Victims of Communist Party of the Philippines purge seek justice, closure

(EDITOR'S NOTE: As the Communist Party of the Philippines marks its 35th founding anniversary this Friday, the Inquirer is coming out with this special report on the bloody purges within the party in the 1980s. With the country under Ferdinand Marcos' rule by martial law, the outlawed Marxist-Maoist party rose to the height of its political and military strength. It was also a time of infiltration by "deep-penetration agents" by the Marcos military. Within the party, hundreds of men and women who had dedicated their lives to what they believed was a noble cause, were suspected of being government spies, tortured and killed in secret camps. This is their story.)

LIKE most children who had never seen their father, Sol had longed to meet hers.

"Ma, doesn't Papa love me?" the then four-year-old Sol would ask her mother Bernice Galang. "Why don't I have a photograph of Papa and me together, like Kuya does?"

"Kuya" is Sol's elder brother Karlo, who has a picture with his father when he was a five-month-old baby, but who has not seen him since he was about a year old.

"Ma, when is Papa coming back?" Karlo, then five years old, would ask. "I envy a friend of mine because he plays basketball with his father."

Bernice had to learn basketball so she could assume the role of the "father" with whom her son could play ball.

At the time, Sol and Karlo had been told that their father Gary had passed away. But their young minds could not understand that he was not coming home.

Now 15, Sol wonders how it is to have both parents around -- something that many children take for granted. "I don't know how it feels to have a father," she said.

Neither does Alleyne, whose father Josemarie "Kristo" Enriquez died when she was two years old. Until she was 11, she was made to understand that her father was working abroad, initially in Saudi Arabia and later in the United States.

Alleyne, Sol and Karlo are among the children who lost a parent in the bloody purges that swept the country's underground communist movement between 1982 and 1989.

The campaign of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) against suspected deep-penetration agents of the Armed Forces killed at least a thousand of its cadres, fighters, and trade union, community and youth organizers, plus non-party members, including peasants and church workers.

Scores survived, but they carry scars of physical and mental torture, and memories of how their comrades died in the hands of fellow comrades.

Many of the survivors eventually left the underground movement. Some stayed on to wage a "people's war," now Asia's longest-running communist insurgency.

The CPP would later acknowledge that the victims had not been established as military spies.

Kristo, head of the party's District 6 in Manila, which at the time comprised the Paco, Pandacan and Santa Mesa areas, died in 1988 in Metro Manila. Also that year, Gary, an organizer of out-of-school youth, was killed in the Southern Tagalog region, south of Manila.

Buried in unmarked graves, their remains, like those of hundreds of others, have yet to be found.

IN BROAD daylight on Nov. 19, 1985, three men believed to be from the military seized an assistant of an assemblyman at gunpoint in the office of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines on Edsa in Quezon City, according to a newspaper report the next day.

Three ex-members of the Communist Party of the Philippines said the abductors turned out to be members of the New People's Army hunting down suspected military spies from Mindanao, who were believed to have infiltrated the underground movement. The NPA is the party's armed wing.

The abduction of Dave Barrios -- who, according to two of his ex-comrades, was an economics graduate of the University of the Philippines and member of a group in Metro Manila supporting the guerrilla war in Mindanao -- was not typical of the methods used by the NPA in arresting suspected military spies during the party's anti-infiltration campaigns in the 1980s.

Many cadres were lured by invitations to an emergency meeting, a conference, a cultural presentation, or an exposure program in a guerrilla zone, survivors of the anti-infiltration campaigns said in interviews with the Inquirer.

Once they were inside an NPA camp, they experienced the horrors of imprisonment, torture and, for some, death.

"We are arresting you in the name of the party because you're a DPA (deep-penetration agent)" was what a cadre was told by the leader of the team that arrested him in a camp in Quezon.

Survivors said prisoners were stripped of their rights, setting the stage for maltreatment. The hands and feet of the prisoners in the anti-infiltration campaigns "Operation Missing Link" (OPML) and "Kampanyang Ahos" were bound with chains secured with padlocks.

The prisoners were held in wooden "tiger" cages (4 x 6 x 6 feet) or were bound to a hut without walls in the forests of Quezon and Laguna. (In Metro Manila, suspects were made to wear blue T-shirts to mark them as prisoners of the Manila-Rizal regional committee.)

Those who survived a camp were moved to another camp and then to another and yet another to avoid detection by the military.

There were no cages at an NPA camp at the foot of Mount Apo in 1985. Hounded by the military, the guerrillas and the committee conducting the investigation moved from one camp to the next, usually a group of houses abandoned by their owners because of military operations, according to a former member of the committee.

To humiliate the prisoners, they were given names associated with beasts. A cadre said he was called "Bornok," the name of a monster in a comics series.

Another cadre said pictures of some of the captives were taken, with the threat that these would be made public.

PARANOIA drove the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) into witch-hunting frenzy in the 1980s.

It came to a point that party members could be tagged military spies on the basis of their being too hardworking or too brave. In a region in Mindanao, homosexuality was accepted as a telltale sign that a party member was a spy, said a former member of the CPP Central Committee [heretofore to be referred to as Al].

Setbacks in the battlefield, in which New People's Army (NPA) commanding officers got shot in the back after ambushing government forces, also fed speculation that military spies had infiltrated the underground movement.

What further fueled the panic that triggered Kampanyang Ahos, the anti-infiltration campaign conducted by the CPP Mindanao Commission (Mindacom) in 1985, was a series of arrests of party leaders in the cities of Davao and Cagayan de Oro in the early 1980s, as well as a report that a party member then being interrogated by the military heard the voice of the head of the Northern Mindanao regional committee.

Al also said the arrest of some senior cadres in the late 1970s and early 1980s -- and their subsequent release on the condition that they give information to the military -- strengthened the paranoia. If senior cadres were offered the deal, what more those in the lower units?

Ahos started in Cagayan de Oro, a "white area," with the arrest of three suspected deep-penetration agents (DPAs) in May 1985.

When interrogated, the party members "confessed" to being spies. "They also said those in the regional committee were government agents," Al said, adding:

"The pattern of admission and pointing to people was sideways and upward nationwide because of the use of torture."

As the local units were weeding out suspected DPAs, the Mindanao caretaker committee took the initiative to coordinate the purges.

At the time, four Mindacom members had left the island for a Central Committee plenum in Luzon. The plenum started in March and ended in October.

The caretaker committee adopted the methods for the arrest and interrogation of suspects first used in the 1982 anti-infiltration campaign in the Quezon-Bicol Zone (QBZ).

Copies of the document on the lessons of the anti-DPA campaign were disseminated to other regions after it was declared a "big success."

Torture was extensively used in the QBZ campaign, also known as Cadena de Amor, in reference to the military's anti-insurgency drive of the same name.

"The [Mindacom] generally followed the pattern and methods adopted in Cadena de Amor," Al said.

Special units were formed to go after suspected spies from Mindanao working in Metro Manila, Cebu and other places after the CPP Executive Committee set up a task force to supervise Ahos.

In an attempt to rein in Ahos, the Mindacom issued a set of guidelines in late October in which "generally, torture was not allowed," Al said.

"But we allowed soft torture, which is an undefined terrain," he said. "And we did not deal with the fact that party members lost their rights upon arrest."

SOME former senior cadres of the Communist Party of the Philippines admit accountability for the anti-infiltration campaigns that killed hundreds of its members and supporters in the 1980s.

The CPP also acknowledges that certain people still with the party are culpable, but does not name them.

A former senior united front cadre couches the accountability in philosophical terms.

"I feel a great sense of moral responsibility. Isang mabigat na kasalanan ko (It's my big sin)," said the former cadre, who claimed to have "reflected long and deeply" about Operation Missing Link (OPML), the campaign against suspected government spies in Southern Tagalog region.

"I don't know if it could be akin to the Christian concept of original sin, though," said the former cadre, who was in Southern Tagalog in 1988.

Like the others, the ex-cadre acknowledged that all party officials involved in the OPML were accountable, but said: "Mabigat ang responsibility ng namumuno (The leaders bear a heavy responsibility)."

The former cadre has resolved not to be quiet the next time a similar situation arises: "I won't keep silent because I know it is wrong. I will have to speak up and say that it is wrong."

For now, the former cadre claims to have sought the forgiveness of some of the survivors and to have achieved "peace of mind."

Yet another former senior cadre accepts responsibility for the OPML: "I am not washing my hands of my sins. We are accountable."

A former member of the Mindanao Commission (Mindacom) declared: "We are the perpetrators."

Asked who should be held accountable for the purges, he said: "The leadership, because of command responsibility. It was accountable. We all are."

A former senior cadre who took part in Kampanyang Ahos, the anti-infiltration campaign in Mindanao, said national and regional party leaders should take the blame.

"The Executive Committee of the CPP Central Committee, the entire Mindanao Commission, the regional committees and the regional executive committees in Mindanao have to be held accountable for Kampanyang Ahos," he said, adding:

"Although some Mindacom members were absent at the 'expanded caretaker committee' meeting, all the Mindacom members were involved in the implementation of Ahos."

The ex-senior cadre pointed out that some members of Mindacom and of the regional and regional executive committees were already engaged in anti-infiltration campaigns even before Ahos was implemented.

"For the anti-infiltration purges in general, the entire party Central Committee, as well as the commissions and regional committees in affected regions, should be held accountable," he said.

AT A PUBLIC forum on Feb. 15 in Intramuros, Manila, a group in the audience objected to the airing by survivors and their friends of the horrors of the purges conducted by the Communist Party of the Philippines in the 1980s.

Furious, an official of a militant group rose and said the Dutch Embassy-sponsored forum on the CPP anti-infiltration campaigns and their implications on human rights was aiding the military.

"We don't want the government to use us to destroy the revolutionary movement," activist Carol Pagaduan-Araullo told the audience gathered in a high-ceilinged room at the San Agustin Museum where centuries-old icons, paintings and other church memorabilia were on display.

A number agreed with her position, effectively dividing the audience into those in favor of remembering the witch-hunts and those against.

The incident highlighted the challenges that stand in the way of closure to a dark period in the history of the Philippine underground revolutionary movement.

For many bereaved families, closure means recovering the remains of their loved ones for a proper burial.

Take the case of Felisa C. Herrera, a resident of southern California in the United States, whose son Lionel was executed by his comrades in Davao City in 1985.

"My family and I have accepted his fate, but until such time that we recover his remains and give him a decent burial, we have no closure at all," Herrera wrote the Commission on Human Rights on March 29, 2002.

Before seeking the help of the CHR, Herrera traveled to Davao in July 2001 to look for her son's remains. She had received a call from someone who claimed to be a former communist rebel and who informed her that Lionel was buried in Ma-a District.

"He gave me directions but he was not going to show up," the mother said. "[He said the site] was easy to locate because there was an excavation at the side of the mountain ... apparently for some kind of construction.

"So the next day, I went to that place with my sister and a couple of Pi Sigma members who knew my son. But we could not find anything, for the area was already a wilderness.

"I was so frustrated because the info came from a voice without a face or a name. I [returned] to the US without any positive result."

At a memorial on May 10 for the victims of the purges, Ferdie Llanes, a fraternity brother of Lionel's, said the latter was branded a military spy and arrested when his comrades found that he had a passport.

Llanes was citing the results of the CHR's initial investigation of Lionel's case.

Lionel, then 23, was left in Davao when his parents and younger brother migrated to the United States in April 1985.

"He used to communicate with me through letters and long distance [calls]," Herrera said. "His last call was sometime in August or September."

For a few families, persistence helped to obtain information on their missing kin.

On the tip of a former partisan, three sisters dug for five days last year in northern Metro Manila, using shovels and a pick, in search of their brother's remains.

"We had mixed feelings of excitement and fear because our informant did not know that we would excavate the place," said one of the sisters. "We were also apprehensive of the military."

because they are on the list.

Text: Philippine Communist Party Designated Foreign Terrorist Group

Designation of a Foreign Terrorist Organization
Secretary Colin L. Powell Washington, D.C.
August 9, 2002

Today we are taking another important step in our continuing efforts to combat global terrorism. I am announcing the designation of the Communist Party of the Philippines/New People's Army (CPP/NPA) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, as defined under U.S. law. I made this decision in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Treasury after an exhaustive review of this group's violent activities.

The CPP, a Maoist group, was founded in 1969 with the aim of overthrowing the Philippine government through guerilla warfare. CPP s military wing, the New People s Army, strongly opposes any U.S. presence in the Philippines and has killed U.S. citizens there. The group has also killed, injured, or kidnapped numerous Philippine citizens, including government officials.

By designating the CPP/NPA as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and publishing that decision in the Federal Register, we impose measures against these terrorist groups in accordance with section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended, which was originally enacted as part of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. This law makes it illegal for persons in the United States or subject to U.S. jurisdiction to provide material support or resources to these terrorist groups; it requires U.S. financial institutions to block assets held by them or their agents; and it makes representatives and members of these groups, if they are aliens, inadmissible to and, in certain circumstances, removable from the United States.

With today's designation, the number of Foreign Terrorist Organizations is now 34. FTO designations play a critical role in our fight against terrorism and are an effective means of curtailing support for terrorist activities and pressuring groups to get out of the terrorism business. I hope this list will draw the attention of foreign governments around the world to this group and to the other FTOs. I also hope it will encourage those governments to take action, as we have, to isolate these terrorist organizations, to choke off their sources of financial support, and to prevent their movement across international borders.

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