Can the Party Still Sail? Looking Back at the MV Karagatan and Doña Andrea Incidents

Figure 1. The MV Karagatan

August 30, 2025 — Pasay City, Metro Manila, Philippines

An Article by Fritz Lawrence Ragunton

Political violence, ideological conflict, and clandestine maneuvering were already prevalent in the Philippines in the months before Ferdinand Marcos Sr. proclaimed martial law on September 23, 1972. Two tragic arms shipment operations, the MV Karagatan (see Fig. 1) and the Doña Andrea incidents, entered history as representations of both revolutionary aspirations and maritime disasters in this volatile political milieu.

In the early 1970s, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) sent several delegations to Beijing, where they engaged in arms negotiations with the Communist Party of China (CPC) in support of the budding communist movement back home. By mid-1972, the CPC agreed to supply more than 1,200 M-14 rifles, mortars, bazookas, and other equipment. With funding from the CPC, Fidel Agcaoili (1944-2020) traveled to Japan to purchase a Japanese fishing trawler named Kishi Maru, which would later be christened MV Karagatan. The plan is to dock the shipment on Isabela’s isolated northeastern shore covertly. However, on July 4, 1972, the vessel grounded on a sandbar near Digoyo Point due to the winds of Typhoon Edeng and miscoordination with local NPA units. Aerial spotting and hasty military response resulted in firefights and the seizure of the majority of the cache: 738 M-14 rifles, 150,000 rounds of ammunition, and 500 rocket shells (see Fig. 2).

Figure 2. The MV Karagatan sank.

The authoritarian government took advantage of the debacle. In his defense of the imposition of martial law, Marcos cited the Karagatan incident as evidence that the CPP was “enjoying the active moral and material support of a foreign power.” The intercepted shipments made headlines, despite the opposition’s claims that the event was fabricated or at least overblown (see Fig. 3).

Figure 3. Intercepted shipments. Pictured are former Philippine Constabulary head Fidel V. Ramos (left) and then-Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile (right).

The CPP seemed unfazed and sought a second shipment. This time, the Doña Andrea, which was also funded via CPC aid, was supposed to collect the arms from Hainan and bring them to the western coast. The operation never reached Philippine waters. The Doña Andrea ran aground on Pratas Reef near southern Taiwan in late 1973 while en route to China. After being saved by a Hong Kong salvage vessel, her crew, later known as the “Dirty Dozen,” joined other delegates-cum-exiles in Shibasuo.

Though frequently recounted as political parables, these incidents are also part of maritime history. They serve as a reminder that the vast sea serves as a stage for covert actors whose operations have the potential to founder as ferocious as any naval disaster. Here, the risks were as much environmental as they were human—typhoons, treacherous reefs, and poor coordination.

These unsuccessful attempts at arms shipments demonstrated the transnational character of the anti-dictatorship struggle in the broader context of the “Long 70s” or the “Global Sixties.” Funding and arms came through the geopolitical currents of the Cold War, coupled with Maoist China’s fleeting desire to export revolution to revolutionary movements worldwide. However, the final nail in the coffin is Beijing’s policy shifts. From rapprochement with Washington to Mao’s embrace of Marcos at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, all these contributed to the CPP’s later practice of “self-reliance” (see Figs. 4 and 5).

Figure 4. Mao Zedong (Left) and Richard Nixon (Right)

Figure 5. Mao Zedong (Left) and Ferdinand Marcos (Right). Figures 4 and 5. Separate diplomatic visits of Nixon (1972) and Marcos (1974) in China, where they shook hands with the CPP’s ideological progenitor, Chairman Mao Zedong.

Five decades later, splintered by internal purges, weakened by successive military campaigns, and stripped of the foreign backing it once enjoyed, the CPP itself has run aground. Once a formidable opponent of the authoritarian regime in a polarized climate, it is now a shell of its former self in a more pluralistic environment. The Party’s trajectory, like those of the Karagatan and Andrea, demonstrates how ambitious voyages, whether across the sea or through history, may end in isolation, wreckage, and irrelevance. Time and attrition took a toll on the Party, just as the sea did those vessels.

Read more:

Briones, J. C. (2024). Arming the revolution: Transnational mobilizations of Filipino exiles in China, 1971-1986. Chinese Studies Journal, 18, 243–271. https://www.chinesestudiesjournal.org/volumes/volume-18-2024/arming-the-revolution-transnational-mobilizations-of-filipino-exiles-in-ch

Peña, R.* (2018, December 12). The NPA arms landing that convinced Marcos to declare martial law. ABS-CBN News. https://web.archive.org/web/20181212181715/https://news.abs-cbn.com/web/20181212181715/https://news.abs-cbn.com/ancx/culture/spotlight/12/12/18/the-npa-arms-landing-that-convinced-marcos-to-declare-martial-law

Scalice, J. (2023). The drama of dictatorship: Martial law and the communist parties of the Philippines. Cornell University Press.

* Famed geologist Rolando Peña headed the MV Karagatan and Doña Andrea crews. He recounted these tragic episodes in his memoir, Crossings: Portrait of a Revolutionary.