NDFP National Council
Public Information Office
Press Statement | July 16, 2018

The National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) vehemently assails malicious insinuations made by the military, police and a number of Duterte apologists that the New People’s Army (NPA) is behind the spate of killings of local officials.

The Duterte regime is making these ridiculous accusations in a futile attempt to muddle what Duterte himself had already impliedly admitted when he said that Mayor Antonio Halili of Tanauan City was killed because of his involvement in the illegal drug trade. The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency had also made disclosures that some of the mayors and vice mayors killed were indeed on the government’s list of “narco-politicians.”

The growing number of local government officials getting killed – the 12th to date being the vice mayor of a Tawi-Tawi town – is clearly part and parcel of the Duterte regime’s brutal campaign against illegal drugs that has already killed more than 20,000 people. Earlier in the campaign, the police had even engineered the gangland-style murder of Albuera Mayor Rolando Espinosa right inside his jail cell, and boasted about it.

But not only is the Duterte regime trying to hide its hands in these killings, it is making the NPA the scapegoat in a malevolent scenario-building scheme to justify the imposition of nationwide martial law.
Scapegoating the NPA for the killings dovetails the AFP’s other wild accusations of a supposed conspiracy between the Church and the Left to oust Duterte which even has an October timeline, according to Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana.

Duterte is unmistakably treading the Marcosian path. He is currently training his sights on the NPA, but will cast a wider net of repression, eliminating every critic, every dissenter, every protester and every actual or potential rival to his power.

The NDFP calls on all freedom-loving Filipinos to unite to thoroughly expose and firmly oppose Duterte’s Marcosian tactic of scapegoating the revolutionary forces in his bid to install a dictatorship.

Only the Filipino people’s resolute resistance in the face of repression can stop Duterte from continuing with his lies and deceptions and stay his iron fist from smashing the people’s rights and liberties.