Hunt for the Huks

Three thousand Philippine army and constabulary troopers, led by sniffing German shepherds, last week stalked the rugged forest of central Luzon. They were searching for a band of killers who fortnight ago gunned down a village mayor and his five companions in a roadside ambush. The deaths brought to more than 60 the number of mayors, village officials and ordinary law-abiding citizens who in recent months have died by the terrorist's bullet. The statistic underscores the problem that has risen to plague the seven-month-old regime of President Ferdinand Marcos: the resurgence of the Hukbong Magpapalaya sa Bayan,* the backwoods Communist guerrillas known as Huks.

Manila once hoped that the Huk insurgency had been pretty well wiped out after President Ramon Magsaysay's intense four-year campaign of pacification and resettlement ended in the mid 1950s. But in the past few years, as government control has waned in Luzon, Huk influence has slowly reasserted itself. One mayor now claims that 80% of his home province of Pampanga has fallen under Communist control, and that nearly half of the area's 22 mayors are either Communists or Communist sympathizers. If these figures are somewhat high, Marcos himself puts Huk strength at 250 hard-core terrorists, 250 to 500 part-time terrorists, and a "mass base" of perhaps 27,000 people, who, out of fear or sympathy, supply them with food, information and protection.

The order for the Huks to start shooting again apparently came from Peking via Manila to the Luzon countryside, and seems to have been aimed at provoking a national outcry at Marcos' recent decision to send Filipino troops to Viet Nam. So far, the Huk outbreak is far too small to spark a keep-the-troops-at-home reaction. Marcos, who as a guerrilla leader became his country's most decorated World War II hero, intends to make it smaller yet. He has seeded the troubled area with loyal officials who fought with him against the Japanese, and has devised his own pacification program, a mailed-fist and velvet-glove approach.

"Those Huks who are simply brigands, we must liquidate them," explains Marcos. "Those who simply do not understand government, we must teach them about government. Those who demand land reform--yes, we must give them land reform."

*Tagalog for People's Liberation Army.

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