The Melito Glor Command of the New People’s Army (NPA) in Southern Tagalog led the region’s celebration of the 49th anniversary of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in a camp in the Sierra Madre on December 29.

The group considered the conduct of the celebration activity a victory against the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), amid the government’s intensified operations against the revolutionary group following President Rodrigo Duterte’s cancellation of the peace talks, terrorist tagging and pronounced crackdown on activists. Members of the media were invited to cover the event.

The group also paid tribute to their martyrs, especially the recent 15 killed in Nasugbu, Batangas. Jaime “Ka Diego” Padilla, the new face of Melito Glor Command, decried the overkill and the international humanitarian law and rules of war violations of the AFP in the brutal killing of the 15.

Ka Diego also read the group’s message for the 49th year of the CPP.

The CPP was re-established by a handful of patriotic youth led by Jose Maria Sison in 1968 on December 26—the birth day of Communist Party of China’s foremost leader and ideologue, Mao Zedong, who to Philippine revolutionaries has successfully applied the teachings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin to the context of a feudal society and also founded the second socialist nation in the world. Sison, the founding chairman of CPP, would further apply the teachings of the three revolutionary thinkers to the Philippine context to come to a study of Philippine society and the methods with which to unshackle the country from domination of the ruling class and foreign invaders and create a more equitable society.

The group grew on a national scale, reporting that its people’s democratic government has grown and spread mainly in the form of local organs of political power to more than 110 guerrilla fronts covering large parts of 17 regions and 71 provinces of the Philippines. Known as the longest running communist insurgency in Asia, Duterte emphasized that the communists has not won after half a century of fighting. The opposite is true for the CPP–amid the struggle to topple a more dominant power aided by US imperialism, it persists, grows stronger and has not been beaten and, in its mantra in one of the NPA’s anniversaries, #DiMataloTalo [cannot be beaten].