Elias Dipasupil
Secretary General, National Democratic Front
NTF-ELCAC is in panic.
NTF-ELCAC’s Eduardo M. Año gives a grim portent of intensifying government repression with his declaration that “With 89 active guerrilla fronts dismantled since 2018 and only one weakened front in the Bicol region remaining … One of our biggest challenges now is dismantling the network of recruitment, support, and finance that allowed the insurgency to survive for decades.”
As if its assault on democratic rights and the people’s protest movements were not enough, the NTF-ELCAC is poised to intensify repression in urban areas during this coming elections and after. Amid the continuous slide of the US-Marcos regime’s popularity, the rising people’s movement against corruption and political dynasties, the demand for transparency and accountability in government, and the call for pro-people economic policies such as higher wages and lower prices, Año releases veiled threats against “legal democratic forces… urban centers, schools, and cyberspace”.
Desperate that its age-worn “anti-insurgency” campaigns of psywar and violence have not yielded the desired results, Marcos’ NTF-ELCAC minions now see the spectre of local communism everywhere – behind outspoken critics of the administration, idealistic young activists, organizations for people’s rights and peasant rights, charitable pro-people programs, conscientized religious institutions and personalities, foreign funding agencies, even within government itself.
While Año says the NTF-ELCAC will “respond not with panic or persecution” to the mass clamor for change and support for new, pro-people candidates, its redtagging actions and alarm of what it calls the “resurgence of insurgency in electoral disguise” show otherwise. For within the framework of the government’s whole of nation approach in its terror war against the people, this military doublespeak targets all forces under the regime’s fascist definition of national security concerns, including political rivals, people’s organizations, human rights advocates, the academe, environmental activists and civil society in general. He is in panic.
In the first place, it is not true – even government knows – that military campaigns have resulted in the defeat of the people’s army and its revolutionary mass base. It has only resulted in increased discontent and revulsion for the reactionary military among the rural folk, who continue to nurture the people’s army and continue their resistance in many different ways right under the noses of military detachments disguised as community programs, even in hamletted areas.
The armed revolutionary forces have even refined their guerrilla tactics, focused on the rectification movement, and adapted to the fascist state’s use of high tech surveillance and weapons of indiscriminate destruction in brutal suppression campaigns.
The revolutionary mass base in Año’s “4,800 barangays” have not been deceived by the what he boasts as “P36 billion worth of infrastructure, health, livelihood, and education support since 2021”, because these services are theirs by right, funded by the people’s money and should have been given to them long before the NTF-ELCAC was even established. Indeed, had the people not waged revolution, the government wouldn’t even have bothered to give infrastucture and services to these barangays, and it has only done so after brutal military campaigns to “clear” the area. All the while, pockets of military and local government officials are lined with these task force funds.
Marcos’ latest Memorandum Circular 83 mandates the NTF-ELCAC to “monitor and evaluate the implementation” of its rehashed “blueprint” for ending the “insurgency”, even as the NTF-ELCAC keeps proving that it can not defeat the national democratic revolution by military might and superficial Barangay Development Projects. Because only by seriously addressing the roots of the armed conflict, only by smashing the evils of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism to establish the People’s Democratic Government can the people achieve real democracy, peace, justice and progress, the aspirations that the revolution upholds.
Progressive forces and the urban populations nationwide will prepare for even worse human rights violations on top of the repression the regime is already inflicting on the people. These times call for increased vigilance, militance, courage and united action, for broadening and strengthening the people’s democratic movement. Together with the firm resolve to stand against continuing repression, we must also acknowledge the actual and immediate dangers to people’s lives and liberty that a panicked regime might inflict.
No deception or repression will defeat the revolutionary movement. It will continue to welcome progressive peace advocates and activists who are targets of state repression into its urban underground networks to become organizers and Red fighters in the countryside’s guerrilla zones. Fascist repression during Martial Law pushed many peaceloving youth to take up arms to continue the fight for democracy. By intentionally shrinking the space for open, legitimate dissent, Marcos junior may yet follow his father’s footsteps in becoming the NPA’s biggest recruiter. ###
The National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) is the revolutionary united front organization of the Filipino people fighting for national freedom and for the democratic rights of the people. The NDFP seeks to develop and coordinate all progressive classes, sectors and forces in the Filipino people’s struggle to end the rule of US imperialism and its local allies of big landlords and compradors, and attain national and social liberation.