I was reading Maya and Carlo Butalid’s Unmasking the Myths of the CPP and its Leader Joma Sison (read the book review) when reports began to trickle across social media about a series of encounters in Toboso, Negros Occidental between the Philippine Army and CPP-NPA-NDF forces. Nineteen were said to have died—most of them young, some barely out of college. Five others, reportedly wounded, were later intercepted and arrested in Talisay, Negros Occidental.
It is difficult not to see these deaths as more than statistics. Hindi ba sayang ang mga buhay na iyon? These were lives shaped, persuaded, and ultimately spent in a conflict that continues to reproduce the same tragic outcomes. One has to ask: to what end are these young people being drawn into armed struggle, only to be cut down before they can even fully live? What possibilities were foreclosed—not just for them, but for the communities they might have served in ways that did not demand their deaths?
No one can easily dismiss the sincerity of many of these young people in their desire to build a more humane and equitable society—one free from poverty and injustice. There is, after all, some truth in CPP information officer Marco Valbuena’s claim that people in Toboso “regard the NPA fighters as their own sons and daughters, who render selfless service as doctors, dentists, farmhands, and teachers to their children.”
And yet sincerity, no matter how genuine, does not make a path just or even defensible—when it repeatedly ends in the same cycle of loss. San Carlos Bishop Gerardo Alminaza is right: the clash in Toboso should not be reduced to a body count. “It must become a wake-up call,” he said. “The conversation must return to root causes, not focus solely on armed actors. Peace processes must be inclusive, not reduced to military solutions.”
But that call cuts both ways. If the state cannot rely on force alone, neither can a revolutionary movement justify a strategy that continues to draw in the young, only to see them die before their lives can fully unfold.
I understand the pull. I was 15, a second-year high school student in the 1970s, at the height of the Marcos dictatorship, when I found myself drawn to the CPP-NPA. The conditions then made such choices feel not only reasonable, but necessary. It took me another 15 years to confront what I came to see as the futility of armed struggle, and to turn instead to other forms of advancing social change.
I was not “terror-groomed,” as some would simplistically claim of young people who take up the cause. There is a line between manipulation and critical awakening. I was fortunate to have teachers and mentors who taught me to think deeply about society and injustice.
I remember visiting Smokey Mountain, the dumpsite in Tondo, Manila and seeing how families lived—how we had to set up a mosquito net, light a candle inside it, and only then open our food, because flies would otherwise swarm everything. Encounters like that do something to you. If you are not moved to want to change those conditions, then something in your sense of humanity is missing.
The question, then, is not why young people are drawn to struggle. The question is why we continue to offer them a path that so often demands their lives, instead of one that allows them to live—and still fight for justice.
As Maya and Carlo Butalid argue in their book, “It is not true that Protracted People’s War is the only way to enact revolutionary change in the Philippines. There are alternative paths.”
The real failure is not the absence of options, but our refusal to confront them. These alternative paths to deep, structural change—grounded in democratic struggle, social movements, and accountable institutions—are too often pushed to the margins, while violence continues to dominate both imagination and policy.
This is what should be at the center of national discourse: not the shallow, personality-driven contest of who is worse or better — Marcos or Duterte —but a serious reckoning with how meaningful change can be pursued without sacrificing yet another generation.
Header photo: Groups staging a protest outside the AFP headquarters at Camp Aguinaldo, condemning the anti-insurgency operation in Toboso, Negros Occidental that left 19 dead, including UP Diliman student leader Alyssa Alano and Negros community journalist RJ Nichole Ledesma (credit: ABS-CBN News, April 24, 2026)
About the author
EARL G. PARREÑO is a political activist, social entrepreneur, investigative journalist and author helping drive reforms and deepen public participation in democratic processes. Earl G. Parreño wrote the books Beyond Will & Power: A Biography of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte (Optima Typographics, Cebu City, 2019) and Boss Danding, an unauthorized biography about Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco (First Quarter Storm Foundation, Inc., Quezon City, 2003).
This piece originally appeared in Rappler on April 23, 2026. Publication in Dateline Ibalon is with the author’s permission.