Captured

For decades, Benito Tiamzon was a man without a face.

Having spent the last 40 years in the communist underground, he went by with assumed names and did without photographs. Over the last two decades, after the schisms and breakaways that racked the CPP in the aftermath of the Edsa Revolution, Tiamzon and his wife Wilma Austria had effective control of the CPP-NPA organization.

Not much is known about Benny Tiamzon. He spent much of his life incognito, a communist bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, looking after the mundane details of keeping the insurgency going. His wife Wilma heads the CPP-NPA finance commission, keeping a tight grip over the movement’s logistics.

All we know about Benny is that he grew up in a quiet Marikina neighborhood and studied at the University of the Philippines. At the UP, he joined the mass organization Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK) as well as the Alpha Sigma Fraternity.

I am sure Gary Olivar, who was with both the SDK and the Alpha Sigma during this period, would know more about this quiet man. Whatever he might be able to recall, however, will be largely irrelevant, superseded by four decades of life in the underground.   

There is no record of Benny Tiamzon ever having delivered a speech before a crowd. He does not seem to have written anything of note. Neither orator nor writer, his merits must lie in exceptional organizational skills.

All we know about Benny Tiamzon, since he disappeared from the UP campus during the days of the barricades, is told to us by way of military intelligence records about his activities.

We are told that Benny, deep in the martial law period, was tasked with leading the communist underground in Samar Island. His work there produced impressive results for the movement. Samar, from the late seventies to the present, has been a CPP stronghold with robust NPA units and encompassing mass organizations to support the armed contingents.

With his strong Samar base, Benny rose to prominence in Party circles. At the CPP central committee, he joined the likes of Romulo Kintanar who built up the movement in Mindanao, Arturo Tabara who consolidated a strong base in Panay Island and Felimon “Popoy” Lagman who chaired the Manila-Rizal regional committee of the CPP and is principally responsible for the notorious Alex Boncayao Brigade.

Kintanar, who once headed the NPA, Tabara and Lagman, after the communist movement was bypassed by the Edsa Revolution, began espousing models of revolutionary insurrection distinct from the orthodox Maoist “protracted people’s war” model championed by Jose Ma. Sison. Because they rejected the orthodox Maoist model, the three eventually composed the “rejectionist” wing of the communist movement.

In the face of dissonant voices within the movement, Sison released a policy paper reaffirming the correctness of “protracted people’s war” for Philippine conditions. His followers were referred to as the “reaffirmists” while followers of the Tabara-Kintanar-Lagman axis were called the “rejectionists.”

Tabara, Kintanar and Lagman, in separate incidents were assassinated, allegedly by their former comrades in the “reaffirmist” camp. Also executed by the CPP, reportedly by his own brother, is Conrado Balweg, leader of the Cordillera People’s Liberation Army (CPLA), effectively a guerrilla front of the NPA. The various tendencies within the general leftwing movement associated with the “rejectionist” wing eventually unraveled and dissipated.

Tiamzon, although he never participated in the theoretical debates that broke out from the late eighties, is generally associated with the “reaffirmist” wing of the CPP-NPA. Possibly guided by his own experiences in Samar Island, he accorded primacy to the role of the armed units in advancing his Maoist conception of the revolution.

With the elimination, by the barrel of the gun, of other possible rivals for leadership of the CPP, the Tiamzon couple took effective control of the communist movement from sometime in the nineties. According to the grapevine, it is actually Wilma Austria who held much stronger views on strategy than her husband Benny. That might be ultimately irrelevant, as the two operated as a tight team and Wilma’s control of party finances gave them uncontested hegemony.

The Tiamzon couple put primacy on strengthening the armed capacity of the communist movement. That eventually brought them into conflict with Sison (and his loyalists based in Holland) as well as with other personalities in the movement who were inclined towards more diverse tactics, including participation in elections.

The Tiamzon couple represented an “army-first” attitude within the movement, holding that all mass organizations must be mere channels for directing logistical support to the NPA.  It is a one-dimensional and inflexible attitude that has been criticized as “militarist” by some of their own comrades. At any rate, the hegemony exercised by the Tiamzon couple marginalized all other factions and points-of-view within the movement.

Call them “hardliners” if you must, although that will tend to blur the nuances. At any rate, the strong centralizing leadership exercised by the Tiamzon couple held together a movement that might have disintegrated into independent rebel bands, each controlled by the local area commanders.

The arrest of the Tiamzon couple and several key members of the CPP central committee will likely lead to the aggravation of two tendencies inherent in an insurgent movement like this one: the weakening of central party control over the dispersed armed units in an archipelagic setting and the weakening of cadre influence over the armed guerrilla units who, after all, hold the guns.

The insurgent movement could degenerate into roving rebel bands and guerrilla warlordism -— as the old PKP did in the fifties after senior party leaders were captured.