On the 45th Anniversary of the Marcos Dictatorship in the Philippines, We Remain Opposed to Auto-Golpe, Authoritarianism and Neo-Fascism

21 September 2017
New York

President Rodrigo Roa Duterte has maintained, throughout the first year of his term, a revision of Philippine history toward the rehabilitation of the memory of the ousted late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, and his clan and cronies.

Having accepted campaign funds from the Marcos clan and cronies, he has wholeheartedly embraced his subservience to the oligarchy that laid waste both the Philippine economy and Filipino lives.

He has had the skeleton of the dictator buried in the Cemetery of Heroes, labeled the son Bongbong Marcos, though defeated in the last elections, “possibly the country’s vice-president,” proclaimed Marcos’ birthday a holiday in his home province and has now declared the 21st of September a national holiday.

He has moreover continued to mimic his dead tyrant-idol through wholescale destruction of the check-and-balance agencies in governance, defunded the Commission on Human Rights, jailed a proclaimed and sworn-in senator on the contrived evidence of photographs and degraded her with a claimed sex video which was non-existent, pushed to have the Philippine Constitution changed to federalism which would enable him to stay in power until 2025, and freed those charged with corruption and used convicted drug lords’ testimony, fake news, trolls and click farms to demonize the opposition.

More, Duterte unleashed a supposed “war on drugs” which was actually a massacre of the poor and the hapless, 13,000 + dead, while those accused of being drug lords were handled with kid gloves and eventually exonerated. This war on the poor morphed the entire Philippine National Police into an assassins’ guild, with quotas for nightly kills, irrespective of guilt or innocence.

And to further imitate his tyrant-idol, Duterte occasioned the most serious armed conflict in Mindanao, with the Muslim city of Marawi reduced to rubble and thousands of refugees continuing a perilous existence in evacuation centers where 39 have died from disease.

This is our response: As we opposed the Marcos Dictatorship through all the two decades of its murderous rampage and rapacious looting, so shall we oppose Duterte’s ambition to channel his dead tyrant-idol and destroy all the democratic processes in the archipelago. Overseas Filipinos have worked under the most stringent conditions to re-establish a bright possibility for the archipelago, accepting some of the most demeaning jobs in the world in order to remit financial resources to enable their families to survive and thrive. We oppose any attempt to nullify this nearly 50 years of sacrifice of those exported overseas to pull Philippine economy up from where it had been trashed by the Marcos clan and cronies, and to restore wealth to the Philippine treasury so looted by the same oligarchy.

As we have and continue to call for justice against malfeasance of the Marcos clan and cronies, so we call for justice against the Duterte Regime for a) murder of 13,000; b) exacerbation of armed conflict; c) enabling the theft of Philippine territory and resources; d) destruction of the democratic procedures fought for and won against the Marcos Dictatorship.

UPHOLD THE JUST STRUGGLE AGAINST THE MARCOS-DUTERTE REGIME!
NO TO MARTIAL LAW! NO TO DICTATORSHIP! NO TO FEUDAL FEDERALISM!
DISMANTLE ALL POLITICAL DYNASTIES AND WARLORD CLANS!
DENOUNCE THE MISOGYNOIR OF DUTERTE’S NEO-FASCISM!
PUSH BACK AGAINST THE WAR ON THE POOR!
TURN THE DRUG TAP OFF AT THE SOURCE!

AF3IRM NYC

 

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