📷: Karapatan | FB
By Diego Morra
On the occasion of the International Day of the Disappeared, the Marcos Jr. administration ought to make a clean breast of the bloody issue of the disappeared, which now numbers thousands from the Marcos Sr. dictatorship until the current regime, a record that has dismayed not only the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) but various human rights organizations worldwide.
On August 30, the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) commemorated the day of the disappeared among the families of the missing, human rights defenders, and peasant communities not only to mourn but also to continue resisting the culture of impunity worsened by the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo regime and succeeding administrations. KMP argued the observance is not only about remembering those who have been forcibly taken, it is about exposing the machinery of state repression that continues to breed disappearances and about demanding an end to the cycle of impunity.
Cases of enforced disappearances under the Marcos Jr. regime stand as chilling reminders of how state violence remains deeply entrenched in our political system. Violence was the DNA of the unlamented Rodrigo Duterte government, during which summary executions in the drug war skyrocketed to 30,000, with the worst cases including even the murders of children aged 7 suspected of theft in Davao City. Of course, the Dutertes have a fetish for corpses, with their solutions for social problems restricted to mass slaughter. Killing is quicker than curing ills and eliminating political enemies. Under the Marcos Jr. regime, at least 15 Filipinos have been abducted– farmers, activists and rights defenders. Their anguished families have begged the military and police to produce their kin to no avail.
KMP has demanded an immediate and transparent investigation into every case of enforced disappearance and other attacks on peasant communities. Accountability must not remain an empty word: State actors who ordered or carried out these crimes must be prosecuted and punished. Even as Republic Act 10353 (RA 10353), also known as the Anti-Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance Act, punishes enforced disappearances, the lack of convictions under that law only deepens the wounds of impunity.
Despite its motherhood statements about respect for human rights and international humanitarian law, the Philippine government has failed to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPAPED), a long-overdue step that would commit the state to uphold the rights of its citizens against this crime. Rather than expressing the usual pablum about human rights, RA 10353 must be enforced with rigor and stronger protections must be enacted to guarantee that families will no longer be torn apart by abductions and deafening official silence.
KMP bewailed the fact that rather than respecting the law, the Duterte and Marcos regimes even exacerbated the instruments of repression through the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), Executive Order 70 (EO 70) and the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020. They have institutionalized red-tagging, harassment, and abductions of farmers and activists. These must be abolished if the government were sincere in addressing enforced disappearances. Yet, Marcos Jr. himself has refused to abolish NTF-ELCAC, which was organized precisely to abide by the US Counter-Insurgency (Coin) Guide and even intensified EO 70, which calls for reinforced military-police operations in areas suspected to harbor New People’s Army (NPA) guerrillas.
“As we mark the International Day of the Disappeared on August 30, 2025, we remember those who have gone missing—Jonas Burgos, Karen Empeño, Sherlyn Cadapan, Nilo Arado, Leo Velasco, Ariel Badiang, James Jazmines and and the many others whose lives and struggles inspire our continuing fight. Their absence is a wound that the people carry, but their legacy fuels our collective resolve. KMP calls on all democratic forces to unite in demanding truth, justice, and accountability. We vow that we will not allow the disappeared to be erased from history. We will continue to seek them, honor them, and struggle in their name until justice is served and state terror is brought to an end,” the peasant organization stressed.
Marcos Jr. has been promising to end impunity and stamp out summary executions, as well as enforced disappearances but there have been many such gross violations under his watch. Neither is the regime pushing with its pledge to pursue the exploratory talks with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) despite signing a commitment to do so on November 23, 2023. Instead, one militarist faction has vowed to dismantle all guerrilla fronts nationwide and torpedoed initiatives to pursue exploratory talks leading to comprehensive peace negotiations. It appears that the Marcos Jr. regime has forked tongues. It doesn’t mean what it says and doesn’t mean what it means. Horrific, forsooth!
