One “criminal partnership” that must end

THE one good direction the government, thru the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), has pursued to hasten the demise of the over five decades of communist subversion and violence is its current focus on the fund-raising activities of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

It is said that in a democracy, all question of governance is a question of money and the same holds true, we should say, for any activity, to include the pursuit of violence and political extremism.

In the case of the CPP, stripped of its “revolutionary” façade, it has become, to this day, the country’s most feared criminal organization.

And like all criminal organizations, the CPP has managed to thrive because some segment of the local political and economic elite who also always wants to dominate the country’s politics and economy, have decided to support the party’s growth.

Indeed, anyone familiar with the history of the Mafia or the drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico, can easily relate the CPP’s growth to them to include their very violent reputations.

But there is a big difference, however.

Whereas it was the Mafia and the drug cartels who had to pay the government for protection and whereas they need to partner with legitimate business to launder their money, in the case of the CPP, both government and business had to “negotiate” separate terms with the CPP in their hope for peace and a return to “normalcy.”

In dealing with such a social monster, the NTF-ELCAC is correct when it adopted the ‘whole of nation/whole of government’ (WON/WOG) strategy in fighting the CPP and the other monsters associated with it—the New People’s Army (NPA) and its many front organizations under the National Democratic Front (NDF).

And under this strategy, Big Business must be made to understand that it is their continuing financial support to the CPP that has made the problem much worse. For the more they give to the CPP, the more is the CPP capacitated to extract more from them.

But now, the game is up and as NICA director general Alex Paul Monteagudo has revealed, their painstaking work in tracing the CPP money pipeline has thus far produced 87 companies, aside from another 18 bogus NGOs the CPP created to also get money from gullible donors from abroad.

We also need to mention here the unstated truth that, yes, politicians are also in cahoots with the CPP. Theirs has become a “mutual relationship.”

If only to make an example and in order to send the clear message that the government is truly serious in its campaign to end CPP violence and deception, those identified and documented to have helped the CPP must be punished to the full extent of the law and their names released to the public.

In other words, there must be no room for “compromise,” political or otherwise.

It has always been human nature to entertain fear and caution when the punishment is certain and inevitable.

And unless this is done, this vicious cycle of criminal partnership between those wanting to overturn our democracy and those believing they could profit from it, shall go on and on.