“Ikaw ang mahiya, kayo ang mahiya sa inyong mga krimen at pagtatakip ng katototahanan sa mamamayang Pilipino. Shame on Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s for covering up truths and crimes against the people in his fourth State of the Nation Address (SONA),” said human rights alliance KARAPATAN.
“Marcos had the gall to call out those who plunder the nation’s coffers in the flood control programs, and yet he and his family had billions tucked away since his father’s dictatorial rule. He and his cohorts continue these corrupt schemes through the Maharlika investment fund, his own confidential and intelligence funds, and various unprogrammed expenses in the national budget,” said KARAPATAN secretary general Cristina Palabay.
“Marcos Jr. also sought to deflect attention from his regime’s failure to exact accountability with the scuttling of Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial by courting populist appeal through boasting about the arrests of low-level bureaucrats in the anti-drug war and pledging to probe the case of the missing sabungeros,” she said.
“Marcos’ great hesitancy to seriously go after corruption in high places is rooted in his own family’s history of plunder,” stressed Palabay. “Going after Sara Duterte will put focus anew not only on Marcosian thievery under martial law but expose the anomalies currently being perpetrated by the ruling Marcos clique.”
“While human rights groups have raised the issues of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, red-tagging, and the increasing weaponization of terror laws that infringe on the freedoms of expression, association and assembly,” she stated, “Marcos Jr.’s completely tangential approach to human rights issues was a general and unsubstantiated statement of being ‘more protective of human rights regardless of age, gender, condition or group’,” she added. “But what Marcos Jr. is really protective of is his regime’s responsibility for growing rights violations.”
Marcos Jr.’s obvious denial of the existence of grave civil and political rights violations precluded any discussion of necessary policy changes or reforms, decried Palabay. “UN Special Rapporteurs, human rights groups and communities have long been demanding that repressive instruments like the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) be abolished, and the executive order that created it be rescinded,” said Palabay. “We have also been demanding the repeal of the Anti-Terrorism Act and the Terrorist Financing Prevention and Suppression Act which have been unjustly wielded against activists and other dissenters.”
“Marcos’ SONA proves that he is not different from Duterte in his policies and actions. He is as fascist, corrupt and anti-poor as Duterte,” KARAPATAN said.