EDITORIAL | Who stands to benefit in the Toboso narrative war?

In the aftermath of the April 19 encounter in Toboso, Negros Occidental, the fighting did not end with the last gunshot. It merely shifted terrain.

From Barangay Salamanca, the battle moved to timelines, press statements, and competing claims about what truly happened. One side declared a tactical success against a weakened insurgent unit. The other questioned the legitimacy of the encounter and demanded justice for their “people’s heroes” or “unarmed civilians.”

Between these narratives is the question least asked, but far more enlightening: who stands to benefit from the way this story is being told?

This may seem straightforward. The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) is projecting operational success from a decisive encounter, high enemy casualties, and minimal or no losses that reinforce an image of capability and control. In areas long described as insurgency-affected, such outcomes signal momentum.

But that is only one side of the equation.

The Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army (CPP-NPA), for their part, seem to be drawing great value from the same incident, ideological, political, and organizational-wise.

They are transforming a battlefield loss into a narrative of sacrifice. By framing the dead as “Red fighters” and “people’s warriors,” they try to reclaim control of the story. Death becomes not a defeat, but a continuation. The message is clear for them: the struggle endures, and martyrdom fuels it.

In sustaining this narrative, it also helps them justify the continuation of networks that rely on support, both local and international. A movement framed as embattled but righteous attracts sympathy, resources, and renewed engagement.

Culturally, martyrdom reinforces identity. The fallen are being elevated into symbols, woven into a larger mythology that keeps the movement alive across generations. Loss is not allowed to remain a loss, but transformed into enduring meaning. This is not new, since the CPP and the NPA have long relied on this narrative capital. 

But in Toboso, something bigger is happening because the identities of those killed have complicated the narrative.

Among the 19 fatalities are individuals whose profiles do not neatly fit the image of members of a conventional armed unit. They turned out to have once been students, one journalist and two Filipino American activists. Instead of prompting a deeper examination of how such individuals ended up in active conflict zones, much of the discourse shifted elsewhere.

The question being asked has increasingly veered away from why they were in an NPA camp during an armed encounter. Instead, it has morphed into the rhetorical “Is it correct to kill researchers, student council leaders, journalists, et al.?”

That shift matters. Because it quietly removes scrutiny from the role of the CPP-NPA itself. It is as though the organization has never recruited from the ranks of students, journalists, Filipino Americans, or even minors. As though such pathways into armed struggle do not exist or have never happened before.

Even the question, “Is it wrong to conduct research in the countryside or in peasant communities?” is disingenuous because it relies on a sweeping generalization rather than examining specific circumstances. Of course, it is not wrong. It is not wrong when done responsibly and transparently, with proper coordination with local government units, community leaders, and even the researchers’ own universities, and within clearly civilian, non-conflict settings. The issue is not research itself, but the conditions under which it is conducted and the environments in which individuals choose to operate.

For critics of the military, the profiles of the dead seem to raise valid questions. A prolonged firefight with no survivors on one side invites scrutiny. These questions deserve answers, and the proposed legislative inquiry can certainly help shed light on this, especially with the arrest of five NPA members (the CPP-NPA are yet to release a statement regarding them). 

But what is striking is where the weight of suspicion falls. And where it does not. The finger of blame, especially in the middle forces and even in parts of the academe, rarely points toward the CPP-NPA. Instead, it is almost entirely directed at the AFP. The possibility that these individuals were embedded, integrated, or actively contributing to the armed struggle was often dismissed outright, or treated as propaganda.

This politics of ambiguity has afforded the CPP-NPA to claim the dead as heroes when it suited their narrative, while their broader network allowed them to deflect accountability by recasting the others who were killed as civilians, activists, or bystanders. 

In its suspiciously vague statement released almost two weeks after the incident, the CPP claimed 10 of the fatalities as NPA “martyrs” (those aged 18 and above), while effectively disclaiming the remaining nine as mere civilians, some of whom included minors or individuals with plausible deniability.

In the narrative war over the Toboso incident, the CPP and the NPA were also able to sweep under the rug the nearly 50 summary killings they had committed over the past two years, many of whom they openly owned up to. 

It is ironic, then, that the outrage over nine deaths, while even excusing the ten already claimed by the CPP as NPA combatants, appears stronger than the far greater number of civilians killed without due process. Former rebels are left to ask: is it because none of those victims were labeled as researchers, journalists, or student leaders from prestigious institutions? Do their deaths not warrant the same condemnation from those who claim to be champions of human rights?

The CPP-NPA have, in effect, capitalized on the tragedy and on how parts of the public received the news of an incident that they themselves described as a “tactical defeat,” turning it into an opportunity to regain narrative ground and moral leverage.

We at Kontra Kwento, along with other former rebels, ourselves previous active participants in the armed conflict, reject dehumanizing the dead. We know the value of a life saved and the pain of a life lost, because many of us have been spared the tragedy of death. We reject the language that reduces the fallen to mockery, are dismayed over terms that have circulated online which strip away dignity and turn human loss into cheap rhetoric or, more accurately, tins of processed meat.

But rejecting dehumanization does not mean abandoning truth and clarity. We also need  to ask the hard questions about how they lived and how they came to die where they did.

Meanwhile, the communities of Toboso remain in the shadows of this narrative war. While no Toboso resident died, hundreds of them were still displaced. Families fled in the early hours, carrying what little they could, seeking shelter in evacuation centers. For them, the debate over labels—fighter, activist, civilian—is secondary to the more immediate reality that their homes and sources of livelihood became battlefields.

And this is where the question of who benefits finds its clearest answer.

The AFP may yet lose its operational and strategic victory with the deaths of the members of a notorious NPA unit—one that had claimed more civilian lives in the past two years than lost NPA fighters in engagements with the AFP in Negros—if it fails to take hold of this narrative war.

The CPP and the NPA, meanwhile, are slowly securing something more enduring: the narrative control of meaning. In shaping how their dead are remembered, by redirecting scrutiny, and by sustaining ambiguity, they ensure that even in a battlefield loss, the narrative serves the cause of the “people’s war.”

But one thing is certain. The residents of Toboso, the poor masses of Negros, the bereaved families who must now live with the absence left behind, and the peace of the Filipino people in general, remain the losers in this narrative war.