Editors Note: The article is based on interviews by the writer with former cadres of the Communist Party of the Philippines who have known and have worked with Noynoy Ponteras when they were deployed by the Communist Party to legal fronts based in Bacolod City, the provincial capital of Negros Occidental in the Philippines. These cadres talked separately to the writer but all spoke on condition of anonymity.
BACOLOD CITY, Negros Occidental, Philippines – As far as Ka Nestor can recall, Noynoy Ponteras used to be a wise ass, a youth activist who had that winsome smile that made some hearts flutter.
Noynoy was not a frontline activist. He was a bit shy to face microphones and cameras of legacy media that domimated the landscape in the 1990s but he later became one of the instructors of the renewed Regional Youth Sector Bureau of the Communist Party of the Philippines that used to only have Negros as the island region under it. Noynoy, who used the codename Hans, assigned the codename “Batibot.” to that Bureau.
He and another Bureau member, Ka Robert, received flak for spreading that joke around.
Cadres sitting in the CPP’s city-based highest urban organ, the Regional Urban/White Area Committee chewed them out a bit for “ridiculing” the Party but Noynoy had a quick reply, he called the chewing out an “award” from the “lords,” referring to the cadres who were high in their sense of entitlement and intellectual superiority but short in humor.
This was spoken about among the members of the YS bureau members and among a few comrades he felt close to.
Those who had worked with Noynoy remember him as a jovial fellow who loved to play the guitar.
His favorite song was “Dakilang Hamon (The Great Challenge) that became an anthem of sorts during the 1990’s Second Great Rectification Movement of the CPP.
To Noynoy and many urban dwellers, that song was a call from the countryside that was then the place to go for those who heeded the call to “serve the people.”
Noynoy’s mirthful way showed in his riskiness on the field.
Once during a “human rights factfinding mission” in Tayasan town in the early 1990s designed to cover the escape of then CPP island secretary Frank Fernandez and the Regional Executive Committee, whose bivouac was raided by the Army, some of his comrades nearly suffered a heart attack when he hopscotched over a fragmentation grenade on the trail the team was walking on.
The propaganda of the team the next day blamed the military for the unexploded ordnance though it was known many months later that it was actually Ka Pagat, whose dead body they recovered, who threw the hand grenade.
Pagat, Boniface Pasakan in real life, was left behind by his comrades who brought Fernandez and regional cadres to safety but not Pagat who, according to some Red fighters thiz writer talked to, told his comrades that he be left behind after he was wounded to hold off the attacking soldiers.
“Noynoy felt that it waa his obligation, like all the other members of the retrieval team, to bring Pagat’s body home as a final tribute to his sacrifice,” recalled Ka Nestor, who led the fact finding team.
He hoped that should the same fate befell him, there would be kaupods (comrades) from the cities who would bring his body home.
Noynoy was last seen during the Bacolod rallies for the ouster of then President Joseph Estrada.
It waa whispered among his activist friends that had gone to the hills (nagpa CS or countryside).
It was whispered later on that he had become a manugsilot (executioner) of death sentences of the Party on anyone and was trained by a former ABB operative or elite Communist killer.
The last time Nestor heard of him waa in the late 1990s that he had been deployed to the Central Negros Front 1, the mother front in Negros founded by Frank Fernandez.
It was said later on that he has become that front’s chief implementor of the RBKS (Rebolusyunaryong Buhis Sa Kaaway nga Sahi or Revolutionary Tax on Claass Enemies) or what the military calls as extortion.
It was not known if Noynoy knew later on that the hukbo he so admired had gone on to kill civilians or that it had been earning at least P20 million in northern Negros Occidental alone, largely unaccounted where it went.
But even if he did, Ka Robert believes Noynoy will not believe it.
“His faith in the Party was strong,” he said
Ka Elias, on the other hand, described Noynoy as a zealot who had dedicated his life to the Party with an almost unquestionable zeal.
Before his death in battle early in the morning of Saturday, 8 March 2025, the Army’s 79th Infantry Battalion have been receiving reports that Noynoy alias Hans/Jojo/Lance/Teddy has been deployed to the island as interim secretary of the unified Regional Party Committee for the islands of Negros, Cebu, Bohol, and Siquijor.
He also headed the Taxation Implementing Group or was the chief Communist finance officer.
The position is akin to that of a governor over over four provinces, a position once hels by senior cadres.
The military said the Communist terrorists are taking advantage of the coming 2025 polls to make money through their supposed permits to campaign for candidates that is beung likened to paying protection money to the Mafia.
Ka Tata was a fellow YS activist of Noynoy.
She said Notnoy knew she had a crush on him but won’t say why he did not xourt her.
Noynoy Ponteras died in battle in an upland village inCadiz City far from home.
He had hoped in life that the kaupods would bring him home.
The kaupods forgot him and another comrade in a field where they fell.
It was cold. Dark. Lonely.
The next day, Noynoy was home in Banago, a coastal village here where he spent his childhood.
It was not the kaupods who brought him home.
It was the kaaways (enemies) who placed him in a coffin and brought him home.
