nine - Political Stability and the Armed Movements

Summary

Two of the most resilient and intractable armed political movements in the region continue to challenge the political authority and legitimacy of the Philippine state. The first, a communist-led revolutionary movement is rooted in several decades of peasant-based struggle for agrarian reform and committed to a strategy of protracted war by building bases in the countryside as a primary condition for seizing political power. In the mid-sixties, a resurgent nationalist movement led by young intellectuals and college-educated student activists reinvigorated the mass movement and founded a new communist party in 1968 and a new guerrilla army in 1969. Under the leadership of the new party, the mass movement gained its peak political and military strength during the last five years of the struggle against the authoritarian rule of Marcos.

The ouster of the dictatorship in 1986 created an opening for political negotiations between the Aquino administration and the National Democratic Front (NDF), the political coalition representing the revolutionary movement. From the start, however, the two parties approached the negotiations with fundamentally different perspectives, leading to the failure of the talks. For the NDF, any discussion of ending the armed conflict including the question of a ceasefire must be pursued within the context of a “comprehensive political settlement” that commits the government to implementing fundamental social and political reforms. For its part, the government was primarily interested in concluding an immediate cessation of armed hostilities without being tied down to the details of any comprehensive political settlement leading to wide-ranging reforms in society. Since much of the discussion got bogged down by questions about implementing and monitoring the preliminary ceasefire, the military also commanded an inordinately dominant role in the negotiations.

By the time the new administration under Ramos decided to resume negotiations with the NDF in 1992, a new conjuncture of events was in place.