THE NEW PEOPLE’S ARMY IN THE DAVAO REGION has reassigned a special unit to Davao City in what is apparently part of a plan to establish a new communist rebel front in Mindanao’s premier city.
An underground source identified the unit as the Paking Quimbaolibot Command which has been pulled out from Compostela Valley province for its new assignment at the Davao City-Davao del Sur boundary.
Fourteen communist rebel fronts already operate in the Davao Region, most of them in the Surigao-Davao Oriental-Davao del Norte area, where rebels get large funds from revolutionanry tax imposed on mining, logging and banana companies.
The Quimbaolibot unit is named after a militant labor leader killed in Compostela Valley sometime in 2002.
The presence of the Qiumbaolibot unit in the Eden-Catigan-Barakatan-Tagurano area in Davao City at the boundary with Davao del Sur surfaced last month after the Merardo Arce Command—the main guerilla unit supervising operations in the Davao Region—claimed responsibility for the killing in downtown Davao City of local orchard grower Vicente Ferrazini.
Rebel spokesman Rigoberto Sanchez, in a statement posted at the NPA website shortly after the killing, identified the Paking Quimbaolibot Red Partisan Command as the unit that carried out the assassination of Ferrazini who was accused of allowing military to set up a camp in his 100-ha orchard farm in Catigan. Sanchez would later apologize for the killing saying a critique by NPA higher units of the murder showed Ferrazini did not deserve the death penalty.
The source said the Quimbaolibot unit would form the core of a still unnamed Front Committee that would mainly operate at the Davao City side of the boundary with Davao del Sur where the Front Committee 51 is already in operation.
In a related development, Davao Region police director Andres Caro said police intelligence reports showed the NPA is reviving its deadly liquidation unit Sparrow Unit as part of rebel offensives.
Rebels also have been monitored as into massive recruitment activities even in urban centers, under the rebel “balikmasa” (Back to the Masses) program.
The Sparrow Unit is the special NPA killing machine behind assasinations of police, military, militia and civilian in the region. Its latest victim is Custodio Varona, barangay captain of Fatima, Paquibato, Davao City, who was shot dead Thursday last week in front of his wife in Fatima.
The rebels fled with the barangay captain’s gun and a bag containing P10,000 that his wife planned to use for a small business. Paquibato is among farflung districts in Davao City tagged by military and police as “heavily influenced” by rebels.
Davao City’s most famous rebel leader, Leonardo Pitao aka Ka Parago, operates in Paquibato, at the city’s boundary with Bukidnon and Davao del Norte.
Filed under: Ferrazini, Military, NEW PEOPLES ARMY, NPA, police, sparrow unit | Tagged: caro, NPA, quimbaolibot, sparrow, unit
