Julie de Lima and Coni Ledesma are two women among countless other revolutionaries at the forefront of the Filipino people’s quest for a just and lasting peace. Julie and Coni have, for the longest time stood out as representatives of the NDFP in the peace negotiations with the GRP to address landlessness, agrarian underdevelopment and industrial backwardness that are the roots of the armed conflict and civil war.
Since the peace talks with the GRP started in the 1990s abroad, Julie and Coni have played significant and enduring roles as members of the NDFP peace negotiating panel. They were part of the NDFP panel that forged important agreements such as the Hague Joint Declaration, the Joint Agreement on Security and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) and the Comprehensive Agreement on Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CAHRIHL) – the same agreements that are blatantly being undermined by the current US-Marcos regime.
The Hague Joint Declaration laid down the fundamental framework for negotiations, affirming that substantive issues such as social, economic, and political reforms should be addressed as the basis for resolving the armed conflict. JASIG provided essential guarantees for the safety and immunity of negotiators, enabling both parties to participate in talks without fear of arrest or harassment. Meanwhile, CARHRIHL established mutually binding commitments to uphold human rights and international humanitarian law, offering a concrete mechanism to protect civilians and regulate the conduct of forces on both sides. Taken together, these agreements helped create a pathway to pursue just and lasting peace in the negotiating table.
During the actual conduct of the peace talks, both representatives stood firmly behind revolutionary principles and diplomacy that guide the negotiations. Coni would be the NDFP panel’s technical and logistics organizer, and the panel’s “bridge” to the third party facilitator (RNG) in the talks. In this role, Coni would relay to the RNG the NDFP panel’s wishes for the smooth conduct of the talks. And after every debacle in the entire process during the talks, Coni would be able to explain to the NDFP panel staff in simple ways the intricacies that brought the talks, for instance, to a standstill. On the other hand, she would be the panel’s first broadcaster to announce joyously the achievements of the panel in every important phase of the talks. As part of CAHRIHL’s implementation, Coni was appointed as member of the NDFP’s Joint Monitoring Committee (JMC).
Julie, on the other hand, is also a panel member since the 1990s, and her appointment in 2020 as NDFP interim peace panel chairperson and later as chairperson, signals a new phase in the talks as its resumption faces greater obstacles with the GRP’s move to dismiss previously agreed HJD and the JASIG, firmly reminding the Filipino people that “in the peace negotiations, we are constantly guided by the mutually acceptable principles of national sovereignty, democracy and social justice”.
In the formal peace talks, Julie took an unassuming and low-profile role allowing the more senior members of the panel to engage the GRP in discussions and to be able to focus on the grueling work on the ground, chairing the NDFP Reciprocal Working Committee on Social and Economic Reforms (RWC-SER) which produced the NDFP draft Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms (CASER). The work on the NDFP CASER draft started way back in the late 1990s, and Julie worked hard to assemble a formidable lineup of consultants – mass leaders from workers and peasant mass organizations, academics, well-known economists, researchers, church leaders and allies from the national bourgeoisie. Julie led in this painstaking and arduous project and took more than a decade to produce.
Described as still a work in progress, the draft NDFP CASER is a “radical path of socioeconomic transformation” and a blueprint of a nationalist and democratic program designed to address the root causes of the armed conflict in the country by dismantling land monopoly and promoting national industrialization, and a program that upholds the interests of working people—specifically farmers, workers, and national minorities—over the interests of foreign and domestic monopoly capital.
Despite the refusal of the US-Marcos regime to resume talks and address the roots of the armed conflict, Julie has tirelessly issued calls on peace advocates and people’s organizations to demand that the GRP and NDFP build further on the mutual agreements already made on human rights and international humanitarian law and to move forward to realizing a comprehensive agreement on social and economic reforms, and political and constitutional reforms.
The real and essential work of these two women of peace, however, can best be seen outside the negotiating table. Julie has long dedicated her life as a revolutionary, and her expertise as a researcher, teacher, organizer and educator for the national democratic revolutionary movement. Professor Sison’s enduring body of works have the undeniable footprint of Julie as she and Joma are wedded together in the same ideological and political standpoint, viewpoint and method. Notably too, was and is Julie’s countless contributions, inputs and tireless efforts to the revolutionary women’s movement and the building of the revolutionary united front.
After the passing of Comrade Sison in 2022, Julie took on the task as guardian of Sison’s body of works. Prof. Sison’s writings and revolutionary mementos are now entrusted to a foundation created in Sison’s honor and memory to help propagate the CPP founder’s legacy to a growing generation of new and young activists and revolutionaries.
Coni, on the other hand, is a household name, so to speak, in the international work of the NDFP. Together with her late comrade-partner, Louie Jalandoni, Coni played an instrumental role in establishing the presence of the NDFP in Europe, the building of the solidarity movement for the revolutionary struggle in the homefront. As international representative of Makibaka, the underground revolutionary mass organization of Filipino women, Coni led in echoing the women’s struggle in the Philippines to the international stage. As head of the NDFP Special Office for the Protection of Children, Coni constantly monitors and strongly speaks out against the GRP’s grave violations of Filipino children’s rights, especially those who become victims of the GRP’s dirty war against the people.
Despite their advanced age, these two women of peace remain as unwavering as ever in their commitment and belief that only in addressing and vanquishing landlessness, fascism, bureaucratic corruption and foreign domination, and the building of a genuinely free, democratic and prosperous Philippines will genuine and lasting peace flourish.
In the meantime, as Julie would always resolutely emphasize, with or without peace talks, the NDFP continues the quest for peace by pursuing the main content of the national democratic revolution – agrarian revolution to liberate the peasant masses from landlord exploitation and oppression, and the Filipino working masses in general enslaved by the semifeudal and semicolonial ruling system.