could conduct "unhampered US military operations" for 99 years (later reduced to 50). Filipino presidents were very politically dependent on US Support, and this did not change until the end of the Cold War in 1989, and the termination of the 1947 US Military Bases Treaty, in 1992. With its close ties to the US, the Philippines was ideologically caught up in the anticommunist scare perpetuated by the US during the Cold War. The government was not yet strongly-established, and it was "fearful of being swept away by [communism]'s rising tide", so in 1957, it passed Republic Act No. 1700, known as the "Anti-Subversion Act of 1957", which made mere membership in any communist party illegal. The Philippines would take three and a half decades to repeal it, through Republic Act 7636, in 1992. The Anti-Subversion Act was originally meant to counter the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) and its armed force, the Hukbalahap, also called the Huks. The campaign against the PKP and the Huks was bloody, but it had basically ended by 1954. Throughout the 1960s, the remnants of the PKP pursued "a course of peaceful action" while working to rebuild their organization, but, this was later challenged by a youth-based Maoist group within the organization created by university professor Jose Maria Sison, who joined the PKP in 1962. Clashing with the PKP party leaders's view that armed struggle was an exercise in futility, Sison and his group were expelled from the PKP in 1967, and on December 26, 1968, founded the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) along Maoist lines. While the PKP sought to marginalize this new group, it soon became the leading communist party in the Philippines. By the time Marcos became president in 1965, the PKP was a weakened organization, and the Hukbalahap reduced to "what amounted to banditry." But Marcos immediately made noise about the supposed "communist threat" – drawing on images of the bloody Huk encounters of the 1950s, and courting the Johnson administration's political support in light of the Us's recent entry into the Vietnam war. Marcos continued using communism as bogeyman after 1968, as the PKP faded into obscurity and the nascent CPP became more prominent. The Armed Forces of the Philippines did likewise in 1969, when the CPP allied with Huk commander Bernabe Buscayno to create the nascent New People's Army (NPA). Although the NPA was only a small