[OPINION] How the Philippine Left lost its way

In his Vantage Point column on September 1, 2026, “What’s left for the Philippines’ Left?,” Val Villanueva proposed some explanations for the demise of the revolutionary Left in the Philippines. One is that the ideology of fighting for socialism went out of fashion globally, with China and Vietnam’s turn towards capitalism. Another is that the Left’s position on EDCA and Pax Silica has aligned it with China geopolitically, thus discrediting it as well as allegedly revealing its ignorance of the economic benefits that could come to the country. In short, global developments have left the Philippine Left behind.

My sense, however, is that the principal cause of the Left’s decline lies in three things: its misreading of domestic political realities after the collapse of the Marcos dictatorship, a bloody internal purge that took several thousand lives, and a very deep split in the leadership of the revolutionary movement.

The way these factors came together is illustrated in the life of former New People’s Army (NPA) cadre Eddie Quitoriano, whose memoir published by Ateneo de Manila University Press, just came out. Let me share a review I did of that book as a way of illustrating why the Left’s decline was really a complex—and tragic—process.

At the launch of his book Deeper Ground, Darker Shadows** in Manila a few weeks ago, Eddie Quitoriano asked, “How did the NPA’s image change from being the ‘Nice People Around’ to one of being only interested in imposing revolutionary taxes and obtaining weapons?”

This was Eddie’s diplomatic way of asking, “How did the Philippine revolution lose its way?”

Answering that question was undoubtedly a key motivation for writing his memoir.  In the process of fleshing out his life in over 300 pages, he provides the reader a fascinating personal odyssey that is meshed with a larger, tragic odyssey, that of the national democratic movement. Eddie as an individual reaches his Ithaca, which is reconciliation with a family he had neglected out of devotion to the revolution. The movement, however, has not, and is still adrift, growing more marginal to Philippine politics by the day.

This is a book that should be required reading for the global left, for it is a sobering affirmation of the truism that efforts to realize good intentions, if not grounded in a firm belief in the intrinsic value of individuals, balanced by good institutional checks, and guided by plain common sense, can go badly awry.

Cadre

The offspring of a struggling family in Mindanao, the Philippines’ second biggest island, Eddie grows up in a frontier area peopled by Christian settlers, indigenous peoples, and Muslims. It is the early seventies and, like many in his generation, he is repelled by Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s declaration of martial law and attracted to the national democratic revolution radiating outwards from Manila to the rest of the country. He is drawn into activist circles, resulting in his being railroaded from the seminary where he has been training to be a Catholic priest. Recruited into the reestablished Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), he proves his mettle as an organizer, one who is able to skillfully navigate both the perils of encounters with the military and internecine conflicts within the fledgling party.  

With the establishment of the party’s Mindanao Commission and the growth of the CPP’s armed wing, the New People’s Army, in the movement’s most promising expansion area, Eddie becomes a seasoned NPA fighter and trainer, even as he fathers a family and, along with his wife, Agnes, rotates in and out of military and police detention. His performance attracts the attention of Romulo Kintanar, the chief of the NPA and a fellow Mindanaoan, and he and his family are brought to Manila for his integration into the people’s army’s General Command.  

In the first part of the book, the excitement of revolutionary organizing and the dedication of CPP and NPA cadres come across despite the author’s understated style of writing and his reluctance to tell the reader about his talents and capabilities. Still, there are things that bother him that he registers. One is the lack of warmth with which he is received by “Tagalog” cadres in Manila; indeed, their reluctance to extend personal assistance contrasts with the spontaneous solidarity of comrades in Mindanao. Another is a disconcerting distrust among the top leadership of the party and NPA, which leads to non-sharing of vital information like his pending assignment to overseas work. The third is the most alarming, which is news from home about an internal purge taking the lives of many veteran cadres in Mindanao beginning in 1985.

The voyage out

But before he can wrap his head around what came to be known as “Kampanyang Ahos,” or “Garlic Campaign,” he is sent off on a mission to raise money and purchase arms abroad by Kintanar, who comes across in these pages as a dynamic, take-charge personality. Over the next seven years, the mission brings him to Syria, North Korea, Nicaragua, Libya, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Greece, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Vietnam, to name just a few stops.  

He is unable to procure weapons, but does get some money, and is able to arrange for the training of NPA combatants in Pyongyang and Libya. In the process, along with top leaders of the party and NPA, he gets to meet the mercurial Libyan chief Muammar Khadaffy, who gives the NPA one million dollars, and the ailing North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung, who promises weapons but wants assurances the NPA can work out a way of receiving them, which it can’t.

Since his mission is not sanctioned by the party leadership but only the NPA General Command, it is not surprising that Eddie eventually gets entangled in the transnational feud between Kintanar in Manila and the party leadership in exile domiciled in Utrecht, the Netherlands, led by Joma Sison, whom Eddie initially accords the respect due to one who has been a key founder of the party and its prime ideologue. The feud stems from jurisdictional, political, ideological, and personal conflicts. An explosion waiting to happen, animosities accumulate and erupt over the mixing of counterfeit dollars provided by the Japanese Red Army (JRA) for NPA operations with Khadaffy’s gift of real dollars. US authorities have spotted the counterfeit dollars, resulting in a major headache for the NDF’s international representatives. Along with another comrade, Eddie is tried by what he describes as a kangaroo court in the Dutch City of Maastricht, with Sison leading the prosecution while denying his own role in authorizing the use of fake dollars for revolutionary ends. Admitting his own role in the foolhardy enterprise, Eddie is dismayed by obvious efforts by others to make him the fall guy.

Stormy voyage back…

Judged guilty and “banned” from again setting foot in Western Europe, Eddie is on his own, subsisting on funds periodically given to him by a Japanese Red Army contact codenamed “Nadia,” who is later revealed to be the legendary Fusako Shigenobu, founder of the Japanese Red Army (JRA). His travels bring him to, among other places, Havana, where hospitable Cuban comrades arrange for cosmetic surgery. He is on the run from US and international police authorities owing to the counterfeit dollars affair and needs a new nose to look like someone of Native American descent from the Andes. The Cuban surgeon botches the first operation, forcing him to return for a second, which succeeds. As he explains, “I had to disappear. I was no longer with the CPP or the NPA and I wasn’t prepared to join the JRA, but I wanted to survive, even as a different person if need be.”

Surprisingly, at a time that he is deserted by his own party, it is the JRA that remains faithful to Eddie, generously providing cash for his subsistence and travels even when meaningful reciprocal support for “joint actions” from the increasingly disorganized NPA General Command is no longer feasible. The grateful Eddie does try to repay the favor by scouting for and securing safehouses in Latin America for the JRA, which is finding its Eastern European safehouses becoming less and less secure with the collapse of socialist governments there at the turn of the nineties.  

Eddie hints at casual encounters with the opposite sex on the winding way back home, but if he does indulge in them, like Odysseus he does not allow any Circe or Calypso derail him from what has now become his obsessive goal of reaching hearth and home.

After an odyssey of nearly seven years, Eddie finally gets back to the Philippines in 1993. No longer with the party and NPA, his priority is to provide his two children and wife with the stability that his revolutionary commitments deprived them when they were growing up. He is able to fend off the military’s efforts to send him to prison, but he cannot avert his eyes from the tragedy that has engulfed the movement he has cut ties with.

…to the heart of darkness

It turned out to be a stroke of luck that Eddie was absent from the Philippines during the period 1986 to 1993. For it was during this period that the CPP literally descended into madness. The scale of the purges in Mindanao that he had first heard about when he left in 1986 shocked him upon his return.  Thousands of trained cadres of the party and NPA had been executed by their own comrades owing to the panic that swept the ranks that were triggered by unverified rumors that the military had been able to infiltrate its agents into the movement. Ironically, methods of summary justice CPP cadres had employed against “bad elements” in the barangays or villages were now turned against their own comrades. Mindanao was turned into a howling wilderness in just a few months in 1985 to 1986 by Kampanyang Ahos, and, failing to absorb the lessons of a purge that went out of control, party and NPA units in Luzon stumbled into the same bloody process, with the purges known as Operation Missing Link and Project Olympia, which Robert Francis Garcia, a victim, documented in his classic 2001 account To Suffer Thy Comrades.

When Marcos was overthrown in February 1986 and Corazon Aquino assumed power, the NDF was immobilized and stood on the sidelines, partly because it had adopted a policy of boycotting the rigged polls that triggered the mass insurrection against the dictator. But the bigger reason was that it was in no position to intervene because its ranks had been depleted and demoralized by successive purges. 

The bloodletting at the base took place in parallel with a fierce struggle at the top for the leadership of the party, with Sison regaining unchallenged control of the party and NPA and driving out those he labeled military adventurists like Kintanar and as well as other factions that questioned his leadership or rejected a return to the classic Maoist strategy of protracted people’s war. Filemon Lagman was assassinated in 2001, Kintanar in 2003, and Arturo Tabara in 2004, though the NPA admitted only to the killing of Kintanar. All had been top leaders of the CPP. In 2005, the names of 14 “counter-revolutionaries” or, as we joked then, candidates for execution, were published by the CPP journal Ang Bayan (among them my own, most likely because I was among the first to do an empirical investigation and publish an analysis of the purges).

Purges are not, of course, uncommon in revolutionary movements. Still, there are those like the Vietnamese Communist Party, that have been able to evolve a collective process to resolve intra-party disputes relatively peacefully. During the Chinese Revolution, Mao Tse-tung dealt with his rivals not by executing them but by relieving them of their positions and isolating them in “criticism-self-criticism” sessions designed to get them to “reform.” Among those famously subjected to this treatment were influential cadres such as Zhou En Lai and Deng Hsiao Ping, who was purged twice. 

Stalin, of course, executed thousands of his Bolshevik comrades and their factional followers, but this took place long after the triumph of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The uniqueness of the purges in the Philippines was that the mass executions took place before the left even had a real chance to come to power. As Patricio Abinales aptly put it, the purges resulted in “the revolution devouring its own children before victory.” Indeed, the purges eliminated thousands of trained, loyal cadres who would have been indispensable actors had the movement been in a position to take over the state.  

A distant reckoning

The tragedy has been compounded by the fact that none of those who led the purges, whether they later aligned with Sison’s “reaffirmist” line or against it by joining the “rejectionist” camp, have stepped forward to take responsibility for the purges, hoping perhaps that memory of the bloody campaigns would be erased with the passage of time. It’s been 40 years since the killings, yet the collective refusal to own up to the collective madness persists. This is understandable, though inexcusable, since most of those in national or responsible regional leadership positions in the then still unified party knew about the ongoing purges but did little or nothing to halt them, though some of them did apologize to the incredulous relatives of the victims. “Kahos (purge) only stopped when there were no more comrades to execute,” Eddie writes.

Eddie is right that the actual number of cadres whose lives were taken will never be really known, though a hint was provided by a party document that acknowledged that in the immediate post-Marcos years, the number of party members abruptly dropped from 9,000 to 3,000. For him, the real measure of the scope of the purge is the “silence of the NPA guns and the collapse of guerrilla fronts and party organizations.”

Having been central in building the party and NPA infrastructure in Mindanao, an endeavor that took years, Eddie is understandably aghast at a campaign that demolished it in just a few months. It is only when he talks about the question of accountability for Ahos that bitterness seeps into Eddie’s writing. People responsible for the purges “have not been held to account because they continue to perform essential duties for the organization. Some have found new lives in government, academia, or the private sector. I am sure they know what happened and what their role was but choose to pretend they have done nothing wrong.” One can sense a smoldering desire to name names instead of the pseudonyms that people went by, but out of a remnant of comradely respect, he refrains from doing so.

The moral high ground surrendered

Revolutions succeed for a variety of reasons. But one of the ingredients of success is that among the people, the revolutionaries are seen as holding the moral high ground. Ahos and the other purges demolished that for all sections of the Philippines left, and it is doubtful that in the foreseeable future they will be able to reclaim that once quaint popular description of them as “the nice people around.”

The question, however, might arise among some readers: How reliable is Eddie’s account? Fairly reliable, I would say. It’s not just the level of detail and complexity with which he describes his experiences, which could not have simply been conjured out of thin air. Just a few pages in, you realize that what you’re reading is not a polemical ideological tract nor an account by someone with an axe to grind but an honest attempt by one who spent 20 years in the revolution as an ordinary cadre to find an answer to one question, one that is asked by many who came into political maturity during a memorable era and became part of something bigger than themselves: Was it all worth it?

Like the response to Eddie’s query of how many young lives were snuffed out by the purges, the answer to this question is not likely to be definitively settled. But to again become a real force in the country’s politics, the revolutionary left must reckon with rather than avoid its past. – Rappler.com

Walden Bello, a retired professor at the University of the Philippines and the State University of New York at Binghamton, is the author of Global Battlefields: My Close Encounters with Dictatorship, Capital, Empire, and Love (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2025).

**Deeper Ground, Darker Shadows: The Making of a Mindanao Rebel (University of Wisconsin Press 2025 and Ateneo de Manila University Press 2026)