Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s recently issued Memorandum Circular No. 83, which adopts and orders the immediate implementation of the National Action Plan (NAP) for Unity, Peace and Development 2025-2028, is a blueprint for intensified political repression as it calls for strengthening the notorious National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), amid mounting calls to abolish it.
With the NTF-ELCAC as the lead agency for enforcing an action plan utilizing the so-called whole of nation approach, both State and private sector resources will be harnessed to the hilt, including colleges and universities, in a grand scheme to demolish what Marcos Jr. deems as the urban infrastructure of the armed rebellion.
The NTF-ELCAC’s usual tack of surveilling, profiling, harassing and forcing political activists and ordinary civilians to abandon their pro-people advocacies and surrender as armed rebels will be stepped up, leading to more violations of human rights. Its hostility to dissent, critical thought and mass-oriented political action will generate more unrest and stoke the fires of unpeace.
The use of civilian agencies of government as well private sector institutions deliberately obscures the real reasons behind the armed conflict, reducing them to mere problems in the delivery of services. Social injustices deeply rooted in history are glossed over, obscuring the need for structural change and deeming as socially and politically destabilizing any ideas or grassroots-based movements that advocate for genuine land reform or national industrialization.
Behind the facade of mobilized civilian agencies, brutal military operations are being conducted in an attempt to crush armed rebellion and social movements altogether. Aerial bombardment, artillery strikes, strafing and other forms of attack that tend to be arbitrary and fail to distinguish armed targets from civilians are being resorted to by the Marcos Jr. regime, in a mad scramble to chase an ever-moving deadline to end the armed resistance.
As long as the Marcos Jr.’s action plans for peace or even human rights involve the NTF-ELCAC and its repressive agenda, they will always have a hollow ring and be nothing but bankrupt plans to escalate the stifling of political dissent and the suppression of the people’s legal, democratic movement.
The abolition of the NTF-ELCAC is a necessary step in any action plan that genuinely seeks peace and the advancement of human rights.