WhereIsAtlas · Philippines

What Happened to the Hukbalahap and the NPA?

From the anti-Japanese guerrilla Hukbalahap to the Maoist New People's Army — the two insurgencies shaped by a century of land conflict.

The Hukbalahap of the 1940s and the New People's Army of 1969 were two insurgencies driven by land and poverty — the Huk crushed by the 1950s, the NPA surviving half a century before diminishing.

Two insurgencies, one grievance

The Philippines has produced two of the world's most notable insurgencies, separated by twenty years but driven by a common grievance. The first was the Hukbalahap, a peasant movement born in World War II. The second was the New People's Army, a Maoist insurgency founded in 1969.

Both grew out of the same soil: deep rural poverty and an entrenched landlord system that left millions of farmers landless and dependent. Their stories are a century-long struggle over who owns the land.

The Hukbalahap: peasants who fought Japan

The Hukbalahap — the 'Anti-Japanese People's Army' — formed in 1942 to fight the Japanese occupation. It drew its strength from the peasant communities of Central Luzon, and it combined the anti-Japanese war with the local struggle against landlords.

By the time the war ended, the movement had become a political force in its own right — armed, organised and with deep roots in the countryside.

The Huk rebellion and its defeat

After 1945 the Hubs refused to lay down their arms. They turned against the postwar republic, and for years a full-scale insurgency gripped Central Luzon. The government, with US backing, responded with a mix of military force and reform — appointing respected figures to run a land-reform and rural-development programme that drained much of the movement's support.

By the mid-1950s the Huk movement had collapsed. Its leaders, including Luis Taruc, surrendered, and the rebellion that had once seemed so formidable was crushed. It was a lesson in how insurgencies can be defeated by addressing, even partially, the grievances that fuel them.

The NPA: a revolution reborn

In 1969, in the midst of the radical 1960s, a small group of ideologues founded the New People's Army (NPA) as the armed wing of the re-established Communist Party of the Philippines. They deliberately picked up where the Hukbalahap left off, channelling the same land and poverty grievances into a Maoist programme.

The NPA grew far beyond the Huk's reach. By the 1980s it was estimated to have tens of thousands of fighters and to operate across much of the country, strongest in the rural areas where land conflict was most acute.

The long, slow decline

The NPA's fortunes rose and fell with political circumstances. During the Marcos dictatorship it gained ground by opposing an authoritarian regime, but after the 1986 revolution and the country's democratic turn, its appeal faded. Government offensives, military successes and the return of democratic politics steadily eroded it.

Over the following decades the NPA shrank dramatically, though it never entirely disappeared. As of the 2020s it remains a much-diminished but persistent rural insurgency.

What the insurgencies teach

The Hukbalahap and the NPA together tell a long story about the limits and possibilities of armed revolt. The Huk show that a movement rooted in real grievance can be enormous — but also that it can be defeated by a combination of force and genuine reform.

The NPA show that such a movement can be reborn decades later, and can survive for half a century, only to slowly fade as the political terrain shifts. Beneath both lies an unfinished question — whether the land and inequality that gave rise to them have ever truly been resolved.

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