📷Altermidya
KARAPATAN renewed its call for the abolition of the Confidential and Intelligence Funds (CIF) after resource persons revealed during the latest hearing of the House Committee on Good Government and Public Accountability that Vice President Sara Duterte had ordered her Special Disbursement Officer to turn over more than PhP200 million in CIF of the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education (DepEd) to ranking officials of her security group.
“Hundreds of millions of pesos of Duterte’s CIF ended up in the hands of military men,” said KARAPATAN secretary general Cristina Palabay. “With the former regime’s war on drugs utilizing a reward system funded by CIF monies, there is ample reason to believe that the same reward system operated within the military to bankroll the surveillance, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and other human rights violations perpetrated against activists, human rights defenders and other dissenters,” she added.
“A report by the Commission on Audit (COA) has already revealed that part of Sara Duterte’s CIF also went to the rental and maintenance of safehouses,” said Palabay. “These safehouses may be serving as secret prisons prohibited under the Anti-Desaparecido Act of 2012, where victims of enforced disappearance are being arbitrarily detained, interrogated, tortured or even killed extrajudicially,” averred Palabay.
“And the funds spent for the so-called purchase of information may well have been reward monies given to bogus witnesses who gave perjured testimonies to enable the filing of trumped-up charges against activists, development workers and other human rights defenders,” she said.
KARAPATAN said that “the opaque nature of the confidential and intelligence funds which shields them from public scrutiny compounds the fact that the funds have undoubtedly been used for evil purposes, not to mention the fact that they are a ready source of corruption.”
The group said that aside from the CIF of the OVP and DepEd, billions have been spent and allotted for the Office of the President, with PhP 4.5 billion this year and PhP10.2 billion for 2025.
“The CIF,” said KARAPATAN secretary general Cristina Palabay, “is simply the old pork barrel in different garb since its ‘confidentiality’ generally puts it beyond the purview of state auditors. This means,” she added, “that Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will not be held accountable for the disposition of such a huge amount.”
Palabay likewise noted that the OP’s Php4.5-billion allotment in 2024 still does not include the Php100 million allocated for the National Security Council, the Php300 million allocated for the National Intelligence and Security Agency, and the Php8 billion allocated for the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) — all of them agencies attached to the Office of the President.
“So, in reality,” said Palabay, “the Office of the President actually has Php12.9 billion at its disposal, all for ‘confidential’ and intelligence purposes, and all unprogrammed and beyond public scrutiny.”
“This is Php12.9 billion for the red-tagging and surveillance of dissenters, for psywar operations, including orchestrated social media attacks to vilify activists and for black operations to abduct, forcibly disappear or extrajudicially kill them,” said Palabay. “This is Php12.9 billion to suppress dissent and wage war on the Filipino people.”
“There is no other recourse,” said Palabay, “but to abolish the CIF altogether.” #
