Valera said the mainstream communist movement in the province and the regional NPA command recently denied having issued a statement threatening him and other Abra politicians for supposedly being anti-communists.
"I believe the regional command of the NPA issued a statement that it had no hand in the series of statements threatening the mayors, including me," the governor said.
Valera was referring to a statement of one Ka Shalom whom Martin Montana, spokesman of the CPP-NPA Ilocos-Cordillera Regional Committee, said was non-existent.
Montana was quoted as saying that the NPA "is not in the habit of making threats and false accusations against people — politicians or otherwise — in the pursuit of its revolutionary cause."
But the NPA’s Agustin Begnalen Command, indeed, threatened Tineg Mayor Clarence Benwaren who, it claimed, has incurred "blood debts awaiting revolutionary justice."