Comrade Nicole, sweating after a session practising hand-to-hand combat, rests her rifle against a tree stump and says she hated the military even before her father was killed in 2002 when his NPA unit clashed with soldiers.
"My father told me to ask farmers why they don't have enough to eat," said Nicole, pretty and barely out of her teens. "They told me that they have to sell their produce almost for free. Even if they own land, it's only one or two hectares."
Nicole's commitment has little to do with Marx. Like other graduates, most of whom are young and from local tribes, it seems enough that the NPA gives them rice, cigarettes and a sense of justice and purpose that the crumbling rural economy cannot.
But the revolution is not as pure as it could be. The NPA's demands for money net the rebels a tidy 300 million pesos (US$5.3 million) a year, according to the military, and not all of it goes towards helping the poor.
"It's big business," said Victor Corpus, the head of the military's civil relations and himself a former NPA guerrilla.
He said NPA leaders had pocketed funds when he was in the movement in the 1970s, and probably still did.
At the rebel training camp, the new recruits wash in a river at dawn to get ready for their big day, which will include tackling a obstacle course carved out of the jungle and commendations for marksmanship and singing.
Later, to a military beat drummed out on a plastic oil container, the graduates march proudly around the clearing.
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