Did you know that the Communist Party of the Philippines was born in Alaminos City 39 years ago? CPP founding chair Jose Ma. Sison confirmed this in an interview.
The following story was published on the front page of the Dec. 26, 2007 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Joma Sison recalls birth of CPP in Alaminos
By Gabriel Cardinoza
Philippine Daily Inquirer
ALAMINOS CITY, Philippines–The Communist Party of the Philippines marks its 39th anniversary Wednesday, but few residents of this bustling coastal city in western Pangasinan know that the CPP was born in one of their upland barangay or villages.
Mayor Hernani Braganza, a former member of the Kabataang Makabayan, a leftist group that went underground when martial law was declared in 1972, said he learned about this fact only in 2001. He was then the agrarian reform secretary and member of the government panel engaged in peace talks with the CPP’s political arm, the National Democratic Front (NDF).
Braganza said it was CPP founding chairman Jose Ma. Sison who told him about it during a meeting in the Netherlands, where the latter has lived in self-exile since the late 1980s.
Sison, the chief political consultant of the NDF, confirmed in an e-mail to the Inquirer that it was in a “barrio” in Alaminos where the CPP “congress of reestablishment” was held on Dec. 26, 1968.
According to Braganza, that barrio is the remote Barangay Dulacac at the tri-boundary of Alaminos and the towns of Bani and Mabini.