Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s regime enters its third year with a repressive machinery replete with the use of terror laws, arrests and detention, bombings and militarization in the countryside.
Marcos Jr.’s deadline to his security forces to crush the New People’s Army by year’s end is fueled by pressure from his US imperialist masters to shift the focus of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) from “internal security operations” to “external defense” — a euphemism for serving as cannon fodder for the US in its warmongering schemes against China.
This US-imposed deadline is behind the escalating use of aerial bombings and artillery attacks in vast areas of the countryside that have been wreaking havoc on civilian communities whose production areas, property and infrastructure have sustained damage and whose livelihoods have been disrupted in the stepped-up counter-insurgency campaign. In these areas, civilians are forcibly evacuated and restrictions imposed on their daily commerce and other movements. The drive to chalk up achievements in the counter-insurgency war has resulted in more civilians being extrajudicially killed or arbitrarily arrested by security forces and falsely presented as combatants neutralized in battle.
In urban areas, terror laws are being increasingly weaponized to suppress political activism, leading to an ever shrinking civic space. Dissent in any form is maliciously misrepresented as providing political support to the armed rebellion — thus the prevalence of red-tagging as a means of threatening, harassing and intimidating perceived enemies of the state. Red-tagging has been broadly and indiscriminately brandished against human rights defenders, environmentalists, church people, development workers, artists and journalists, worker and peasant rights advocates, educators, lawyers, judges and many others, intending to create a chilling effect on a wide range of democratic expression.
Red-tagging inevitably renders victims vulnerable to more serious human rights violations. The figures say it all: 3.4 million victims of threats, harassment and intimidation, including red-tagging, many of them ending up as among the 105 victims of extrajudicial killings, 12 victims of enforced disappearance, 754 political prisoners, 381 illegally arrested, 112 charged with terror law violations, 44,065 victims of indiscriminate bombings and 558 victims of forced surrender.
This campaign to achieve mindless intolerance to dissent is being orchestrated by a cabal comprising the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) and the Anti-Terrorism Council (ATC). Together, they are responsible for the heightened violations of human rights and international humanitarian law that marked Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s first two years in power.
These violations can only worsen nationwide as Marcos Jr.’s security forces try to chase their counter-insurgency deadline at US imperialism’s behest.
We cannot allow the US-Marcos regime’s frenzied counter-insurgency drive to run roughshod over our most basic political and civil rights. We call on all freedom-loving Filipinos to forge the broadest possible unity and defeat all forms of state terror and fascist attacks. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his coterie of US imperialist puppets are the real terrorists, and they must not be allowed to prevail.