On March 29, the Filipino people and all their revolutionary forces will mark the 50th founding anniversary of the New People’s Army (NPA). This will serve as occasion to celebrate all victories accumulated through five decades of fierce armed resistance against the armed agents of the US-supported reactionary government of oppressors and exploiters.

In celebrating the NPA’s 50th anniversary, all its Red fighters and commanders, as well as Party cadres and mass activists, reaffirm their determination to wage revolutionary armed struggle whatever the hardships and sacrifices and however long it takes to end the Filipino people’s oppression and exploitation under the neocolonial state and class rule of the big bourgeois compradors and big landlords.

For 50 years now, the reactionary armed forces have failed to defeat the revolutionary armed struggle waged by the NPA under the Party’s absolute leadership. The NPA has surmounted relentless military offensives mounted by the US-supported Armed Forces of the Philippines. It has grown from one level to another, from a small company of Red fighters in 1969 to a nationwide revolutionary army, the strongest ever in the Filipino people’s history.

The reactionaries have been repeatedly frustrated in their futile attempt to defeat the NPA. More significantly, armed with lessons from the past and determined to overcome weaknesses and shortcomings, the NPA is ever confident and capable of further strengthening itself and advancing the people’s war to higher levels and attaining complete victory in the foreseeable future.

Marking the NPA’s golden anniversary at this time is even more significant as it has so far prevailed over the strategic offensive under the Duterte fascist regime’s National Internal Security Plan (NISP) mounted by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) since last year.

Contrary to AFP declarations since 2015 of aiming to decimate the NPA in Eastern Mindanao, the NPA forces in those regions continue to persevere and score victories. Despite suffering setbacks in some parts, mostly as a result of internal weaknesses, the NPA in the eastern Mindanao regions continues to surmount difficulties posed by the AFP’s sustained military offensives.

Underscoring the determination of the NPA and its ability to confront the enemy’s superior military force, its units in Mindanao continue to successfully mount major tactical offensives wiping out enemy contingents and seizing its weapons. It has frustrated several rounds of focused military offensives, dealing significant blows to the rampaging enemy forces. In the past two years, the NPA has also steadily advanced in Western Mindanao.

Since last year, Duterte and his military officers repeated ad nauseam their plan of crushing the NPA by middle of this year. However, in the face of the conspicuous and undeniable steady advance of the NPA nationwide, it has changed its tune and moved their deadline (for the umpteenth time) to the end of 2022. After extending martial law rule in Mindanao, it has extended its declaration of a state of national emergency to Bicol in Luzon, and in the Negros and Samar provinces in Visayas, to cover close to half of the country.

Overcoming several years of slow growth, the NPA in Luzon and Visayas regions have made significant headway, resolving such problems as overdispersal, self-constriction, military conservatism, and so on. Units of the NPA in north and south Luzon and across the Visayas regions are moving higher from one level of strength to another. This is unequivocally demonstrated by the rising tempo of successful NPA tactical offensives mounted since the latter part of 2018.

The NPA is determined to accomplish the tasks set upon it by the Party over the course of the current five-year program of the Central Committee. It aims to recruit several thousand more Red fighters and bring the people’s war to levels higher than ever before.

This year, the NPA is set on frustrating the continuing strategic offensive of the US-Duterte fascist regime and its armed forces, police and paramilitary groups. It aims to further raise the momentum of the revolutionary armed struggle in the coming months by mounting more annihilative tactical offensives to wipe out enemy units and seize their weapons.

The US-Duterte regime is becoming increasingly frustrated and desperate in its aim of suppressing the people’s armed and non-armed resistance. The AFP is overstretching its forces and wasting gross amounts of public money in all-out military offensives. Its troops are increasingly being forced to go on one combat operation after another with very short periods of rest and rising casualties. Conflicts over corruption and favoritism are set to rise and break out among officers and between officers and foot soldiers. US military support for Duterte’s total war will be increasingly untenable as grave violations of human rights and humanitarian law rouse international indignation.

The US-Duterte regime is causing the Filipino people grave suffering with its onerous taxes, social cuts, further import liberalization, excessive foreign borrowing and other neoliberal policies. This has resulted in rising cost of living, joblessness and widespread economic displacement among the broad masses of workers, peasants and petty-bourgeoisie and further ruin of the national bourgeoisie. The Duterte regime is increasingly bankrupt as it faces rising trade and fiscal deficits, devaluation of the peso, balance of payment deficits and other financial troubles. Corruption has become increasingly rampant as Duterte and his allies plunder state resources through flagrant bureaucrat capitalist and criminal operations.

In the face of its utter failure to address the pressing socio-economic conditions of the people, the Duterte regime has increasingly resorted to all-out political suppression through military rule and other draconian measures. It is employing state terrorism to silence all criticism and opposition to his tyrannical rule. There are rampant cases of extrajudicial killings and massacres, abductions, arbitrary and prolonged detention, filing of trumped-up charges, armed intimidation and coercion, food blockades and restriction of movement and other attacks on democratic rights.

In the face of the fascist criminal onslaught of the Duterte regime, the Filipino people are ever drawn to join or support the armed struggle being waged by the NPA. Under Duterte’s reign of terror, the need to wage revolutionary armed struggle has become ever more necessary and urgent.