SIERRA MADRE MOUNTAINS, Philippines — In the late-night hours and amid the chirp of crickets, Katryn welcomed a huddle of exhausted Filipino journalists in cheerful spirits like she was home. “Coffee?” she asked with a comforting smile.
Comrade Katryn is her nom de guerre, however, and for her, home is a rebel encampment concealed in the rain-soaked wilderness of the Philippines’ Sierra Madre Mountains. The 24-year-old walked away from her family two years ago to join one of the world’s longest-raging Marxist rebellions.
Mostly in their 20s and 30s, a few dozen New People’s Army guerrillas lugged M16 rifles and grenade launchers on a plateau where red hammer-and-sickle flags adorned a makeshift hall. Most wore mud-stained boots while cooking over wood fires or guarding the peripheries of the encampment, just 3 km from the nearest army camp.
They’re part of a new generation of Maoist fighters who reflect the resiliency and constraints of an insurgency that has dragged on for nearly half a century through six Philippine presidencies while Cold War-era communist insurgencies across much of the world have faded into memory. They are driven by some of the same things as their predecessors, including crushing poverty, despair, government misrule and the abysmal inequality that has long plagued Philippine society.
“The New People’s Army has no other recruiter but the state itself,” a young rebel, Comrade May, said.
She joined the rebellion two years ago after her fiancé died of kidney failure because his family was too poor to afford the expensive dialysis treatment. A lowly paid factory worker, May couldn’t do anything. Government hospitals overwhelmed by swarms of indigent patients failed to give him immediate care.
“His family gave up and reserved the remaining money for his coffin,” said May, who now serves as a rebel medic for fellow guerrillas and destitute villagers beyond the government’s reach.
Katryn came from a middle-class family that could afford a car, a house and education. She wanted to become a journalist, but got profoundly disaffected by a government and laws she said could not protect the working class, including her father, who lost his job as an engineer for joining a trade union.
She said she went underground as a left-wing activist and bid goodbye to her father, her mother, who was a former teacher, and a life of modest comforts. “It was difficult. I cried,” she said. — AP
