📷: National Security Adviser and NTF-ELCAC Vice Chairman Eduardo Año
The Marcos Jr. administration is in big trouble. National Security Adviser Eduardo Año, who also moonlights as vice chairman of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), has declared that he is going full-blast against what he deems the “legal infrastructure of the armed revolution.”
Which means he will be employing the use of red-tagging that the Supreme Court (SC) has ruled as illegal since it poses threats, subverts the constitutionally-enshrined freedom of expression and threatens the lives and limbs of people that the NTF-ELCAC has been targeting. Intent on acting as superior even to the Commission on Elections (Comelec), NTF-ELCAC earlier warned the poll body to “ban” progressive partylists that offer alternative platforms championing the interest of workers and farmers, defending national sovereignty against incursions by both China and the US and calling for nationwide across-the-board wage hikes.
Comelec chairman George Erwin Garcia was peeved by the unsolicited “order” of the NTF-ELCAC that he publicly complained about its actions and explained that an agency created by a mere executive order by the unlamented, detained ex-president Rodrigo Duterte cannot threaten a constitutional body like the Comelec. Comelec officials were dumbfounded to hear that Ano and his NTF-ELCAC were telling them how to manage the electoral process like a boot camp sergeant barking out orders to trainees. This is vintage Ano, who was trained by a convicted ex-Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan. The ex-Army general was convicted for the abduction and disappearance of UP students Karen Empeno and Sherlyn Cadapan in Hagonoy, Bulacan on June 26, 2006. Ano was also implicated in the abduction of Jonas Burgos, son of Malaya founder Joe Burgos, on April 28, 2027.
Being the national security adviser and NTF-ELCAC vice chairman must have emboldened Ano to throw caution to the wind by talking loudly about the overt and covert operations of his task force against those whom he deems to be the enemies of his state. The trouble here is that Ano believes his own propaganda and he bandies about his agency’s successes. He has bragged about inflicting the “final blow” against legal organizations and even wrote a piece about it entitled “An Insurgency-Free Philippines is on (sic) the Horizon” dated May 4, 2025. Among his targets are non-governmental organizations (NGOs) receiving foreign grants, which will be slapped with trumped-up charges for financing terrorism. Such world-class boast from a man who has thus far slapped such charges against a sari-sari store owner and a carinderia proprietor, frozen the bank accounts of nuns but failed to find out how Chinese crime gangs have laundered cash from their scams here to purchase properties in Dubai, Singapore, and other parts of Asia.
Ano is openly telling the Supreme Court to come and discipline him as he and his footmen, in collaboration with the police, the military and the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA), have defied the ban on red-tagging, which was the subject of a landmark ruling in 2023. Ano’s agency is organizing its own network against progressive partylists in cahoots with spineless local government units (LGUs), state colleges and universities (SCUs) and regional units of various departments and bureaus. In short, as a private group that quit collaborating with NTF-ELCAC found out, the task force is promoting an agenda that conflicts with the law, contrary to jurisprudence and based on obsolete theories copied from the US Counterinsurgency (Coin) Guide.
Commenting on the latest frenzy of NTF-ELCAC, the human rights watchdog Karapatan stressed on May 6, 2025 that it “will also be intensifying its attacks on the legal democratic movement, on academic freedom and freedom of association on the pretext of stemming recruitment to the New People’s Army (NPA.) Alarmingly, Año is likewise paving the way for a major crackdown on progressive candidates and partylist groups, dismissing their advocacy of pro-people politics as a ‘rebranding and resurgence of insurgency in electoral disguise.’” In short, Ano feels that no one around him will have the gumption to check his illegal activities, his firm belief that “thinking against the existing order’ is akin to the “thought crimes” manufactured by Donald Trump.”
Año has also shrugged off calls by United Nations special rapporteurs to stop red-tagging while he dismisses the SC ruling defining red-tagging as a threat to life, liberty and security. “By obliterating distinctions between legal and armed resistance, Año thereby justifies arbitrary and widespread repression and even the infliction of violence, in open disregard of international humanitarian law,” Karapatan argued. “Not surprisingly, the NTF-ELCAC has also admitted that it will be wheedling more money out of government coffers to fund not only these escalating attacks on the people’s movement in urban areas but its fake and forced surrender schemes in the countryside like the Enhanced Comprehensive Local Integration Program (E-CLIP) and its Barangay Development Program, the so-called soft component that partners with brutal military operations to comprise the regime’s counter-insurgency drive,” it added.
Like Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio, an ex-NTF-ELCAC operative herself, Ano doesn’t want anyone to scrutinize the funding for ECLIP and BDP, long recorded as the cash cow of generals, the police and task force officials. Stories about surrenderers getting a pittance for yielding, and “monetary assistance” ending up as mere baskets of goodies are legion, forcing many in the countryside to avoid being linked to the NTF-ELCAC operatives. In the face of damning evidence, Ano may segue a furious Sara rant and insist that he is also being “persecuted” for pushing the anti-insurgency campaign to write finis to the armed struggle. What should be done to this NTF-ELCAC is to subject it to a comprehensive audit and check where the billions of pesos it has handled since 2016 went. NTF-ELCAC, like Sara, might have battalions of Mary Grace Piattos, Xiaome Ochos, Fernando Tempuras, Reymunda Jane Novas, Carlos Miguel Oishis, Jay Kamotes, Miggy Mangos, Dodong Bunals and Dodong S. Baroks under its wing. (DIEGO MORRA)
