A former high-ranking New People's Army commander has published a detailed critique of how the Communist Party of the Philippines portrays casualties from armed clashes, arguing that the movement deliberately obscures the "revolutionary integration" process that transforms activists into combatants.
Jam "Ka Amihan" Saguino, who served as Deputy Secretary of the Southern Mindanao Regional Committee before surrendering, posted his account following the April 19 deaths of 19 NPA members in clashes in Toboso, Negros Occidental. Among the dead were Alyssa Alano, a University of the Philippines Diliman student council member, and RJ Ledesma, a regional coordinator for an alternative media outlet.
The CPP's ecosystem "brands them as students, researchers, organizers, or civilians," Saguino wrote in a widely-shared video statement. "Were they civilians in some aspects of their lives? Possibly. Did some hold legal public identities? Certainly. But were those identities the whole truth? Of course not."
Saguino described how "revolutionary integration" operates through a multi-stage process: campus organizing around legitimate social issues like poverty and inequality, followed by rural immersions with underground cadres, then courier work or intelligence gathering, and eventually integration into guerrilla units. "Not everyone goes all the way," he acknowledged, "but many are drawn step-by-step into structures they did not initially understand."
The account provides rare insider detail on NPA recruitment methods at a time when the insurgency faces declining manpower. Saguino, who was recruited at the University of the Philippines Visayas through the League of Filipino Students, accused the CPP of exploiting young idealism: "If you believe in your cause, own the casualties. Do not send promising young Filipinos into the mountains and just call them 'innocent civilians' after they die."
The government has long argued that the CPP uses legal organizations as recruitment fronts, a claim activists reject as red-tagging that endangers legitimate advocacy work. Saguino's testimony—from someone with deep knowledge of internal CPP structures—complicates both narratives.
For families of the dead, the debate over labels offers little comfort. Whether Alano and others died as civilians, combatants, or something in between, they are gone. But for peace talks that have stalled for years, understanding how young Filipinos end up in conflict zones matters for any effort to interrupt the recruitment pipeline.
The five-decade insurgency has killed an estimated 40,000 people. Saguino's intervention is unlikely to end disputes over who counts as a combatant, but it provides a window into the integration process that CPP critics say makes such distinctions deliberately unclear.
