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The specifics may vary from village to village, but the N.P.A.'s calculated combination of blandishment and brutality has been repeated in thousands of villages since 1981. According to U.S. officials, the guerrillas move freely in 20% of the archipelago's 41,615 villages. Although the Philippine government says the figure is only 5%, it concedes that Communist insurgents now operate in 60 of the country's 74 provinces. They are a strong presence throughout the central island of Negros and in most of resource-rich Mindanao. Estimates of regular N.P.A. troop strength range from the Philippine military's count of 12,500 to Washington's 16,500 and the Communists' own claim of 20,000. Although the 230,000-strong Philippine armed forces enjoy an overwhelming numerical edge, their resources are stretched thin as they attempt to combat insurgents in 59 separate areas. Moreover, as Marcos admitted in a recent TIME interview, by early 1985 the combat troop-to- guerrilla ratio had effectively deteriorated to 4 to 1. To raise the ratio to 10 to 1, the level that military theorists commonly suggest is necessary to control an insurgency, the government is training and deploying eleven new combat battalions, each with about 670 men.
The N.P.A. has a valuable ally in its political alter ego: the illegal, 30,000-member Communist Party of the Philippines. The C.P.-N.P.A. combination is one of the 22 organizations in the National Democratic Front, an outlawed coalition of community, labor, church and leftist groups that boasts a total membership of 1 million and has an executive committee dominated by Communists. In addition, many moderate opponents of Marcos have accused Bayan, a federation of leftist groups that claims 1.5 million members, of also being Communist infiltrated.
The rebels and their political allies stress "simple living and hard struggle." Before a person can join the party, says Ka Victus, "we must change him entirely, re-educate him and indoctrinate him." Once inside the party, he continues, "if you want to court a girl, you must submit her name, and she will be investigated." On matters of internal discipline, the guerrillas can be ruthless. If a rebel discredits the insurgency, says Victus, "the N.P.A. will kill its own member."
Yet in urban areas where the insurgency is trying to attract the middle class, attitudes toward capitalist life-styles are more flexible. Front men in Manila, dressed in business suits and traveling in shiny cars, some equipped with phones, often make contacts in trendy restaurants or respectable offices. So enamored are most Filipinos of Western culture that the Communists have had to find a justification for "bourgeois pleasures." Argued an article in the Communist youth magazine Collegian Folio: "Boy George and break dancing . . . are minor questions in the category of fads that do not exert deep and long-lasting influences."