Revolutionary forces join commemoration of Aquino assassination – CPP

By CPP Information Bureau
August 21, 2012

The revolutionary forces today join the commemoration of the 29th anniversary of the assassination of former Sen. Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino on August 21, 1983 masterminded by the Marcos dictatorship and its fascist henchmen.

Aquino was among the several thousand anti-Marcos political oppositionists killed, tortured, imprisoned and abducted during the martial law years from 1972 to 1986.

"Ninoy Aquino's assassination was among the historic watersheds leading to the fall of the US-Marcos dictatorship," said the CPP. "The Aquino assassination further militated the Filipino people. It highlighted the brutality of the US-Marcos dictatorship and spurred the gigantic mass demonstrations of workers, peasants, students, women and different democratic sectors in 1983-1986."

"Ninoy Aquino was among the prominent stalwarts of the anti-Marcos political opposition who touched base with the CPP and consulted the revolutionary mass movement in the struggle against the Marcos dictatorship," said the CPP. "Aquino recognized the revolutionary forces as among the most steadfast in the anti-dictatorship struggle."

"It is an outright distortion of history for certain groups, especially those identified with the ruling Aquino regime (by Ninoy's only son Benigno III), to lay sole claim to the anti-Marcos movement and deny the crucial role played by the CPP and the revolutionary forces in the struggle to end the Marcos dictatorship," said the CPP. "The atrocious claims repeatedly made by the military and certain reactionaries that the NPA, and not Marcos, was behind the August 21, 1971 bombing of the Liberal Party miting de avance in Plaza Miranda form part of such distortion."

"Despite being confronted by Marcos' far larger AFP forces, the CPP reestablished itself in December 1968, organized the New People's Army (NPA) in March 1969, and persisted in underground work and revolutionary armed struggle," said the CPP. "Several years into Marcos' martial law, the US-Marcos dictatorship had failed to stem the growth of the people's armed struggle and had even become the the NPA's biggest recruiter by negative example. The NPA would become the most formidable force delivering the biggest blows against the Marcos dictatorship."

"Before and during martial law, the forces of the national-democratic mass movement led numerous demonstrations against the Marcos dictatorship, including the huge student demonstrations of the First Quarter Storm of 1970, the workers' strikes of 1974 which shattered the terror effect of martial law, the nationwide student demonstrations from 1977 to the early 1980s, the workers strike movement and mass demonstrations from the early 1980s to 1986, and the peasant marches and demonstrations of 1984, among others."