Fight To Hasten The Ouster Of Arroyo Regime And Strengthen The Revolutionary Movement

Message of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines
To the Party Cadres, Red Commanders and Fighters of the New People's Army
March 29, 2006

On behalf of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), we the Central Committee express warmest revolutionary greetings to the Party cadres, Red commanders and fighters on the happy occasion of the 37th anniversary of the establishment of the New People's Army (NPA). We salute you for the victories in pursuing the Filipino people's democratic revolution through protracted people's war against US imperialism and the local exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords.

We honor all the Party cadres, Red commanders and fighters who have contributed to the victories of the people's democratic revolution since 1969. We congratulate you for your achievements in mass work and in advancing the people's war in the past year. We commend all the Red commanders and fighters for carrying out the tactical offensives on a national scale.

We pay the highest tribute to our revolutionary martyrs. Their heroism, hard work and self-sacrifice inspire us. Let us live up to their legacy and obtain further vindication and justice for their martyrdom by fighting the enemy valiantly and fiercely. On the basis of the strength that we have accumulated, we renew our resolve to advance the Philippine revolution.

The Filipino people are confronted today by the evil Arroyo regime. This regime has usurped power by electoral fraud and is hell-bent on clinging on to power by the foulest of means. It is utterly servile to US imperialism and carries the worst characteristics of the local exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords. It knows no bounds for its corruption, brutality, deceptiveness and mendacity. It seeks to destroy the revolutionary movement in the vain hope of eliminating all forms of resistance to oppression and exploitation.

We therefore urge you to continue and further intensify the nationally coordinated tactical offensives started in the middle of September last year. Let us accelerate the momentum of our tactical offensives. These are the best possible response of the people and the revolutionary forces to the escalation of state terrorism and the emergence of fascist dictatorship. We must fight to hasten the ouster of the Arroyo regime and strengthen the revolutionary movement. Our plan is to enter and develop fully the middle phase of the strategic defensive in the people's war.

The Rottenness and Isolation of the Crisis-stricken Regime

Since 2001, the Arroyo regime has inflicted intolerable suffering on the broad masses of the people. It has imposed on them the worst policies that exploit and oppress the people and feed the greed of foreign monopoly capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. It has passed on to them all the burdens resulting from the chronic crisis of the semifeudal and semicolonial ruling system and the world capitalist system.

The Arroyo puppet regime has pressed harder on the Filipino people the US-dictated policy of neoliberal globalization and thus violates their economic sovereignty and sells out their national patrimony. Liberalization, privatization and deregulation are for the benefit of the foreign monopolies and their big comprador agents at the expense of the entire nation, the working people, the women and children and the environment.

The economic crisis is more severe than ever before. Local manufacturing and food production have broken down under the weight of imports. The production of raw materials and low value-added semimanufactures is in shambles due to oversupply and depressed prices in the global market. The reactionary state is spending heavily on graft-ridden and overpriced supplies to its bureaucratic and military machinery. The military, police and imaginary intelligence operations have priority over available funds at the expense of such basic social services as education and health.

The financial crisis is unprecedentedly grave. The reactionary state is bankrupt, with debt service on public debt equivalent to more than 90 percent of tax revenues and more than 30 percent of the government budget (excluding foreign loans not yet classified as liability of the state). The Arroyo regime has run amok with foreign and local borrowing in order to cover ever increasing budgetary and trade deficits and to conjure the illusion of growth in the gross domestic product. It is incurring foreign debt at more onerous commercial terms than ever before.

It is assuring the multinational firms and banks that the Philippine economy can be buoyed up by a triple combination of new foreign and local debts, remittances of Filipino overseas contract workers and a big increase of the tax burden. The imposition of the expanded value-added tax under conditions of a depressed economy is squeezing the working people and the middle social strata. It is generating social discontent and resistance.

The level of accumulated unemployment is extremely high, with nearly 50 percent of the labor force actually unemployed. The nominal income of the people is always cut down by the soaring prices of basic commodities and services. The peso is on a general course of depreciation, relieved only by injections of foreign debt. Social services, especially education and health, are deteriorating even as the fees exacted from the people are ever rising.

More than 80 percent of the population live below the poverty line. Most of them survive on less than USD 2 or PhP 104 per day. Year in and year out, the regime turns a deaf ear to the demand of the workers for a measly increase of PhP 125 in the daily minimum wage. The peasant masses are subjected to intensified forms of feudal and semifeudal exploitation. Landgrabbing, arbitrary increases of land rent, usury, depressed farmgate prices of agricultural products, low wages for farm work and lack of additional sources of income plague the peasant masses in the countryside. Most of the people face the problem of getting three meals a day. Hunger and malnutrition victimize most the children and their mothers in rural and urban poor communities.

The Arroyo regime has maliciously adopted the US slogan of "war on terror" as a license to oppress the people, especially the toiling masses of workers and peasants and the national minorities. It accuses the trade unionists of being terrorists in factories and is quick to use the military and police in attacking and murdering workers on strike. It has adopted and carried out Oplan Bantay Laya in order to unleash campaigns of suppression against the peasant masses and guerrilla fronts in order to serve the interests of local landlords and foreign corporations.

It is on a rampage of grabbing land from the peasants and national minorities and further opening up the natural resources to foreign and big-comprador corporations interested in mining, logging, agriculture and marine resources. The immediate social and environmental costs are appalling. The destruction is permanent in the case of nonrenewable mineral resources. But for lack of forest resource management and reforestation, deforestation has become permanent, causing floods, landslides and drought.

Aside from deploying concentrated forces and special operations teams, Oplan Bantay Laya seeks to intimidate the people by using death squads to kidnap, torture and murder leaders and members of progressive mass organizations and party list groups, human rights activists, priests and pastors, teachers, lawyers and journalists who are active in defending the interests of the people. The regime now is poised to unleash the death squads in the national capital region and step up their actions in provincial cities to complement the police and military units conducting arbitrary arrests, searches and seizures and suppressing mass protest actions.

A major feature of Oplan Bantay Laya is the announced objective of destroying the suspected political infrastructure of the revolutionary movement. This is modeled after the Plan Phoenix in the US war of aggression in Vietnam in the late 1960s and it is designed by no less than the Cabinet Oversight Committee for Internal Security (COC-IS) under the direction of such long-time US intelligence assets as Gen. Eduardo Ermita and national security adviser Norberto Gonzales.

The Arroyo regime is relying on the use of brute force to preempt and counter the mass movement and the broad united front of legal forces that are seeking to oust it or compel it to resign by peaceful and nonviolent means, patterned after the ouster of Marcos in 1986 and Estrada in 2001. This involves the people rising up and encouraging the reactionary military and police to withdraw their support from the regime and thus make way for a new civilian government. However, the avoidance of violence by the military and police against the opposition forces and the people is being misrepresented by the regime and its hacks as coup-making.

In the use of brute force, the regime has leaped from the so-called preemptive calibrated response of preventing the people from exercising their right to free assembly and speech to the usurpation of martial law powers under the guise of a declaration of a state of national emergency like Proclamation 1017. Even after this proclamation was lifted, as a result of public outrage, the Arroyo regime continues to make warrantless arrests, indefinite detention, raids and threats of closing down mass media and taking over public utilities.

In order to keep itself in power and to expand its powers, the Arroyo regime seeks to break up the broad united front against it by trying to destroy the legal and patriotic and progressive forces. It also expects to debilitate the armed revolutionary movement by destroying the legal patriotic and progressive forces. Arroyo and her Cabinet Oversight Committee or cluster in charge of Internal Security are claiming to have gotten from the US the license to kill communists and patriots in the name of anti-terrorism in order to cancel the 2007 mid-term elections, prevent the legal opposition parties from winning and impeaching Arroyo and clear the way for charter change, the amendment of the 1987 constitution in a way mutually most desired by the Arroyo regime and the US imperialists.

The Arroyo regime is set to get the same autocratic powers that Marcos got from the 1973 constitution in the sham transition from the presidential to the parliamentary form of government.

It also intends to dilute the clear guarantees drawn from the Miranda doctrine and delete the restraints on the exercise of martial law powers. In exchange, the US and other foreign monopoly corporations can have unlimited ownership and control of land, natural resources, public utilities and all businesses. The US military forces can also keep military bases, combat troops and nuclear weapons in Philippine territory.

The Arroyo regime is a traitor regime that is always begging to be propped up by the US. It does not learn lessons from the rise and fall of the Marcos fascist regime. For a while, Marcos could benefit from US support while giving in to US dictates. But in the end, the US would give him up when the broad united front of anti-fascist forces and the mass movement reached a certain high level against the draconian measures undertaken by him and his military minions.

When Marcos started his fascist dictatorship in 1972, the Keynesian policy regime that was in place allowed him to take plenty of foreign loans that in turn allowed him to beef up the reactionary armed forces. The US still had more than 19,000 troops and huge air and naval bases in the Philippines for which the Marcos regime was getting lots of military grants and loans. But the US policy shift to the neoliberal regime drove the post-Marcos regimes, especially those of Ramos and Arroyo, to overload the country with onerous loans from foreign commercial banks and the bond market.

Notwithstanding the big amount of military and financial support for the Marcos regime from the US during fourteen years of fascist dictatorship, the revolutionary people and forces led by the Communist Party of the Philippines grew in strength and advanced. To this day, they continue to thrive among the people. The armed revolutionary movement in the Philippines has become an outstanding phenomenon in the world. It has proven that the revolutionary people and forces can withstand and fight whatever the US can unleash on a semicolony.

Under the Visiting Forces Agreement, the US has engaged in direct military intervention in the Philippines, at first under the guise of joint exercises with the Philippine puppet armed forces and then under the guise of fighting "Muslim terrorists" in the Philippines as a "second front" of the Bush so-called war on terror. But to this day, the joint operations of the US and its Filipino puppet troops have apparently failed to destroy the Abu Sayyaf, a small criminal gang in a small part of the Philippines unless this is deliberately allowed to persist as a continuing excuse for the US to bring military forces in the name of fighting so-called Islamic terrorism.

However, there are always limits to US military power. During the time of Marcos, the US was preoccupied with its war of aggression against the Vietnamese and other Indochinese peoples and with so many other troubles elsewhere in the world. Today, it is more overextended than ever before. It is bogged down in Iraq, wasting many personnel and huge resources there and is paying less attention than it wishes to other areas in the world. While the US is busy coveting the oil resources in the Middle East and Central Asia, it has exposed its weaknesses and vulnerabilities in East Asia, South Asia, Latin America and elsewhere.

The US is rotten to the core economically and financially. It is gravely stricken by the crisis of overproduction. And it is living off other imperialist countries and some dependent countries by attracting investments from them and making them accept cheap US dollar payments for US imports. It passes off as "growing" a GDP bloated by foreign-financed consumption, a housing bubble, excessive government spending for the military and homeland security and overvalued investments on military production, housing speculation and the remains of the bygone high-tech bubble.

The world is actually in a state of depression, with the raw-material producing and underdeveloped majority of countries worst off. But the illusion of global economic growth is conjured by the neoliberal and monetarist manipulation of monetary and fiscal policy in all the imperialist countries and some dependent countries like China, India and Brazil. It is possible to create GDP growth by increasing financial flows to consumption, government and investment without raising industrial production and regular employment. Thus, there is the phenomenon of jobless or wage-frozen growth.

The economic crisis of the Philippines can in no way be solved by any external force. The economic and social crisis has aggravated and deepened precisely because of policy dictates by the US and such US-controlled multilateral agencies as the IMF, World Bank and WTO. The crisis is bound to aggravate as the US and other imperialists connive further with the big compradors, landlords and bureaucrat capitalists.

Under the current circumstances of socioeconomic crisis, the political crisis can only worsen further. The frills of bourgeois democracy that were restored after the fall of Marcos have worn out. Once more because of the worsening crisis, the reactionary classes are unable to rule in the old way. Proclamation 1017 exposes starkly the tendency of the ruling clique to impose the open rule of terror on the people.

The contradictions among the reactionaries have become far bitterer and more violent than ever before. The reactionaries in power have become more corrupt and repressive. The reactionaries out of power are quicker to expose the wrongdoings of those in power. The Arroyo ruling clique has become isolated among the reactionaries because it has scandalously used public funds to buy votes and bribe the electoral and military officials to rig the elections.

The increasing number of opposition parties are trying to ride on the groundswell of popular hatred for the Arroyo regime over a wide range of economic, social and political issues. The ruling coalition parties called Lakas-CMD is becoming shaky with the disengagement of Liberal Party and other parties. Even within the Arroyo Cabinet, a considerable number of cabinet members and other high officials have resigned since middle of last year. The Philippine Senate has turned opposition.

The most striking new development in the reactionary armed forces and police is the polarization into those who are for and who are against Arroyo. The officers are divided into at least five groups: the pro-US and pro-Arroyo officers, two pro-US but anti-Arroyo groups of officers (Coalition of National Salvation headed by former defense secretary Fortunato Abat and YES-ARMS headed by retired Commodore Aparri) and two relatively patriotic and progressive anti-Arroyo groups of officers (Para sa Bayan/YOU New Generation and Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan/Makabayang Kawal Pilipino).

There are more anti-Arroyo groups among the military and police forces. They proliferate in order to foil counterintelligence efforts of the regime. The most significant development in the political ferment now is the emergence of anti-Arroyo groups of military and police officers willing to enter into truce, alliance and cooperation with the revolutionary movement in order to fight the Arroyo regime and move towards the establishment of a patriotic and democratic government under the principle of civilian supremacy. They repudiate the reactionary military tradition of servility to the US and the local exploiting classes and partaking of their crumbs under the banquet table.

The overwhelming majority of officers and enlisted personnel in the military and police forces oppose the Arroyo regime because they are disgusted by the regime's broken promises of raises in salaries and pensions, because they are scandalized by the use of the military to rig the 2004 elections in many areas, because they reject the malversation of operational and savings funds by corrupt generals and because they are revolted by the rapid promotion of favorites, provincemates and relatives of Arroyo and the flagrant connections of these with the most lucrative criminal syndicates engaged in gambling, bank robberies, kidnap-for-ransom, smuggling, illegal-drug trade, carnapping and illegal logging.

The severe socio-economic and political crisis of the ruling system and the increasingly virulent contradictions among the reactionaries constitute favorable conditions for the armed revolution. As they pursue the correct line of people's democratic revolution through protracted people's war, the CPP, NPA and other subjective forces of the revolution can take advantage of the favorable conditions in order to heed and fulfil the Filipino people's demand for revolutionary change.

Accumulated Victories and Basis for Advance

Under the absolute leadership of the Party, the New People's Army has accumulated victories in the last 37 years and has won brilliant victories in the past year. It has put revolutionary politics in command of all its actions. It has learned well from the Second Great Rectification Movement and has performed with conscious iron discipline the political, military, productive, organizational, cultural and other tasks set forth by the Party.

The NPA carries out the revolutionary armed struggle, land reform and mass base-building as integral components of the democratic revolution. It wages armed struggle to build itself as a fighting organization and destroy the enemy forces. It undertakes land reform in order to realize the democratic content of the revolution and mobilize the peasant masses as the closest allies of the working class. It encourages and supports the organs of political power and the mass organizations of workers, peasants, women, youth, children and cultural activists. This organized mass base is the reliable source of Red commanders and fighters.

The NPA has grown as the main organization of the Party. In turn, the Party has grown as the core of political leadership within the NPA. The Party cadres, Red commanders and fighters are constantly within definite units and under definite commands. Thus, they can maintain Party life on a daily basis and can easily recruit and train new Party members. The Party cadres, the Red commanders and fighters cooperate in organizing the masses and the Party in the localities.

The NPA is operating in more than 120 guerrilla fronts, which cover 800 municipalities in 70 out of 79 Philippine provinces. Each guerrilla front has an optimal total strength of a company with highpowered rifles, divisible into one platoon as the center of gravity or as the main guerrilla unit and two other platoons as secondary guerilla units, further divisible into squads and teams for mass work on a wider scale.

The NPA is capable of concentrating platoons, oversized platoons and full companies for tactical offensives and law enforcement according to the varied levels of development of the guerrilla fronts and the ability of the command at the level of the guerrilla front, province or region. The NPA is still in the phase of multiplying platoons for combat by way of approaching and developing the middle phase of the strategic defensive and also by way of carrying out extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on a nationwide scale.

The nationwide strength of the NPA full-time fighters is in the thousands. It is augmented by the people's militia as the police force in the localities and the self-defense units based in the mass organizations. The people's militia and self-defense units are auxiliaries and reserves of the NPA. They are far more numerous than the full-time fighters in the NPA. They are sources of recruits for the NPA as soon as arms and the concomitant politico-military training are provided. The NPA can readily expand upon the seizure of arms from the enemy troops through ambushes, raids and arrest operations.

Defense officials and military officers of the enemy keep on guessing that the total rifle strength of the NPA is anywhere between 7,000 to 12,000. At the same time, they boast that through Lambat Bitag I, II and III they succeeded in bringing down the armed strength of the NPA from the level of 25,000 to 6,000 from the late part of the 1980s to the early 1990s. This is not true. In 1986, the NPA had only 6,100 high-powered rifles, without any strict accounting of those that were lost in the Kampanyang Ahos in 1985 and 1986. Furthermore, the development of the militia and self-defense units was neglected.

The tactics of concentration and gradual constriction of Lambat Bitag became successful in destroying a large part of the revolutionary mass base only because those who carried out the wrong line of premature large formations and premature regularization played into the hands of the enemy by engaging in self-constriction, neglecting mass work and divorcing the people's army from the masses. The Second Great Rectification Movement has corrected the error by requiring a widening and deepening mass base for extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare.

Since September 11, 2001, the Arroyo regime has been under US diktat to escalate military campaigns of suppression against the NPA and the people in accordance with the US policy of "war on terror" and making the Philippines the "second front" of such war. In 2002, the regime formally launched Bantay Laya, patterned after Lambat Bitag, to concentrate enemy military forces on selected areas or guerrilla fronts for a strategic war of quick decision and deployment of platoon-size special operations teams (SOT) for the purpose of gradual constriction against the NPA through combat, psywar and intelligence within said areas.

The concentrated military and police forces and death squads can inflict serious harm to the people wherever they focus and sustain their operations. But they simply do not have enough strength to cover all the barrios of the country. The reactionary armed forces have only 120,000 troops and the national police have 130,000 members to cover a population of 85 million within an area of 300,000 square kilometers. The enemy force structure is top-heavy and can deploy only 25 percent of personnel for field maneuvers at every given time. The police force structure is also top-heavy and the personnel on the ground are divisible into three 8-hour work shifts.

The total deployable forces of the enemy armed forces can cover only a few hundreds of barrios nationwide at every given time. Oplan Bantay Laya aims to concentrate enemy armed forces in six regions and in a total of 600 barrios or a general average of 100 barrios per region for sustained military operations until the destruction of the armed revolutionary movement. But actually the enemy armed forces can deploy troops only on less than 300 barrios at every given time. They leave free thousands upon thousands of barrios where the NPA can operate and grow in strength.

The enemy armed forces have their own way of augmenting their strength by coordinating with the police and private security agencies, organizing paramilitary units like the civilian auxiliary forces geographical unit (CAFGU), civilian volunteers organization (CVO), the barangay intelligence network (BIN) and pseudoreligious fanatical cults and hiring renegades who fled from their criminal liabilities in the revolutionary movement. But these entities are spread out thinly and are vulnerable to the political and military offensives of the NPA.

The insoluble problem for the enemy is that the current regime and the entire ruling system are rotten and crisis-stricken and are hated by the people. The officers and personnel of the reactionary armed forces and police are themselves discontented with their low salaries and inadequate supplies for their personal needs and, worse, the corruption and other criminal activities of many of their highest officers. The violent and bitter contradictions among reactionary political factions competing for wealth and power have already resulted in splits and rifts within the armed forces and police.

In heeding the wishes of the people, the NPA has created so many guerrilla fronts and is expanding, consolidating and increasing them. Available to the NPA are flexible guerrilla tactics of concentration to attack so many weak points of the enemy forces, dispersal to do mass work and shifting to avoid being cornered by a superior enemy force. At the tactical level, the NPA has been able to concentrate force and use the element of surprise on weak points of the enemy forces. The enemy forces are strategically superior in military strength but lacks mass support and are thus rendered blind and deaf.

In the years 2002 to 2004, the people and the revolutionary forces went through difficulties in guerrilla fronts where the enemy forces concentrated under Oplan Bantay Laya. But even in these guerrilla fronts, they started to counter the attacks of the enemy. From the latter part of 2004 to 2005, the number of guerrilla fronts stabilized above the level of 120. Since then, these have increased. The objective of Bantay Laya to destroy some 10 to 15 guerrilla fronts at every given time and move on to destroy a similar number has utterly failed.

Oplan Lambat Bitag appeared to have succeeded in destroying large chunks of the revolutionary mass base and stopping the growth of the people's army from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. But in fact the "Left" opportunists played into the hands of the enemy, with such erroneous lines as the "strategic counteroffensive" and the "RAWA strategy". The NPA today has learned lessons and benefited from the Second Great Rectification Movement and has won resounding success in frustrating and defeating Bantay Laya.

The expansion of the revolutionary mass base has allowed us to undertake major steps to seize the initiative in fighting the enemy. We have been able to direct the commands at the levels of the guerrilla front, province and region to undertake politico-military work seriously, shake off conservatism and the roving rebel tendency or mentality and deliver lethal blows to the enemy forces. We have been able to prove that our revolutionary strategy and tactics and the unity of the NPA with the people through the organized mass base can defeat the enemy military and police forces despite their far larger size, more resources, more training and latest gadgetry from the imperialists.

Since the middle of September last year, the NPA has launched nationally coordinated tactical offensives under general guidelines in order to seize the initiative from the enemy forces, to accelerate the seizure of arms and thus the expansion of the NPA and to hasten the downfall of the Arroyo regime. On the basis of experience and strength gained so far, the nationwide tactical offensives can continue vigorously and move up to a new and higher level.

The intensified contradictions among the reactionaries help the NPA to intensify its nationwide tactical offensives. The Arroyo regime is drawing military and police forces to the national capital region in order to preempt and counter the prospect of being overthrown by a people's uprising cum withdrawal of military and police support, impeachment and trial by the legislature or by a coup d'etat.

Some military and police officers have expressed their desire for truce, alliance and cooperation with the revolutionary movement against the regime. And the NPA has welcomed their good intention. The Party has assigned cadres to do clandestine revolutionary work within the reactionary armed forces and police. A special bureau is in charge of the work. The Crispin Tagamolila Movement has been revived to encourage enemy officers and personnel to shift to the side of the people. It is also expected that among the military and police personnel they can undertake their own open democratic movement to defend and promote their rights and legitimate interests against the rotten ruling system.

The broad united front of anti-Arroyo forces and the mass movement have developed rapidly through peaceful and militant mass actions to oust the Arroyo regime. But the regime has reacted by usurping martial law powers under the guise of Proclamation 1017 declaring a state of national emergency and has used brute force to disperse mass actions, arrest progressive leaders without judicial warrant, raid newspaper offices and threaten to take over enterprises owned by anti-Arroyo businessmen.

The Arroyo regime has justified Proclamation 1017 and the continuing policy of state terrorism by inventing the story of a communist-military coup conspiracy that it claims to have foiled on February 24. It is whipping up anticommunist hysteria in order to justify repressive measures for keeping itself in power. It has converted into an arrest list the list of NDFP negotiators, consultants, staffers and other duly authorized personnel under the GRP-NDFP Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) and has completely ended the peace negotiations between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines. These can no longer be resumed unless a new government in Manila arises to propose resumption to the NDFP.

Under the increasing conditions of repression, the broad masses of the people are eager to join and support the armed revolution. The united front for armed struggle is developing rapidly. Leaders and activists of the mass movement are being forced by the Arroyo regime to go underground and join the armed revolutionary movement. Allies are offering their cooperation with the NPA so that it can deliver more effective blows on the enemy. The Arroyo regime is panicking about the prospect of a majority of military and police officers being opposed to it and ready to withdraw support from it as soon as a big mass uprising occurs either at Edsa or around the presidential palace. It is conducting a witchhunt within the armed forces and police and trumping up charges of coup plotting against officers suspected of being sympathetic to the opposition. These officers are being subjected to arbitrary arrest, restriction to quarters, floating status, demotion or dismissal.

We are aware that the anti-Arroyo currents within the armed forces and police are becoming stronger than ever. But these currents are being pent up and anti-Arroyo groups are considering how to fight back. Most groups continue to bide their time and wait for the occasion to withdraw support from the regime. Other groups are considering military strikes to demonstrate the inability of the regime to rule or to capture the usurper of presidential authority through electoral fraud or stage a coup against it.

Aside from the anti-Arroyo groups in the military and police, there are fringe armed groups in Mindanao, Visayas and Luzon that similarly wish to undertake sabotage actions against the installations and facilities of the Arroyo regime and their foreign and local corporate supporters. We admonish all armed groups opposed to the Arroyo regime not to undertake military actions that harm solely or mainly the civilian population or the environment. Otherwise, they cannot be regarded as acting in the interest of the people.

As far as it is concerned, the NPA follows the constant policy and line of the Party to deal lethal blows on the enemy in the most precise way possible, to protect and promote the national and democratic rights and interests of the people and to accumulate political, military, socioecomic and cultural victories for the forward march and ultimate victory of the people's democratic revolution.

Guidelines for Accelerating the Offensives

Under the leadership of the Party and in responding to the demand of the Filipino people for revolutionary change, the New People's Army must continue to intensify its tactical offensives against the military and police forces of the reactionary state, except those that show clear proof of opposition to the Arroyo regime. The tactical offensives are immediately aimed at weakening and causing the ouster of the Arroyo regime but they are also intended to further strengthen the revolutionary forces and advance the people's democratic revolution against the entire ruling system.

It is impossible for the people and the broad united front of anti-Arroyo forces to oust the Arroyo regime in a relatively peaceful manner without the withdrawal of military and police support from it as in the so-called Edsa 1 of 1986 and Edsa 2 of 2001. Without the withdrawal of such support, the Arroyo regime would continue to monopolize control over the reactionary military and police forces through the chain of command and can at will curtail civil and political rights and suppress the mass actions as it has done on February 24.

The people and revolutionary forces are eager to hasten the downfall of the Arroyo regime. They are outraged by the crimes of the regime. The current broad united front of opposition political parties, democratic mass organizations and anti-Arroyo sections within the reactionary forces and police has enough potential strength for ousting the regime. But the regime still has ways of prolonging itself in power by using the bureaucratic and military machinery of the state and by conniving and exchanging favors with the US imperialists and the most reactionary institutions, particularly the highest officials of the dominant Catholic Church and the big business chambers and clubs of foreign multinational firms and big compradors.

These are the forces that allowed the Marcos fascist dictatorship to run for fourteen years. They claim the main credit for finally overthrowing it. But in fact they junked the fascist dictatorship only when it became more of a liability than an asset to them. They wanted to head off the challenge of the rising revolutionary mass movement and the people's army to the entire ruling system. The Arroyo ruling clique knows how the US-controlled ruling system of big compradors and landlords works. Thus, it is poised to use the charter change scheme not only to prolong its stay in power but also to acquire Marcosian dictatorial powers in exchange for amendments desired by the US and the local exploiting classes.

The prolongation of the Arroyo regime in power is a bad thing in one sense. But in another sense it is also a good thing because the long-rotten system is burdened by a regime, which is the stinking concentration of rottenness in the system. The fact that it is able to stay in power only through naked violence and deception proves the necessity of the armed revolution. The short-term movement to overthrow the Arroyo regime through armed struggle is in line with the long-term movement to overthrow the entire ruling system through armed revolution.

The enemy armed forces are superior to the people's army in terms of the number of troops, military training, equipment and financial resources. It suits them to go on a strategic offensive or a war of quick decision against the people's army. But their strength is extremely limited relative to our strategy and tactics and the social and physical terrain for the maneuver of the NPA. Our strategic line is protracted people's war and our current tactics involve tactical offensives within the strategic defensive. The NPA is based among the peasant masses and has plenty of room for maneuver in the countryside. The enemy forces can be strategically superior to the NPA at the ratio of 10 to 1. But at the tactical level, the NPA can achieve superiority over the enemy forces at the ratio of 10 to 1 and thus wage battles of quick decision.

The NPA must carry out extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever widening and deepening mass base. We must develop the middle phase of the strategic defensive by expanding, consolidating and increasing the number of guerrilla fronts, multiplying our combat platoons and employing them against the enemy frequently and on a nationwide scale in order to wipe out and disarm the enemy. At the same time, we must have the flexibility to employ small teams and squads (for sniping, sabotage and punitive operations) as well as oversized platoons and companies, depending on the nature and requirements of a mission.

We must develop the operational commands of the NPA at the levels of the guerrilla front, province and region in order to overcome the downside of having long focused on mass work and having become accustomed to the mode of deployment and ways of the armed propaganda squads and teams, which have been described as conservatism and roving rebel band tendency or mentality. Each of the commands at the levels of the guerrilla front, province and region can have at least a platoon as a strike force, develop their capabilities (politico-military training, intelligence, operations, ordnance, medical services, etc.) and contribute to increase the frequency of tactical offensives.

We must maintain the fighting initiative against the enemy. We can do so because we have the ample mass base from which to launch our tactical offensives and within which we can maneuver, whatever are the tactics needed, be it of concentration, dispersal or shifting.

We can always observe the enemy forces to discover their weakest points. We can choose the time and place for concentrating our force and deal lethal blows on the target. We can compel the enemy forces to make mistakes and become confused on how to deploy his strategic and tactical units.

We must fight only battles that we can win. We must not enter into any indecisive battle, which we are not sure of winning. We must avoid being put into purely defensive battles. We must conduct ambushes, raids and arrest operations in which we have the upperhand by concentrating a superior force and taking advantage of the element of surprise. We must do so at such a rapid rate on a wide scale that the enemy cannot know where and how to seize the initiative.

When the enemy force advances with a superior force raring for a fight, we must not meet it headlong with an NPA force that it can easily see, pin down and crush. We can inflict casualties on an advancing enemy force by using landmines, small teams and snipers. When the enemy force camps, we can undertake harassment actions and keep him from taking any rest. When it retreats, we know where to hit it hard on the basis of the information that we have gathered about its movement.

We must continue the nationwide tactical offensives. We do so under broad guidelines from the Party center and national command of the NPA. In consonance with the long running policy of decentralized operations, the NPA in the various guerrilla fronts, provinces and regions must avail of a wide range of flexible tactics, using various types of offensive units and weapons. There are tactical offensives well within the jurisdiction and capacity of the NPA at a certain level of command. Proposals for tactical offensives requiring a larger force than available at a certain level can be made to a higher level of command, with sufficient intelligence build-up and timely reconnaissance of the target provided.

We must increase the tactical offensives for seizing weapons. We do so through raids, ambushes and arrest operations against units and elements of the military, police, paramilitary and private security agencies. We need more weapons in order to build more fighting units of the NPA and to raise the level of the people's war. As the repression intensifies in the white areas, we expect to integrate more Party cadres and members and mass activists in the NPA.

We must pursue tactics of annihilation, attrition and disintegration against the enemy forces. We give first place to tactics of annihilation because it yields us the most arms. But when the smoke of battle clears up, we treat well the enemy survivors and give medical treatment to the wounded. In the course of battle, the enemy personnel can be allowed to surrender. Whenever possible, we do not fire at an enemy unit or element that can be disarmed without firing a shot.

We can make the enemy side pay heavily through attritive actions. We must observe and study the lines and means of transport, installations, depots and other facilities that are vital to the counterrevolutionary war effort of the enemy. We must subject these to attacks as often as necessary in order to weaken and destroy the war capability of the enemy forces and to compel them to go on the defensive, put more personnel on guard duty and lessen the number of combat effectives for deployment in the field.

We must disintegrate the enemy personnel through various tactics. We must ensure that our revolutionary propaganda reach the enemy troops. We remind them of the oppressed and exploited conditions of their families and the toiling masses and persuade them to join the armed revolution. We offer truce, alliance and cooperation against the hated Arroyo regime. We spread the word that we do not attack enemy units that show proof of being against the regime. We respect the surrender of enemy personnel even in the midst of battle. We treat our captives with leniency in accordance with international humanitarian law.

We must give no quarters to the worst and most notorious among the reactionaries: those most culpable for directing and carrying out repression, human rights violations, plunder, destruction of the environment and the drug trade. Upon complaint of the victims, the Party or the pertinent organ of political power, the people's court must issue the warrants of arrest, search and seizure for the NPA to enforce. In case the criminal suspect is well armed and dangerous or is surrounded by armed cohorts, the NPA arresting team is authorized to use the necessary amount of force or to give battle in order to subdue any resistance.

Against all the repressive measures being undertaken by the Arroyo regime, the people and broad united front of legal anti-Arroyo forces must persevere in their efforts to exercise their civil and political rights and wage mass actions in defense of national and democratic rights. They know how isolated and weak is the position of the Arroyo regime and they can draw from their rich experience in waging legal struggles in the time of the Marcos fascist dictatorship.

The united front for legal struggle is distinct from the united front for armed struggle but the two have continuity, interaction and interoperability. The broad united front for legal struggle is arousing and mobilizing the people in the millions and for isolating and weakening the enemy. The poll surveys indicate that 65 to 80 per cent of the people want the ouster of the Arroyo regime. The broad united front for legal struggle opens the way wider for the united front for armed struggle, which is the main aspect of the united front for overthrowing the current regime and the entire ruling system.

The leaders and members of the patriotic and progressive forces who are now most threatened by deadly repressive measures, such as kidnapping, torture and murder, can shift to the revolutionary underground and onward to the field of revolutionary armed struggle. Allies are also welcome in playing a role in and contributing to the armed struggle. The revolutionary forces are willing to negotiate and agree with the anti-Arroyo groups of military and police officers on social, economic and political reforms and on how to carry these out.

The revolutionary united front policy is comprehensively anti-imperialist, antifeudal and antifascist even as from time to time it focuses on a narrow target such as the Arroyo regime (the chief representative of the exploiting classes) and broadens as to include certain sections of the reactionary forces against the common target. Under conditions of the broad united front, the revolutionary forces must be firm as a matter of principle to uphold the revolutionary class line and maintain independence and initiative even as they adopt flexibility of policy and tactics.

The revolutionary united front policy is founded on the worker-peasant alliance, which is led by the CPP and has a people's army. The revolutionary united front is expanded through such further alliances as the progressive alliance of the toiling masses with the urban petty bourgeoisie, the patriotic alliance with the national bourgeoisie and the temporary alliance with sections of the exploiting classes opposed to the enemy, that is the worst among the reactionaries servile to imperialism.

The Arroyo regime is worried to death by the broad united front and mass movement in the national capital region and the existence of several anti-Arroyo groups of officers among the military and police forces. Thus, for its supposed protection, it is deploying more troops under those considered loyal officers in the national capital region. The number of troops deployed against the NPA in the countryside tends to be reduced. The regime is trying to firm up its ceasefire with the MILF and improve its relations with the MNLF (Misuari) in order to make more troops available for deployment against the NPA. But we are confident that the Moro people will intensify their own armed struggle as we deal lethal blows and inflict defeats on the common enemy.

In the proliferation of anti-Arroyo groups within the military and police, there are some groups that wish to undertake punitive and sabotage actions in the national capital region and in provincial cities supposedly in order to demonstrate the inability of the Arroyo regime to rule. We are in no position to stop them from doing what they plan to do. But we publicly advise them to avoid harming civilians in the process of undertaking punitive and sabotage actions against selected targets.

Lest the Party and the NPA be blamed for actions of anti-Arroyo military and police groups in the national capital region, we stress at this point that no matter how violent the Arroyo regime becomes in the national capital region, the position of the CPP and NPA is that the form of struggle in the cities is legal and defensive and that the arena for armed struggle in the meantime is in the countryside. However, the armed city partisans and other special teams of the revolutionary movement are available for punitive actions against the worst of the reactionaries wherever they are in the country.

The Arroyo regime is generating a spiral of violence in the national capital region in order to justify its use of brute force for suppressing the people, the opposition parties, the democratic mass organizations, the mass media and other entities. This broad array of actors must have full play in waging legal struggle against the regime. We can undertake punitive actions against the enemy in the urban areas. But we must always make clear the just character of such actions and ensure that the rate at which these are undertaken does not runs counter to the main legal and defensive character of struggle in the urban areas.

In justifying the issuance of Proclamation 1017 and unleashing draconian measures, the Arroyo regime has fabricated the myth of an alliance for a coup d'etat between communists and military rightists. The revolutionary forces are categorically and strongly against any coup d'etat by any anti-Arroyo group of military and police forces. But like the legal democratic forces and the opposition parties, they want the military and police forces of the reactionary state to respect the right of the people to free speech and assembly, to withdraw military and police support from the regime, to uphold the principle of civilian supremacy, to support the establishment of a new civilian government and to agree to the resumption of the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations.

We can anticipate that the Arroyo regime will become harsher and harsher nationwide, in both cities and countryside. We have already seen the brutal operations of the regular military and police units and the death squads and other irregular units. The gross human rights violations have outraged the Filipino people and the people of the world. But it is not enough to protest. There is need for tit for tat struggle and for intensifying and raising the level of people's war.

The broad masses of the people are engaged in a self-reliant struggle for national liberation and democracy. Our revolutionary cause is just. It enjoys abundant moral and political support from the people all over the world. We further exert efforts to bring about a new and higher level of international support. As always, we deem it our duty to make our own contribution to the global struggle of the people against imperialism and reaction.

The NPA will become stronger by intensifying armed struggle, carrying out land reform on a wider scale and building a stronger mass base. It is determined to advance from one phase to another and from one stage to another in the protracted people's war along the general line of new democratic revolution against US imperialism and the local exploiting classes. We look forward to the complete victory of the people's democratic revolution and the advent of socialist revolution in the long march to communism. ###

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