ISRAELI STATE • PHILIPPINES Philippines Communist Party leaders in danger INTELLIGENCE units of the Philippine army managed to arrest a number of cadres of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) on March 29 in San Juan, a neighborhood in the Metro Manila urban complex. Among the seven activists captured were national leaders of the party. PAUL PETITJEAN ACCORDING to the army general staff, the following people were arrested:
• Rafael Baylosis, alias Manching or Kumander [Commander] Dong, 39 years old, general secretary of the CPP.
• Romeo "Rolly" Kintanar, the main leader of the New People's Army (NPA), in particular of its elite corps.
• Benjamin de Vera, alias Kumander Benjie, a member of the Political Bureau heading the commission responsible for following developments in the important southern island of Mindanao.
• Napoleon Manuel, logistics commander of the NPA, and his wife Inez.
• Marco Palo, a member of the CPP liaison committee.
The present president of the CPP, Benito Tiamson, was also supposed to have been in Manila and to have just escaped being arrested.
A year and a half ago, on September 29, 1986, the former president of the party, Rodolfo Salas, was arrested in the capital as he came out of hospital while the government, the National Democratic Front (NDF) and the CPP were negotiating a ceasefire. The lawyer José Diokno, former senator and head of the President's Committee on Human Rights, wrote to Cory Aquino shortly before his death to protest against the conditions of Salas' imprisonment.
Known also under the names "Rudy" and "Kumander Bilog," Salas was imprisoned for the first time in June 1973 but he rapidly escaped. Over the years, he has become one of the CP cadres most sought by the repressive forces.
In November 1987, the army announced that it had captured a former cadre of the CPP Central Committee, Juanito Rivera; and in February 1988 it announced that it had arrested the "Committee for the Western Visayas" (the statement did not make it clear whether the army was claiming to have arrested all or only part of the committee; the Visayas are a group of islands in the center of the archipelago).
This is the not first time that the CPP has suffered such blows. In the mid1970s, the best known leaders of the CP (including its president at the time, José María Sison, alias Amado Guerrero) and the NPA (Bernabe Buscayno, alias Kumander Dante) were arrested. At the beginning of the 1980s, the best known leaders respectively of the NDF (Horacio "Boy" Morales) and Christians for National Liberation (Edicio "Ed" de la Torre) also fell.
Those arrests did not prevent the Communist Party, the guerrillas and the National Democratic Movement from continuing to grow. The jailed leaders were released in 1986, after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship.
The army's successful swoop in March 1988 came at a time when the CPP is going through a difficult political period for the left, and at a time when there is every reason to be apprehensive about the fate in store for those arrested.
Amnesty International has just published a report (extensive excerpts will be published in the next issue of International Viewpoint) in which it expresses alarm about a deteriorating situation as regards human rights. It is to be feared, in particular, that those imprisoned will be subjected to torture, which is tending again to become a general practice.
State terrorism, both in an official form (murders perpetrated by the army) and a parallel-police form (the activity of the Philippine "death squads" and vigilante groups), is assuming graver and graver proportions. The factional struggle in the army is far from ended, as shown by the escape on April 2 of Gregorio "Gringo" Honasan, the mastermind of the August 1987 putsch, and other mutinous officers.
In these conditions, it is important to mobilize international solidarity as quickly as possible on behalf of the CPP cadres who have fallen into the hands of the repressive forces. *