Ang kadre may mas hugot nga gagap sa esensya sang rebolusyon kag sa kaisipang MLKMZ (The cadre has a firm grasp of the revolution and Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong Thought), Frank Fernandez said as he raised a fist and shook it back and forth while closing his eyes.
The “students” nodded their heads in approval as some pumped their fists in the air, confident that the revolution’s victory was around the corner as they sat on makeshift bamboo benches, in the schoolhouse mostly made of coffee saplings with a tarpaulin roof built by armed guerrillas that morning.
The “students,’about 30 or so Communist urban operatives who have infiltrated” middle forces” institutions like the Church, the mass media, and government’s civilian bureaucracy just had breakfast of corn rice and a broth of sorts of yam flavored by a few cans of sardines in tomato sauce.
It was a sweltering summer in the early 90s and Fernandez, a former Roman Catholic priest, was then secretary of the Probisyunal Komiteng Tagpatuman (Provisional Executive Committee) of the Communist Party of the Philippines in Negros island then identified by the Communists as a national priority for recovery efforts after a major split in the 1990s that saw the NPA’s armed force dropped to only a platoon or around 30 fighters.
That conference deep in the mountains of Negros Oriental in the uplands of Guihulngan City in Negros Oriental was a pasinsin, a deepening of sorts on the Rectification Movement, the second one of the CPP after that split.
Most of its fighters went with the Revolutionary Proletarian Army (RPA), the armed wing of the CPP’s ideological rival, the Rebolusyunaryong Partido ng Manggagawang Pilipino once derisively called by Sison as “Trotskyites and insurrectionists.”
The 1992 debate between the RAs and the RJs was not largely understood by mass sympathizers on both sides and remains as murky as a carabao’s turogban or watering hole until now.
It was into this intense ideological debate and political maelstrom that the second generation of Communist cadres were born – the RA (Reaffirmist) babies who were drawn to the “dakilang hamon” or heroic challenge to serve the “poor and the oppressed” in the countryside of the island who were portrayed by the Communists as the most neglected and oppressed who have never felt the services of the government.
Those mass sympathizers were never told, however that the NPA torches heavy equipment of contractors who will not pay them extortion money nor will they tell them that government workers who will go to the mountains will be kidnapped at the least or suffer a more horrific fate.
To the cadre, however, the Communist Party is the savior of the masa, the knight in shining armor who will bring about peace, justice and prosperity to the country’s blighted lands.
In the 1990s,Negros was seen as the island a cadre worth his or her salt must go to, the place where the root evils of Philippine society – imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism – trample on people who writhe under their boot heels.
Or at least the Communists made it appear so.
To the CPP, the new batch of cadres in the 90s were like patdan, the small cuttings of sugarcane planted that will give way to a fresh crop and, once harvested, would become the kalaanan or the ratoons that would grow a new crop.
What ails the CPP now? Why has it become difficult to replace ranking cadres deployed from other parts of the country who have been falling in battle since the Duterte government unleashed the whole of nation approach against the insurgency?
From Kerima Tariman to Ericcson Acosta to Rogelio Posadas, all cut down by the Army in gunfights, has the revolutionary fervor died down and has Neggros become a cursed ground for cadres?
