The National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) greets the New People’s Army (NPA) on its 56th Anniversary on March 29, 2025. For almost six decades, the NPA has fought eight bureaucrat-capitalist, pro-imperialist and landlord-controlled regimes, exemplifying the Filipino people’s spirit of courage and determination for democracy and independence.
In the tradition of the Katipunan, the NPA started as a small, poorly-armed force in 1969. But with the support of the oppressed and exploited Filipino people, it grew into a force so formidable that the semi-colonial and semi-feudal ruling state considered it the number one threat to its power.
The NPA became the masses’ defense against feudal landgrabbing, environmental depredation, and violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. As a peasant army under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines, it embodied the basic alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry. Its clear national democratic line, conscious discipline and daringness to confront a much larger enemy force attracted thousands of peasants, workers, student leaders and other urban youth, women’s rights advocates, environmental activists, and other patriotic individuals to become Red fighters in the revolution for genuine and comprehensive social change.
Without foreign support, the NPA drew its strength from its close links with the masses. Since the dark years of Marcos’ Martial Law, the NPA carried out successful military offensives, demoralizing the state’s reactionary troops and inspiring the masses.
But astute as it was in executing well-planned tactical offensives and other military campaigns, the NPA as a people’s army was not only an effective armed organization of the CPP and the NDF. It was the main revolutionary organizer in the countryside, an active participant in educating the masses, setting up peasant, women and youth organizations, launching health and production campaigns, implementing revolutionary land reform, training people’s militias to defend their villages, and supporting emergent structures of the people’s democratic revolutionary governments in rural strongholds.
In the widespread and intensified fascist mlitary campaigns against the people this last decade, the NPA heroically sacrificed many of its best commanders and Red fighters, while learning new methods of work to overcome the high-tech advantage of the fascist enemy, and teaching the masses how to resist the more insidious schemes of the ruling class. Together with other allied organizations of the NDFP, the NPA resolutely carries out the CPP’s third rectification movement, restrengthening itself, rebuilding the mass base and reinvigorating the mass organizations.
Despite the Duterte regime’s all-out war against the people and the continuing, more intensified attacks under the US-Marcos regime, the perverse campaign of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) to destroy the revolutionary mass base and people’s organizations, and the military’s repetitive script of decimating the people’s army by the end of every year, the NPA still stands strong today as the biggest revolutionary armed force in the country. Together with the masses of peasants, workers and other patriotic sectors of society, it continues to wage protracted war in the main islands of our archipelago.
The present political intramurals within the ruling class are mere distractions in the context of the decades-long people’s war. The NPA is resolutely pursuing the struggle for freedom and democracy for the country’s poor and oppressed. The revolutionary armed struggle presents itself as our country’s primary solution to the unprecedented economic and political crisis in Philippine society today. The crisis created by the unbridled corruption and plunder of bureaucrat-capitalists, the greed of new-type landlords, the frenzied, war-mongering efforts of US imperialism to maintain total world domination, breed widespread discontent among the people. As more young peasants, workers and students realize the need to strike deep roots with the masses and take up arms, the New People’s Army will grow stronger from anniversary to anniversary.
Long live the New People’s Army!
Long live the national democratic revolution!
By Elias Dipasupil
Secretary-General, National Democratic Front of the Philippines
source: NDFP