Commies to ‘guide’ mass base in voting

By SHIELA MAE BUTLIG
and LITO RULONA
Correspondents

COMMUNIST rebel leaders announced that they would take advantage of this year’s elections to advance their cause and at the same time, guide the masses in choosing candidates.

Norsen Manggubat, spokesperson of the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army (CPP-NPA) in northcentral Mindanao, said they would “seize all the advantages and opportunities to further the advance” their “revolutionary tasks.”

“We would painstakingly study the situation, and the standpoint of politicians in order to correctly provide the masses with sound guidance in making their choice of casting their votes to candidates who truly uphold their interests and welfare,” said Manggubat in a statement.

The NPA has earlier claimed that its hold on the masses continued to widen and deepen.

The CPP claimed, “We have attained a 28-percent increase in total barrios covered and 39 percent net increase in our organized masses.  These gains were accumulated as a result of the fruitful implementation of the agrarian revolution, for putting to correct practice the concept of doing mass work in clusters of barangays and in advancing agrarian struggles in these clusters;  giving full-play to the leadership role of the local sub-section committees in organizing and consolidating those who participated and those benefitted by the gains of the peasant struggle; in doing expansion and recovery work in barrios outside areas of maneuver of guerilla platoons.”

Manggubat said they would seriously study, combat and rectify the “bourgeois and other non-proletaran ideas and attitudes that are reflections of the rotten social system.”

“If timely measures would not be applied, these would undermine the internal unity of the Party, violate our organizational principles, policies and processes, taint the prestige of the Party and weaken our collective determination to advance the revolution and defeat the enemy,” Manggubat said.