The Pambansang Katipunan ng Mabubukid (PKM) rejects the deceitful statement issued by NTF-Elcac Executive Director Ernesto Torres Jr. saying that the NTF-Elcac’s “rebranding” is a means to sustain “the peace gains already won and pushing development work even deeper.” Torres’ claims are nothing but a desperate attempt to whitewash the NTF-Elcac’s well-documented role in perpetuating red-tagging and militarization. His assertions of “peace gains” and “development work” exist only in his imagination.
If there was truly “progress”, why are the majority of Filipino peasants still landless? This unresolved landlessness – the fundamental problem at the heart of the armed conflict – remains unaddressed despite the supposed “peace gains” being peddled by NTF-Elcac. Filipino peasants continue to till the land they do not own. Land reform is either denied or sabotaged. Agrarian reform beneficiaries are routinely harassed, displaced by militarized plantation expansion, criminalized through trumped-up charges. Worse, those who organize for genuine land reform are being murdered.
In Negros alone, state violence has escalated under the direction of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in coordination with NTF-Elcac. On June 14, 2023, peasant couple Emelio and Marilyn Fausto and their two sons – 15-year-old Ben and 12-year-old Raben – were mercilessly executed in their own home, shortly after repeated harassment by military agents and red-tagging by local NTF-Elcac elements.
This massacre is not an isolated case. It is part of a pattern of the so-called “whole-of-nation” approach that Torres exhorts in his statement. In reality, this “whole of nation” approach is a euphemism for using the entirety of the civilian apparatus in support of militarization. It serves as a license for extrajudicial killings and red-tagging of civilian communities under the pretext of “counterinsurgency.”
Torres continues to downplay the existence and consequences of red-tagging. Red tagging is not a figment of anyone’s imagination – it is a real and systematic campaign of intimidation that has resulted in killings of unarmed civilians, activists, peasants and indigenous leaders. The NTF-Elcac cannot claim peace when its trail is marked by blood.
In fact, the reactionary Marcos Jr. regime spends far more on militarizing communities than on public services. The NTF-Elcac is set to see its budget increase threefold in the 2025 national budget reaching P7.8 billion while social assistance programs were significantly defunded. Billions are poured into the NTF-Elcac while schools are closed, clinics understaffed and rural livelihoods deteriorate. The so-called “sustainable livelihood packages” are palliative, often corrupt, and serve as propaganda tools to justify their fascist campaigns.
The NTF-Elcac flaunts “farm-to-market” roads but to whom do these roads serve? In many areas, these roads are used not for transporting farmers’ produce, but for troop movement, resource extraction, and the encroachment of mining and agri-business firms. Without genuine land reform and sustained support for Filipino farmers, roads become highways for militarization and dispossession.
The so-called “mass surrenders” that Torres speaks of are fabricated, forced, or manipulated through deception. Many of those paraded as surrenderees are civilians, bribed or threatened.
Genuine progress cannot exist in a country where the peasant class remain landless and oppressed. Until the root causes of armed conflict are resolved, no amount of road construction or forced surrender ceremonies can bring peace. If the Marcos Jr. administration were truly concerned with ending conflict, it would start by distributing land to the tillers, pulling out military troops from the countryside, and ending its campaign of red-tagging and terror by dismantling the NTF-Elcac. Until then, no amount of rebranding or ribbon-cutting can cover up the reality that in many parts of the country, peace remains a bullet in the night.
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.