The Communist Party killed hundreds of its own cadres in a wave of paranoia that swept the rebel movement in the 1980s.

by Robert Francis Garcia

In the 1980s, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People's Army (NPA), undertook a series of "purges" of what it perceived were military infiltrators within its ranks. The purges resulted in the arrest, detention, torture and killing of hundreds of communist cadres suspected of being undercover military agents. In Mindanao, an estimated 600 to 900 were killed in what the Party called Kampanyang Ahos, an "anti-infiltration" campaign that took place from 1985 to 1986. In 1988, 121 cadres were tortured and killed in an NPA guerrilla camp in the Sierra Madre, in what was known as Oplan Missing Link. A similar operation, called Olympia, took place in Manila at about the same time, later becoming a full-blown national campaign against "enemy infiltration."

Robert Francis Garcia was arrested and tortured in the course of Oplan Missing Link, which began with a failed guerrilla operation in Southern Tagalog. Party cadres attributed the failure to military infiltration and formed a task force to round up suspected "enemy agents." Under interrogation, the suspects yielded no new information, so the task force resorted to torture. To appease their captors and save themselves from further pain, the suspects resorted to making contrived confessions.

Their false admissions of being enemy spies fed the paranoia of ranking cadres and led to a spiral of arrests, tortures and killings that ended in November 1988, when the CPP central committee reviewed the purge and ordered the release of the detainees who were still alive. Garcia was one of the survivors. In 1995, he wrote about his ordeal in a first-person account published in this magazine.

In To Suffer thy Comrades, a book that will be released by Anvil Publishing later this year, Garcia provides a riveting account of the purge and situates it within the context of a revolutionary movement that was nobly motivated but also tragically flawed. The book grew out of a study he did for the University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies and was supported by the Institute for Popular Democracy and the Popular Education for People's Empowerment, where Garcia was executive director and still a member of the board.

Suffer thy Comrades goes beyond Garcia's narrative of his and other survivors' harrowing experiences and explains why the purges took place, how both torturers and victims coped and made sense of their plight, and how they survived in the aftermath of the purge. The book sheds light on the darkest and deepest secrets of the revolutionary movement and provides insights that are useful now that the communists are negotiating peace with the government.

The following excerpt from the book describes the torture that took place in the guerrilla camp where Garcia and other Missing Link captives were kept for several months:

TORTURE had never really been standard practice within the Philippine revolutionary movement, even within the ranks of the New People's Army. While it is true that guerrillas engage the military in armed hostility as a matter of course, this is within the context of a raging war and mostly within the parameters of international rules of combat.

The NPA has always dealt carefully with prisoners of war and trumpets the fact that it adheres to the tenets of the Geneva Conventions. Part of this, of course, was propaganda, but the other part was a genuine desire to prove sincerity in struggle.

It is thus the cruelest of ironies that the only time communist revolutionaries used torture was with their own comrades. Arguably, the military employed more sophisticated torture methods (electrocution, water cure, "ice" treatment, and so forth), but the rebels' interrogation techniques cannot be considered benign.

One of these is popularly known as the "good cop-bad cop technique," which is designed to weaken a victim's defenses through psychological manipulation. One interrogator plays the role of the rough and brutal torturer who employs cruelty and physical attacks to pry out information. The other plays the nice and sensitive partner who treats the prisoner well and begs and cajoles him to talk so as to ease the suffering. Joey, a victim of an earlier purge in Northern Luzon, had a first-hand experience of this on his first day of interrogation, "with one interrogator offering me cigarettes and food while pleading with me to 'cooperate,' and another beating me black and blue."

One thing we observed during Oplan Missing Link was that our captors could not really play the "good cop" role to the hilt as everyone was expected to be "bad." There developed an unwritten "policy of cruelty" that everyone was expected to observe. Some would attribute this to the "collective paranoia" that infected everyone, from the highest-ranking official to the lowliest guard.

There was at least one exception to the contagion of cruelty: Ka Jerry, a member of the Oplan Missing Link task force. I knew him way before as the typical senior cadre who took revolutionary principles to heart. I still remember him sporting unruly hair and a bushy moustache. He always had that famished, emaciated look, but he was constantly ready with a hearty laugh and a joke or two. At the Southern Tagalog purge, he refused to be drawn into the whirlpool of violence. While he participated in the investigations, many attested that he never lifted a finger against any captive.

That may have been his undoing as he soon earned the suspicion of the other task force members. Ka Jerry was himself eventually investigated by the task force; some detainees told me that his investigation was "fast-tracked" because the officers sensed that he was cooking up something, possibly an escape plan or a mutiny. He was detained, tortured and eventually executed. The fact that he was the first cousin of one of the leaders of the purge did not help him at all.