I'm going to discuss some of that on another thread (one of these days), and try to keep this one focused on the NPA and the east of Mindanao.
78 sounds about right... when I was in Trento (79-81) everyone knew they were around in Davao Norte (now ComVal), but there was very little fighting, mostly they were lying low and organizing. When it did kick off, it gained momentum very fast.
Having been there at the time, I'd point to 3 reasons. NGPI, had an impact well beyond the immediate area. Rumors went all over that new areas were being targeted for plantation development and more farmers were going to be chased off the land. The people who were evicted scattered and brought their stories with them. The NPA could not have asked for a better entry point.
Lademora... engaging conversationalist, comes off as benign as your favorite uncle. The stories aren't fiction, though, whether from Cotabato, Samar, or Agusan. Call him war criminal, serial human rights violator, whatever you want; there's a history there and it's an ugly one. The evictions and the way they were carried out were a major boost to the NPA and a major factor in the rapidity of their rise in the east.
When I talked to Lademora he never admitted a thing. I also talked quite a bit with some of his guys, who were a lot less circumspect, especially after a few drinks. They weren’t the least bit ashamed; quite the opposite… the idea that a communist (very loosely defined), or still more a Muslim, had “rights” would have struck them as completely absurd.
The second major factor was the farcical 1981 election, which had an enormous impact in Davao. Marcos called that election after the (very nominal) lifting of martial law, to put a little democratic veneer on the whole mess. The opposition boycotted it, and they couldn't find a candidate to run against Marcos. Finally they drafted a retired general named Alejo S. Santos.
The campaign in Davao was a joke. In those days the newspapers all called Marcos "FM", by his initials; Imelda was "FL", for First Lady. The papers in Davao all referred to Santos by his initials as well, which happened to be ASS. Every night kids would go out and paint BOYCOTT in big red letters on every available surface, every day obedient government employees would paint it out in white. We all called the ritual "sa pula/sa puti, like at a cockfight. Everyone joked that ang manalo sa Davao ay si Boy... sino pa kundi si Boy Cott.
Then Time and Newsweek ran features playing up the humor. FM (or maybe it was FL) got inis and told his crony on the spot to get it under control. He had access to his own equivalent of the lost command: the prisoners at Davao Penal Colony worked on his plantations in Tagum, and performed odd jobs on the side.
Suddenly kids were getting picked up on the street at night and their bodies were turning up in the morning on Times Beach. Sometimes shot, sometimes stabbed, sometimes just hogtied and thrown in the water to drown. Escalated very quickly, pretty soon it was open season on anyone even vaguely connected to the political opposition. Of course the main beneficiaries of all that were the NPA; within a few months Agdao was Nicaragdao and the Sparrows ruled the streets. Of course they abused their power every bit as thoroughly, setting up the rise of Jun Pala (another quintessential Mindanao lunatic that I managed a few conversations with) and the Alsa Masa.
Another thing that helped kick it off was that by ’82 Marcos was really and truly losing his grip. That sounds far away from Mindanao, but there were real repercussions. Marcos may have been a scumbag, but he knew how to keep his boys in the field balanced and under control… like any good feudal lord, he played his barons against each other and used the pork barrel to good effect. When he fell apart the barons went out on their own, complete free-for-all, with the military and police running with whoever promised them the biggest payback. After the Aquino assassination in ’83 the loan guarantee circus shut down and the pork barrel dried up; with nobody in charge the level of abuse and exploitation shot through the roof. You had all the psycho sects, Tadtads and Rock Christ and 4k and Pulahan. Putian, killing anyone who couldn’t fight back and trying to carve out reputations as the nastiest guy in town.
Yes, it started in the late 70s but took off in the early 80s, with NGPI, the Davao debacle, the collapse of central authority. Of course the NPA was growing at a similar rate in a lot of other places at the same time. A lot of the factors that torpedoed NPA growth elsewhere were also present in Mindanao, most notably the internal purges… so why were the eastern Mindanao NPA able to resurge after the 90’s retrenchment?
Partly money, of course. Small scale miners, plantations, logging, all easily “taxable”, and the area has a long tradition of submission to extortion. Money makes it a lot easier to sustain a rebellion.
Then of course there are the Lumad, a ready-made source of footsoldiers, with the grievance but not the organization to try and redress the grievance on their own. As you’ve pointed out before, without the Lumad the NPA in Mindanao would be crippled; they’d have leaders but no followers, officers but no soldiers, drastically reduced support base in the hills. In theory, by resolving the issues driving the Lumad to affiliate with the NPA you could deprive the NPA of manpower and mass base and weaken them. That worked in the Cordillera: when the dam, logging, and mining projects were dropped the indigenous population backed away from their (always rather tentative) alliance with the NPA and stopped fighting. They’d won, why keep fighting?
I don’t see that working for the Lumad, because the Lumad aren’t going to win. As far as I can see the Lumad are stuffed. They waited way too long to fight and when they did they didn’t control their own fight, but supported a group that has no real concern for their interests. The NPA are ultimately just another bunch of intrusive outsiders using the Lumad, if they ever won (unlikely) the Lumad would be just as screwed as they are now.
Where do the Lumad have real control over their own ancestral domain, in anything but miniscule fragments? Where do they have control over resources? Are there any Lumad congressmen or governors? How many mayors? How many barangay captains, especially if you don’t include those who are tools of some settler politician?
The Lumad are toast, gone, swept aside by the settler tide. They’ve lost control of their land and they are too scattered and fragmented to regain it. They’ll end up like the Aeta or the Mangyan; powerless, scattered, marginalized.
Of course, as you say, the State has the sovereign prerogative of allowing settlement wherever it wants. The state has a bunch of other sovereign prerogatives as well. They can dam the river and flood you out, they can strip every tree from every hill, they can throw you out and turn the land over to a mining company, they can seize your land for a plantation and shoot you if you don’t want to leave. The only way indigenous communities can survive the sovereign prerogatives of the state is armed resistance, and the only way to succeed is to resist from the start.
The Igorot core communities have kept control of their land and resources through a policy of zero tolerance: don’t accept ANY settlers, don’t let Manila get a foothold. The local attitude toward settlers taking over land is that that if you allow one in, tomorrow there will be ten, in a week a hundred, in a month a thousand and in a decade they’ll be the majority and you’ll be on your way to perdition. They’re right, and the only reason they still have what they have is that they’ve fought for it, from the start. If they’d taken the “just get along” route they’d be in the same boat as the Lumad. In places around the periphery where they have taken that route, that’s what happened.
If you want an example, look what’s happening right now in the islands north of Palawan, in the ancestral domain of the Tagbanua. Visayan settlers are moving in… starts with a temporary hut on the beach for passing fisherman, then the hut is permanent, then there’s a family there, then there are more families. Pretty soon the dynamite fishing starts, and the cyanide, and the deforestation and all the other things that the settlers did to destroy the places they came from. The Tagbanua are not aggressive people; they just try to co-exist. As a consequence, they are chased back from the seashore, crowded off their fishing grounds, left with the scraps. If they go to town they are treated like subhumans. Government does nothing for them; even when the areas being settled are legally restricted to Tagbanua. That’s what co-existing gets you.
So in theory, you could disable the NPA in eastern Mindanao by addressing and redressing the grievances of the Lumad. In practice, this will be very difficult to do, because, as you say, the settlers aren’t going away, and there’s little or no chance of the Lumad ever regaining control of their land or resources. If they won, they could stop fighting, as the Igorot did… but they’ve already lost.
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