ABSTRACT
"The magnitude of the land problem can be summed up," the Communist Party official said, gesturing around us toward the bare, rocky mountains where kaingeros were losing their fight to scrape a living from the tired soil. Feudal landownership and agricultural practices coupled with the mountainous terrain that covered 86 percent of Nueva Vizcaya and neighboring Quirino province had produced harsh living conditions. The ultimate goal of the rebel program was to distribute free land to farmers, arid to do so communist peasant associations backed by the NPA simply took over several tracts of farmland. During the Marcos years, landholdings in Nueva Vizcaya and Quirino had escaped the government's agrarian reform program because of the political power of the provinces' major landlords. Lands would be confiscated from their owners and distributed to poor peasants, and landlords would be eliminated as a class.
