Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) chairman Danilo Ramos has urged the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to reject ex-president Rodrigo Duterte’s bid for an elective post, whether as mayor of Davao City or as a candidate for the Senate. Ramos argued that Duterte has not paid his debt to the Filipino, particularly to the 30,000 summarily executed in his bogus “war on drugs” and the thousands of citizens killed as his soldiers waged a bloody counterinsurgency campaign.
Ramos argued that any vote for Duterte is a vote for the “war against the Filipino people.” He noted that Duterte launched that war in 2018 by abandoning peace negotiations with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDF), organizing the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) on Dec. 4, 2018 through Executive Order No. 70 (EO 70) to implement the US-inspired “whole of nation” counter-insurgency approach, and deploying thousands of soldiers and police commandos to the Bicol Region, the Samar provinces, Negros Oriental and Negros Occidental under Memorandum Circular No. 32 (MC 32) to launch offensive operations that killed hundreds of sugar workers, farmers and activists.
MC32 was supposed to “suppress lawless violence and acts of terror” and “prevent such violence from spreading and escalating elsewhere in the country.” It was part of the two-pronged strategy designed to destroy the revolutionary forces, with MC32 crafted to hit the rural mass bases at the outset, and EO70 institutionalized to eliminate the legal organizations that had been criticizing Duterte for his culture of impunity and his necromania or obsession with death and the dead (or having sex with corpses) as in the cults of Osiris and Hecate.
EO70 and MC32 are part of the “whole-of-government” approach practiced in Latin America and the banana republics which compels the military, police, and justice ministries to spy on the “enemies of the state” and harass them with a raft of criminal cases. Here, the AFP, PNP and the Department of Justice (DOJ) would collaborate to target those “suspected of, or are responsible for, committing or conspiring to commit acts of lawless violence in the country.” In both the US Counterinsurgency (COIN) guide and MC32, due process is dispensed with even as they talk about the mantra of respect for the people’s “constitutional rights.” Sadly, the victims of MC32 can no longer complain. They’re all dead and gone, stilled by the state’s lawless violence.
The plan for MC32 and EO70 could have been written as early as September 2016, when a blast in a Davao City night market killed dozens and seriously injured more than 60. Duterte used it to hurriedly declare a “state of national emergency on account of lawless violence” all over the country. In May 2017, barely eight months after that bombing, Duterte placed Mindanao under martial owing to a botched service of arrest warrants in Marawi City that degenerated into a shootout between soldiers and police and Muslim residents. It led to the wanton destruction of the city by Duterte’s artillery, rockets, and helicopter gunships and the deaths of hundreds. Martial law in Mindanao ended on Dec. 31, 2018. Gleaning from Duterte’s history, his response to crimes like the Davao City blast was to impose stern measures, restrict the movement of people, and expand the scope of his “emergency” beyond Mindanao. He failed to inflict martial law nationwide, a repeat of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s botched attempt to use the Ampatuan massacre as a pretext.
Duterte’s shills had justified the issuance of MC32 due to “a number of sporadic acts of violence” in Bicol, Samar provinces, Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental, ambushes, assaults on police detachments and the massacre of workers. However, witnesses tagged the military and police as responsible for the massacre and the subsequent killings of people in organized communities. MC32 was issued following the Sagay 9 massacre, when members of the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW) cultivating part of a hacienda in Sagay City were mowed down, and Duterte and his minions tagged the New People’s Army (NPA) as the culprit. It turned out that militiamen protected by the military and aligned with landlords committed the heinous crime.
In November 2018, lawyer Benjamin Ramos was murdered by motorcycle-riding hitmen. Ramos had been under military surveillance for several years for handling the cases of slain activists. He was also Red-tagged as a “leader of the underground armed movement,” said the National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL), which he helped organize in 2007. KMP’s Danilo Ramos said lawyers have been prime targets of both MC 32 and EO70, and Duterte made no bones of his desire to eliminate those who defend the defenseless and dare criticize his bloody regime.
Ramos has taken the cudgels for farmers who continue to be battered by Duterte policies and the liberalization of food importations and who demand that the rice industry be freed from favored traders who control rice importations, with the National Food Authority (NFA) reduced to buying low volumes of palay for its buffer stock. NFA cannot temper rice prices by releasing stocks in the market when prices soar. Runaway increases in rice prices came when Sen. Cynthia Villar and the champions of rice tariffication claimed ample stocks in the market. But farmers said there was a big inventory kept in warehouses. As George Soros reminded us: “The market is always wrong.” Like Duterte. Like Marcos Jr. Like Villar. And like Francisco “Franco” Tiu Laurel.
