By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
NDFP Chief Political Consultant
Fidel Agcaoili, chairman of the NDFP Negotiating Panel, Coni Ledesma, member and Luis Jalandoni, senior adviser to the panel, have decided not to proceed to Manila for reasons of security.
They have been threatened with arrest by military and police authorities of the Duterte regime and Duterte himself has given no assurance of safety and has publicly expressed lack of interest in any effort to resume the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations. NDFP lawyers have also warned of court summons being served as a result of Proclamation 374 designating the CPP and NPA as “terrorists”.
The resumption of the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations runs counter to the scheme of Duterte to carry out martial law nationwide, de facto or under formal proclamation, and establish a fascist dictatorship in order to control the results of the 2019 elections and push charter change to a bogus kind of federalism as cover for the fascist dictatorship.
The Duterte kind of federalism is bogus because it centralizes powers in his hands as fascist dictator and allows him to handpick the dynastic lords and warlords as his regional and provincial agents.
Duterte is misrepresenting as localized peace talks the mass intimidation of barangay officials and rural communities and the staging of fake surrender ceremonies whereby the DILG, the local public oificials, military and police officers privately pocket public funds under the cover of paying the fake surrenderers.
The Duterte regime is politically bankrupt. It uses mass intimidation, deception and murders to suppress the legal opposition and the revolutionary resistance of the people and to clear the way for a fascist dictatorship ala Marcos.
The Duterte regime is economically and financially bankrupt. The conditions of mass poverty, unemployment and low income have worsened. The tax burden has been increased at the expense of ordinary consumers in order to escalate funding for the military and police, feed bureaucratic corruption, make graft-laden infrastructure projects, cover trade and budgetary deficits and pay for the rising debt service. Thus the prices of basic goods and services have been soaring.
The Duterte regime is on the traitorous path of auctioning off to China the natural resources of the Philippines in the West Philippine Sea and elsewhere in exchange for high interest loans for overpriced infrastructure projects. All these privately profit Duterte and his cronies in terms of contract shares and finders’ fees at the expense of the current and future Filipino generations.
Under the current dire political and economic circumstances, the Filipino people are incited by the Duterte regime to wage all forms of struggle in order to liberate themselves from the tyranny, brutality, corruption, plundering and mendacity of the regime.
