Statement of the ILPS Philippines on December 10 International Human Rights Day
In commemoration of the 74th anniversary of the International Human Rights Day, the International League of Peoples’ Struggle – Philippines strongly denounces the US-Marcos Jr. regime for waging all forms of war against the Filipino people.
In his first five months of Marcos Jr., the Filipinos have been plagued with record-high 8% inflation that pushes the family living wage higher up in all of the country’s regions, while minimum wages remain low. Marcos Jr. even had the gall to appoint himself as Agriculture Secretary to push for the further liberalization of agriculture and a more import-dependent economy. These measures have drowned Filipino farmers and fisherfolk into greater poverty. In a self-serving attempt to gloss over his family’s tarnished name, Marcos Jr. is now railroading the Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF) which essentially justifies control of hundreds of billions of pension and public funds into the hands of a few – a no-brainer scam orchestrated by the country’s most corrupt political dynasty.
To hasten the Marcos-Duterte power consolidation, Marcos Jr. has tended to the US imperialist government to continue neoliberal policies that allow increased US intervention in our economy, politics, diplomacy, and military. During the recent visit of US Vice President Kamala Harris to the Philippines, the Marcos Jr. administration has expressed all-out support to the US warmongering scheme dubbed as the Indo-Pacific Strategy. The US-Marcos Jr. tandem has earmarked $66.5 Million for the construction of Enhanced Defense Cooperation (EDCA) projects in approved locations within the next two years. During the worst periods of rights violations, the United States has also extended $100 Million in credit for weapons and purchases and supplied $1.4 Billion (in 2015-2021) weapons to the Philippine government.
This so-called military modernization and the government’s counter-insurgency program National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) have been responsible not just for the continuing vilification of activists but also for the unhampered operations and indiscriminate bombings in the countrysides- victimizing civilians, peasants, and IP communities. Non-stop militarization in Samar, Negros, and Aklan has led to the crackdown, illegal arrests, and killings of farmers and national minorities. Also in Negros, the AFP troops have viciously targeted not just revolutionaries but unarmed civilians, including their families, who are being harassed in their homes. In Barangay Cawayan, New Washington, Aklan, military clampdown and operations have continued for three straight months.
In Southern Tagalog, Central Luzon, Caraga, Samar, and Negros, there are incessant politically-related killings, harassment, surveillance, and filing of trumped-up charges against activists and revolutionaries. Just this November 30, in time for the commemoration of Bonifacio’s birth anniversary, NDFP Peace Consultant and poet Ericson Acosta and peasant advocate Joseph Jimenez were summarily executed by soldiers in Kabankalan City. The 94th IB and 47th IB troops have been trying to justify and cover-up this gruesome murder and their criminal brutality by the overused excuse of an ‘encounter’, while reports from the region have confirmed that Acosta and Jimenez were both unarmed and were in no position to fight. Initial reports also stated that the victims suffered from stab and knife wounds, suggesting they were hacked.
These desperate maneuverings of the Philippine military are outright violations of international humanitarian laws as guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions and the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL). More than one hundred have fallen victims to this campaign of killing, including Acosta’s wife Kerima Tariman (2021), Jorge Madlos or Ka Oris (2021), his son Vincent and daughter-in-law Glorivic Campos Belandres (2022), Julius Giron (2020), Eugenia Magpantay and Agaton Topacio (2020), Antonio Cabanatan and Florenda Yap (2020), Juanito Magbanua (2022) and others.
Data from the Philippine Universal Periodic Review Watch, Karapatan, and Sandugo (July 2016 – June 2022) also reported that there are 20, 348 victims of indiscriminate firings; 47, 587 victims from the use of schools, medical, religious, and other public places for military purposes; 20 enforced disappearances; 233 victims of torture; 481, 918 victims of forced evacuation from communities; 442 victims of extrajudicial killings (not including drug-related extrajudicial killings); 1,025 families displaced outside Marawi due to mortar shelling of military groups; 13 cases of indiscriminate airstrikes and bombings affecting 5,253 IPs from 11 provinces in Luzon and Maguindanao; and indiscriminate firing by the 72nd Infantry Battalion in Arakan, North Cotabato.
In his increasingly mad crusade of state terrorism, Marcos Jr. is giving the military free rein in conducting its heavy-handed attacks in the countryside, while completely jeopardizing the peace negotiations and refusing to address the root causes of the ongoing armed conflict in the countryside – landlessness, poverty, foreign plunder of ancestral lands, among others.
Part of this political cabal is the Anti-Terrorism Council’s (ATC) designation of “terrorist” to peace warriors such as former NDFP Peace Negotiating Panel Chairperson Luis Jalandoni, who has tirelessly and consistently fought for the demands, complaints, protests and wishes of the Filipino people not only on the negotiating table but also outside of the formal talks between the two parties.
The Marcos Jr. regime and its military also funded disinformation to demonize human rights defenders, activists, and peace advocates while camouflaging the violations and abuses they have committed themselves.
In these challenging times amid the worsening socio-economic crisis under the illegitimate US-Marcos Jr. regime, we call on the international community to be in solidarity with the Filipino people in the call to uphold human rights and international humanitarian law. We call on the Philippine government, including its Congress, to speed up bills that will defend the defenders of human rights, and end all forms of red-tagging among activists. We also amplify the demand to end all US military aid to the Philippines that supports the brutal crackdown and massacre of peasants, Indigenous Peoples, national minorities, and civilians in the countryside.
Stop the Killings!
End US Military Aid to the Philippines!
End AFP militarization in the countryside!
Junk Terror Law!
Dismantle the NTF-ELCAC!
Free All Political Prisoners!
Uphold International Human Rights!
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