The Garden (2)

A ‘loveless’ loveteam that clicks – and how!

As the mass grave – called The Garden by the communists – of victims of CPP-NPA purges were being dug up in Inopacan, Leyte, Akbayan Rep. Etta Rosales delivered an angry speech on the Floor of the House. In that speech, she denounced her former comrades in the communist movement for "gangsterism."

This is not the first time Rosales railed against the Maoists, who have made a cottage industry out of shaking down peasants and entrepreneurs in the countryside – and terrorizing them if they fail to come across. A few years ago, she wrote a piece in an investigative journal denouncing the rapid descent of the armed communist underground into becoming nothing more than a heavily armed criminal syndicate. Later, she was again at it, denouncing the NPA for collecting "permit to campaign" fees from poor party-list groups seeking out votes.

The party-list representative of a more moderate leftist formation was provoked, this time around, by the torching of a truck in Negros island. The truck belonged to a cooperative of former leftist activists now preoccupied with opening livelihood opportunities for the peasants of this depressed island economy.

It turns out, the NPA had been trying to extract money from this struggling cooperative for some time now. After negotiating with the Maoists, they allowed the cooperative to continue without paying "revolutionary taxes."

Lately, however, the NPA renewed its demands for money. This time they demanded P30 million from the poor cooperative. That money the peasants working for the cooperative could only dream about.

When the cooperative, which markets raw sugar products for the "politically correct" market, failed to pay up, the NPA promptly torched their truck. Now the cooperative could not bring its meager products to market. Now the peasants working for the cooperative are impoverished as ever.

In a way, this cooperative is lucky. In other areas, people who fail to pay up money demanded by the communist guerrillas are assassinated. The terror such killings cause enhance the collection efficiency of those taking in "revolutionary taxes."

Regularly, we read reports of farm implements being destroyed, rural buses being stopped and burned, and cell phone towers being blown up by the communist guerrillas. With their arms, the guerrillas have the means to enforce the extortion on which the entire panoply of Maoist groups – including the open, NDF-led mass movements – depend on to cover their overhead costs.

This is the Philippine version of Maoist "self-reliance." It has thus reduced the NPA – on whose shoulders fall the task of raising the revenues for the CPP and its allied groups – into a gang of extortionists.

It seems that when the NPA is not purging its ranks in cyclical bouts of "cleansing", the group is running a wide protection racket. In some areas, it has been reported that the NPA has raised tithes it collects from dirt-poor peasants from 10 percent to a quarter of all the money they manage to make. That is most oppressive on those who are poorest.

Increasing operational costs, mainly going to the urban mass movements that depend on CPP subsidies, will force the NPA to rely on blatant intimidation in order to produce the funds.

There are multiple ironies in this.

First, the urban mass movement seems to be financially dependent on "taxes" collected from the rural poor – simply because the rural poor is more vulnerable to NPA intimidation. Second, the "political" wing of the movement is dependent on the armed wing for financial support – inviting an unseemly shift in influence to one where the guerrilla army dictates on the party rather than the other way around.

At any rate, the more the entire Maoist movement leans on the NPA to produce the money, the more brutal the NPA will be in leaning on the targets of extortion. And the longer the list of atrocities committed by the guerrillas will be.

At about the time Etta Rosales delivered her speech denouncing the CPP-NPA, I read an blog put out by Mardi Mapa.

Mardi is one of the really tireless do-gooders I am proud to count as among my friends. Presently, she is running an NGO that organizes women in the hinterlands of Negros into waving cooperatives. This is means to open up employment opportunities for them.

In her blog, Mardi complains of being harassed by elements of the Revolutionary Proletarian Army (PRA) – a breakaway faction of the communist movement once led by Arturo Tabara. Once the chief of the CPP Visayas Commission, Tabara broke from the diehard leadership of the gang led by Jose Ma. Sison. A few years ago, Tabara was assassinated by NPA gunmen, in the same manner that his colleagues Felimon Lagman, Romulo Kintanar and, lately, Sotero Llamas were rubbed out.

Apparently, Mardi and her group strayed into territory controlled by the PRA. The breakaway faction maintains armed units now helping government in suppressing the CPP-NPA.

The RPA militiamen accused Mardi of organizing for the CPP. What made matters worse was that Mardi was in the company of Benedicto Sanchez, a former ranking CPP cadre who has now reinvented himself as an NGO leader dedicated to helping open livelihood opportunities for the poor of Negros.

Sanchez I know well. He was a buddy in high school and a comrade during the First Quarter Storm. We entered the UP together – and together we were purged from the ROTC for involvement in protest activities.

For the better part of his life, he worked in the political underground for the CPP. Several times he was arrested. Several times, he escaped.

During those years he was underground, he would suddenly surface at the UP to collect my books. Then he would disappear again for years.

Disenchanted with the CPP, he chose to work aboveground, directly assisting the poor to which he had committed his life. Because of his political past, he is now high on the order of battle of the PRA – and probably also of his former comrades in the CPP.

These days, he sometimes surfaces in the frequent high school batch fellowships we organize. When he does, all I can say to him is to move with great care.

He and Mardi have apparently survived that scare with the heavily armed RPA. But the incident tells me that in Negros, as in many remote places in the archipelago, the space for sincere individuals serving the country by working for the poor is extremely tight.

The incident is also indicative of the degree of animosity that persists between rival factions of the communist movement. That animosity has produced casualties over the past few years and will likely continue to take a steady toll in the future.

The poor communities caught in the crossfire between rival leftist factions, and between these and the military and police units, the ground for productive economic activity can very terribly infertile. Small enterprises in the countryside could not prosper under the heavy exactions of leftist extortionists. Entrepreneurs would rather take their life-nurturing investments elsewhere.

I dread imagining the depths to which the rival leftist groups could descend to, under pressure to maintain their logistical requirements in the rural areas whose local economies their very presence undermines.

The pressures of guerrilla life, the complexities of the modern economy that armed young peasant guerrillas could not fully grasp, could lead to terrible outcomes. The small-minded ideology that the peasant guerrillas ingest is insane to begin with. The paranoia that is bred by clandestine bands distant from everyday life and constantly suspicious of everything they do not understand occasionally explodes in orgies of murder.

I am afraid we have not seen the end of the Killing Fields episodes that have wracked the local communist movement. As they come under pressure from the full-blown counter-insurgency offensive, the propensity for unreasonable behavior increases.

What happened in Inopacan, Leyte is not an isolated incident. The silent skulls of those hammered to death by their own overly suspicious comrades are testament to the abnormality the insurgency breeds among its ranks.

Mass fraternal killing is an epidemic whose virus lurks under a very thin veneer of organizational order. Anything could cause that virus to break out once more and take many lives senselessly and cruelly.

Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to the problem. And do-gooders like Mardi Mapa and Benedicto Sanchez, who try to bring the mainstream economy to the remotest villages, risk their lives doing what they do.

They are vulnerable. But what they do is extremely precious.