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revolutionary justice

Marcoses’ political rehabilitation bodes more tragedy for the nation

in Editorial

Three decades have gone by since February 1986, when the Filipino people’s unified will and action ousted the Marcos dictatorship. Ignominously, the US imperialists plucked the tyrant and his family—along with their loot—out of Malacañang by helicopters, subsequently flying them to safe exile in Hawaii.

Yet today the Marcos heirs are back in the high circles of power. And the dictator’s embalmed remains—publicly displayed in Batac, Ilocos Norte for over two decades—was deceitfully ensconced in the Libingan ng mga Bayani in November 2016, courtesy of President Rodrigo R. Duterte.

Yet they haven’t returned much of the estimated $10-billion they had stolen during their corrupt, abusive and repressive reign. With such a huge war chest that can only grow bigger over time (even at conservative interest rates in what Imelda Marcos flaunts as over 100 secret bank accounts), they are being served/protected by a platoon of lawyers. They have allies and toadies at various levels of the reactionary government, besides a fleet of PR people, false historians, and keyboard warriors.

They thus feel secure moving freely within the same bureaucrat capitalist system that nurtured them in power.

The rotten system enabled them to amass wealth at the cost of thousands of Filipino lives and the stunting of Philippines’ agricultural and industrial development. It allowed them to spend five years of lavish and vulgar exile in Hawaii. Upon their return, towing the embalmed body of their dictator patriarch, this system welcomed them back into the fold as they gradually carved anew their fiefdom.

Twice did Imelda Marcos attempt to run for President: in 1992 when she lost and in 1998, when she withdrew her candidacy. In between her two presidential bids, Imelda won a seat in Congress where she served as Leyte representative for three years (1995-1998). In 2010, she again won a seat in Congress, this time representing Ilocos Norte, the late dictator’s home province and political base.

Starting from their Ilocos Norte base, the two elder Marcos siblings took turns being the province’s governor and congressional representative from 1992 to 1998. It was 24 years since dictator Marcos was ousted when Bongbong Marcos entered the Senate in 2010. Imee Marcos took longer entering the national scene. She came into the Senate in 2019.

It was in Bongbong Marcos’s first stab at the vice-presidency in 2016 that the family tasted their first defeat in what some accounts call their “spectacular comeback.” Unaccustomed to setback, Bongbong lodged an electoral protest he wouldn’t let go even after three years.

The family has now repositioned itself back as close as possible to Malacañang. But for Bongbong’s defeat at the 2016 national polls, he would have been just a heartbeat away from the presidency, a very real threat to the Filipino people considering Duterte’s multiple acknowledged illnesses. Had Marcos Jr “won” the vice-presidency, Duterte would have—as he has publicly expressed a number of times—opted to yield the presidency and thus pave the way to the Marcoses’ total political rehabilitation.

Undoubtedly, the Marcoses are a veritable example of bureaucrat capitalism. To this day articles are being written about how the dictator Marcos and his wife “smartly” looted the national coffers, put up opaque companies and seized stakes in strategic businesses, and how he “transformed” the military and the police into a unified armed forces to back up his fascist rule, rendering the armed services deeply partisan (for him) and more corruptible than ever.

Throughout that process, the US imperialists propped up his dictatorship. They armed, trained and guided the establishment of the armed forces for their own imperialist ends and those of their puppet tyrant. Marcos, “our ‘son-of-a-bitch’” (as then President George Bush referred to him) only became a “problem” to them when the people began protesting against the dictatorship in evergrowing number and frequency. The armed communist-led revolution was growing by leaps and bounds and had led the fight against the dictatorship and its imperialist master.

Marcos’ ouster will always be a historical triumph of the Filipino people’s collective power— both armed and unarmed, in the underground and in the open democratic arena of struggles. The ongoing turbo-charged rehabilitation of the Marcoses under Duterte, however, is as loud a reminder as we all can get that, no, the people cannot stop at merely ousting the current, abusive tyrant. The system that breeds such ilk needs also to be smashed. This system has proven to have merely continued the puppet presidency and imperialist domination of the country.

A corrupt system is bound to rehabilitate the Marcoses

The Communist Party of the Philippines, in a 2018 statement, sharply pointed out that the “successive reactionary regimes failed miserably to address the clamor of the Filipino people for swift justice.” “Every ruling regime allowed the Marcoses to return stage by stage,” it said. “None carried out a decisive act of justice, fearing this will rouse demands for the same measures to be meted against them over the same crimes they themselves commit while in power.”

At the outset, Cory Aquino, responding to insistent public demand, established the PCGG (Presidential Commission on Good Government) to go after the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth. But her administration emasculated the PCGG by ordering it to seize nothing directly and work instead through the courts. What the agency recovered, of course, was peanuts for the dirty-moneyed Marcoses.

The US imperialist’s rescue of their once serviceable puppet continued even after the Marcoses returned to the Philippines. The US government redacted transactions involving US organizations in their records. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) refused to disclose what they knew, reportedly prompting a veteran of PCGG to call the US and Marcoses “partners in theft.”

Most probably, the US possesses loads of damning information on the kleptocracy and rights abuses of the Marcoses. Not only does it exercise control of the Philippine state forces, it’s also been known to keep tabs on even its “allies,” according to a declassified report on the CIA’s eavesdropping on conversations of government leaders such as those of the Philippines.

With clues from the US and their latest puppet on how the Marcoses were to be cossetted since the late 1980s, Marcos died in Hawaii without being punished by the Filipino people, through their supposed government’s justice system. His widow, Imelda, returned to the Philippines with her three adult children in 1992. She was greeted by an avalanche of graft cases. But with their political allies regaining government posts, she never had to worry about jail time or threats of warrants of arrest.

Imelda was convicted at least twice for graft, once in 1993 for a fraudulent land deal and in 2018 for illicit financial dealings with Switzerland-based NGOs. But she remains free to this day. In her 2018 conviction, under Duterte’s watch, she was asked to put up bail of only P300,000, despite the gravity of the case and the amount of what’s been stolen. The conviction is turning out into a ploy to fast track the movement of the case.

After more than five administrations (including two Aquinos), more than 90 lawyers and personnel of PCGG placed at the increasingly frustrating trail of seeing signs of billions of hidden wealth — only for these to be whisked away before their eyes — and the precious length of time that’s gone by, the Marcoses still harbor much of the ill-gotten wealth. Some of it was divulged in the upheaval of disclosures regarding what are called the Panama papers, where the ultra-rich keep their money away from taxes and prying eyes.

By now it’s clear the graft cases against the Marcoses have been filed only to placate the angry masses.

Dictator’s final rehab under a Marcos clone

The impact of the people’s victory in ousting Marcos and the underlying desire for genuine democracy was such that it took the Marcoses more than three decades before bureaucrat capitalism could ease them back into Malacañang as “honored” guests. The Marcoses managed to do it under another imperialist puppet president they financially supported as candidate, who publicly claims he idolizes Marcos and looks back at his father’s political career as one that had benefited from the Marcoses.

And, yes, before we forget, a president who evidently wants to be another dictator and tyrant. He himself has already reprised many Marcosian tactics.

Despite his anti-corruption posturing, Duterte early into his term stunned the nation by allowing Marcos’ embalmed remains to be buried, after at least two postponements due to public protests, at the Libingan ng mga Bayani in November 2016. The most brazen of post-Edsa puppet presidents at helping the Marcoses, he nevertheless balked at personally witnessing the undeserved public pomp reserved only for a hero’s and former president’s burial. It took him a year before he set out again to glorify Marcos: commemorated him in postage stamps. The Duterte regime has timed its actions idolizing Marcos on the last quarter of the year.

Under Duterte the corruption cases against the Marcoses that dragged on for more than three decades are being thrown out one by one.

In August and October 2019 several ill-gotten wealth cases against the Marcoses, 27 to 31 years in court, were dismissed allegedly for lack of probative evidence (government lawyers only submitted photocopies of documents, whose originals are supposedly kept in the Bangko Sentral vaults), or for the lawyers’ failure to attend court hearings.

The bulk of their massive loot remains beyond reach of the government and the people from whom they stole it. Estimates of what the PCGG managed to recover ran from just one to two billion dollars. The precious works of arts bought with stolen money inadvertently would show in Imeldific photographs in her posh digs, but they always disappear whenever the investigators come knocking.

The billions they extorted from coconut farmers were partially recovered but each succeeding administration has made it difficult for the coconut farmers and real owners of the fund to fully recover it.

People must clip the Marcoses’ greed

Thus, looking at the Marcoses’ rehabilitation into power, it is not true that horror repeats itself. It gets more horrendous in Part 2.

Unapologetic, flushed with their success, the Marcoses are greedy for more. They’re spoiled believing they can get away with it, again and again. They’re coming back to do more of the same on a vehicle much bigger and ratcheted up by their original loot; oiled by the blood, sweat and tears of injustices of those they had oppressed; and covered by the same imperialist power that continues to lord over the country as long as their puppets dutifully run it to the ground for the benefit of their businesses and military interests.

More than three decades since the world applauded the Filipino people’s uprising that booted them out, the Marcoses have not been made to account for the thousands of human rights violations and humanitarian crimes they committed to maintain the dictatorship.

Now the maturing children, beneficiaries of the Marcos loot and their network of allies and cronies, are hovering about for another chance to take over Malacañang. They are intent as well in whitewashing their family’s crimes; Imee Marcos chose to head the Senate committee on culture. Like father like daughter, as he had faked his wartime medals, she faked her academic achievements (so did Bongbong, too). Whenever confronted about their family’s crimes, Imee perfunctority tells the Filipinos: “Move on.”

Against the Marcoses’ rehabilitation and whitewashing, against the current president’s desiring to be another Marcos, the CPP 2018 statement declares that theFilipino people “have no other recourse but to take revolutionary action and overthrow the ruling system and class rule of big bourgeois compradors, big landlords and bureaucrat capitalists.”

“Only by wielding revolutionary power—democratic people’s power—can they subject the biggest criminal and fascist oppressors to just punishment with full decisiveness and dispatch,” the CPP statement concludes. ###

#NeverAgain
#NeverForget

—–
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Vibrant Democracy Thrives in the People’s Army

in Mainstream

by Vida Gracias and Pat Gambao

Soon after breakfast they started moving into a makeshift schoolhouse on a hillside surrounded by lush vegetation. The sun was shining brightly and the weather was cool. Most of them were young, in their late teens, early 20s and 30s, largely local men and women making up a company of Red fighters somewhere in a guerrilla front in Eastern Visayas.

Casually, with their rifles at hand, they sat on long, tiered bamboo benches, bantering, smiling, some were quiet, others in deep conversation. Soon all eyes were glued to the blackboard as the Red commander finished sketching vicinity maps, with arrows pointing at target structures, entrance and exit points. Silence hovered when the commander, in his forties and apparently a veteran of many battles, turned to face his audience.

The meeting was called to discuss three simultaneous raids to be executed in a day or two. The objectives were to disarm the local police station, warn the despotic town mayor of his abuses and confiscate his firearms right inside his home, and punish a certified informer with blood debts to several victims.

Before laying out the plans, the commander cited the political objectives. He didn’t seem like a commander at all, never flaunting authority or arrogance. Much like a teacher and moderator, he invited his audience to comment on the plan, examine the tactics and details, look for loopholes, alter, adjust, modify. What followed was a lively discussion, with voices resonating, never drowning out those who raised questions or clarifications, seriously listening to the pros and cons. In the middle of the interchanges, jokes would be thrown in and laughter would erupt, until unity was attained.

Then the meeting focused on the most crucial task. The commander did not select who should go in each assault team — he asked for volunteers. And without any prodding, several arms were raised. Everyone knew death could await him/her more than any other, but that seemed like the least of their concerns. How so easily one can offer his life in the service of the people is the mark of a true guerrilla of the New People’s Army (NPA).

The NPA commander was wise about not getting stuck in his own ideas. Instead, he produced results acceptable to all by rousing his troops to suggest how to attack and capture enemy positions and how to fulfill their tasks. Mutual instructions came off fluidly between officers and soldiers and also among the soldiers themselves.

On the day of the raid the entire camp was busy. It seemed like everybody was descending into town to attend a fiesta—except that each Red fighter had baon—a slice of chicken and boiled rice wrapped in banana leaves, prepared by the kitchen staff well before dawn. Days before, clothes and even shoes were washed and dried; firearms were cleaned, polished and examined; and backpacks were sorted out. The women tied their hairs and the men combed theirs. Although the water supply was a bit low as the streams had been drying up, the Red fighters took their baths or simply washed their faces and brushed their teeth. Everyone looked neat and fresh before they began to trek down to the village.
Later in the day the three teams carried out their tactical offensives, swiftly and efficiently. Not a single shot was fired, not one casualty on the side of the Red fighters.

Covered by the dark night, and with high spirits, they went back to the camp, anticipating another round of meeting and lively discussions to assess their strengths and weaknesses in carrying the tactical offensives (TO). Everyone was eager to tell his or her story. No single person would claim credit for the victory as each one had a part in achieving it.

This practice of military democracy, under the centralized leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), is replicated many times over in various regions of the country where units of the NPA operate. Meetings have become “second skin” to red fighters in arriving at collective decisions and collective actions. Victory is invariably achieved via a democratic movement. Hence, anyone who has seen the NPA in action up close can verily debunk the “terrorist” images painted by the reactionary state about the people’s army. Likewise, all the Operational Plans (OPlans) hatched up by successive regime and the Armed Forces of the Philipines (AFP) over the decades, in collaboration with American imperialists, have failed miserably as the people’s army frustrated them all and thus advanced the people’s war.

Democratic Centralism

Democracy thrives in the NPA, guided by the principle of democratic centralism whereby policies and decisions by central leadership correspond to the needs and aspirations of the broad masses. Under the system, the interest of the whole takes primacy over the interest of the parts, the minority is subordinate to the majority and the lower level to the higher level. Through training, commanders and fighters grasp the relationship between democracy and centralism and how democratic centralism is put into practice.

Democracy is attained through the firm grasp and understanding of the cadres and fighters of the principles, policies and line of the national democratic revolution through free and deep discussions among them.

Democracy is manifested in the abolition of feudal practices in the army such as highhandedness and arrogance of officers towards their men, docility of the troops and acquiescence to orders without questioning. Instead, camaraderie prevails in the Red army as officers and men share the problems and difficulties, the passion in their tasks and the joy of fulfilment of their service to the people. It is democracy that enables them to endure and triumph over travails.

The management of the limited resources of the NPA—equipment, supplies and funds—is a collective responsibility. The unit members assist the leadership.

Discipline in the NPA

Democracy strengthens discipline and combat effectiveness. For an army to be hailed by the people as capable of defeating the superior enemy must have a high sense of discipline. This galvanizes the unity among commanders and Red fighters and between the Red army and the people. Thus, the NPA has in its heart and mind the Three Main Rules of Discipline and the Eight Points of Attention, a legacy from Chairman Mao Zedong and the victorious Chinese Communist Revolution.

The Three Main Rules of Discipline are:

  • (1) Obey orders in all your actions;

  • (2) Do not take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses;

  • (3) Turn in everything captured.

The Eight Points of Attention are:

  • (1) Speak politely;
  • (2) Pay fairly for what you buy;
  • (3) Return everything you borrow;
  • (4) Pay for anything you damage;
  • (5) Do not hit or swear at people;
  • (6) Do not damage crops;
  • (7) Do not take liberties with women;
  • (8) Do not ill-treat captives.

The Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention also serve as the NPA’s guide in the treatment of Prisoners of War (POW). Unlike in the reactionary armed forces, the revolutionary forces fully respect human rights and adhere to the principles of humanitarian law. Contrary to the image created by the reactionary state’s propaganda machine, the people’s court in the guerrilla fronts is no “kangaroo court.” The people’s court abides by a judicial system that observes a “judicious procedure: investigation, indictment, hearings, sentencing, pardon and release.”

Well-rounded Fighting Force

The revolutionary cause that the New People’s Army (NPA) is fighting for—the interests of the broad toiling masses, their social emancipation and national liberation from US imperialism and the local exploiting classes—strengthens its resolve to be the epitome of unflinching self-sacrifice, courage, discipline and democracy. With this resolve and as it deeply immerses in the bosom of the masses, the NPA under the absolute leadership of the CPP has become an invincible force to contend against.

Communists advocate peace, just peace, and the “abolition of war.” But the US-supported local big bourgeois comprador and landlord class keep a ferocious reactionary army to perpetuate their hold on power and continue to exploit and suppress the struggling masses. Acknowledging the lessons of history, the truth that “political power grows of the barrel of the gun” the NPA, composed largely of the peasantry, takes up the gun and wages a revolutionary war to seize power, smash the reactionary state, and create a sovereign democratic republic of the people. However, ever conscious that politics commands the gun and not the other way around, the Party leads the army and ensures that it is not just a fighting force but an edifice of revolutionary strength and power of the people.

Under the Party leadership, the NPA has a fundamental task to push forward the armed struggle, carry out agrarian revolution, and build the revolution’s mass base. Closely linked with the masses, it organizes and rouses them as well as helps them in economic production, and in building the organs of political power.

The practice of democracy in the New People’s Army is essential to its consolidation and development. Democracy in the New People’s Army has steeled unity, fortified discipline and fired up a potent force that will sustain the protracted people’s war until victory.###

#PeasantMonth
#ServeThePeople
#JoinTheNPA

—–
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43 CASUALTIES OF AFP AND PNP IN NEGROS

in Statements

Not less than 43 soldiers and police is the recorded casualty in three tactical offensive by the New People’s Army under Mt. Cansermon Command (MCC) in Negros since June 22- July 18.

Last June 22, a unit of MCC – NPA conducted a sniping operation which resulted to 3 casualties on the side of the 94th IBPA in the hinterlands of Sitio Bulo, Brgy. Bantolinao, Manjuyod, Negros Oriental. The soldiers killed are part of the team securing the area for the medical mission sponsored by Police Regional Office 7(PRO 7).

While conducting combat and clearing operation, the joint force of 94th IBPA and 704th Regional Mobile force Batallion we’re ambushed through the use of command detonated explosives (CDX) and exchange of firefight in Sitio Cambugtong, Brgy. Bantolinao, Manjuyod, Negros Oriental. More than 20 recorded casualty on the fascist reactionary side. To save face, only 1dead and 2 wounded was reported to the public.

Meanwhile last July 2, a unit of MCC-NPA foiled the raid attempt of 11th IBPA in Sitio Small Samac, Brgy. Nalundan, Bindoy, Negros Oriental. The unit of MCC-NPA launched a counter offensive and positioned for ambush. The gunfight ensued for an hour which resulted to 10 dead and 6 wounded on the side of the military. No casualty on the NPA side and the unit successfully maneuvered outside the enemies encirclement with the guidance of guerilla tactic’s in warfare.

On othér news, four police killed in an ambush in Sitio Yamot, Brgy. Mabato, Ayungon, Negros Oriental. Aided by a substantive Intel report the enemies plan to conduct another record round of oplan sauron was deferred. Confiscated from their possession are 4 canik 9mm pistol, 9 magazines and 135 ammunition, and a list of names of their targets.

The series of successful tactical offensive was conducted by MCC-NPA to need the call for justice for the victims of extra judicial killings especially for the innocent victim’s of Oplan Sauron 1 and 2.

Oplan Sauron or Synchronized Enhanced Management of Police Operations (SEMPO) is the current fascist move of the Duterte régime to brutally attack the people of Negros. It is characterized by surprise and synchronized attack of target locations; planned arrest or killing of targets. Since its inception last December 2018, it already claimed 21 victims killed and almost 100 illegally arrested on false charges. it has also resulted in forced evacuation and destruction of crops and livelihood of the people.

Dionisio Magbuelas, Spokesperson

Mt. Cansermon Command-New Peoples Army

July 25 2019
http://tiny.cc/lzpgaz

#DefendNegros
#RevolutionaryJustice
#FightTyranny
#JoinTheNPA
#ServeThePeople

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BUKAS NA LIHAM PARA SA BAGONG HUKBONG BAYAN

in Statements 
25 Marso 2019

Isang pagpupugay sa ika-50 anibersaryo ng Bagong Hukbong Bayan, mula sa isang kaanak ng biktima ng paglabag sa karapatang pantao ng mapanupil na estado.

Ako ay sumulat para maghapag ng isang hiling sampu ng iba pang kaanak ng di mabilang na biktima ng pagpatay, pagdukot, harassment at iba pang paglabag sa karapatang pantao.

Kaming mga kaanak ay taon at ang iba pa ay dekada nang sumuong sa prosesong legal na binigay sa amin ng 1987 Constitution para lamang makamit ang hustisyang aming inaasam. Lahat ng proseso ay dinaanan ng mga kaanak ng mga biktima. Pero di mabilang sa kamay ang mga may hustisyang nakamit ng mga kaanak. Bagama’t malakas ang ebidensya, parating nauuwi lamang sa kangkungan ang mga kasong aming hinain sa mga korte. Madalas, kami ay pinapaikot-ikot lamang sa kamay ng mga salarin at ng mga legal na institusyong dapat sana ay magtatanggol sa aming mga biktima. Pero paano nga naman kung ang hinahabol ng hustisya ay mismong nagpapatupad ng batas. Kadalasan bumabalik kami sa una naming tanong sa simula nang mapatay o madukot ang aming kaanak: paano ba namin makakamit ang hustisya?

Walang pakundangan ang mga pwersa ng estado maghasik ng lagim sa mga komunidad. Karahasan ang sagot sa mamamayang nagpapahayag lamang. Mabigat sa aming dibdib na patuloy at buong laya ang paglabag sa karapatang pantao. Tuyo na ang aming luha sa hinagpis habang ang mga salarin ay laya pa rin.

Alam ko/namin na kilala ninyo ang ilan sa mga salarin sa maraming kaso. Sila ay patuloy pa rin na nagkakalat ng lagim. Kada taong kawalan ng hustisya ay taong dusa ng mga biktima.

Humihiling kami ng hustisya sa tunay na hukbo ng bayan. Parusahan ang mga may utang na dugo sa mamamayan. Mula sa ulo ng krimen hanggang sa mga galamay nito. Di na ‘ko umaasa na makakamtan ang hustisya sa estadong nagsisilbi lamang sa mga dayuhan, panginoong maylupa at burgesya komprador. Sa inyo na lamang kami umaasa ng katarungan.

Depensahan ang mamamayan na inyong pinaglilingkuran. Ang bawat bigwas sa mga sagad-sagaring salarin ng paglabag sa karapatang pantao ay hakbang patungo sa paghilom ng aming mga sugat.

Muli, bumabati sa ika-50 anibersaryo ng tunay na hukbo ng mamamayan. Panahon na para maningil hindi lamang para sa aming mga biktima kundi para sa mamamayang inaapi.

Umaasa,
Kaanak

#NPA50
#ServeThePeople
#CherishThePeoplesArmy
#RevolutionaryJustice

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