The United States government plays an active role in the harassment and murder of Filipino people. The Philippine National Police (PNP) has an outpost at the Philippine Consulate General in San Francisco and is known to actively surveil local activists here in the Bay Area. There is also a history of the Bay Area police departments establishing training exchanges with the PNP. Recently, on June 24, 2021, the U.S. approved three new arms sales for the Philippines worth over $2.9 billion in F-16 fighter jets and various missiles. By supplying the government of the Philippines with funds for weapons, the United States government is upholding the corrupt Duterte regime.
Since the start of Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s regime in 2016, there have been over 30,000 extrajudicial killings and many more human rights violations against women, activists, indigenous communities and children. Human rights organization, Karapatan, reported that from 2016 until now, over 45,000 schools, medical, religious, and other public spaces have been commandeered by the military. Thousands of civilians are known to have died under the campaign. National data acknowledges more than 6,000 deaths, but international rights groups have long warned the figure could be far higher. These actions are clear steps to maintain authoritarian power over the people of the Philippines. By replacing educational, medical, religious, and communal spaces, with high military presence, Duterte’s regime has placed Filipinos in a state of fear of persecution and death at the hands of the government.
Duterte’s institutionalization of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) has led to the intimidation and red-tagging of organizers, meaning the malicious blacklisting of individuals and organizations for their criticism and dissent against the Philippine government. Adrian Bonifacio from Anakbayan USA stated, “I did not take being red-tagged lightly – after all, I’d heard and seen what it meant for fellow organizers in the Philippines, like Joseph Canlas and our very own Brandon Lee. But the experience gave me all the more reason to fight back.”
Every year the Philippine President gives a State Of The Nation Address during which he congratulates himself for the good he claims to have done. This year, which is President Rodrigo Duterte’s last, was no different: instead of addressing how COVID-19 ravaged the Philippines and its people, he applauded his administration for their militarized response to the pandemic, advocated for free legal assistance for soldiers and police, and congratulated himself for his war on drugs which in reality, is a war on the poor. The People’s State Of The Nation Address (PSONA) is an annual mobilization organized by Filipino community members and international allies to spread the truth about the violence and oppression Filipinos face at the hand of the Philippine government.
This year’s PSONA called to end Duterte’s tyranny on the Filipino people. Speakers raised criticisms against the Duterte administration for its failure to handle the COVID-19 pandemic, attacks on indigenous peoples, and neglect of overseas Filipino workers. A major takeaway from this year’s PSONA was the emphasis on international solidarity with other communities who have been impacted by US imperialism. It is not enough to just passively observe injustices in the world. All oppressed people must see the similarities in our struggles, take up arms, and unite against the common enemy. Systems of oppression function only to divide the people they oppress because they recognize that unity among the masses will lead to their downfall.
We recommend joining the San Francisco Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (SFCHRP), who shares the vision of human rights advanced by the National Democratic movement of the Philippines. SFCHRP educates, organizes, and mobilizes people and communities in the Bay Area to take
progressive action in upholding and supporting human rights in the Philippines and throughout the world. Our ask is to come together across communities and cultures to collectively uplift ourselves and each other to create the material conditions for change. It takes a mass movement, one led by those who deal with the brunt of these injustices, to achieve genuine liberation.