BACOLOD CITY – The names of a ranking re-elected government official, and several other candidates in the May 2019 polls were among those found in a tax collector’s list recovered from a front secretary of the Communist Party of the Philippines last April, this year.
“The list was contained in a spiral notebook recovered from Ka Aba,” a member of the intelligence community told DNX.
“There were at least 20 names in that list – all ran for elective public posts,” another source said.
The CPP got at least P50,000 from just one politician for only one month.
The two sources are intelligence operatives assigned to different units of state security branches.
Both do not know each other and requested that all details of their identities be withheld.
Both initiated contact with this reporter through electronic mail on different dates over the past two months ago. They eventually agreed to communicate through mobile phone and other messaging platforms.
This reporter met with one of them, (codename: Alpha), who disclosed that the notebook was among the documents recovered from Abraham Villanueva alias Ka Aba.
Brig. Gen. Benedict Arevalo, commander of the Philippine Army’s 303rd Infantry Brigade, said in a PNA report that Villanueva heads the CPP’s South West Front.
He was nabbed with two other suspected rebels in the sub-village of Amian Ilawod, Tampalon barangay in Kabankalan City on 1 April 2019.
The second source gave the names, positions, town/city of these politicians, and the amounts paid to the CPP and the New People’s Army (NPA), some as part of the permit-to-campaign tax levied by the rebel group to those wanting to campaign in areas covered by “Red political power.”
He, however, requested this reporter to not disclose full details of these politicians as this would affect their “ongoing” operations of other security forces.
Arevalo did not answer DNX when asked about this via SMS.
He did not also answer or return calls.
