The New People’s Army of the Philippines’ Husband and Wife Duo: A Profile of Wilma and Benito Tiamzon

The New People’s Army of the Philippines’ Husband and Wife Duo: A Profile of Wilma and Benito Tiamzon

On March 22 a joint operation between the Philippine military, federal and local police in Barangay Aloguinsan, Carcar City, resulted in the arrest of seven members of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) Central Committee two days before the Party’s 45th anniversary. An informant who provided information leading to the arrests received a 5.6 million peso ($126,000) reward (Philippine Star, March 25).

Among those taken into custody were 63-year-old Benito Tiamzon, de facto head of the CPP and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA), along with his wife Wilma Austria Tiamzon, a CPP Central Committee member and the CPP finance officer. The other CPP members arrested were Rex Villaflor, Lorraine Castillo, Joel Enano, Jeosi Nepa and Arlene Panea. Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin confirmed the arrests and announced the two were “now undergoing tactical interrogation” (Philippine Daily Inquirer, March 23).

The Tiamzons were arrested and charged with attempted murder and murder cases that have been pending in the Regional Trial Court Branch 31 in Laoang, Northern Samar Island as well as charged with the murder of 15 civilians in Inopacan, Leyte, who were buried in a mass grave discovered in 2006 (Philippine Daily Inquirer, March 24). The Filipino government estimates that the Maoist-inspired 45-year-old communist insurgency, the longest running in Asia, has claimed 30,000 lives since it began. In 2002 the United States and the EU designated the NPA a terrorist organization.

News of the detentions provoked immediate and widespread comment. During an interview at the Malacañang Palace, President Benigno Aquino III said that the Tiamzons’ arrests would not affect peace talks, though the seven CPP arrests would “deliver a serious blow” to the communist insurgents. Aquino said: “[Do the arrests] have an impact? I don’t think so. It really depends on [the CPP’s] willingness to go back to the bargaining table. And it shows you also the competency of our security forces” (Philippine Daily Inquirer, March 24).

A week after the arrests, Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) chief General Emmanuel Bautista told reporters that the NPA had degenerated into a bandit gang with no ideology, commenting, “After five years, they [the NPA] will be irrelevant. They won’t even last for five years. Their focus now is extortion” (Philippine Star, March 29). Bautista had previously noted: “The New People’s Army is down to about 4,000 guerrillas from more than 26,000 in the late 1980s” (Manila Standard Today, March 24).

In a March 28 press conference, Catholic Bishop Deogracias Iniguez said that the arrest of the Tiamzons “will put a damper again to the formal talks that restarted so optimistically in February 2011,” referring to the peace talks between the Filipino government and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), the political wing of the CPP. Iniguez, speaking as a core member of the Philippine Ecumenical Peace Platform, the Philippines’ largest ecumenical formation, called on both the government and NDFP to return to the negotiating table and discuss further possible steps towards a “just and lasting peace” (Bulatlat, March 28).

Jose Maria (Joma) Sison founded the CPP in 1968 and is now the NDFP peace panel’s chief political consultant. Living in exile in the Netherlands, Sison described the impact of the Tiamzons’ arrests in an interview with an NDFP publication:

Background

Benito Tiamzon was born on March 20, 1951 and grew up in Marikina City (Manila Standard, March 23). Tiamzon studied at the University of the Philippines Diliman beginning in 1968, where he wrote for the student newspaper The Philippine Collegian, joined the the Alpha Sigma Fraternity and graduated with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and B.A. in History, according to a former senior CPP cadre (Rappler, March 23).

Tiamzon eventually joined the militant Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK – Youth Democratic Association), a Maoist student movement. The SDK was initially formed as an offshoot of the Sison-organized Kabataang Makabayan (KM – Patriotic Youth) in 1967. SDK was formally established on January 30, 1971, and, along with the KM, would form the backbone of the student national democratic movement during the Marcos years. Tiamzon met his wife, Wilma, in the underground movement. When President Marcos declared martial law in September 1972, he singled out both KM and SDK in Proclamation No. 1081, describing the SDK as “another militant and outspoken front organization of the radical left.” Many SDK and KM members subsequently fled to the countryside, where many joined the NPA. [1]

Tiamzon started party work by organizing labor unions in Manila under the CPP’s Metro Manila-Rizal Regional Party Committee according to Rigoberto Tiglao, who headed the eight-member Regional Committee for Metropolitan Manila and Rizal province in the early 1970s until his arrest in 1974. Tiglao recalled, “Tiamzon headed our labor union operations, while Wilma headed a sub-regional organization covering Pasig and other Rizal eastern towns, and later on the regional committee’s “education bureau”—i.e., the unit in charge of educating the organization into Marxist worldview and strategy (Manila Times, March 23).

Tiamzon commuted between Manila and Catbalogan, Samar Island, where he rose to become head of the CPP’s Eastern Visayas Regional Party Committee and rose in the ranks because of his work in developing Samar Island into an NPA stronghold (Philippine Star, March 25).

Purges and the Tiamzons’ Rise to Power

The decades following Sison’s exile saw him attempting to assert his ideological control over the CPP from afar, but he was unable to avoid the schisms and breakaways that racked the organization in the early 1990s. CPP ideological tensions had been rising since the 1986 “People Power Revolution” led by Corazon Aquino that toppled Marcos’ government, causing many revolutionaries to begin questioning previous policies (Philippine Star, February 27, 2013). Pressure intensified when Sison initiated a campaign against deviation from CPP doctrine that ordered cadres to return to the old principles of a protracted people’s war, discouraged “adventurism” in the ranks and criticized CPP leaders who wanted to fast-track the revolution by expanding in key cities and provinces. [2]

The “rejectionists,” who began espousing models of revolutionary insurrection distinct from the orthodox Maoist “protracted people’s war” model championed by Sison included Kintanar, who once headed the NPA and who had built up the CPP/NPA in Mindanao; Arturo Tabara, who consolidated a strong CPP/NWA presence base in Panay Island; and Felimon “Popoy” Lagman, who chaired the Manila-Rizal regional committee of the CPP (Philippine Star, March 25). Two unknown assassins killed Langman in February 2001.  It is estimated that between 1986 and 1993 approximately half of the CPP Central Committee was expelled and that the CPP lost half of its members. [3] It is unclear whether they left under their own volition or were similarly expelled.

The Dutch arrested Sison in Utrecht on August 28, 2007 for his involvement in three assassinations in the Philippines – the murder of Kintanar on January 23, 2003 and the murders of Tabara and his son-in-law Stephen Ong on September 26, 2006 (Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 28, 2007). On March 31, 2009 the Dutch national court said there was “not enough evidence” to implicate Sison in the murders and prosecutors dropped the charges (BBC, March 31, 2009).

While Tiamzon and his wife remained loyal to Sison’s ideology, in the aftermath of the EDSA Revolution and the subsequent weakening of the indigenous CPP leadership, the pair slowly acquired effective control of the CPP-NPA. Tiamzon had earlier stayed mostly in the Bicol region at the height of the insurgency in the 1980s (Manila Standard Today, March 24). 

The “People Power Revolution” that toppled Marcos did not include CPP action, which led to an ideological split in the CPP, which Sison from exile was unable to contain. Tiamzon was instrumental in reasserting Sison’s local authority in his struggle against the “Rejectionists” who now rejected Sison’s Maoist “protracted people’s war” model ideology on how the armed struggle should proceed and instead believed that the Party needed to adapt to the changing times.

Consolidation of Power

Sison and Tiamzon drifted apart in the succeeding years, when Sison supported moves within the CCP/NPA to participate in legislative elections, which Tiamzon rejected to maintain the armed struggle. The Tiamzons and their followers, who make up the current CCP/NPA leadership, have long since seized power by largely sidelining Sison and his aging allies, running it independently of the Netherlands-based leader despite a façade of unity and the lack of a mandate in the form of a “plenum” that would install the Tiamzons as formal heads of the CCP/NPA.

By May 2013, the government’s chief negotiator, Alexander Padilla, said that based on intelligence reports from within the communist movement, Sison and NDFP head Luis Jalandoni were no longer in charge of the CCP-NDFP-NPA, commenting during a forum hosted by the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines, “Who is in charge? Well, intelligence reports say that the Tiamzon spouses are in charge” (Cebu Daily News, March 23).

Philippine National Security Adviser Cesar Garcia said the Tiamzons may have gained the upper hand because the NPA ground commanders respected them for their decision to stay and continue the CPP’s armed struggle in country: “The general belief is that those based in the Philippines are exercising leadership. It is strange for a leader to be out of the country, and that is how the Tiamzon couple is able to exercise effective leadership” (Manila Standard Today, May 7, 2013).

The Future of the CPP/NPA Without the Tiamzons

The AFP saw Benito Tiamzon as the “center of gravity of the CPP-NPA-NDF here in the Philippines as the acting chairman in lieu of Jose Maria Sison who is in Utrecht as Chairman Emeritus.” The AFP also charged Tiamzon with being responsible for “the landmining, the killings, and the violence of the NPA” (Philippine Daily Inquirer, March 23). AFP military intelligence chief Major General Eduardo Año commented: “It only takes one email from Tiamzon to give direction to all regions,” adding that it would take the CPP at least six months to convene a plenum and elect Tiamzon’s replacement (Rappler, March 24).

A theory currently circulating in Manila is that the Tiamzons were actually turned in by Sison and his remaining followers in the Communist movement, with the reason for the betrayal being that Sison wants to reclaim the Party and eventually strike a deal with the Aquino administration. The government’s political adviser, Ronald Llamas, has sought for years to put an end to the decades-long communist rebellion by dealing exclusively with Sison and ignoring the Tiamzons, who actually run the movement in the Philippines (Manila Standard Today, March 25). Because Sison could no longer dictate to local communists from exile and because he is disinclined to deal with the Tiamzons, both the aging CPP/NPA leaders in the Netherlands and the Aquino administration have begun to see the Tiamzons as the stumbling blocks to their rapprochement. The Tiamzons had also decreed that the underground left should not participate in the 2010 and 2013 elections, despite the urging of Sison and his fellow “Netherlanders” to do so.

On April 8 the Tiamzons refused to enter a plea at their arraignment on two counts of abduction and serious illegal detention before the Quezon City court. Judge Madonna Echeverri, however, entered a “not guilty plea” for the couple and set a pre-trial of the charges for May 19 (Manila Standard Today, April 9). The question now is what effect the arrests of the Tiamzons will have on the peace process.

In the April 7, 2014 issue of Ang Bayan (“The Nation”), the CPP’s Central Committee’s periodical reported:

In Manila, Institute for Political and Electoral Reform Director Ramon Casiple believes the Tiamzons’ arrests strengthen Sison’s position, commenting: “A continuation of the peace talks and the signing of an agreement are more likely following the arrest of the (CPP) party leaders. Their detention will strengthen the position of those CPP members who want to push negotiations forward” (Deutsche Welle, March 26).

In the murky world of internecine CPP power struggles, the only thing clear is that the Tiamzons are unlikely to be freed anytime soon, leaving Sison to direct a shrunken CPP/NWA from afar, either to renewed “people’s war” or back to the negotiating table.

Notes

1. Soliman Santos, “Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan: Some basic information,” December 1, 2006, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article15837.

2. Lucas Fernandez: A Farewell Letter to the CPP, July 31, 2011, https://theworkersdreadnought.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/lucas-fernandez-a-farewell-letter-to-the-cpp/.

3. Wolfgang Bethge, “Jose Maria Sison – the co-founder of CPP and NPA – in the dead end,” 2004, https://www.insights-philippines.de/sisoneng.htm.

4. “Editorial: the Tiamzons’ arrest is a blow to the peace talks,” Ang Bayan, April 7, 2014.