The National Liberation Front Is Formed
Hanoi organizes the southern insurgency into a political front with a ten-point program for overthrowing Diem.
Quick facts
- Founded
- 20 December 1960, Tay Ninh province
- Military arm
- People's Liberation Armed Forces (Viet Cong)
- Program
- Ten-point manifesto against the Diem government
What happened
On 20 December 1960 delegates representing communist and non-communist groups opposed to Diem's government met in Tay Ninh province and formed the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF), dominated from the outset by the North's Lao Dong (Workers') Party. The NLF issued a ten-point program calling for the overthrow of what it called the camouflaged colonial regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, democratic liberties, land reform for tenant farmers, and the peaceful reunification of the country by negotiation. Its military arm, the People's Liberation Armed Forces, became known to the Saigon government and its American allies as the Viet Cong, a contraction of Viet Nam Cong San, Vietnamese communist.
Why it matters
The NLF gave the southern insurgency a political structure that could claim to represent more than Hanoi's interests, complicating American and South Vietnamese efforts to frame the war as simple foreign aggression rather than also a civil conflict.
How we know
The Front's founding program survives as a primary document reproduced from the Pentagon Papers, and the State Department's own account of the war's escalation describes the 1959 start of the insurgency this front organized.
Sources
- The Wars for Vietnam, Vassar College (from the Pentagon Papers). Program of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam · Primary source (author-declared)vassar.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War: the Gulf of Tonkin and Escalation, 1964 · Reputable sourcehistory.state.gov · The domain "history.state.gov" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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