Reports say Vince Francis Dingding, a former UP Cebu student leader, was among five people killed on May 16, 2026, in reported encounters between government troops and alleged NPA members in Cauayan, Negros Occidental. Public accounts also suggest that he had been separated from ordinary family life for years after reportedly joining the underground movement. If true, this letter is not merely about death. It is about how the CPP-NPA-NDF does not only take young people to the mountains. It takes them away from their families long before the bullets come.
Behind the slogans, the romantic language of “martyrdom,” and the propaganda of revolution, there is a mother battling colon cancer, a father forced to write in pain, and a family begging that questions about their dead son be coursed through a barangay captain because they can no longer bear the burden directly.
And then came the most devastating line:
“We decided that we will no longer claim his remains in Negros Occ.”
That is the real face of the CPP-NPA-NDF’s war. Not heroism. Not liberation. Not justice. A dead son in a distant province. A sick mother pushed deeper into suffering. Parents so exhausted by grief, fear, distance, and pressure that even the final act of bringing their child home became unbearable.
This is what the movement leaves behind when the slogans are stripped away: broken homes, abandoned bodies, grieving parents, and families forced to carry the cost of a war they never asked for. The CPP-NPA-NDF may call its dead “martyrs,” but this letter shows the crueler truth. For the families left behind, there is no glory. There is only silence, trauma, and the unbearable pain of losing a child twice: first to the movement, and then to the grave.
