BACOLOD CITY, Negros Occidental, Philippines – The Army in the province continues to whittle down armed remnants of the New People’s Army as the 62nd Infantry Battalion reported a series of clashes in a mountain community that led to the battlefield death of an armed regular of the defunct Central Negros Front 1, the former mother front of now imprisoned island Communist leader and former priest Frank Fernandez.
Army 62nd IB civil military officer, Lieutenant Mary Liza Joy De Guzman, said in a dispatch that the body of Richard Dela Peña alias Rocky, 50, was found in the second clash site in Saksak, a community in the mountain town of Quintin Remo, a village in Moises Padilla, a town around two hours drive south from here.
She said the first clash erupted around 7am after the Battalion sent a rifle unit to the area after residents tipped them off about the armed men who were extorting from them and forcing people to join the terrorist force.
De Guzman added the armed men broke contact after a 10-minute firefight as the soldiers engaged them again after a chase in the neighboring sub village of Inangawan where another clash lasted for around five minutes.
Soldiers then found the body of Pena, an M16 assault rifle and a 357 caliber revolver aside from belongings and subversive documents.
Former rebels, the dispatch also said, identified the body of Dela Pena who is believed to be in the same unit under Marivic Ebarle alias Ka Ivan who was killed in the same town last year.
Dela Pena, the Army ssid, is involved in a series of crimes, among them the killing of Albert Navaro Goles alias Tongkay, a civilian slain by the rebels on suspicions that he was a military spy.
The CN1, which has an area of influence in Oriental and Occidental areas, including Guihulngan City, is a historic front for the CPP.
Underground and intelligence sources said it was Fernandez himself, the former priest who became the head of the CPP Negros regional committee in the 1990s, who founded the CPP from a platoon of fighters who stayed with the NPA after a disastrous split by many of its armed units who formed the Revolutionary Proletarian Army.
