The Philippine government should work in earnest in winning the peace, as it had promised in November 2023 when it signed a joint statement with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDF) committing to pursue negotiations on a comprehensive settlement of the armed conflict.
For one, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. should have declared in no uncertain terms in his third State of the Nation Address (SONA) that he would not succumb to pressure from the militarist wing of the regime which populates the recently-installed human rights committee. This action was like giving the wolf supervision over the henhouse and ensuring that everything will be whitewashed, from a thorough investigation of all abuses, summary executions and enforced disappearances from 1972 until today.
Neither is the government mulling the release of all ailing and elderly political prisoners like former priest Frank Fernandez, an NDF consultant and his wife. Fernandez suffers from a slew of ailments long before he was convicted of common crimes after being captured unarmed. Health Action for Human Rights (HAHR) also called for the release on recognizance of political prisoner Ernesto Jude Rimando, now confined at the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) with Stage 4 liver cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pulmonary tuberculosis.
He was illegally arrested on trumped-up charges on January 6, 2021 in Quezon City while undergoing treatment for liver cirrhosis and sepsis. Before his arrest, he was a long-time researcher for the Alyansa sa mga Mamumuo sa Sugbo in Cebu. The captors planted firearms and a grenade on him and revised his arrest warrant in the name of “Allan Morales” prior to his inquest. Rimando is already at the terminal stage of both his liver cancer and liver cirrhosis. He is bedridden. Rimando deserves release for being a victim of false arrest, planted evidence, perjured testimonies and multiple other human rights violations.
On July 20, 2024, the Artista ng Rebolusyong Pangkultura (ARPAK) and the Free Amanda Echanis Movement (FAEM) launched the installment of TL;DR:TRL at Heyday Café in Manila to demand the immediate release of political prisoner Amanda Echanis, daughter of murdered NDF consultant Randall Echanis, who was illegally arrested along with her infant on Dec. 20, 2020, and is imprisoned at the Cagayan Provincial Jail on trumped-up charges. Amanda, niece of noted writers Jose Lacaba and the late Emman Lacaba, also authored the book “Binhi ng Paglaya.”
Cordillera activists led by Steve Tauli, Sarah Abellon-Akiles and scores of indigenous communities have been red-tagged and already proscribed under the unjust Anti-Terrorism Act and denied their rights to protection under the writ of amparo, which the Court of Appeals (CA) denied to grant them last year. The net effect is to push them out of the negotiating table and make them part of the menu for the militarists, their unprotected, defenseless prey.
In similar straits are two NDF consultants— Ma. Elizabeth P. Principe and Concha Araneta—who have been placed on the terror list by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) and their bank accounts and assets frozen. This is double injustice for Principe, who had won acquittals in four criminal cases filed against her after she was captured on Nov. 28,2007 in Cubao, Quezon as she sought medical treatment. After the bench declared her innocent, a mere administrative body created by Rodrigo Duterte impeaches the “notatu dignum” of the courts and tags Principe as a terrorist.
How can the Marcos Jr. government genuinely pursue peace when it imprisons activists, red-tags leaders of progressive IP groups and bars NDF consultants from organizing revolutionary forces in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao to prepare them to respond to comprehensive peace negotiations? This is injustice for the peace process among the living, and double injustice for those who have been murdered so the wheels of peace could not be cranked to start the journey to its destination.
