PHILIPPINES: Operation Scorpio

With his customary flair for thepolitical spectacular, Philippine-President Ferdinand Marcos last week organized a remarkable lineup of prisoners at Fort Aguinaldo, an army base outside Manila. There stood 25 ranking members of the Philippine Communist Party and its military wing, the New People’s Army (N.P.A.), including nine of the party’s 14-member Central Committee. Almost all of the prisoners had been taken into custody since January. Their collective appearance at Fort Aguinaldo was an awesome display of progress in Marcos’ effort to end the Communist guerrilla movement that has survived, despite great difficulties, ever since the Philippines was granted independence from the U.S. in 1946.

The star prisoner—and the object of an intensive man hunt code-named Operation Scorpio—was the most recently captured: Bernabe Buscayno, 32, alias Commander Dante, a veteran guerrilla who rose from a peasant background to become commander in chief of the N.P.A. He had been arrested only the week before—with humiliating ease —while asleep at his family’s rural home. Buscayno was visiting his two-week-old daughter (named Malaya, “free”) and his wife Mila, who had been released from detention in June and apparently served as an unwitting lure. Army soldiers closed in at 3 a.m. and Buscayno surrendered without a fight. He walked out to be photographed with smiling army officers and even Marcos himself, who arrived to interrogate the prisoner personally. “He said the society is only for the rich,” Marcos later reported to TIME Correspondent William McWhirter. “I admitted there were still inequities but that we were trying to remove them.”

Many Filipinos doubted that Buscayno, a Communist guerrilla since the age of 16, could have been caught in such a simple, old-fashioned trap. To them it seemed more likely to have been a typical Filipino maneuver: lutong macao, or precooking. Dante might have consented to his own capture because of tension within his movement between younger urban activists and rural guerrillas like himself.

In any case, Operation Scorpio, plus the earlier arrests, was a triumph for Marcos as well as the greatest setback for the Communists since the breakdown of the old Huk guerrilla movement in the mid-1950s. The military announced that the big roundup would continue, its chief target now being the Communist Party’s chairman and shrewd ideologue, José Maria Sison, 37.

Dubious Charges. The captured Buscayno will go on trial this week before a military tribunal—along with his second in command in the N.P.A., Victor Corpuz, and Benigno Aquino Jr., the former Liberal Party leader and presidential candidate, who has been confined for the past four years on dubious charges that he was an N.P.A. leader.* They will almost surely be convicted, but they stand a good chance of a presidential pardon if they make confessions and come over to the government side.

Though the government has been able to harry the N.P.A. by military force, the rebel movement still shows signs of considerable strength. Over the past four years, N.P.A. activity has spread from its original coastal stronghold of Isabela in northern Luzon all the way through the rural areas of the Eastern Archipelago Provinces and even to parts of Mindanao, which is also troubled by the far larger rebellion of Moslem separatists. Though the N.P.A.’s armed strength may be no more than 2,000 to 3,000, its political activists, drawn largely from educated urban youths, are probably far more numerous. They have established effective, well-concealed cells in such places as the squalid squatter areas of Manila as well as among low-paid farm laborers.

In the long run, the growth of Communist political influence poses a greater danger to the Marcos regime than the N.P.A.’s ineffectual military wing. At the same time, part of Marcos’ problem is growing unrest—particularly among university students and the Christian churches—over the continuation of martial law, with its suspension of civil liberties. The government plans a referendum next month on the retention of martial law. Two previous referendums in 1973 and 1975 indicated yes by some 90%. This time the results are widely believed to have been equally lutong macao, or precooked.

*Aquino has been brought before military tribunals three times since his arrest, but each time the case was postponed when he eloquently rejected the rights of Marcos’ martial law regime to try him.