LOST in the maze of the ongoing trial of Vice President Sara Duterte by the Senate impeachment court is the issue of communist insurgency. It is one of the major reasons that she sought P612.5 million in confidential and intelligence fund.
In justifying her huge and unprecedented confidential and intelligence fund, Duterte cited the need to keep a close watch on communist insurgency with the intention to neutralize the rebels.
Hence, information gathering, monitoring, and surveillance activities were intended to quell the insurgency, she argued. But stopping communist insurgency is not a mandate of the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education, which she led for over two years until she resigned in 2024. It aptly belongs to the Department of Defense and Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).
But communist insurgency is on the wane. Those communist rebels, who have waged the longest running armed struggle of 56 years or more against the government, were on a steady retreat, as indicated by its own admission. This bolsters the suspicion that Sara Duterte could have either misused or pocketed the state funds given her. Her use of the communist bogeyman was flimsy and baseless.
The outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) had admitted it was losing badly since 2018 in its armed battle against state troopers. In a statement issued on Dec. 26, 2023, or 54th anniversary, the CPP Central Committee has asked its cadres to engage in what it termed a “third rectification campaign” to correct its past errors” and boost the CPP in its battle against the government.
“To overcome and repudiate these errors, the entire Party must wage a rectification movement on the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the Party’s basic principles as enunciated by Ka Joma,” the CPP said in its editorial in “Ang Bayan,” its official party organ.
Ka Joma is the late Jose Ma. Sison, the founding CPP chair. He died in Utrecht, the Netherlands on Dec. 16, 2022. Sison also led in the creation of the New People’s Army (NPA), CPP’s military arm, and the National Democratic Front (NDF), the political arm that seeks to unite non-communist elements under the CPP umbrella.
The CPP blamed what it termed as “military conservatism” and “military passivity” of its military arm for losing the initiative in its battle against state forces. NPA units have been avoiding tactical offensives against the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), focusing instead on survival and passivity, it said.
For her part, the Vice President claimed that they spent a huge part of the confidential fund on information-gathering and surveillance activities on an issue that has ceased to present itself as a national security issue. By all means, it was used so that she could pocket state funds.
Her allies in the Senate impeachment court were trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to connect the questioned state funds to quelling communist insurgency. But it was not gathering steam for the simple reason it was not succeeding.
The Vice President has submitted to the Senate impeachment court bulks of receipts alleging the use of her confidential fund for surveilling and monitoring alleged communist activities. But she could hardly present proof of the success of their operations.
The Commission on Audit (CoA), according to two state auditors, who testified at the impeachment trial, said that CoA has issued a Notice of Disallowance (ND) on P375 million of the 2023 confidential fund of P500 million on OVP.
By all means, there was nothing to neutralize as the CPP has weakened considerably.
It cited as factors the lack of ideological study of its cadres and weak mass base work, where it lost barangays and failed to collect revolutionary taxes. Moreover, certain cadres could not resist the lure of urban insurrection, as they have focused more on cities, neglecting the CPP’s model of a countryside-based protracted war.
The CPP asked its cadres to go back to the basics by reading Sison’s works, launching more tactical offensives, and rebuilding the mass base. The Philippine government has estimated that the CPP-NPA has slightly over 2,000 guerillas nationwide. They are mostly based in Mindanao and Western Visayas.
