📷Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro
There is this Gang of Four that is throwing wrenches into the peace process between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP.) It is comprised of Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr., National Security Adviser Eduardo Ano, Jonathan Malaya of the National Security Council (NSC) and the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC.)
Ano, Malaya and NTF-ELCAC have been working at cross-purposes with former armed forces chief Carlito Galvez, who signed an agreement with the NDFP to restart backchannel talks in November 2023. Ano, the hawkish bureaucrat largely trained by convicted Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan, and Malaya, were the first to skewer the peace process by demanding that the New People’s Army (NPA), part of the 18-member organizations of the NDFP, renounce armed struggle and lay down its arms. The NDFP quickly shot down the proposal, saying it would be engaging in peace negotiations, not surrender. The NDFP panel also resented the insistence of Ano and Malaya to tag the revolutionary coalition as “terrorists,” with Juliet de Lima arguing it is weird for them to negotiate with terrorists.
Moreover, Teodoro was the defense secretary when the unlamented Gloria Macapagal Arroyo unleashed a spate of kidnappings, summary executions, and illegal arrests in a failed attempt to weaken the NDFP from 2001 to 2009. Teodoro tagged the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) as “Jurassic” for not declaring a ceasefire during the Christmas holidays. Ano figured in the enforced disappearances of Jonas Burgos, son of press freedom icon Joe Burgos, and UP students Karen Empeno and Sherlyn Cadapan, while other cases were traced to Hermogenes Esperon Jr., whose personnel tracked down Menandro “Menny” Villanueva, captured him and summarily executed him. Villanueva, earlier named chief commander of the NPA, and Esperon belonged to the same batch at the Philippine Science High School. Suspicions are rife that the abduction of NDFP consultant Leo Velasco in 2006 was the handiwork of a team directed by the Malacanang War Room.
Previous agreements between the NDFP and GRP did not impose preconditions that the militarist hawks in the Marcos Jr. administration are demanding now. The negotiations are meant to precisely find a comprehensive solution to the basic problems of the Filipino people. It doesn’t require allegiance to the Philippine Constitution, which Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio, Marcos Jr., and Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez violate at every turn. Sara’s graft-ridden OVP and her mismanagement and bribery at the DepEd prove that while the P289-billion insertions in the DPWH budget and the P26-billion redundant AKAP doleout for both the Senate and the House of Representatives violated the rule against the addition of appropriations beyond what the plenary had approved.
The Marcos Jr. regime thought it would be a breeze to win a comprehensive settlement with the NDFP despite the bloody record of the military and police when ceasefires were declared. Despite promises never to engage in offensive actions, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) continue to engage in reconnaissance, surveillance, and offensive operations in pursuit of its internal security campaigns. Since 2017, that has been the case, with the government insisting that serving warrants of arrest, searches, and seizures cannot be impeded by any ceasefire. In short, the militarists want to operate with impunity while tying the hands of the NDFP, its member organizations, and NDFP consultants engaged in nationwide consultations.
CPP did not declare any ceasefire this year, pointing to the unremitting military suppression campaign and the imposition of de facto martial law in the countryside. In its official statement issued on Dec. 16, 2024, CPP stressed that the AFP has thrown thousands of troops into the interiors of Ilocos Norte, Abra, Kalinga, Cagayan, Isabela, Bulacan, Aurora, Laguna, Quezon, Mindoro Oriental, Mindoro Occidental, Camarines Norte, Albay, Sorsogon, Masbate, Capiz, Aklan, Negros Occidental, Negros Oriental, Northern Samar, Eastern Samar, Samar, the Surigao provinces, the Agusan p; provinces, Bukidnon, Davao del Norte, and the Lanao provinces. These deployments belie the claim of Teodoro and his cohorts that the NPA is down to only four guerrilla fronts, with the number of guerillas estimated to be only 1,111. Malacanang is more hallucinatory as it dreams the NPA is now limited to only one guerrilla front.
Yet, facts are facts and in October 2024, clashes occurred in at least five provinces in Luzon, Masbate, Bukidnon, Mindoro, Palawan and Quezon. The following month, a monitor disclosed that the highest number of casualties was registered, indicating that far from dissipating, the armed struggle is intensifying. What the CPP sees is not the neutralization of the NPA but the unlimited disinformation campaign through the AFP, the NTF-ELCAC, the Philippine News Agency (PNA), PTV-4 and the army of trolls and crones employed by the Dutertes and Marcos Jr. who now moonlight as AFP propagandists, with help from Lorraine Badoy Partosa and the bogus NPA operative Jeffrey Celiz. Fighting rages in “insurgency-free” provinces where billions of pesos in military pork barrels end up in the pockets of top officers.
CPP said the military has occupied hundreds of barangays in the countryside, bombarded communities using rockets and artillery, imposition of checkpoints to limit the movement of people, food blockades, and the ban on farming, resulting in huge losses to peasants, restrictions on trade and the propagation by soldiers of drug use, pornography and other vices among the youth, overnight drinking by troops who engage in indiscriminate firing when they are drunk, increased cases of sexual molestation and rape, forcible recruitment of residents into the CAGFU, forcing people to work for soldiers, harassment of farmers and house-to-house searches to force them to “surrender” to the AFP, kidnappings and extra-judicial killings (EJKs), massacres, illegal arrests, torture, land grabbing and the eviction of Indigenous people to pave the way for destructive mining and large plantations as well as infrastructure projects. (DIEGO MORRA)
