Hidden under a lush canopy of trees in the southern Philippines, a group of excited youngsters prepare for their graduation ceremony.
There will be no caps and gowns, but the graduates are sure of a job -- attacking town halls and police stations and ambushing army patrols across sprawling Mindanao island as the latest recruits to the world's most resilient communist insurgency.
PHOTO: REUTERS
They will also demand money from mining companies and plantations and run "political education" classes in remote villages, adding to a growing national security headache for the government as May 10 national elections approach.
Comrade Oris, in charge of about 70 New People's Army (NPA) recruits finishing a six-week course in guerrilla warfare, swells like a proud father as graduation day nears.
"Time is on our side," he says, cheerfully dismissing the failure of communism elsewhere as part of the "ups and downs" of revolutionary movements.
"We have not been crushed by the biggest imperial power in history," he adds, referring to the US.
The sprightly 55-year-old, who seems to model his well-trimmed beard on that of late Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, has spent more than a decade on the run.
He is one of the NPA's top cadres, planning strategy from a tiny jungle shelter amid a tangle of wires connecting his telephones. While his comrades in the legal Communist Party of the Philippines talk peace with the government from exile in the Netherlands, Oris' focus is firmly on the armed struggle.
As elections approach, barely a day goes by without NPA rebels attacking police, clashing with soldiers or assaulting local politicians who balk at their "permit to campaign" fees.
Unlike the various Muslim rebel groups fighting for an Islamic state in Mindanao, the NPA is active on the entire Philippine archipelago. To Washington, they are terrorists, while the Manila government says they are extortionists who cripple rural development and drive away investment and tourists.
Either way, they have proved remarkably resilient over the past 35 years while communist movements elsewhere in Asia were either crushed long ago or lost their radical edge in government.
"The Filipino comrades are very clumsy," late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once said, as Beijing established relations with the Philippine's fervent anti-communist president, Ferdinand Marcos, in the 1970s.
Watching the new NPA recruits clump through the mud in ill-fitting rubber boots, it is clear they still lack polish.
But as China recently changed its constitution to protect private property, Philippine comrades were still holding out for a revolution and growing more confident by the day.
After suffering from a bloody internal feud in the wake of Marcos' fall from power in 1986, the NPA's ranks have grown by several thousand to an estimated 11,000 in the past decade.
Any trip into the Philippine countryside shows why.
For many rural poor, life has changed little since Spanish colonialists grabbed vast tracts of land centuries ago.
Millions of farmers still scrape a living from small patches of rented land, while the wealthy descendants of Spanish families use vast haciendas for weekends away from the city.
Despite "people power" uprisings in 1986 and 2001 -- ousting presidents Marcos and Joseph Estrada -- the Philippines has seen little genuine economic or political reform, which is fueling widespread sympathy for the NPA among the poor.
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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