The communist insurgency in the Philippines is into its sixth decade. Since its formation in 1969, the New People’s Army (NPA)—the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), formed a year earlier—has fought a low-level guerrilla war against government troops. Over that time, much has remained the same. The CPP’s founder Jose Maria Sison remains at the helm, albeit now aged 82 and living in self-imposed exile in the Netherlands. Across the Philippines, NPA insurgents still target soldiers and police officers in roadside ambushes before retreating to their isolated rural hideouts.

Amid this violence, peace talks have failed under six successive Philippine leaders, including current president Rodrigo Duterte since 2016. His election—as an outsider candidate hailing from Mindanao where the insurgents are most active—initially led to hopes of a breakthrough. Yet since peace talks collapsed a year into his tenure, the proliferation of ‘‘red-tagging’’, whereby senior officials routinely label political opponents as communist sympathizers, now risks further violence. Killings of left-wing activists by vigilantes and police have become more frequent, and threaten reprisals from the NPA.

Talks collapse under Duterte

Such an outcome was not inevitable. In August 2016, the NPA and the Philippine military had both declared unilateral ceasefires soon after Duterte came to power. Manila entered negotiations with the National Democratic front of the Philippines (NDFP)—a negotiation panel representing the CPP and NPA in peace talks with the government—and several rounds of talks were held in Amsterdam, Oslo and Rome. But in early-2017, the peace process collapsed after Duterte refused a CPP demand to release political prisoners, sparking renewed rebel attacks and bringing an end to the ceasefires.

Efforts to re-start talks have since failed. The CPP has refused to meet a list of pre-conditions set by Duterte; which include an immediate cessation of rebel violence and for the CPP to pledge never to partake in a future coalition government. Sison has also declined repeated requests from Duterte to return to the Philippines for one-on-one talks, fearing the invitation is a pretext for his arrest. A war-of-words has erupted between the two men in recent years as Government-CPP ties have faltered.   

Localized peace initiative stalls

Since terminating talks in 2017 and disbanding its negotiating panel, Manila has pursued a localized approach to tackle the NPA uprising. In December 2018, Duterte signed Executive Order 70, forming the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC). The role of this body is to oversee smaller provincial and municipal task forces, charged with engaging rebel commanders in local settings and encouraging defections. Rebels who surrender are offered livelihood support, jobs and skills-training through a government-run programme. This local-level strategy has several flaws.

First, it rules out a peace agreement with the CPP-NDFP at the national level, preventing a solution to the conflict in its entirety. Second, the success of this plan has been overstated by the military. In 2020, the military claimed 7,615 rebels had surrendered over the course of the calendar year; this is more than the entire fighting force of the NPA, which has around 4,000 fighters. This figure presents an inaccurate picture of inroads being made against the NPA locally, as among those listed as having defected were rebel supporters or villagers belonging to the NPA’s Militia ng Bayan. In any case, the NPA has proven its ability over five decades to continually replenish its ranks after suffering losses.

The military’s aim to defeat the NPA by the end of Duterte’s term in mid-2022 is a near-impossible task. Many previous deadlines have come and gone, with the NPA’s strength seemingly unaffected. Eastern Mindanao, Samar, Mindoro, Negros Island and northern Luzon all remain NPA strongholds.

The proliferation of ‘‘red-tagging’’

Aside from violence in those areas, the broader narrative of the conflict is increasingly being driven by government propaganda. Under Duterte, ‘‘red-tagging’’—the labelling of a wide range of political adversaries as NPA supporters—has returned on a scale not seen since the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos at the height of the insurgency in the 1980s. The practice has been deployed to target labour leaders, human rights activists, students, journalists and legislators from opposition left-wing parties in the Makabayan bloc. This campaign has been waged alongside intimidation, threats and violence.

In 2020, four NDFP negotiators were killed. Some were shot dead by unknown gunmen while others died during law enforcement raids. In March, Julius Soriano Giron was killed in Baguio city. In August, Randall Echanis was shot dead in Manila. And in November, Eugenia Magpantay and Agaton Topacio were killed during a raid in nearby Rizal province. These high-profile killings demonstrate that targets of police operations often extend beyond armed rebels, to the political leadership of the movement.

A pattern has also emerged of law enforcement raids targeting activists judged by the government to share ideological links with communist fighters. On 30 December, nine local indigenous leaders, suspected to have ties to the NPA, were killed in co-ordinated police raids on Panay Island. Then on 7 March this year, another nine people were killed in similar raids across the provinces of Batangas, Cavite, Laguna and Rizal. Human rights groups claimed that among the deceased were anti-poverty campaigners, the leader of a workers’ union and two members of a local fisherman’s organization.  

The killings in March sparked huge outrage, coming just two days after Duterte had ordered police and military forces to ‘‘finish off’’ communist rebels. In the same remarks, made in Cagayan de Oro city at a meeting of NTF-ELCAC, Duterte told soldiers to ‘‘forget about human rights’’ in operations targeting suspected insurgents. His national security advisor, Hermogenes Esperon, later defended the raids as legitimate and claimed the victims were all insurgents, stating ‘‘in the name of law and order, a shoot-to-kill order has been issued against armed CPP-NPA members. It is shoot on sight’’.

Encouraging vigilante violence

The widening crackdown associated with ‘‘red-tagging’’ has been assisted by a new Anti-Terrorism Act passed last year, which granted the state new powers to list groups and individuals as terrorists and openly publish their names. Amnesty International has said this practice is ‘‘in contravention of international standards on due process and the presumption of innocence’’, while ‘‘vague and over-broad definitions’’ of terrorism risk the law being ‘‘used to target government critics’’. In December, the NPA and CPP were both designated under the new legislation as domestic terror organizations.  

Armed vigilantes have been empowered in this hostile climate. On Negros Island, a hotspot of NPA activity, anti-communist militia Kagubak has been linked to assassinations of farmers and left-wing activists in recent years. In February, Cristina Palabay, head of Philippine human rights organization Karapatan, told VOA that at least 78 people were killed and 136 arrested in 2020 in cases recorded as being linked to ‘‘red-tagging’’, warning that ‘‘more and more people are now in the firing line’’.

Human Rights Watch raised similar alarm in a recent statement, warning that the deadly practice ‘‘constricts further the increasingly diminished democratic space in the Philippines, where activists, rights lawyers, journalists and even ordinary Filipinos on social media are under threat’’, and called out ‘‘government officials who give a wink and a nod to extrajudicial killings by their red-tagging’’.

Aiding the rebel cause?

The ‘‘red-tagging’’ epidemic now risks pushback from the NPA and escalation on the battlefield. At the start of this year, the CPP directed the NPA to revive its Special Partisan Units, which are tasked with assassinating soldiers and government figures in towns and cities. These secretive units, usually made up of three or four NPA snipers, proliferated during the Marcos dictatorship in the 1980s, and their revival on a notable scale would bring the insurgency from the countryside into urban centres.

In response to the 7 March killings of activists by police, the NPA has welcomed those targeted by ‘‘red-tagging’’ to join its ranks, vowing that ‘‘targets of Duterte’s state terrorism can be absorbed by NPA units or provided safe haven’’ in rebel bases. A CPP statement also called on the NPA to launch ‘‘tactical offensives’’ and ‘‘mobilize its units’’ to ‘‘punish the perpetrators and masterminds of these crimes’’. Through his expanded crackdown, rather than defeat the NPA, Duterte is aiding its cause.

A version of this article is also published on Geopolitical Monitor.