 51 squads in such various formations as one regular company, seven regular platoons and 21 separate regular squads. In Central Luzon, we have 15 squads in such various formations as three regular platoons and 6 separate squads. In Southern Luzon, we have four regular squads. In all regions, including Eastern Visayas and Mindanao, we have cadres with political-military training and their propaganda teams can be easily transformed into fighting units at the appropriate time.

The armed strength of the people's army includes not only its regular fighters but also about 1,500 local guerilla fighters armed mainly with old single-action rifles and homemade rifles of the shotgun type and about 16,000 militia members (estimated conservatively at 20 members per barrio) armed mainly with homemade handguns and such indigenous weapons as bolos, spears, bows and arrows, hidden spikes and traps, and others. Local guerilla units vary in strength from one full squad to a full platoon in a barrio; full guerilla platoons are characteristically found in forest regions. As we are now systematically manufacturing shotguns, we can build local guerilla units faster. As we are now launching the explosives movements in the countryside, both the local guerilla and militia units can become a more powerful auxiliary force and reserve force. The widespread use of homemade grenades and land mines can cause incalculable casualties and damage on the enemy and strain his morale.

The New People's Army has engaged in a wide range of military operations against enemy troops and military establishments, landlord despots, informers and bad elements. These operations include arrests, ambushes, raids, sabotage and others. We have inflicted some 1,700 casualties on the enemy in the process. Of these, about 800 were enemy troops who were either killed or seriously wounded. About 900 informers, landlord despots and bad elements were killed. So far, only 22 U.S. military officers have been killed. On the basis of these figures, our armed struggle takes the form of the agrarian war or civil war. Though U.S. military advisers and U.S. military planes occasionally accompany the local reactionary troops, direct and large scale actions by U.S. military personnel are not yet being undertaken against us. However, whenever the occasion arises, we always attack major Philippine and U.S. military installations and command posts. Among those that we have attacked are the main administration building of the JUSMAG in Quezon City and command posts of the Task Force Lawin in Central Luzon and Northern Luzon. We have successfully raided the Philippine Military Academy in order to seize arms. We have destroyed or damaged six enemy aircrafts, including five helicopters; military trucks, jeeps and armored cars; communications equipment; and various military supplies.

We have also taken steps to disintegrate the enemy armed forces. We have disseminated revolutionary propaganda among officers and men in the regular enemy service, military trainees in schools (ROTC and PMT) and in "home defense" centers and students in the Philippine Military Academy. The revolutionary examples of two comrades in leaving the reactionary armed forces and joining the New People's Army have given rise to the Corpus-Tagamolila Movement. Under the direction of the Party, this movement is secretly and systematically conducting political work among enemy officers and men.

We have made considerable headway in disintegrating the "barrio self- defense units". Without firing a single shot, we have managed several times to dissolve entire "BSDUs" by persuading their personnel to turn their arms against their P.C. "supervisors". A great number of "BSDU" men are secretly in contact with us and are cooperating with us. Our policy towards the "BSDU" is to exert every effort to frustrate its establishment and, if the enemy still succeeds in establishing it through coercion, to maintain secret contact with the "BSDU" men (some or all, as the case may be), get information from them about the enemy and then instruct them to join the people's army with their arms at an appropriate time. The fundamental weakness of the "BSDU" is that it serves the people's enemies, it is created through coercion and it is actually a form of dispersal for enemy strength. Since it is imposed by the enemy on the people who have started to rise up, the key to disintegrating it is to make full use of the good relations between the Party and the people's army on the one hand and the people on the other hand. Only the few real enemy diehards among the "BSDU" men are singled out for punitive action.

There is no doubt that the New People's Army has achieved brilliant successes under the leadership of the Party. But these are still small in comparison to what is still to be achieved. It is of great importance to consider our difficulties, shortcomings and mistakes so that we can advance further. Since the Party had correctly defined the road of armed revolution as the road of winning victory, there is less danger within the Party and the New People's Army of Right opportunism than of "Left" opportunism. There is definitely no serious trend in the Party to abandon the armed struggle and take up parliamentary struggle as the main form of struggle. But bourgeois reactionary ideas can take "Left" forms to advance the essence of Rightism even as we are steadily advancing. At the moment, we have to be most alert to "Left" opportunism as the main internal danger.

It should be clear at the outset, however, that we speak only a danger and that so far not a single "Left" opportunist error of such gravity as to seriously damage or totaly wreck the entire revolutionary movement has yet occured. Even as we cite actual cases of adventurism committed by certain units or certain cadres of the Party, our criticism would have nothing in common with the babble of the Lava revisionist renegades that the Party as a whole has bogged itself down in "Left" opportunism. They pretend to attack "Left" opportunism only to defend the Right opportunism promoted by Jesus Lava from 1955 onwards and then bequeathed by him to them. In fact, they also defend the "Left" opportunism represented in the past by Jose and Jesus Lava. This ties up with their present anti-Party and anti-people revisionist fascist activity in connivance with the reactionary state. Modern revisionists, who have even become fascist agents, are absolutely incapable of determining what is "Left" opportunism and what is not.

In our previous statement of facts regarding the barrio organizing committee and the barrio revolutionary committees, there is a noticeably great disparity between the number of the latter and the number of the former. This signifies a great disparity between consolidation and expansion, between guerilla base areas and guerilla zones or between stable and unstable areas. Certainly, consolidation can easily fall behind expansion; there is the law of uneven development. But it is not good to keep consolidation too far behind expansion at the ratio of less than one barrio revolutionary committee for every ten barrio organizing committee. What would certainly be a better situation than now is to have one or two revolutionary committees for every five barrio organizing committee. The general view that we wish to bring out is that consolidation work should be done well even as we boldly expand so that small units of the New People's Army do not flounder in too large an unreliable and unconsolidated area.

It is easy for the ideology of the roving rebel bands to gain ground where consolidation work is not done well. There is the danger of related mistaken ideas like the purely military viewpoint, ultrademocracy, disregard of organizational discipline, absolute equalitarianism, subjectivism, individualism or putschism to arise. Without consolidation and, therefore, adequate Party leadership and powerful mass support, our fighting units are susceptible to losing the correct direction. There is always the danger of adventurism, of launching offensives even only of a tactical character with no rear base to rely on.

The great disparity between the number of barrio organizing committees and that of barrio revolutionary committees is not the result of a willful design or gross negligence by any leading organ. Rather it arises mainly from certain objective conditions that a newly re-established Party has had to face. Our ideological and political line has been comprehensively laid down in the basic documents of the Party as well as of the New People's Army from the very beginning. But during the last three years, especially from 1969 to 1970, the number of Party cadres and members was grossly inadequate for conducting all-around consolidation. Furthermore, those few who were available for revolutionary work in the countryside were still lacking in experience. Thus, the original squads that the Party fielded in Central Luzon tended to rely on their previous experience. They had to rely mainly on the barrio organizing committees, without a clear view of what to do next. They keep on creating the barrio organizing committees because they were most acquainted with this form of organization and thought that it was the best way for guaranteeing mass support in the face of intensifying enemy campaigns of "encirclement and suppression".

The second district of Tarlac, where we fired the first shots to reopen the road of armed revolution, had the specific advantage of having a large mass of people with a fine revolutionary history. But at the same time, it has the specific disadvantage of being the site of large U.S. military bases and Philippine military camps and of being on the plains. There is no barrio here which cannot be reached in a few minutes' time by armored car or helicopter. Further making our situation difficult from March 1969 to the later part of 1970, the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique tried to block us from the south in Pampanga and the Eduardo Cojuangco clique also did the same from the north in the first district of Tarlac. We were not only hemmed in by these two reactionary cliques; the Monkees-Armeng Bayan-Masaka gang of the Lava revisionist renegades at first surreptitiously and then openly assisted the Task Force Lawin in perpetrating crimes of bloody intrigue calculated to discredit us.

From March to June 1969, the reactionary armed forces made probing attacks against us with the use of platoon-size patrols and a considerable number of spies. We had no alternative but to wipe out these spies and prevent the enemy troops from becoming effective against us. We also picked off isolated enemy troops in order to seize arms. Intensifying his platoon-size operations, the enemy was able to intrude into the office of the Central Committee, disrupt our work and seize a number of documents on June 9, 1969. From this day, Task Force Lawin started to field and concentrate a full battalion against us in every "search and destroy" operation. By July 1969, the reactionary armed forces started to station P.C. troops at the fringes of our guerilla zone and undertake "clear and hold" operations. By September 1969, they were already forcing large numbers of "barrio councils" to set up the "barrio self-defense units" in an attempt to move in on us and deprive us of area for manuever.

Certain barrios, mainly those in the center of our guerilla zone, and also the scarcely wooded Tarlac part of the Tarlac-Zambales mountain range were deliberately left open for us by the enemy who had the intention of making these his "killing zones". At the same time, he fielded "civic action" teams (spy and deception teams) in some of the barrios here, especially along the national highway. He, therefore, conducted counterrevolutionary dual tactics. Throughout 1970 and 1971, he tried to make use of his predetermined "killing zones" by conducting surprise raids and savage abuses here in regimental or divisional strength through the combined forces of the Task Force Lawin and the Tabak Division. By early 1971, the reactionary military authorities boasted that the New People's Army had already been crushed in Central Luzon and that its last remnants had either fled to Isabela or were hiding themselves in the Tarlac-Zambales mountains. Puppet chieftain Marcos echoed his fascist henchmen in his January 1971 state-of-the-nation address.

But the truth is the opposite of the enemy's claims. We have never been crushed in Central Luzon. By employing flexible tactics and effective underground methods, we have managed to preserve ourselves here and we have repeatedly attacked the enemy despite his constant heavy pressure. It is true, however, that most of our barrio organizing committees collapsed for a time; unconsolidated areas gave way to the enemy and our squads became more easy prey for enemy attacks. Also, it is true that in the face of an overwhelming enemy force on a terrain not so favorable to us we have had serious difficulties and shortcomings in giving full play to battles of annihilation against the enemy. But on the whole in Central Luzon, we have advanced although not as rapidly as in Northern Luzon. Since the second Plenum of the Central Committee, which analyzed and summed up our experience in armed struggle, we have proceeded to steadily recover temporarily lost ground in Central Luzon and to deploy units of the New People's Army far beyond the confines of the first district of Tarlac. We have also been favored by the disintegration of the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique in September-October 1970.

Our Tarlac experience of 1969 to 1971 cannot be taken in isolation of our overall efforts on the road of armed revolution. Tarlac was the best possible place where to establish a people's army and start revolutionary armed struggle in early 1969. By starting with the revolutionary forces there, we were able to arouse the entire nation for the people's democratic revolution and to create a larger scale for people's war in Luzon. Now, we do not only have Central Luzon but we also have Northern Luzon and other areas. By paying too close an attention to such a narrow area as the first district of Tarlac, the enemy paid scarce attention to the emergence of guerilla base areas and guerilla zones in Northern Luzon. From the beginning, we were aware of the difficulties that we have had to face in Central Luzon and we did immediately exert efforts to open new battlefields.

In our efforts at nationwide expansion, we have also suffered some serious but temporary reverses. It is important to cite the most glaring cases in the Visayas during the last three years in order to emphasize the point that there is great need for doing consolidation work while doing expansion work. It is obvious why in areas distant from the Party headquarters in Luzon there is even greater need for such. It is difficult to replace our very new and very few cadres in Visayas and Mindanao if they should be encircled and crushed by the enemy before they can have some rear base to rely on. If we recall our Negros Occidental experience of 1969, we can easily see how grossly erroneous it was for a small group of armed men to seek battle with the enemy even without having organized a single barrio organizing committee in the area. In the case of the Capiz experience of 1971, the armed propaganda team had been able to organize five barrio organizing committees but these proved to be insufficient for coping with an enemy campaign of "encirclement and suppression". These negative experiences are educative for anyone if they were analyzed and summed up. As we have long ago stated, the archipelagic character of the country is at first a disadvantage for us. But through expansion and consolidation, and vice-versa, the guerilla base areas and guerilla zones that we can create in the Visayas and Mindanao will cause in the long run a more serious dispersal of enemy forces favorable to all revolutionary forces.

The Party and the New People's Army in Northern Luzon are now getting the concentrated attention of the enemy. Though revolutionary forces here are relatively larger and more advanced than those in other regions, it should be borne in mind that these still have to pass so many severe tests, especially as the enemy keeps on intensifying its campaigns of "encirclement and suppression" here. The regional organization and particular units of the Party and the New People's Army also have had their mistakes and weaknesses. Most of these spring from the great disparity between consolidation and expansion. A squad or a platoon which covers tens or scores of barrios and which does not do well its consolidation work is susceptible to the mistakes and weaknesses of a roving rebel band. However, it is to the great advantage of the Party and the New People's Army in Northern Luzon that before the enemy could exert pressure on the area in the same manner that he had done in Central Luzon our Party cadres and Red fighters have already learned much from the Secong Plenum of the Party Central Committee, from the concrete experience of their comrades in other areas and from their own experience and study. Furhtermore, there are in Northern Luzon such specific conditions favorable to the revolutionary forces as the extreme impoverishment of majority of the people, a mountainous and hilly terrain and a highly diversified agriculture.

As of now, the National Operational Command of the New People's Army cannot easily meet very often inasmuch as its composites, including the commander-in-chief and his deputy commanders, are tied down either to the Northern Luzon Operational Command or the Central Luzon Operational Command. The Military Commission of the Central Committee therefore performs so many functions which in the future can be passed on to the National Operational Command as a whole. The Party as a whole should exert more efforts to develop more military commanders and more Party cadres adapted to work in the New People's Army. As a result of these efforts, we shall be able to set up capable military subcommissions and regional operational commands. Through intensified political-military training and through actual revolutionary armed struggle, more Party cadres and military commanders will certainly emerge to cover wider battlefronts and fill up the command structure of the New People's Army.

To prepare for the next important stage of development in the growth of the people's army, we need to develop vigorously a sufficient number of cadres who are ideologically, politically and technically competent to lead and command at least twenty regular companies. Our success in developing a strong leadership in the revolutionary armed struggle depends on our success in arousing and mobilizing the people and, of course, on correctly undertaking consolidation and expansion in our mass work. Our Red fighters are drawn from the ranks of the masses and the great bulk of our regular mobile forces will continuously be drawn from local guerilla and militia units. Our army will march forward victoriously and accumulate strength along the way so long as it can rely on the broad masses of the people.

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