The claim yesterday by Sec. Benjamin Abalos Jr that the New People’s Army (NPA) now operates in only five guerrilla fronts is utterly ridiculous. Even a typical regional command of the NPA has more than that. Will Abalos and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) care to identify where these “remaining” fronts are?

Abalos is grossly exaggerating facts to make the brutal counterinsurgency of the AFP and Philippine National Police (PNP) appear successful. Yet, the Marcos regime is set to continue spending hundreds of billions of pesos to buy bombs, bullets, guns, cannons, fuel for jetfighters and helicopter, and expensive military equipment even in the middle of an economic crisis.

Gross violations of human rights including killings, torture and illegal detention by Marcos’ security forces continue to run rampant. Across the country, especially in the rural areas, hundreds upon hundreds of barangays are placed under the control of the military where people’s civil and political rights are wantonly violated, as they are paraded as “surrenderees.”

The exaggerated claims of having crushed the NPA is meant for foreign capitalist investors, who the Marcos regime wishes to invite to plunder the country’s mineral riches and other natural resources. The NPA and the people, however, will continue to take action to defend the people’s livelihood and the country’s patrimony.

The people’s war being waged by the NPA is a protracted war. It is a fluid war. Where the enemy concentrates its forces, the NPA shifts and expands elsewhere. The AFP can always declare military victory in an area, but they can never declare victory in the hearts and minds of the people.

The military victory being declared by the AFP is hollow and temporary, because they can never gain the true support of the people–especially not the peasant masses and minority people, whom they aim their guns at, oppress and drive away from their land to allow the expansion of destructive mining operations, plantation and infrastructure projects.

The people’s war will continue to spread across the countryside and advance nationwide, as the broad masses of the people see the necessity of waging revolution amid the continuing crisis of the rotten ruling system, and in order to defend themselves against the brutalities of state-terrorism.