One of Asia's most veteran guerrillas is ready to negotiate a conditional delivery of weapons in the coming months. An operation with ingredients of dissolution and defeat, but also of resolution and rehabilitation, after a fight against the State - today democratic, previously dictatorial - for fifty-five years, with 40,000 deaths behind it.
Everything indicates that the Philippine government will resume peace talks in the first quarter of 2024, abandoned in 2017 when the then president, Rodrigo Duterte, slammed the door. This was announced this Tuesday by the Norwegian government, which acts as a mediator, together with the Netherlands.
"There is a common vision for peace," said the host, the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Espen Barth Eide, who only yesterday, Tuesday, disseminated the pre-agreement, as did both parties - government and guerrillas - in separate press conferences. This, however, had already been signed last Thursday, in Oslo City Hall, as a framework "to negotiate the end of violence, attacking its causes."
One of the triggers for the détente is the death, eleven months ago in Utrecht, of José María Sisón, the founder in 1968 of the Maoist-oriented Communist Party of the Philippines (PCF), the nucleus of the "people's war." Sisón, who as a poet used the pseudonym Amado Guerrero - that is, in Spanish - had been in exile in Holland since shortly after his amnesty, at the end of the eighties.
Although Rodrigo Duterte recognized the anti-imperialism of Sison - who had been his teacher - and at the beginning of his mandate he appointed a Minister of Agriculture similar to him, in just over a year he went on to declare war on him.
The New People's Army (NPA), the name of the armed wing of the PCF, today would have about four thousand men and women in arms. Although at its peak, during the opposition to the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., it reached twenty-six thousand. Manila claims that hundreds of guerrillas have come down from the mountains in recent years in exchange for financial assistance and means of subsistence.
Both the military and political fronts are under the umbrella of a larger organization, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, based in the Netherlands and which brings together both legal and clandestine entities. This Front now acts as an interlocutor for the Manila government, since the NPA is considered a terrorist organization.
This time, progress would not have been possible without President Marcos' amnesty last week of several rebels, including members of the NEP-PCF. The pre-agreement would mean an amnesty for those convicted of crimes "of rebellion, sedition and unlawful assembly", although not for those serving prison sentences for blood crimes or kidnappings.
According to the agreed text, the government and the National Democratic Front recognize "the urgent need to address together the challenges facing the nation and to resolve, in a fair and peaceful manner, the causes of the armed conflict", recognizing "the existence of socioeconomic grievances and deeply rooted politicians.
This is the culmination of contacts that began to flow in Holland at the beginning of last year, before coming to fruition in Norway. The same sponsors of the peace talks seven years ago. The rebel negotiator, Julieta de Lima, widow of José María Sisón, could not specify when there will be a formal round, but she assumes that it will be in the first quarter of the year. The key will be, according to her, "immunity for negotiators", the "release of political prisoners" and stopping the movement from being classified as "terrorist".
In other words, the foundations would be being created for the conversion of the National Democratic Front into a legal political party, following the experience of several guerrillas in Latin America.
The prospect of the abandonment of the weapons of ultra-leftism in Luzon and other islands is added to the pacification of parts of the south, in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, overwhelmingly endorsed in 2019 and with greater powers than it ever had. previous incarnation, led by the Moro National Liberation Front.
Mindanao is also the island of Duterte, who was mayor of Davao for many years. The controversial and foul-mouthed former president has recently threatened to return to the political arena. Apparently, not everything is going smoothly in the alliance between his daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, and President Ferdinand Marcos, son of the late dictator of the same name.
Although the real point of friction seems to be the possibility that Marcos once again recognizes the International Court of The Hague, years after Duterte removed the Philippines from its jurisdiction, so as not to be persecuted for his war against small and medium-sized traffickers. of drugs. A pulse that, following the example of Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, earned him numerous sympathies in the country and condemnations abroad.
It should be said that the communist guerrilla lost its main reason for existence with the fall of the Marcos dictatorship. In the previous thirty years there were forty rounds of talks, but this time it could be different, with the physical disappearance of the founder.
Those conversations with Duterte, a weather-beaten president, derailed because he did not want or could not respond to the organization's request to amnesty some 390 "political prisoners." Duterte seized on the attack against a police officer in which a baby also died to declare war on the organization, with the most profane language imaginable, at a time when he already had too many open fronts with Washington, due to his initial approach to China and even Russia.
His admired Ferdinand Marcos father, who was one of the closest allies of the United States during the Vietnam War, detained, tortured and murdered thousands of Filipino communist militants from 1971 until the overthrow of his kleptocratic dictatorship in 1986. The amnesty to These - including Sison - was a recognition of their sacrifices by democratic President Corazon Aquino.
Today, even the head of the Armed Forces, General Romeo Brawner Jr., seems to welcome some type of amnesty and guerrilla demobilization, something that would allow the military to concentrate on the defense of the Philippine borders and not on search and capture. of internal enemies.
