Word: huks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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During his year in office, President Ferdinand Marcos has leveled a two-pronged attack on the troublesome pockets of Huk rebellion that still persist in parts of central Luzon more than a decade after the collapse of the main Communist insurgency. One weapon is a social-reform program that aims to undercut the Huks by building schools and hospitals, repairing wells and roads, and providing land-improvement loans to farmers. The other is the cold steel and hot bullets of a 3,800-man military force under Colonel Rafael Ileto, 46, who was named last winter to hunt down...
Those who failed to follow that route often found themselves siding with a new force in Philippine politics: the Huks. Originally known as the Hukbong bayan laban sa Hapon (People's Army Against Japan), the Huks turned quickly to the Communist antidemocratic guerrilla warfare that their brothers in China and Indo-China were fostering. By the late 1940s, the Huk menace was massive: it claimed 14,000 fighting men under arms, and controlled by terror and taxation some 4,000,000 Filipino peasants, mainly in central Luzon. President Roxas, who died in office of a heart attack, was succeeded...
...many Filipinos resent the volume of U.S. aid to Viet Nam and Thailand, and one of Marcos' objectives in visiting Washington was to warn that without more U.S. help, the Philippines could well turn into the Viet Nam of the 1970s. Absurd? Only 15 years ago, the Communist Huk guerrillas came perilously close to taking over the nation. Even now, central Luzon is seeing a recrudescence of Huk terror as some 1,000 armed guerrillas, supported by an estimated 27,000 peasants, prowl the forests...
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...
...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...