Philippines: The AFP spews lies to deter overseas Filipinos from joining people’s struggle
Fight Back News Service is circulating the following statement from Compatriots – National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP).
Compatriots-NDFP, the revolutionary organization of Filipinos overseas, condemns the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) for spewing lies in an attempt to slander the revolutionary movement, cover-up the realities of Philippine society and deter overseas Filipinos from joining the people’s struggle.
A few days ago, social media accounts related to the AFP posted a “Wanted” poster with the name and picture of Cristina Pasion – a Filipino-American who grew up in the United States – making the baseless allegation that she is a recruiter of the New People’s Army. In a change of tact, the 2nd Infantry Division of the AFP released a statement on April 9 calling on the New People’s Army to “release” Cristina purportedly on “humanitarian” grounds. Their “concern” that she is “emotionally distressed” is a brazen lie. It is just the latest example of psychological warfare meant to deceive the people.
According to the NPA, it has no one to “release.”
Pasion decided to go back home to our motherland and integrate among the most exploited and oppressed masses in Mindoro. Her consciousness was awakened through her own experiences growing up separated from her own country, through integration with Filipino workers in the U.S. who were forced to leave their families just to be super-exploited overseas, and through taking up the issues and campaigns of the toiling masses being violently repressed under the tyrant Duterte and now Marcos regimes.
She, along with an ever growing number of Filipinos abroad, are choosing to witness the realities of the semi-colonial and semi-feudal Philippine society first hand in order to change it. They are in effect defying the government’s policy of forced migration that pushes people out of the country, telling us that the solution to our problems lies in toiling overseas rather than in struggling to address the roots of poverty back home.
The military has no right to call on Filipinos abroad to turn our backs on our fellow compatriot masses in the countryside. They have no right to speak about “upholding humanitarian principles” and “safeguarding the welfare of individuals” when it is state institutions like the AFP, the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), and others who are responsible for torture, starvation, mass displacement, illegal bombings, and mass murder. The AFP is nothing but a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In fact, it is the very violence perpetrated by the state that pushes more and more people to join the revolutionary mass movement.