Fight against the massive military onslaught of the Duterte fascist troops!
The Cordillera People’s Democratic Front (CPDF) congratulates and salutes the Red fighters and commanders of the Leonardo Pacsi Command (LPC)-NPA Mountain Province in repulsing the massive onslaught of the AFP’s focused military operation from the organic units of the 5th and 7th ID now currently being directed by the Northern Luzon Command. A unit of the Leonardo Pacsi Command engaged the Charlie Company under Lt. Pulalonan of the 50th IB contingent in an armed skirmish in the vicinity of Barangay Aguid, Sagada, Mountain Province last September 26 resulting in the death of Cpl. Jordan Manawa and the wounding of PFC Melvin Ngodes. There was no reported casualty on the NPA side.
According to Comrade Magno Udyaw, Spokesperson of the LPC, there are about two aggregate batallions saturating the five towns of Mountain Province namely Besao, Sagada, Tadian, Bauko and Bontoc and the adjacent town of Tubo, Abra. Since September 16, contingent units from the 50th IB, 54th IB, 81st IB, 24th IB and from the 51st and 52nd DRC have swarmed into Mountain Province.
This ongoing massive AFP onslaught against the revolutionary forces and the people of Mountain Province and the whole country is part of Duterte’s daydream to End the Local Communist Armed Conflict before his term ends by 2022. His Whole-of-Nation-Approach is a rehash of the previous counter–revolutionary Oplan Bayanihan along the guidelines set by the US State Department. He however glossed over the fact that this same strategic campaign dubbed as the Whole-of-Government-Approach applied by the US in its war of aggression in Afghanistan was a failure.
As always, spin masters of the AFP desperately tried to justify their unwelcome intrusion and militarization of our ancestral lands and communities in the lame alibi of “scouring for planted landmines”. Apparently, the so-called landmine hard-sell they are referring to is our people’s continuing struggle to defend our ancestral territories from the thieving local and foreign vultures who rob our tribes wholesale of our future and the generations to come after us. In the course of their combat operations, village folks are terrorized and their daily normal activities gravely disrupted. They are deprived of their freedom of movement and coerced to collaborate. The innumerable violation of human rights are heaped up as mere statistics time after time.
But Duterte never learned his lessons from his idol Dictator Marcos who unleashed and pursued massive military operations in the darkest days of Martial Law that failed to cow the Igorot people into submission. The late dictator’s flagship projects of building the destructive imperialist funded Chico Dam and the Cellophil Resources Corporations’ massive logging operations, the massive land grabbing of Ibaloi agricultural lands at Taloy Sur, Tuba, Benguet to make way for the Marcos Park among others were altogether scrapped as a result of our people’s resolute fight.
In the same manner today, the preying vultures of the corrupt and greedy Duterte’s breed and his US and Chinese masters are racing with time. With barely three years left, large–scale mining applications , mega-energy projects that are tapping our river systems, solar, wind as well as geothermal and irrigation projects in the Cordillera are waiting to be fast-tracked. The ruling class have no other means to subdue people’s oppositions except through fascist coercion. The ongoing combat military operations in areas where these projects are to be put up is emphasizing the obvious. We can calculate with certainty, that community support program operation (CSPO), a new phony label for psywar operations, will follow soon.
History is replete with examples that the Igorot masses are most enraged when brute fascism is used to grab and plunder our ancestral lands. The CPDF and allied revolutionary mass organizations will always be at the forefront in the fight of the oppressed national minorities of the Cordillera. We will persevere in advancing the struggle for national freedom and democracy and until the recognition of our right to self-determination is finally attained. ###