El aggiornamiento maoista en Perú y Filipinas.

 

In Peru and the Philippines, Maoist Insurgencies Update Their Rhetoric

By Jacob Zenn | 03 Jul 2012

Una formación de "Sendero".

More than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with most of the world’s attention having shifted to the threat of international terrorism, the Philippines and Peru are still struggling to pacify their countries’ communist insurgencies. Rather than fading into history, the Philippines’ New People’s Army (NPA) and Peru’s Shining Path have updated their rhetoric to reflect contemporary concerns in an effort to make their ideologies relevant to the “masses” in the post-Cold War era.



The NPA and Shining Path, which were founded in 1969 and 1982, respectively, have not abandoned their discourse on Marxism and land reform, but their justification for attacks on multinational corporations and the government now centers on indigenous peoples’ rights and the environment. On Oct. 3, 2011, 200 NPA fighters launched simultaneous attacks on three mining companies in Surigao del Norte in northeast Mindanao, destroying roughly $11.5 million worth of equipment and facilities and briefly taking employees hostage. The Communist Party of the Philippines, the NPA’s parent political organization, released a statement saying that the attacks were carried out for “the protection of the environment and natural resources and the defense of the rights of the Lumad [indigenous] people, peasants and workers.” In another statement, released on March 29, 2012, to commemorate the 43rd anniversary of the group’s founding, an NPA spokesperson listed popular protest actions carried out by the group as being focused on “environmental destruction caused by large-scale mining, logging and plantation, [and] massive land-grabbing of peasant lands.”

Peru has seen similar attacks against multinational corporations in recent months. On April 9, Shining Path fighters took hostage 36 Peruvian laborers working for the Swedish company Skanska, which is building the Camisea gas pipeline that passes through the Apurimac and Ene River Valley (VRAE). Before retreating, the fighters made speeches to villagers about the environmental effects of the pipeline on local communities. Two months later, on June 7, 30 armed Shining Path members entered the encampment of another company, Transportadora de Gas del Peru, also in the VRAE, and took 19 workers hostage. The workers were freed the same day, but not before the Shining Path issued a letter to the consortium of companies working on the Camisea gas pipeline calling on them to “respect the agreements with the indigenous peoples.”

Membership in the Shining Path is drawn almost entirely from the Quechuas, indigenous to the VRAE, while the Lumad of Mindanao make up roughly 70 percent of the NPA. In both cases, the indigenous groups’ resource-rich lands comprise the core geographic area of operations for the insurgencies. Though the transition to democracy and an increase in foreign investment have led to higher standards of living in both Peru and the Philippines, indigenous people have seen little of the benefits. Despite Peru having posted Latin America’s highest average annual GDP growth rate from 2001 to 2011 at 5.75 percent, 92 percent of inhabitants in the VRAE are classified by UNICEF as “poor” and 47 percent as “extremely poor.” A similar situation exists in the Philippines, where despite per capita GDP rising from $2,836 to $3,560 from 2003 through 2010, the poverty rate rose from 24.4 percent to approximately 27 percent over the same period, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The NPA and Shining Path receive sufficient popular support from these indigenous communities to sustain their insurgencies and continue their campaigns of violence against multinational corporations and the government. The NPA is now fighting on 42 fronts in Mindanao, up from 32 in 2009, and it has increased its platoon strength by 20 percent since 2011 to approximately 5,000 fighters today. In Peru, despite the army’s 1,200-troop offensive in the VRAE in 2008, the Shining Path maintains a core of 500 fighters in the region. Both groups have declined significantly since their peaks in the 1980s, when the NPA had some 25,000 fighters and the Shining Path more than 10,000, but both are still capable of carrying out deadly attacks in addition to kidnappings and sabotage. The NPA killed nearly 200 government personnel in 2011, while the Shining Path has killed nearly 100 Peruvian soldiers and contractors in the VRAE since 2008.

The rhetoric of indigenous peoples’ rights and the environment also provides cover for the groups’ financial strategies. Multinational companies in Mindanao are forced to pay “revolutionary taxes” to the NPA, estimated to average $450,000 per month, and, in Peru, companies must conclude “coexistence agreements” with the Shining Path if they want to be spared from attacks. The Shining Path initially demanded $10 million for the kidnapped Skanska workers, settling for an unannounced sum when it released them.

Other insurgent movements formerly predicated on communism, such as the Naxalites in India, have similarly portrayed themselves as protectors of indigenous peoples and the environment to justify political violence. Though the rural base of these insurgencies and the distances between the countries involved prevent them from coordinating a unified, global ideology, the Shining Path has regional adherents in Ecuador’s “Red Sun” party and Bolivia’s “People’s Revolutionary Front,” and the Naxalites are influential among Nepal’s Maoists.

Correspondingly, governments have adopted either national or regional counterinsurgency strategies to combat these groups, but not a unified approach. They are often faced with the choice between paying off the rebels to cease their attacks or developing policies aimed at addressing underdevelopment in the resource-rich areas where indigenous people live. The former option only emboldens the insurgents, while the latter is unattractive to political leaders seeking short-term solutions to impress national constituencies. The latter path is, however, ultimately the only way to win over the local population, isolate the insurgents and force them to join or reintegrate the political process.

While the NPA, Shining Path and other postcommunist movements may be exploiting indigenous people to seize political power and wealth, their persistence decades after the end of the Cold War shows the lasting power -- and adaptability -- of ideology, which combined with citizens’ feelings of marginalization can create an environment for continued insecurity and violence.

Jacob Zenn is a legal adviser and international affairs analyst based in Washington, D.C. He specializes in the insurgent groups of Southeast Asia, South America, Nigeria and Central Asia.