Neocolonial Elections and State Terrorism in the Philippines

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Neocolonial Elections and State Terrorism in the Philippines

By E. San Juan, Jr.

7-08-07, 9:54 am
An Interview with former president of the University of the Philippines, Emeritus Professor Francisco Nemenzo

Contrary to Philippine government claims, the mid-term May elections sounded a dirge to the Arroyo regime’s barbaric repression of its citizens and its subservience to U.S. imperial dictates. On the face of State terrorism carried out through military abductions, harassment and extra-judicial killings, millions of Filipinos rejected the bulk of Arroyo’s candidates for the Senate and voted into office a rebel military officer and Arroyo critic, Antonio Trillanes IV. Supported by civil-society groups like Laban ng Masa, BAYAN, and others, Trillanes vowed to investigate the rampant political killings, torture, kidnappings, and warrantless arrests ascribed by KARAPATAN, Asian Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International and United Nations rapporteurs, to the Pentagon-advised Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and their para-military “death squads.”

Last month, Human Rights Watch came out with an /itemid=8888900008 84-page report entitled Scared Silent: Impunity for Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines. The New-York based international organization urged the US government to suspend millions of dollars of aid to the Philippines unless the military-connected perpetrators of the murders have been prosecuted. Most of the victims of the State’s “dirty war” were legal church workers, farmers, labor union leaders, and civil-society activists belonging to legitimate parties and groups labeled by the AFP and security agencies as “communist fronts.” Three generals so far have rallied behind Trillanes’ call to expose the AFP’s covert policy of assassinating civilians or citizens opposed to government policies, including its involvement in the “Hello Garci scandal”—Arroyo’s tape-recorded manipulation of the 2004 elections (Christian Esguerra’s reports in Inquirer, June 18 and 25).

Electoral Circus

The election was both an index of neocolonial decadence and popular protest. A colony of the U.S. for almost half a century, the Philippines remains in Washington’s stranglehold, with its military advised, armed and supervised by the Pentagon. U.S.-style elections, however, have been managed by feudal warlords and oligarchic dynasties, with the military directly involved in electoral fraud. The People’s International Observer’s Mission, representing 12 countries from around the world, characterized the official handling of the May exercise as “an attack on the people’s sovereign will.” The Mission witnessed the reality of a corrupt institution in which traditional politicians gained power through “guns, goons and gold,” exemplified by: “significant number of disenfranchisement of voters and vote buying, deadly election-related violence, direct intimidation of voters by elements of the AFP, suspicious absence and abandonment of duties and responsibilities of COMELEC (Commission on Election) officials at numerous voting locations and incidents of overt coercion by candidates from powerful political clans.”

In their final press statement of May 18, 2007, the Mission also stressed “the intimate relationship between systematic violations of the electoral process in 2007, the ongoing socio-economic crisis in the Philippines rooted in neoliberal economic policies and the terror of systematic extra-judicial killings which have claimed the lives of over 850 people since 2001.” According to the human rights monitor KARAPATAN, as of May 15, the Arroyo regime is now infamous for the 863 extra-judicial executions (including 51 journalists), 196 abductions, and countless instances of brutality inflicted by its police and military agents through death-squads or recruited vigilantes. State terror is conducted with absolute impunity, making a mockery of the established U.S.-modeled legal/court system which has been staffed by corrupt time-servers or inept bureaucrats.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/5538/1/270/