Old scores are settled frequently with bullets in the Philippines, a country where armed rebel leaders are notorious for changing their allegiances and their uniforms in exchange for senior government posts.
At times this chameleon existence can be fatal, as it proved to be last week for Romulo Kintanar, the former leader of the New Peoples’ Army, a rural guerrilla movement whose 40-year communist insurgency has been as durable across the archipelago as the Moro National Liberation Front’s Islam-inspired separatist war on the southern island of Mindanao.
Kintanar, 50, had reinvented himself as the chief of security for the Bureau of Immigration and chief consultant for the National Electrification Administration–a far more lucrative and comfortable existence than his past 25 years of battling government troops and disagreements inside the NPA.
The insurgent group is blamed for having caused the deaths of nearly 45,000 people. It resurfaced recently in the form of weekly ambushes of army patrols and heavy death tolls.
In the past, the NPA usually re-emerged at times of national instability and uncertainty. Nowadays, the Philippines is split by ferocious infighting over whether President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s bloodless coup against her predecessor, Joseph Estrada, was legitimate, whether Arroyo should be impeached for graft just as Estrada was and who would succeed her now that she has decided not to seek another term next year.
Assassins strike at eatery
Kintanar was eating lunch Jan. 23 at his favorite Japanese restaurant in Quezon City, on the outskirts of Manila, when two customers at the next table pulled out pistols and shot him with five bullets–the last one at close range to make sure he was dead. Afterward, the assassins calmly walked away.
Few investigators doubt the killing was ordered by one of the three NPA factions. A rebel statement last year had sentenced to death four “defectors,” including Kintanar, who apparently left the communist guerrilla movement in 1992.
“It’s an internal matter,” said Luis Taruk, the 90-year-old founder of the Huk peasant rebellion in the 1930s and 1940s. Many of his followers formed the core of the NPA after World War II.
“There are only a few thousand NPA followers left and they try to scare each other. Once they were Stalinist, now they don’t believe even in God. This kind of killing is to make people afraid of antagonizing them. It means they are quarreling,” he added.
Taruk, whose movement was an inspiration for Kintanar, has remained an anachronism among insurgents. He still lives in a humble shack on the income earned from a hole-in-the-wall shop his niece runs. He never accepted a government post or remuneration.
In addition, Taruk still organizes rural rallies of his aged followers, exhorting them to peaceful protests against the failure of consecutive Filipino governments to start serious land reform in breaking up the large rural haciendas mainly owned by 28 families.
Land reform and unemployment among a ballooning rural population have been a battle cry for almost a century in this country east of the Asian mainland. The dream of land has made the impoverished countryside a fertile recruiting ground for rebel movements such as the NPA and the Muslim insurgency on Mindanao.
Changing allegiances
Many rebels leaders have opted for a more peaceful existence in a nation where ministers, lawmakers and security chiefs often have checkered pasts, changing allegiance to the winning side.
Doting fans elected Imelda Marcos, wife of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, to parliament even though she was under investigation for allegedly misappropriating billions of dollars in public funds. The Moro National Liberation Front’s supreme leader, Nur Misuari, was made governor of Mindanao a few years ago in return for a peace deal, which created Islamic splinter groups including Abu Sayyaf, the notorious kidnap-for-ransom terrorist gang.
Also, rebel soldiers who ran kidnapping and hit squads have become senators and there even is talk that Estrada, ousted in 2001, might make a comeback in next year’s election.
Kintanar is best remembered in the Philippines for his daring escape with an arsenal smuggled in from China in 1972. The commander of that guerrilla operation was one of his best friends, Victor Corpus, now chief of military intelligence.
In 1985, Kintanar devised a daring plan to take over Manila and oust Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the nation from 1965 to 1986. But NPA chairman Jose Maria Sison vetoed that plan.
Kintanar never forgave Sison, who lives in exile, for missing what he considered an opportunity to bring the NPA to power.
