Marco Valbuena | Chief Information Officer | Communist Party of the Philippines
May 11, 2023
1.Notorious for her militarist and fascist mindset, as well as for ambitions to become president, Sara Duterte fits in well in the NTF-Elcac, than in the Department of Education. After one year, she has proved herself to be a big failure in the DepEd where she has ignored the pressing problems faced by teachers and students.
Instead of heeding calls for higher salaries, more classrooms, more teachers, more funding for education, and other urgent demands, she has stepped up her anti-communist diatribes against organizations representing the interests of teachers and students. In almost everything, Sara Duterte’s addresses issues by silencing those who voice out and seek solutions to the people’s problems.
2. Curiously, Sara Duterte was appointed “co-vice chair” of the NTF-Elcac, despite the fact that Executive Order #70—the order issued by her father in 2018 that created the body—specifies only one vice chairman, that is, the National Security Adviser. Even more curiously, she was appointed to a key position in the NTF-Elcac while President Ferdinand Marcos was overseas.
The timing of her ascent in the NTF-Elcac hierarchy comes while the ruling Marcos clique is busy reorganizing the PNP to remove the key officers appointed by Duterte, and when Duterte-appointed loyalists in the AFP are set to retire. It also comes a few weeks after the Marcos government issued a pronouncement saying that the NPA will be “crushed” in two years, which contradicts Rodrigo Duterte’s statements last year that the NPA must be crushed after one year, or else, he might have to come out of retirement.
In all likelihood, Sara Duterte’s questionable appointment by Duterte’s cohorts in the NTF-Elcac, is a maneuver to ingratiate herself to the AFP and security forces. It is a form of warning against Marcos not to use his powers to reduce the influence of the Duterte clique, especially in the security sector.
3. Broad segments of the Filipino people are incredulous over claims being made the NTF-Elcac and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) that there are now only 22 guerrilla fronts of the NPA, and all except for two in Northern Samar, are already “weakened.”
These claims of the AFP contradict the drive to build more combat battalions in addition to more than 150 battalions of military and police forces deployed in counterguerrilla operations across the country, and carry out campaigns of state terrorism. Across the country, especially in the rural areas, the AFP and Philippine National Police (PNP) continue to carry out military operations characterized by widespread violations of civil and political rights.
De facto martial law prevails as entire communities are placed under military hamlet and people are duped or forced to “surrender.” There are rising cases of extrajudicial killings of civilians as well as arrested revolutionaries in the guise of fake encounters, abductions and enforced disappearances perpetrated by state forces, torture, prolonged political detention using trumped-up charges, and other gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.
4. The Party, the New People’s Army and all revolutionary forces are determined to carry forward the people’s democratic revolution. The broad masses of peasants and workers are ever desirable of revolutionary change as they are subjected to worsening forms of exploitation, oppression and political repression, amid crisis of the ruling system and intensified drive of the imperialists and their local cohorts to accumulate profit and wealth.
To the broad masses of peasants and workers, waging revolutionary armed struggle remains just and necessary, in order to defend themselves against fascist repression, fight for their democratic interests, and advance their long-term aspirations for national and social liberation.
