The Marcos Jr. regime’s efforts at window-dressing have failed to conceal the sordid human rights situation on the ground.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s bloody two-year record shows 105 victims of extrajudicial killings, 12 victims of enforced disappearance, 381 victims of illegal arrests, 44,065 victims of bombings, 558 victims of forced or fake surrenders and up to 3.4 million victims of threats, harassment and intimidation, including red-tagging.
These human rights violations were perpetrated in the course of a brutal counter-insurgency drive that aims to wipe out the New People’s Army (NPA) by the end of the year, in accordance with the orders of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the commander in chief.
As a result of this self-imposed deadline, vast areas of the countryside have been turned into virtual war zones, marked by frequent aerial and artillery strikes, the forced evacuation of civilians, the destruction or loss of their properties and the disruption of their economic activities, on top of the devastation already caused by El Niño.
The frenzied campaign by the military to accumulate “achievements” in the counter-insurgency drive has moreover led to hundreds of civilians being killed and falsely portrayed as NPA combatants slain in gunbattles with soldiers.
The counter-insurgency campaign is not confined to the Philippine countryside, but has its counterpart in urban areas through the targeting of human rights defenders, political activists and other dissenters who are branded by the Marcos Jr. regime as the soft infrastructure of the armed rebellion. Thus, the phenomenon of criminalizing dissent and the prevalence of red-tagging and other forms of threats, harassment and intimidation against what the regime calls “Communist terrorist group (CTG) front organizations.” Red-tagging, as aptly described by a recent Supreme Court ruling, is a threat to a person’s life, liberty and security as it renders victims vulnerable to more serious human rights violations.
Victims of red-tagging are often forced to surrender as NPA combatants or as members of so-called CTG front organizations, again falsely boosting the regime’s counter-insurgency achievement rates. Those who refuse face retaliation in the form of being arrested and detained on trumped-up charges, forcibly disappeared or extrajudicially killed.
There has also been an alarming escalation in the weaponization of counter-terrorist legislation against activists and other dissenters. The most recent targets include human rights workers servicing political prisoners and development NGO workers who have long been assisting the country’s poorest and most marginalized communities. To date, 112 persons have been charged under these anti-terror laws, with 32 of them in jail.
Illegal arrest and detention are a continuing threat to dissenters. There are currently 755 political prisoners in various prison and detention facilities nationwide, with 103 of them arrested under the Marcos Jr. regime.
These are solid figures that pierce through the Marcos Jr. regime’s tattered veil of deception. They cannot be concealed no matter how much Ferdinand Marcos Jr. tries to prettify the ugly truth about human rights under his regime during his State of the Nation Address. #