CPP: Marcos 'in dreamland' with zero active NPA fronts claim

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, January 15) — The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) said President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was dreaming when he claimed that its armed wing, the New People's Army (NPA), no longer has active guerrilla fronts in the country.

«Marcos Jr is in dreamland when he claims there are no more active NPA guerrilla fronts. The NPA remains active in 14 regional commands across the country each with a number of guerrilla fronts,» CPP Chief Information Officer Marco Valbuena told CNN Philippines on Sunday.

The CPP's statement was a response to Marcos' earlier pronouncement that there are no more active NPA guerilla fronts as of December 2023 after government forces neutralized some 1,400 members of extremist groups.

«If Marcos's declarations were true, why is it that around 60-70,000 military and police combat troops (or around 150 battalions of AFP and PNP counterinsurgency units) remain deployed against the NPA across the country?» Valbuena said. «Why do they continue to squander hundreds of millions of pesos to drop bombs and fire their howitzers?»

The CPP official said Marcos made the declarations to play to the desires of foreign investors, whom, Valbuena said, the president «desperately wants to entice with promises of unlimited access to the country's land and natural resources».

Valbuena added that while the NPA suffered setbacks over the past years, it is «far from defeated» and remains determined to thwart the Armed Forces of the Philippines' (AFP) «brutal offensives.»

«The NPA continues to carry out guerrilla maneuvers to break out of the AFP's encirclement, to quietly build a bigger mass base and expand its guerrilla fronts,» he added.

Despite the AFP's alleged bloody campaign of state terrorism in the countryside, taking away peasant farms and ancestral land, Valbuena stressed that the Filipino people, especially the peasant masses, continue to support and join the NPA to defend their economic and political rights.

«The NPA will make sure that it will outlast Marcos, just like it outlasted his father and all the governments of the past 35 years who all bragged of crushing the NPA,» he said.

The AFP said there are still 13