Blood on the Sugarlands: The CPP-NPA's Betrayal of the Peasant Masses in Negros Island

Sixty-two. Say the number out loud. Sixty-two poor peasants of Negros Island have been shot dead by the Communist Party of the Philippines–New People's Army (CPP-NPA) in eighteen months, from January 2025 to today. Sixty-two farmers marched off, lined up, or were ambushed and executed by the very guns that claim to fight in their name. There is no revolutionary language sophisticated enough to launder this into anything other than what it is: the massacre of the poor by an armed group that has turned predator against the very class it was founded to serve.

The CPP-NPA has built its entire claim to legitimacy on two pillars: the anti-feudal class line and the mass line. Strip away the slogans, and the demand is simple - trust us with your sons, feed our fighters, shelter our cadres, and in return we will defend you against the landlord and the state. Negros Island now has its answer to that bargain, written in the blood of sixty-two of its own: betrayal. The CPP-NPA in Negros is not an army of the peasants. It is an army against them.

Call this what it is, not "internal discipline," not "revolutionary justice," not any of the sanitized terms the CPP-NPA's propagandists will reach for. It is terrorism. It is the calculated slaughter of unarmed farmers by an organization that has lost its mass base through its own corruption and irrelevance, and has decided the fastest way to rebuild fear-based control is to put bullets in the people who no longer believe in it. An organization that must murder its own social base to keep it in line has already died as a revolutionary movement, whatever name it still marches under.

And follow the money, because it tells the truth; the propaganda won't. While farmers are being executed, the CPP-NPA is running a protection racket for middle and small landlords across Negros, collecting so-called "revolutionary taxes" in exchange for safe passage and non-interference. Let that sink in: the landlord pays, and lives. The peasant refuses, resists, or simply gets in the way, and dies. This is not agrarian revolution. This is a criminal syndicate extorting the countryside under a red flag, and it has picked its side, and it is not the side of the poor.

Meanwhile, the big landlords and hacienda owners of Negros operate untouched, continuing to grind down the sakadas under conditions of exploitation that have persisted for generations. The CPP-NPA has nothing to say about this, no armed action, no agrarian justice, no defense of the cane cutters whose suffering supposedly justifies its entire war. Its silence is not neutrality. It is complicity. An organization that kills poor farmers while sparing the landlords who exploit them has no standing left to invoke the word "revolution."

Let this be said plainly: the CPP-NPA in Negros Island is not a people's army. It is an armed racket that has turned its guns on the peasantry, sold its protection to the landed class, and abandoned the sakadas to their exploitation, all while draping itself in a revolutionary flag it has long since disgraced. Sixty-two peasants are dead. Their blood is the evidence, and no statement, no slogan, and no anniversary manifesto from the CPP-NPA can wash it away. The people of Negros do not need to be persuaded of this. They have buried the proof.