In his fourth State of the Nation Address, Marcos will surely boast about his regime’s program of “peace and development.” He will use this occasion to applaud his fascist forces and minions for “crushing the armed conflict.” At the same time, he will obscure the grave abuses of power and trampling of democratic rights, in the cities, and especially in the countryside.
Marcos’ “National Action Plan for Unity, Peace and Development” is false and hollow. It deceitfully obscures the reality of widespread poverty, hunger, and suffering of tens of millions of peasants, workers, and unemployed. Its goal is to make the people believe that it is their fate to suffer oppression and exploitation, so as to crush their spirit and strength to defend and fight back, and make them submit to the power of the terrorist state.
In the guise of “peace,” Marcos uses the state’s armed forces to impose martial law in rural areas to suppress the struggle of the peasant masses. Its goal is to subject people to surveillance, control food supply and commerce, and regulate even the working hours of peasants in their fields. Everyone is forced to “clear” their names and “cooperate” with military officers. Known leaders and activists in peasant organizations are relentlessly persecuted. There are numerous cases of murder, arrest, and illegal imprisonment, torture, and massacres, forced evacuation, shelling and aerial bombing near communities.
To intimidate the people, groups of soldiers are deployed in villages, making use of schools or barangay health centers as barracks. They disrupt the village peace by their drinking sprees, gambling, drug use, and indiscriminate firing of guns. In the name of “territorial defense,” soldiers forcibly recruit peasants into paramilitary groups like the CAFGU and Barangay Intelligence Network to use them against their fellow villagers.
In the name of “capacity building” in urban communities, Marcos uses his armed forces to suppress the rights of workers, urban poor, youth students, and other sectors in urban areas. Unionists and activists in schools and communities are subjected to surveillance and intimidation to stop them from organizing and helping their people. Like in rural areas, the military and police use the tactic of subjecting their families to constant pressure and threats to force their compliance.
Marcos brags of “distribution of land titles” in a grand scheme to deceive the peasant masses, because most of these titles were already in their possession as collective titles (Certificate of Land Ownership Award) under “agrarian reform communities,” including lands that were already distributed by the revolutionary movement to farmers and indigenous peoples, which are being fragmented to make it easier for large land grabbers to buy or take over.
Marcos auctions off vast tracts of land to foreign big capitalists in the form of 99-year “leases”. Tens of thousands of peasants and indigenous peoples are driven off to make way for plantations, mines, energy projects, tourism, and other operations of big foreign and local companies. Marcos offers them incentives to invest with little or no taxes to pay. It’s certain that President Trump of the US will dictate even more anti-people and anti-national policies to Marcos during their meeting at the White House.
Marcos, his military officers, and accomplices in the NTF-Elcac are deceiving only themselves in boasting that they are close to crushing the New People’s Army. They claim that there is only one guerrilla front left in the country, but continue to deploy majority of the AFP’s combat battalions in the NPA’s guerrilla fronts.
Marcos uses a handful of traitors to the masses to sing praises to his “peace and development”. They are all reactionary special agents tasked to spit out disinformation and lies against the revolutionary movement.
Marcos’ “peace” is the silence of the graveyard of the victims of his fascist rule. The US imperialists and local ruling classes celebrate this peace that Marcos claims, which will allow them to freely exploit the land of the peasant masses, ravage the mountains and rivers, plunder the country’s wealth, steal the people’s money, and establish the power of the US military forces in the country.
This false peace of Marcos, the NTF-Elcac and AFP is a major obstacle to peace talks with the NDFP. Another obstacle is the continued persecution, imprisonment, and killing of NDFP consultants and representatives, in violation of previous agreements. A just, liberating, and lasting peace cannot be achieved as long as the root causes of the armed conflict in the country are not addressed and resolved, and if the only goal is to crush, suppress, and subjugate all who wage resistance.
The Filipino people should reject Marcos’ false and hollow peace. In the face of intensifying oppression, wor- sening forms of exploitation, and deepening crisis of the rotten semicolonial and semifeudal system, the Filipino people have no other choice but to take the path of struggle, especially the path of armed struggle. Armed struggle is the most powerful weapon of the people to defend their rights, lives, and livelihood. Without armed struggle, the US imperialism and ruling classes will unabatedly continue to oppress and exploit the people.
Despite the losses arising from its own weaknesses and amid the intense attacks of the AFP, the New People’s Army is determined to continue the armed struggle, correct past weaknesses, and strengthen the revolutionary resistance. Under the leadership of the Party, the NPA and its mass base will continue to strengthen and expand throughout the country. The ground remains fertile for the armed struggle to advance and revitalize the guerrilla fronts, which will serve as bastions for the people’s struggle for national and social liberation.
