This year, we mark International Human Rights Day in the face of renewed attempts by the Marcos Jr. regime to deodorize itself amid reports of mounting violations of human rights and international humanitarian law perpetrated by its henchmen in the military and police.
In his most ambitious PR gimmick to date, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has chosen this date to launch his so-called Philippine Human Rights Action Plan. This, as well as a slew of executive orders and task forces formed to investigate specific rights violations, however, cannot gloss over the crimes that have been perpetrated under his watch.
To date, there have been 119 extrajudicial killings (EJK) of activists, rights advocates, farmers and ordinary folk since Marcos Jr. took power in July 2022. Another 76 individuals were victims of frustrated EJK; 14 victims of enforced disappearance; 43,582 victims of forced evacuation; 63,380 victims of indiscriminate firing; and 46,921 victims of bombing.
On the other hand, the Dahas Project of the Third World Studies Center has documented more than 800 drug-related killings since Marcos Jr. took over, a far cry from his claims of a “bloodless” war on drugs.
The spectacular exposés of Vice President Sara Duterte’s scam to siphon hundreds of millions of pesos of Confidential and Intelligence Funds (CIF) and former president Rodrigo Duterte’s scheme of using his own CIF to reward his death squads for the killing of tens of thousands of drug suspects have outraged the people and spurred calls to have Sara Duterte impeached and Rodrigo Duterte arrested and stand trial before the International Criminal Court.
Yet, no matter how much he tries to prettify his image by raking dirt on the Dutertes, Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s own hands are bloodied by human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law perpetrated under his regime, which does the bidding of the US in undertaking counterinsurgency campaigns that desperately try to quell all forms of dissent.
The worsening violations of human rights and international humanitarian law under the current regime are the logical consequences of Marcos Jr.’s refusal to do away with any of the Duterte-era laws and policies that have engendered such violations, including those that pertain to the war on drugs.
He maintains the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) created under Duterte’s Executive Order No. 70 which continues to red- and terror-tag activists and threaten and intimidate them into joining staged surrenders. Those who refuse to become part of such a farce are made vulnerable to extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance or unjust arrest and detention on trumped-up charges.
Marcos Jr. has weaponized to the hilt the Anti-Terrorism Act signed into law by Duterte, and an earlier law against terrorist financing, further suppressing dissent by linking activism to terrorism. These twin terror laws have so far victimized more than a hundred activists and ordinary civilians.
His militarist policy in dealing with insurgency has turned vast areas of the countryside into war zones, where villagers are subjected to food and economic blockades and civilian authority is undermined by the military’s repressive presence.
And as far as the CIF is concerned, Marcos Jr. is merely following in Duterte’s footsteps when the Office of the President spent PhP4.56 billion in 2023, the biggest chunk in the PhP10-billion CIF for that year. CIF allocations infamously jumped 900% under Duterte compared to his predecessor, a pattern that Marcos continues to this day.
TODAY, AS WE MARCH to mark International Human Rights Day, we denounce Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s attempts to window-dress the sordid human rights situation and demand justice and accountability from him and his henchmen. At the same time, we demand that Rodrigo Duterte be arrested, tried and imprisoned for the extrajudicial killing of up to 30,000 drug suspects. We likewise demand that his daughter Sara be impeached, removed from public office and charged criminally for stealing and misusing public funds.#
