Editors Note. Officers of the 79th Infantry Battalion, the Army unit leading the ground war in northern Negros Occidental province reported last week that its rifle units killed in combat the interim secretary and chief finance officer of the unified regional committee for Negros, Cebu, Bohol, Siquijor islands when these clashed with a band of remnants in the upland village of Caduhaan.
Subsequently, they also said that Noynoy Ponteras was an unlikely choice to succeed Rogelio Posadas, the erstwhile regional secretary who also died in combat in April of 2023.
They said due to the dearth of cadres within the Communist movement, those who are not experienced enough are being promoted to handle key positions, like in the case of Ponteras.
DNX takes a look into this phenomena and why the image of Negros for Communist cadres took a turn from being a known bailiwick of the Communist revolution in the 1990s.
Since Posadas and regional New People’s Army commander Romeo Nanta fell in battle, the Army has stacked up kill counts in battle of cadres from other places, including Metro Manila, that were deployed here like Kerima Tariman and her husband, Ericcson Acosta.
We start today.
Summer. 1990s.
Frank Fernandez walked through a patch of half natured sugarcane in Murcia, the town east of Bacolod City, the final staging area for the “strategic counteroffensive phase” of the Protracted People’s War that now dead Communist Party founder Jose Maria Sison once dreamt of.
For a time, especially in the 80s, the Philippine Communists deluded themselves into believing that victory was around the corner based on the ideological telescope of Marx and Mao.
History proved the Communists wrong as a debilitating split in the early 90s almost destroyed the CPP and its armed wing, the New People’s Army, in Negros island.
That split saw the bolting of a majority of NPA regulars to form the Revolutionary Proletarian Army that later sought negotiated peace with the government.
When Fernandez, then called Ka Frank or Ka Ibay emerged from that sugarcane field after walking under the El Niño heat across rows of clay-loam soil hardened by the heat and dotted by hunan excreta, he sparked a series of events that would turn the CPP into a formidable money-making machine by fusing the use of non-profits to funnel money from abroad and laundering dirty money on top of the existing criminal moneymaking activities of the NPA that relied mainly on extortion and other criminal activities like kidnapping with ransom.
Fernandez was sent to Negros to salvage what looked then like an irreversible decline that he, then deployed by the CPP in the 1990s to head the National Democratic Front of the Philippines at the national level, was sent to lead recovery efforts.
Fernandez brought with him a former member of the Alex Boncayao Brigade, an elite kill squad of the NPA that was responsible for, among other murders, the killing of James Rowe, a retired Army colonel and military adviser to the Philippines.
