The investigation was code-named Operasyon Kampanyang Ahos (Kahos), a metaphor inspired by the potency of garlic (ahos in Cebuano) in repelling evil spirits and demonyos (demons), which in Party parlance was how the military was commonly described. [2] Kahos began in the provinces of Misamis Oriental and Bukidnon but quickly spread throughout Mindanao. [3] In its frenzied effort to “contain” and eliminate the problem, the caretaker group sanctioned the use of torture (“hard tactics”) to obtain confessions. It also approved the use of testimonies drawn from at least two tortured suspects as evidence against other suspects. [4] A third directive was the most fatal: political officers of basic party cells and of NPA platoons were given the power to act as judge, jury and executioner. Suspects were not given the right to appeal to a higher body, and those who “admitted” their “crimes” were promptly executed. [5]

What began then as a systematic investigation turned out to be a brutal affair. The directives did not only cause panic and hysteria; they promptly transformed Kahos into an out-of-control bloody Mindanao-wide investigation to ferret out and eliminate suspected and real spies. [6] Stories of cadres and activists who were ordered to go to the guerrilla zones “for consultation” and then did not return began to circulate within Mindanao. Unable to get a clear explanation from their leaders, many cadres who received these notices fled from their areas after hearing of such stories; others simply resigned their posts. The alleged formation of special “investigation teams” sent from the countryside to as far as Cebu and Manila to pursue and mete out the “appropriate punishment” to “traitors” and spies only aggravated fears inside. One cadre painfully recalled what happened in the NPA camps all over Mindanao where suspected spies were interrogated and eventually killed by their interrogators:

The arrested persons were herded into investigation camps, brutalized in a Kafkaesque manner by tormentors equally brutalized by their own brutality. Many of them perished by torture not by any formal act of a death sentence. But to be brought to those camps, stripped of their basic rights as human persons, and subjected to torture was already tantamount to a death penalty. [7]

The killings shocked the returning Mindacom leaders who immediately issued an order to discontinue Kahos. This, however, came belatedly—three months after the killings had already taken their toll. The distrust had spread to even include Mindacom itself, making it doubly difficult to implement the order particularly in guerrilla zones where NPA units had become extremely suspicious and closed the zones against outsiders, including even the Party leadership. It took another six months before a task force organized purposely to end Kahos had stopped the killings. [8]

The formal discontinuance of Kahos, however, did not necessarily mean an admission that a serious mistake had been made. While conceding that “excesses” did happen, Mindacom also insisted that the “campaign” was a success and that it did weed out spies among the ranks. With most of its leaders retaining influence, supporters, or control of important positions inside the Party’s powerful Politburo, the report was officially accepted. However, as more stories of “mass executions” came to light, admitted even by media people sympathetic to the revolution in Luzon, and began to filter into the public sphere, the Party was forced to alter its position. [9]

In 1989, the Politburo issued a new explanation for Kahos: it called the killings a major mistake brought about by “ideological errors” that warped the investigation and allowed for paranoia to break out within the ranks and cause the unwarranted and uncontrolled killings. Mindacom reluctantly accepted this revisionist assessment, qualifying its acceptance however by asserting that while Kahos decimated the organization, it failed to destroy it completely. It then almost instantaneously announced that the movement was already on the road to recovery, fast reclaiming its presence in Mindanao. [10]

These Party actions—revising an official evaluation, then claiming a crisis was over—did not erase the devastating impact of Kahos. The killing cost the CPP dearly. While it did ferret out military spies, Kahos’s victims were mainly loyal cadres, guerrillas, and activists whose only transgression was to be critical of and disagree with Party policies. [11] Within a six-month period, 950 cadres, guerrillas, and activists were executed for being demonyo suspects. [12] The dislocation was massive—in nine months party membership declined from nine thousand to a mere three thousand due to resignation, surrender, or AWOL; the NPA was reduced from fifteen or sixteen companies to a mere two, supported by seventeen platoons; and the CPP lost over 50 percent of its mass base. [13] Reports of Kahos-like incidents in Southern Luzon, albeit on a minor scale, worsened matters for a CPP already placed on the political defensive after 1986. By the end of the decade, the CPP was experiencing the most serious crisis of its twenty-year history, with Kahos being the most painful of all its misfortunes.

Why did Kahos happen, and why most intensely in Mindanao? Existing explanations within and outside the CPP focus on two themes. One interpretation regards Kahos as the ultimate effect of an internal struggle over revolutionary strategy. Another view suggests that Kahos was the disastrous aftermath of an authoritarian paranoia that grows within Leninist parties in crisis. This essay posits a parallel explanation that looks at Kahos within the structural and historical frames that helped to shape it. It argues that Mindanao, as the Philippine’s last land frontier, was “closing” up fast demographically. But even as it was doing so, the social instabilities continued, in part caused by the war that broke out between the military and armed Muslim separatists, but also in part caused by a more intrusive Philippine national state that sought to integrate Mindanao closer into its “developmentalist goals.” I am suggesting that “closure” did not normalize Mindanao’s demography by calcifying emergent social ties. On the contrary, the closure exacerbated social instabilities and mutated social relations. It was this contextual flux within which the CPP grew. It would reap its benefits, but it would also fall victim to its outcomes.

In returning to the importance of context, I do not claim that this essay’s argument fully explains the emergence of Kahos. There may be merit in looking at this disaster as a product of paranoia or as a fallout of failed strategies. However, I do maintain that context and history cannot be ignored as fundamental factors, and in the light of the prevailing explanations for Kahos, this essay hopes to reassert the importance of the larger frame. Kahos, however, remains to be fully explored. A full understanding of the killings warrants in-depth field research to collect and record especially interviews and conversations with the survivors, the victims’ kin, the perpetrators, Party leaders, and other actors and actresses involved in it. It also requires conducting a more intensive comparative study of Mindanao and other regions in the Philippines where the CPP is/was active and where Kahos-type killings did and did not happen. Finally, a full contextualization of Kahos inevitably leads us to the “larger phenomenon” of Filipino communism itself—a topic which I am, at this stage, ill-prepared to deal with. This essay must then be seen as one of the many windows opened on the subject. As such, the essay is itself open to criticism and revision by those who decide to investigate much more fully the still uncharted territories of contemporary Filipino communism.

THE KAHOS DEBATE: THE VERSIONS AND THEIR AUTHORS

The 1986 “tactical mistake” of ordering its forces to stay away from the confrontation between Marcos and Aquino was the catalyst that would bring forth longsuppressed but unsettled internal problems inside the CPP. The Party began to unravel, ultimately splintering in 1989 into two factions that disagreed over almost every significant topic: interpretations of the Party’s history, the value of its fidelity to Maoism, questions about the united front, assessment of the Marcos and postMarcos periods (especially on how to deal with the popular Aquino), evaluation of the crisis socialism with the breakdown of Eastern Europe, and predictions for the future of the Philippine Left. [14] However, the most divisive issue that, in a way, precipitated the CPP’s split was Kahos. [15]

The faction that fired the first salvo was the group identified with Jose Ma. Sison, founding chairman of the CPP who regained control of the party from a younger group of leaders known to be critical of Sison’s obstinate devotion to Maoism. [16] In a 1991 document that “re-affirmed” the CPP’s return to its Maoist roots, Sison made extensive use of Kahos as proof of his rivals “political opportunism.” [17] Pointing to the killings as “a devastation [that] was unprecedented in the entire history of the Philippine revolution,” Sison linked Kahos to what he called “the worst kind of dogmatism” inside Mindacom. He argued that Mindacom dogmatism was best illustrated by that group’s adoption and imposition of the Sandinista model on Philippine conditions in hopes of creating a “revolutionary situation” that would usher in the final confrontation between dictatorship and revolution. This deviation from the Maoist strategy of people’s war induced the “worst kind of disorientation” which in turn, prompted a series of other mistakes leading fatally to Kahos. But the worst thing, according to Sison, was that those responsible for the killings were absolved of their crimes and even managed to circumscribe a full-blown investigation into the tragedy due to their powerful positions in the Party. [18]

With the Party leadership under its firm control, the Sison faction saw its chance to push for a reinterpretation of Kahos among the ranks of disoriented party followers. (The arrest of his rivals during the years 1988-91 facilitated the seizure of power by the Sison faction.) It sanctioned the slogan “wrong line, temporary military success, and urban pasiklab, enemy counter-action, and finally Kahos” as the official explanation for the tragedy, even as it initiated a “re-orientation” of loyal Mindanao cadres. [19] Sison, in the meanwhile, ordered the expulsion of those linked to Kahos, calling them “renegades” and promoters of “gangsterism, grave abuse of authority, corruption of partisan units and men [and] criminal neglect” inside the Party. [20]

The ferocity of Sison’s attacks stunned his rivals. [21] For a time, most thought naively that the debate could be handled along comradely lines and also by deferring to Sison as Party founder. [22] Some were at a loss to decide how to respond to this systematic, all-out attack on them, while others warned of a witchhunt and the threat of “a form of one-man rule” inside the Party. [23] As they recovered from initial attacks by the Sison faction, these variously splintered units and individuals began to coalesce into a “Democratic Opposition” inside and outside the CPP. [24] This consolidation also led to a much better response to the attacks from the Sison faction, among which were the cadres whom Sison accused of being responsible for Kahos. [25] Their initial response was to deny that the shift in strategy caused the tragedy. They would also insist that the “excesses” notwithstanding, Kahos was a success, and that the setbacks because of the killings were being systematically remedied. [26]

The “Rejectionists” also took the offensive arguing that the attention focused on the killings had obscured the significance of the Mindanao comeback. [27] Once Sison turned on the heat, however, there was no way his rivals could skirt Kahos. Most preferred to look at Kahos in relation to the debates over strategy. A former Mindacom leader named Ka Taquio agreed that Kahos was a product of an “ideological error” and that a “militarist tendency” inside the Mindacom organization led to “the narrow interpretation of class struggle as violent elimination of the enemies (and a) mechanical interpretation of the Maoist principle ‘political power grows out of the barrel of the gun.’” However, he strongly disagreed with Sison’s argument tying Kahos to a deviation from Maoism. He notes:

It is difficult to imagine whether the so-called ‘erroneous line of quick military victory’ and ‘wishful armed insurrection’ was one of the root causes of the Kahos debacle because in the first place, it still has to be proven whether such an erroneous line really took shape . . . [It] was more a lack of seeking truth from facts and actual processes and procedures in the Party that caused the Kahos campaign to snowball without the tight control of the Commission. ... [All this was due to] a limited familiarity with the Marxist tools for assessment and summing up. [28]

Paco Arguelles, the author cited in the introduction of this essay, responded to Sison along the same lines, stating emphatically that Kahos “was the decisive factor in the sharp decline of revolutionary strength on the island” and not an “erroneous line” promoted by Mindacom. He questioned Sison’s selective use of evidence, his failure to use “Marxist analysis” and a penchant for “reductionism” in explaining both Kahos and the general condition of the CPP. Arguelles turned Sison’s argument on its head by questioning the viability of Maoist strategy itself. He argued that “the limited and low level of capability of the theory of protracted people’s war in grasping, throwing light on, and guiding the revolutionary process of the country” was in fact the real culprit that made Kahos possible. [29]

Others, however, insisted that there was something inherently wrong inside the Party’s way of life. A “Standing Group” of the Visayas Commission (VISCOM) disputed Sison’s assertion that Kahos flowed out of Mindacom’s “adventurist” policies of “insurrectionism,” insisting that the killings were the byproduct of excessive paranoia and mistrust inside the Party. They called Kahos a “right error” reflective of a larger problem—that of a failure of strategy to adopt to changing conditions, a failure which allowed sentiments like paranoia to persist. [30]

Walden Bello, however, broadens his argument by claiming that Kahos was the dire outcome of Marxist-Leninist politics itself. He argues:

An instrumental view of people is a tendency that affects particularly activists in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, making them vulnerable during moments of paranoia at the height of the revolutionary struggle to expedient solutions involving the physical elimination of real or imagined enemies. In normal times, the combination of a tactical view of people, ideological fervor, youth, and the gun already carries a threat potential. Touched off by social paranoia, it can easily become an uncontrollable force, as it did in Mindanao and Southern Tagalog. [31]

Bello, a long-time leader of the American anti-Marcos solidarity network, conducted interviews with survivors of Kahos and came to the conclusion also that “the absence of an institutionalized system of justice and scientific assessment. . . allowed paranoia to spread unchecked.”

The efforts of members in the emerging anti-Sison group to respond to the criticisms of “Reaffirm,” however, was blunted by one decisive factor: Kahos had weakened their positions in the CPP leadership and undermined their abilities to respond to the Sison group’s assaults. Some of their leading spokespersons were accused of being involved in one way or the other in the killings, while others had been displaced from their positions of power and influence due to imprisonment or to the varied organizational ruses employed by their rivals. In the end, therefore, it was the Sison group which gained the upper hand in the Kahos debates, and within Philippine Left circles today, their version has become the “official” story. [32]

(RE)SORTING THE NARRATIVES: THE MISSING CONTEXT

Kahos may very well have been caused by all the reasons cited above. There is enough evidence of paranoia existing inside the CPP, as well as evidence to show that members who were caught up in Kahos challenged the Maoist paradigm, as Sison claimed. Kahos could also be the product of a multiple number of causes, some apparently traceable to the CPP’s nature as an underground organization, a conspiratorial organization disadvantaged by the deficient “ideological” training of its cadres and activists.

Yet, even within these contrasting positions, certain flaws in the Party are camouflaged and ignored. Most importantly, in their efforts to validate their own visions of the suitable CPP strategy, both sides actually ended up reifying Kahos. Sison and his opponents could be faulted for understating the nature of the tragedy by using it as a mere empirical source to confirm their respective strategic preferences while repudiating the others. Even the Visayas “Standing Group,” perhaps the nearest among the CPP cadres to recognize the tragedy of Kahos, unavoidably contextualized it within a discussion of how best to win power in the Philippines. Thus enclosing Kahos inside this conceptual frame, they—like others—depreciated the profound implications of the tragedy. [33]

Neither can arguments about “low ideological training” sufficiently explain the eruption of Kahos. Revolutionaries never attain the perfect ideological state where they and their followers can profess complete devotion to the cause. Multi-layered, complex individuals bring to the organization different levels of perceptions, various levels of commitment to the prevailing doctrine, and different propensities when it comes time to act on those doctrines. Moreover, time and again, communists always encounter “problems” from below, which may arise when “little traditions” resist directives from above, or conversely, when the more elite members of a revolutionary body lack adequate ideological sensitivity to popular sentiments and consciousness. [34]

Only Bello appeared to have taken Kahos seriously. But even he still ended up digressing towards using Kahos as a didactic example to score theoretical points by bringing in his critique of Leninist vanguardist politics in the Philippines via Kahos. His argument that, by being Leninist, the CPP all-but-naturally deteriorated into instrumentalist politics and thus made itself ready for Kahos betrays an ahistorical understanding of the nuanced development of the Party.

Looking back at the biggest crisis of the Party before the tragedy—that of the rift between Manila-Rizal Executive Committee (KT-MR) and the Central Committee in 1978—one is surprised to note that the purge ordered by the latter never led to executions. As the documents of that period show, there were not only considerable democratic exchanges between the two party organizations, the Central Committee was surprisingly tolerant of the Manila regional committee for a while, giving it remarkable leeway to try to prove its point. The decision to purge only came at the last minute when, despite evidence to the contrary, the KT-MR had come to believe its own logic that an anti-Marcos coalition could win in an election stage-managed by the dictatorship. Bello may be correct in expressing his wariness towards Leninist instrumentalism, but he must reconcile his theoretical-psychological argument with that of a history showing a CPP acting less as a centralized organization and more like a set of “squabbling sects.” [35]

In short, both these sets of explanations—one which describes Kahos as a byproduct of errors in strategy (orthodox or otherwise), and the other, which describes Kahos as the fatal outcome of paranoia and Leninist instrumentalism—cannot fully account for the tragedy because they remove it from its historical moorings and ultimately shove it into a minor place of import. The debates thus regressed until they had become nothing more than an ideological version of “who is to blame” while transmuting Kahos into an incident caused by individuals or groups of individuals obsessed by an agenda. The essays in the Red Book and other writings, aside from their revelatory features, are notable for their incessant propensity to quibble over facts, the inclusion and/or exclusion of evidence, and mutual charges of selective data use, all to validate each other’s assumptions and ideological presuppositions. Somewhere along the way, Kahos disappeared amidst the brawl over the right evidence. In the din of the rhetoric, the tragedy’s meaning and import got lost.

It is not surprising therefore that none of the various antagonists ever considered explaining Kahos as the outcome of the structural features of Mindanao society itself and the manner in which CPP cadres adjusted their organizing to that society. Why, for example, did an organization as schooled in conspiracies as the CPP only respond with such widespread brutality in 1985, and only in Mindanao? Why not in the periods before 1985, and why not as massively as in other areas? Such questions, normally expected to be posed by Marxist analysis, do not appear in any of the internal Party tracts that tried to explain the tragedy. None took into consideration the “instabilities” of Mindanao society nor the more inherent features of the island as a land frontier.

Once removed from its historical context, Kahos was eventually explained away as a psychological malady. The contending factions oddly ended up sharing this conclusion as the litter of terms like “collective paranoia,” “over-suspiciousness,” “hysteria,” and “madness” found in all the writings suggests. If the historical terrain upon which Kahos rested had been reified, so would the social context upon which it stood. In the succeeding pages, I would like to elaborate on this context, without necessarily arguing a direct causality between this context and Kahos but instead suggesting that the structural-historical frame cannot be ignored if one wishes to arrive at a multi-causal explanation of Kahos.

REASSESSING COMMUNISTS AND FRONTIERS

The CPP came to Mindanao at a crucial period in the island’s evolution as the Philippines’ last large island frontier. While the Party’s first attempts to set up guerrilla units and underground cells in Mindanao ended up in failure, it was initially saved by two political developments: the Muslim armed separatist movement and the radicalization of the Mindanao church. [36] The war waged by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) drew over 60 percent of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) into the Muslim provinces, thereby creating a “breathing spell” which allowed communists to try again. [37] Party organizing was facilitated when Catholic clergy, nuns and laity began drifting towards a Filipino “theology of struggle” as they sought to protect their flock from an increasingly militarized society. This “religious sector” became the CPP’s biggest resource base as well the foundation upon which an island-wide network of legal and underground organizations was created. [38]

In five years (1975-80), Mindanao communists had recovered to become the fastest growing regional organization of the Party. By 1980, conditions had remarkably changed, so much so that in its Eight Plenum, the Central Committee established Mindacom to supervise island-wide revolutionary activities.

Yet it was not only the secessionist war nor a radicalizing religious that gave CPP cadres their new lease of life. The fluidity of Mindanao itself made it ripe for radical expansion. Everything associated with a frontier “filling up” was in evidence by the late 1960s and early 1970s: increased population density, decline of land to people ratio, and, in settler-dominated areas like southeastern Mindanao, the re-emergence of early stages of land concentration, tenancy, and class stratification. The frontier had not only lost its efficacy as a safety valve because it had reached the limits of its absorptive capacity, it also began to mimic land-related problems in more denselypopulated areas with highly-skewed land ownership and concentration. [39]

As demographic changes during the period signaled frontier closure, the other side of the coin, capitalist expansion to tap the island’s rich resources, also grew. Domestic and foreign corporations had launched a drive to invest in agriculture, notably pineapple and bananas, to expand existing industries like timber, and to make initial moves to open up more of the island’s mineral resources. [40] Not unlike the northern Brazilian frontier, demographic saturation and capitalist penetration eventuated into different kinds of tensions, the most serious of which occurred between indigenous and settler communities fighting against each other over land ownership, and against expanding corporate capital seeking freer access to land and mineral resources. [41] Those with the capacity to fight back, like the Muslims, did so, while others were marginalized. The Muslim resistance began as a land-related conflict but was soon transformed into a religious war which escalated once the Philippine military stepped in to suppress it. [42]

Tensions, however, were not increasing solely in the Muslim areas. Social friction over land ownership, access, and use also began to affect erstwhile “stable” provinces at just about the time the Muslim secessionist war broke out. In the northeast and southeastern portions of Mindanao, reports of land conflict had become regular news fare. [43] Clearly, with very few exceptions, the general consequence of these massive changes was the exclusion, impoverishment and marginalization of indigenous and settler communities in Mindanao. [44]

Martial law was the final qualitative twist to all these changes. Pace the arguments of scholars re-examining contemporary Mindanao politics, the intrusion of the national state in 1973 signaled stronger state involvement in Mindanao as compared to earlier periods. Unlike its predecessors, who gave Mindanao only cursory attention, the Marcos dictatorship exerted the strongest and most directed effort at asserting state power in Mindanao to date. [45] Muslim armed secessionism was the initial reason for this unparalleled state intrusion. Over 60 percent of the military was involved in containing a rebellion where undisguised brutality had become the norm. The military war effort—despite an impasse in 1977-78—also became the justification for the national state to maintain its overarching presence in the island, the first time since the US Army administered the Moro Province at the turn of the century. The bulk of the army would stay in Mindanao, although by the 1980s it had a different enemy—the CPP.

The dictatorship not only escalated its presence to contain the Muslim rebellion; it also sought to integrate Mindanao into its “developmentalist agenda.” State centralization activated old national agencies as well as creating new ones, and with ample external financing, the dictatorship undertook a massive infrastructure program designed to make Mindanao and its resources more accessible to capital.

One author notes that over twenty-seven billion pesos were poured into Mindanao during the 1970s; eleven major road projects were funded through sixtyeight million dollars external financing and 1.4 billion pesos local counterpart. [46] Specific regions also became prime targets; in southwestern Mindanao, for example, Australian economic assistance totaling $A 50.4 million (with local counterpart of $A 43.1 million) helped establish the Zamboanga del Sur Development Project which undertook the infrastructure development of the area. Its total budget, resources and personnel, observes one author, “exceeded that of the provincial government and the line agencies of the national government in the province.” [47] The impact of this massive developmentalist thrust may have benefited some, but it also exposed various communities to the vagaries of economic transformation. Infrastructure opened up inaccessible areas and hastened land re-classification, which, in turn, brought in more dominant economic actors like foreign and local investors, to the detriment of communities in the island. [48]

The 1970s, therefore, was a decade of unusual volatility, and the economic and social instabilities provided the CPP with various sources of potential partisans from within the ranks of these affected communities. It was under these intensely turbulent conditions that the CPP grew remarkably after its 1975 miscues. From the ranks of these marginalized groups, the CPP recruited its first generation of cadres. [49] The MNLF war also presented the Party with a potentially powerful ally who, if handled well, could be convinced to work together with the CPP in eroding the national state in Mindanao. [50] Under new leadership consisting of cadres from Manila as well as those “indigenous” to the place, Mindacom lost no time consolidating Party growth while shaping larger plans for the future. [51] It systematized the available party data base on the difference provinces of the island, introduced some measure of “professionalism” into cadre training, organizational procedures and routines, and established more systematic training for NPA guerrillas.

Mindacom also initiated contacts with potential non-communist “allies,” notably anti-Marcos groups like the MNLF, church and human rights groups, and politicians displaced by the declaration of martial law. The aim was to build a broad coalition that would spearhead the anti-dictatorship movement in Mindanao under the direction of the CPP. The administrative talents of Mindacom leaders, not to mention the enthusiasm with which they set themselves to task, immediately showed astounding results. In a year’s time, the Mindanao CPP had become the strongest of all the regional bodies of the Party, outdistancing Central Luzon and Manila. It had also replaced the MNLF as the strongest threat to the dictatorship.

There are no exact statistical data on the numerical rise of the Party and the NPA in Mindanao, as compared to other regions. Security considerations figured prominently in the blurring of positions, but the lack of very clear data was also due to the actual absence of any effort to distinguish the Party from its “people’s army” or its “mass activists.” One may be able to draw certain tentative inferences from available information in hand, however. A declassified aerogram from the US consulate in Cebu reported an upsurge in NPA activity in eastern and northern Mindanao in the 1980s as well as Party expansion in provinces hitherto the domain of the MNLF, like the Lanao provinces. In eastern Mindanao (consisting of the provinces of Davao del Norte, Davao Oriental, Agusan and Surigao), the report cited a 30-50 percent increase in the number of NPA personnel, reaching a high 950 guerrilla force with 288 weapons of various types. [52] Based on the figures supplied in Table 1, one can extrapolate that Mindanao communists in 1981 comprised 15.7 percent of the total CPP-NPA force. Assuming that this percentage remained consistent, and using the US embassy figures as a base, one can thus make the inference that Mindanao communists grew from 950 in 1981 to as many as 2,396 on the eve of Kahos. This also meant that those who were killed or resigned roughly comprised 40 percent of the entire Mindanao communist force.

Given the ambiguity of the figures, other indicators of Mindacom’s growing importance as the new and vital cog in the revolutionary wheel could be seen in the following areas: the promotion of its leaders and the manner in which Mindacom as a “lower organ” related to the central leadership. In 1980, its top leaders were promoted to important party bodies. The Party center likewise gave Mindacom considerable latitude to experiment with strategy. This was partly in compliance with a policy laid down in the mid-1970s; but it was also partly the center’s admission of Mindacom’s extraordinary mobilizing capacities.

From here, Mindacom immediately initiated a series of “mass struggles” revolving around issues that ranged from campus reforms to anti-militarization. These were soon supplanted by larger “multi-sectoral” anti-dictatorship mobilizations, some of which involved as many as 150,000 people. [53] The 1983 assassination of Benigno Aquino, Jr., provoked more mobilization as new anti-Marcos groups materialized among the hitherto uninvolved middle class and worked in tandem with if not parallel to CPP-influenced organizations. By the middle of the decade, Mindacom was launching the first of its welgang bayan, popular strikes staged to choke key road arteries all over Mindanao, thereby disrupting industrial and commercial activities and keeping the military in constant disequilibrium. [54] These “advances” reinforced the confidence of Mindanao communists to a point where Mindacom cadres proposed to the Party leadership an alteration in the strategy. Using the welga as model (and inspiration), Mindacom began lobbying for a modified ruse de guerre which would emphasize what they called a “politico-military framework” (pol-mil).

Table 1. CPP/NPA Armed Strength

Year	Regulars	Firearms	Mindanao CPP/NPA (estimate)**
1969	250	300	—
1970	245	240	—
1971	500	700	—
1972	1,320	1,520	—
1973	1,900	1,515	—
1974	1,800	1,600	—
1975	1,800	1,620	—
1976	1,200	1,000	—
1977	2,300	1,700	—
1978	2,760	1,900	—
1979	4,908	1,960	—
1980	5,621	2,843	—
1981	6,013	2,546	950
1982	7,000	2,500	1,050
1983	8,900	4,620	1,335
1984	10,570	8,351	1,585
1985	15,978	10,125	2,396
1986	16,018	11,179	2,402
1987**	25,000	15,000	3,750***

_{Sources: Felipe B. Miranda and Ruben F. Ciron, “The Philippines: Defence Expenditures, Threat Perceptions and the Role of the United States,” in Chin Kin Wah, ed., Defence Spending in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 1987), p. 138.}

_{** Asiaweek Magazine, Nov. 2,1994 and from extrapolation of data provided by US Embassy; assuming that Mindanao CPP consistently make up 15 percent of the total CPP-NPA force.}

_{*** The calculation is based on the assumption that Kahos casualties had not been taken into account yet.}

Using the 1981 Central Committee declaration that the “last sub-stage of the strategic defensive” was soon to give way to a “strategic counter-offensive” (SCO) phase, Mindacom proposed that the Party replace Maoist strategy with “pol-mil.” Adopting the latter would require the CPP to do away with Maoism’s “constrictive dichotomy” of defining arenas of resistance, a stubborn partiality to countryside resistance over urban political and armed mobilization, and an image of the revolution as “advancing in waves” from the countryside to the cities with the decisive confrontation between state and revolution still decades ahead. The alternative polmil framework would exercise a fair amount of flexibility, combining “all forms of struggle,” with the final confrontation not to be decided by just the rural guerrilla army’s tempo of development. [55]

The apparent effectiveness of the strikes in paralyzing Mindanao from late 1983 throughout 1984 became the justification for Mindacom leaders to continue pushing for a new strategy, and in fact they experimented with pol-mil without apparent sanction from the center. The welgang bayan were broadened into mini-uprisings which combined strikes with the increased use of NPA “armed city partisans” in urban and town centers. [56] NPA guerrilla units were also reorganized into “larger mobile formations” and ordered to engage the military in set battles aside from the usual “war of the flea” types of confrontations. As NPA attacks, strikes, and urban assassinations increased in tempo and intensity all over Mindanao, so too did the confidence of Mindacom that it would soon enough pressure the Party to adopt the new strategy. And as long as the welgang bayan appeared to be working, leaders in the Party center—although expressing discomfort at the deviation—could not do anything.

The excitement also suggested a more fundamental evolution within Mindacom. The series of “autonomous actions” that its cadres initiated not only signified inventive improvisation; more importantly, it evinced the power of a regional body to pursue its own goals independent of its superior’s original intentions. In the 1980s, therefore, the surprising expansion of Mindanao communism had two notably contradictory features. On the one hand, a rapid escalation of the revolution occurred both organizationally and in terms of political influence. [57] On the other hand, a growing tension between Mindacom and its superiors developed as the former continued to proceed with its own plans. [58] These fairly common, and perhaps predictable, tensions between the “small tradition” (Mindanao communism) and the super-ordinate and “bigger” counterpart produced a recurring sideshow to accompany the overall drama of a CPP coping with rapid changes after 1983. The calling of a plenum in early 1985 was regarded as an effort to ease the tension while preparing the Party for what was thought of as the final confrontation with the dictatorship by the end of the decade. Kahos changed all this; an aggravating factor was to be the CPP’s fatal mistake of boycotting the 1986 elections. [59]

THE BREAKDOWN OF MINDANAO COMMUNISM

If demographic changes, active national state intervention, a “neighboring” secessionist war, and an imaginative corps of cadres catapulted Mindanao communism to political prominence (and notoriety), the very same factors would become its bane. For out of these processes emerged conditions which, while allowing Mindanao communists to expand swiftly, also made that growth unsteady and quite brittle.

The resurrection of social and class stratification in settler communities, for example, had as one of its effects the creation of rural underclasses, particularly new tenants and landless peasants. These new groups would be the main sources of mass activist and NPA guerrilla recruits as well as sympathizers of the revolution.

Yet, the appearance of these underclasses also indicate that as settler communities sink their roots into new settings, so also do social relations also become rooted and begin to define how people and groups relate to each other. Simply put, class relations may be unjust, but they also function as a stabilizing agent for communities, especially in settler areas. In Mindanao, this “normalization” of frontier life was derailed at its early stage and thus was not able to set itself upon more enduring foundations.

Table 2. Estimates of Net Migration Exchange for Provinces of Mindanao and Sulu, 1960-1970 and 1970-1975

Provinces	1960-70	1970-75
Agusan	+60,291	-18,201
Bukidnon	+106,100	+33,808
Cotabato	+127,533	-89,163
Davao	+191,080	+91,586
Lanao del Norte	-21,899	-28,802
Misamis Occidental	-13,178	-5,705
Misamis Oriental	-6,814	+765
Sulu	-16,098	-76,407
Surigao	-188	+22,310
Zamboanga del Norte	+9,739	+11,597
Zamboanga del Sur	+2,009	-40,341

_{Source: Michael Costello, “Social Change in Mindanao: A Review of the Research of the Decade,” Kinaadman: A Journal of the Southern Philippines 6 (1984): 5.}

Demographic and migratory patterns were disrupted by the massive population shifts within Mindanao itself, these were caused in part by the Muslim secessionist war, but also aggravated by the initial impact of the dictatorship’s developmentalist agenda. “Christian” and “Muslim” provinces that adjoined each other experienced constant population changes as the conflict forced people to flee to ethnically congenial areas. [60] In fact, between 1970 and 1975, despite an aggregate population growth due to increased migration, the distribution of migrants was fairly uneven, with the more turbulent areas experiencing out-migration and more stable ones suddenly facing a deluge of new “home-seekers.” Table 2 above gives us a sense of the demographic commotion going on during the period.

From the figures one can trace the frequent shifting of people who had very little time to establish themselves at a place of their choice. Social ties, including class relations, had no time to root themselves as people moved from one place to the other. The war with the MNLF in particular created “internal refugees” from out of the affected provinces. Instead, new instabilities began to materialize, partly as a result of renewed competition over land and resources between newcomers and those who preceded them. The tensions would disrupt not only nascent social ties but also social rhythms and routines necessary to steady a community’s life.

It is especially worthy to note that in the provinces where the most extensive Kahos killings were said to have been committed—northern Davao, Surigao, Zamboanga del Sur and the Misamis-Bukidnon boundary—population pressure had increased significantly, not so much due to an influx of incoming settlers from northern and central Philippines, but to an incursion of Mindanao residents who had settled on the island but, menaced by war and also seeking better land opportunities, chose to migrate to new provinces. Social ties therefore remained unstable in these areas; the rapid capitalist transformation of the Mindanao countryside would merely exacerbate these instabilities, as settler communities felt the impact of the intrusion of corporate agriculture into their lives. [61]

The changes were not exclusive to the settled countryside. Increased state and capital penetration likewise animated placid urban and town centers, turning them, almost overnight, into “growth points” for economic expansion. [62] These areas began to attract migrants although they were structurally unprepared to absorb them. One immediate effect was an urban version of rural tensions; as one sociologist notes , the “rapid rates of urban growth [became] a two-edged sword [with the] probability that the supply of in-migrating to the cities may exceed the number of viable opportunities found there.” [63]

The inability of the urban areas to absorb immigration and the unpreparedness of local officials to anticipate the transformation of their cities into “growth points” resulted in the enlargement of their “slum communities” and uncontrolled urban expansion. In turn social problems arising from constricted urban space, intense competition over available employment, and the emergence of underground economies began to intensify, leading to an increase in criminality, constant violence, brutal and brutalized lives, and the prevalent notion that authority and order were either inadequate or non-existent. [64]

What I am suggesting therefore is that the social ties and group identifications necessary to bind communities and individuals together and to stabilize social life in Mindanao were unable to thrive in such an environment. Instead mutable relations continued to predominate in a lot of urban and rural communities and the “normalization of frontier life” never completely transpired even as late as the 1980s. While one may argue that language- or religion-based loyalties did compensate for the frailty of other social and class ties, scholars who advance this argument ignore the fact that these two general buttresses of fidelity were themselves weakened by internal “sub-rifts.”

Tensions between Muslims and Christians, for example, were quite pervasive, but so too were rivalries within these two major ethnic and religious categories. Among Christian settlers, endemic divisions based on provinces or regions of origin, as well as language/dialect differences, created constant friction; among Muslims, “age-old tribal differences” among the major groups and between Muslim “elites” and their followings also persisted. These smaller rifts were hidden from outside observers because of the inordinate attention given the generalized religious basis of the conflict as a way of explaining Mindanao’s violent landscape. A closer examination within each group, however, will reveal a more nuanced picture that belies the capacity of religion and ethnicity to function as social adhesives. [65]

The Mindanao war, however, did not only displace people, unsettle demographic patterns, and exacerbate rural and urban problems. It also gave an already turbulent frontier society a more violent edge by preserving a continuous state of war which by the 1980s had advanced into the erstwhile peaceful provinces by virtue of the expansion of the CPP. It has been argued that the centralization attempts of the Marcos dictatorship were facilitated by the massive militarization of Philippine society.

Tables 3-5 show that it was Mindanao which bore much of the brunt of state violence compared with other areas. In three important categories of human rights violations, the human cost of state coercion in Mindanao soared rapidly upwards by the 1980s, coincidentally the same period when the CPP underwent its most dramatic growth. Yet, there was more happening here than a magnified exercise of State coercion. The war also created an opportunity for the violence to be spread horizontally. With the MNLF amply supplied by Libya, and the Philippine army benefiting from increased American assistance after Vietnam, the secessionist war gave rise to a proliferation of arms easily obtainable from both sides.

By the late 1970s, the government ban on weapons had become an impotent policy in Mindanao as cheap arms proliferated everywhere, with military men peddling these weapons of war themselves and even selling them to their new nemesis, the NPA. [66] With “democratized” access to arms, it became easier for people to justify arming themselves as a way of coping with the uncertainties of the times. With arms, one could defend oneself against rivals or seek to eliminate them before they became a threat. Various “armed groups” became conspicuous all over Mindanao, especially in areas where army and guerrilla fighters were involved in intense conflict with one another.

Having weapons facilitated the creation of Mafia-type associations and alliances operating outside of both state and the revolutionary networks which offered services and “protection” to an insecure population, while playing both the military and NPA against each other. [67] The splits within the Muslim armed movement, and active military support for “civilian” anti-communist groups (organized either as militias or “private armies” of politicians), escalated this process. In the 1980s, Mindanao had become a complex landscape where different armed groups competed for space, resources, and attention with communist revolutionaries, army units, and armed secessionists.

Violence was thus gaining acceptance as a “normal way of life” in this frontier zone. Immersed in this condition, the CPP had no problems attracting a steady supply of recruits, supporters, and sympathizers. This beneficial situation, however, was double-edged. It also meant that the types of solidarities and fidelity that the Party hoped to ingrain and strengthen in its mass base would be ultimately as fragile as the other social ties and identifications found in unstable frontiers.

More importantly, the constant state of war, accompanied by widespread availability of coercive resources and blended with the shifting demographics, exacerbated the general state of flux, giving the CPP very little time to consolidate and stabilize its influence over the areas it “controlled.” A condition existed wherein the speed of people’s attachment to the revolution was equaled by the speed of their subsequent abandonment. This partly explains, for example, why the same “slum” community that was in the early 1980s the stronghold of communist urban guerrillas in Davao, became, after 1986, the stronghold of the anti-communist vigilante group Alsa Masa (People Rise). [68] This brings us to the final issue of Mindanao communism itself. The contextual determination of the remarkable growth of the CPP in Mindanao contradicts the argument that internal “structural” problems determined the expansion and shrinking of the Party. One should note that the Party was already growing at an amazing rate prior to and even despite the “professionalization” of its leadership, and that beneath the revolutionary surge was a delicate foundation that would break down with Kahos.

Table 3. Disappearances likely due to Military Arrests or Executions

Year	Manila	Luzon	Visayas	Mindanao	Total
1977	2	11	1	3	17
1978	1	3	4	2	10
1979	2	12	-	34	48
1980	2	17	-	-	19
1981	-	8	-	45	53
1982	-	16	2	24	42
1983	2	13	15	115	145
1984	7	34	24	93	158
1985	11	28	43	129	211
Total	27	142	89	445	703

Table 4. Extra-judicial Killings Attributed to the Military

Year	Manila	Luzon	Visayas	Mindanao	Total
1977	-	24	21	6	51
1978	1	25	44	16	86
1979	-	56	38	102	196
1980	-	45	36	137	218
1981	-	65	28	228	321
1982	-	46	28	136	210
1983	1	62	41	265	369
1984	2	114	61	361	538
1985	8	53	74	260	395
Total	12	490	371	1,511	2,384

Table 5. Number of Arrests by the Military

Year	Manila	Luzon	Visayas	Mindanao	Total
1977	414	345	214	378	1,351
1978	320	202	193	905	1,620
1979	265	183	111	1,402	1,961
1980	170	125	141	526	962
1981	52	304	255	766	1,377
1982	226	795	76	814	1,911
1983	185	152	108	1,643	2,088
1984	599	375	403	2,725	4,102
1985	737	132	227	3,729	4,825
Total	2,968	2,613	1,728	12,888	19,197

_{Source: Leonard Davis, The Philippines: People, Poverty and Politics (New York: St. Martins Press, 1987), p. 149 (for Tables 3 and 4) and p. 156 (for Table 5)}

The pre-1980 expansion of the CPP leading to the eventual formation of Mindacom is not simply attributable to a refined and experienced corps of cadres. Mindanao communist leaders were running the Mindanao section of the CPP like an informal barkada, seeing no reason to professionalize the organization. It was only upon the transfer of Manila cadres led by Edgar Jopson, Benjamin De Vera and Magtanggol Roque that the Mindanao leadership began to take the form of a wellorganized machine. [69] Thus, the source of the CPP’s growth between 1975 and 1980 came not from its cadres’ organizing skills but from the social context of Mindanao itself. The CPP’s lack of experience was more than made up by a readily available mass of “warm bodies” stirred up by the turbulence of the land frontier. The tragic human and social consequences of Mindanao’s transformation and militarization ultimately profited the CPP when it came time to recruit new members—it was an opportunity the CPP could ill-afford to pass up as the recruits, so to speak, were there for the picking. [70]

It was in the dynamic between organizational opportunity and inadequate capacities, however, that institutional weaknesses within the Party would come to light. Foremost among these was the decline in the “quality” of people joining the revolution. In the pre-Mindacom period, the slow pace of Party development may have had disadvantages, but it also had merits. At that time, the process of recruitment and training of cadres into the Party and the NPA could be carefully handled, offsetting the pervasive inexperience and inefficiency among cadre ranks. Stringent security requirements and the slow process of “political education” assured that a reliable core of cadres was being developed, “reliable” in the sense that these new members were familiar with and dedicated to the CPP’s cause.

In the Mindacom era, this almost conservative approach to revolutionary growth was replaced by more relaxed recruitment and organizational criteria in response to the deluge of recruits. As Party membership grew, Mindacom leaders applauded the vigor and valor they were witnessing. However, reports from the field increasingly alarmed the leadership, especially when they saw pervasive “ideological problems” within the organization. The Party was turning out exceptionally good protest organizers and guerrilla fighters, but all this was being counteracted by inadequate ideological training, a generally low level of political education, and a simplistic and crude approach to solving problems. A 1980 Mindanao evaluation report admitted that despite the escalation of the revolution, organizational and ideological problems had worsened. The cadre Taquio noted that Mindanao communism’s “party-building” phase was notably weak. The absence of a “systematic educational campaign” was paralleled by cadres’ “limited familiarity with Marxist tools for assessment and summing up.” [71]

In the 1980s, these “weaknesses” had worsened as Mindacom began to notice more evidence of “militarist tendencies” in the organization. Often observed was the increasing propensity of the NPA to resort to coercion when attempting to settle land disputes and to dispense with the judicial “people’s hearing” before condemning and executing “bad elements” in rural communities. In the towns, executions of “class enemies” and “fascist troops” quickened, opening up occasions for indiscriminate killing. [72] Mindacom had also become aware of the changing credentials of some of the fresh revolutionary recruits; it was increasingly alarmed at the number of activists and guerrillas “with a lumpen background” who were joining the party and who had positioned themselves in the vanguard of its mass mobilizations and military campaigns. [73] The inclusion of these “Robin Hood-types” further burdened a Mindacom facing “difficulty in combining ideological consolidation with other activities.” Mindacom tried to put a stop to this alarming development by instituting counter-measures like stepped-up educational training and “ideological consolidation” to complement increased political mobilization. It also issued an order to study other “models” of revolution deemed more appropriate to Mindanao.

In the whirl of the rapidly changing political climate after 1983, however, these counter-measures were never fully implemented; problems of communication between urban and rural areas, as well as between Mindacom and its subordinate units, worsened the predicament. The momentum hastened by the strikes excited and preoccupied Mindacom, which became increasingly absorbed by the upsurge of mass mobilization and an apparent retreat by the state. Growing fascination with the mini-uprisings and hopes that these uprising might act as launching pads for a possible general insurrection prompted calls for consolidation and unity among members. The dictatorship was dying, the revolution was “advancing,” and those who called for a slowdown were regarded as conservative, even reactionary. [74] Then Kahos erupted and changed everything.

CONCLUSION

The two remaining questions to ask are these: why was Kahos not replicated in other areas where the CPP had a presence and to what extent was it unique to the Philippine experience?

Given the limitations of this essay already stated in the introduction, here I can only venture some tentative explanations. There were indeed similar cases reported between 1988-91 in Southern Tagalog and Central Luzon, two regions located just outside of Manila. [75] Apart from the killings, however, there were also significant differences between the situations in these regions compared to Mindanao. These were smaller in scale and were immediately checked by a CPP leadership that had learned a painful lesson from Kahos. The structural features in these areas were also different from Mindanao. These two regions had been settled regions, experiencing no social breakdown of the same breadth and intensity as Mindanao’s in the postwar period.

Southern Tagalog and Central Luzon were no longer the frontiers that they had been when the CPP re-established its presence in those regions and labored to build on some of its pre-existing social ties while introducing a revolutionary/class element to them. Moreover, the war between dictatorship and revolution may also have been intense in these areas, but it could not compare with the breadth and severity of the violence in Mindanao. [76]

Kahos also distinguishes Philippine communism and the CPP from other Southeast Asian communist parties. [77] First, executions do not normally happen while communists are still fighting for power; they tend occur after the seizure of power. [78] Kahos happened when mechanisms for internal repression that “normally” become central once a party is in power were not even set up yet. Moreover, while most communist parties tend not to admit bloody episodes in their histories, the CPP not only involved itself in this ruthless enterprise, but also discussed it openly. [79]The CPP was still far from the point of needing a Cheka for internal policing. Instead, it relied on and used extensively its own army, whose assumed function at that point in time was to do battle with the state in a much more intense and regular manner. The metamorphosis of the NPA into an internal policing force merely abetted the breakdown leading to the killings.

Mindanao communism thus appeared powerful only on the outside. Internally, its foundations were brittle. Thus, its attempts to position itself among the challenging forces and pressures of divisive national politics were bound to lead to disaster; Mindacom was primed for a situation like Kahos to happen. With no stable underpinnings, it was only a matter of time before the organization would crack. As Kahos spread, Mindacom began to lose its political stature; there was little to distinguish its deadly bands of cadres from the rest of the “armed groups” that roamed Mindanao. The CPP’s post-1986 general crisis would only exacerbate this particular condition.

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Patricio N. Abinales

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