"(The New People’s Army rebels) torched the classrooms so the pupils can no longer go to school and they can easily recruit them for their cause," said Castilla Mayor Renato Luarenaria.
The burning of the classrooms, which occurred at 2 a.m., would affect at least 100 pupils, he said.
The insurgents, reports said, have intensified their recruitment of minors, mostly high school students, in Castilla town, promising them salaries and firearms if they join the underground movement.
Laurenaria called for an all-out war against the guerrillas to stop their extortion activities and killings of civilians whom they suspect to be helping the police and the military.
Following Laurenaria’s declaration, the Army put up a detachment late last year on an eight-hectare coconut plantation which the NPA rebels took control of after killing its owner in 1986.
Last Dec. 31, a dynamite exploded at the Pajo Elementary School in Balud, Masbate, leaving about P10,000 in damages.
Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. Narciso Abaya, chief of the Armed Forces’ Southern Command based in Zamboanga City, has ordered military units in South Cotabato to run after communist rebels who wounded a senior Army officer and three other soldiers in an ambush in Tupi town last Saturday.
Abaya said elements of the Army’s 601st Infantry Brigade and Police Mobile Group were on patrol when the guerrillas waylaid them in Barangay Palian, Tupi town.
Wounded in the ambush, which led to more than two hours of firefight, were Lt. Col. Eduardo Andes and three of his men.
In another development, NPA guerrillas executed two men they had suspected to be military assets in a remote barangay in Buenavista, Agusan del Norte the other day.
Police said the NPA had implicated brothers Emilio, 27, and Venerando de la Peña, 22, in the arrest and killing of some of its members in Buenavista town.
Hinterland communities in Buenavista, Las Nieves and Carmen towns are rebel-infested. — With Roel Pareño and Ben Serrano