By the late 1960's the old Philippine Communist Party, the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, had largely come to accept the government of Ferdinand Marcos, and the Huks had been reduced to small scattered bands. On December 26,1968, a young intellectual from the University of the Philippines, Jose Maria Sison, organized a new communist party, known as the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). Sison was inspired by the thinking of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. Sison believed that the Huks had been unsuccessful because they were limited largely to the single region of central Luzon. He therefore began to organize small guerrilla groups in rural areas around the country.
Sison entered into an alliance with Bernabe Buscayno, a young man from a peasant background known as Commander Dante. Buscayno had been a guerrilla fighter in one of the remaining small groups of Huks. Together Sison and Buscayno organized the New People's Army (NPA), the military wing of the CPP. When Marcos used the new communist forces as an excuse to
Declare martial law, this drew attention to them and helped the communists appeal to those who opposed the Marcos dictatorship.
Even after Sison and Buscayno were imprisoned in the early 1970's, NPA power continued to grow. By 1986, when the Marcos era ended, the NPA had over 22,000 fighters and controlled perhaps 20 percent of the country.
The CPP-NPA began to decline with Corazon Aquino's rise to power in 1986. President Aquino's popularity and the infighting among the communists undermined the guerrilla movement. When the government of the Philippines ended the agreement in 1991 allowing the United States to keep military bases in the Philippines, this also undermined the NPA's claim that it was fighting foreign imperialism. Under Aquino's successor, Fidel Ramos, the nation's economy improved steadily, and although NPA fighters remained in the countryside, it appeared unlikely that they would be able to overthrow the government.
World History
