By Diego Morra
Simply put, this is standard military phrase that means “take no prisoners,” akin to Gen. Joseph Smith’s order for US troops to turn Samar into a “howling wilderness” after a raid by Filipino freedom fighters annihilated American soldiers in Balangiga. The same policy led to the massacre of more than 1,000 Muslims in Bud Dato, Sulu.
In its latest reiteration in the US Counter-Insurgency (Coin) Guide, battling “insurrectos,” “juramentados,” “bandidos” and all those opposed to subjugation, plutocratic rule and the joint exploitation by imperialist overlords and local ruling circles required a “whole-of-nation” approach, which covers the executive, legislative and, yes, the judicial departments. This policy was sharpened by the unlamented ex-president Rodrigo Duterte in 2018 when he organized the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) through Executive Order No. 70 and appropriated billions of pesos to wage a tit-for-tat struggle against the revolutionary forces.
To add more sting to NTF-ELCAC, Duterte signed Memo Circular No. 32 in the same year to justify the deployment of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) in Bicol, Negros Island and Eastern Visayas to wage a scorched earth campaign to “drain the lake” in which guerrillas operate, meaning decimating and dismantling rural mass bases. Food blockades, systematic harassment and holding hostage the families of suspected fighters, along with red-tagging civilians organizing peasants and rural workers, showed just what kind of a fascist Duterte was.
While post-Marcos Sr. regimes officially denied that it was state policy to implement enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings (EJKs), the Duterte regime threw caution to the wind and legitimized the illegal actions, gave his implementing agencies, even if NTF-ELCAC is a mere task force but it got more than P19-billion to implement a total war against the revolutionary forces. Why should taxpayers be made to cough up cash to finance a campaign that violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Philippine Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the rule of law and common sense?
While pretending to abhor US imperialism and shifting his allegiance to China, Duterte abided by Coin and elevated his death squads into a well-funded killing machine, with a keyboard army employing the doctrines of Ft. Bragg and adhering to the playbook developed and meticulously honed by death squads in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Bolivia, Guatemala and Colombia, Chile, Peru, Argentina and Brazil. Duterte improved on the operations launched during the bloody regime of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, which emphasized snatchings and summary executions. With funding for NTF-ELCAC and local government units (LGUs) sharing in the expenses for red-tagging and filing of criminal charges against activists, non-government and religious organizations, Duterte tried for four long years to liquidate the armed struggle and the working-class movement but failed.
His minions claimed that they could decimate the revolutionary forces with enough scrip to buy LGU leaders, implement bogus community development projects and pay off renegades as well as informers. When Duterte failed to convince the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) to yield to his demands, he unilaterally scrapped the peace talks. He flew into narcissistic rage and exploited a solitary skirmish as a basis to torpedo comprehensive negotiations. The errors of the militaristic approach to resolve the issues raised by the NDFP since 1973 betrayed the weakness of the Philippine government in analyzing the depth and breadth of the many agreements it has signed with the revolutionary coalition from the administration of the late President Fidel Ramos. Until this very hour, we still cannot comprehend why poverty and hunger bludgeon more than half of the entire population, why the country is already suffering from stagflation and why the import-policy in agriculture has condemned peasants to lead wretched lives.
When Nenita Buscada was murdered by soldiers in Malaybalay City, Bukidnon on June 15, 2026 as she, her husband and two others gathered firewood to earn some money to buy school supplies, Lt. Col. Arnold Bautista, the commander of the 88th Infantry Battalion (IB), merely issued an apology, an admission that his troops stole the life of an indigenous woman, prompting the Bai Indigenous Women’s Network to condemn the killing and demand punishment for her killers. “This is not a mere ‘misencounter.’ It is a blatant violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and the rights of civilians in armed conflict,” Bai argued in a statement.
In the disappearances of Rizalina Ilagan and Jessica Sales in 1977, the abduction of Leticia Pascual and her colleagues, the snatchings of Jonas Burgos, Leo Velasco, James Jazmines and hundreds of others, no apology has been issued. Retired major general Jovito Palparan was convicted for the abduction of Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeno on June 26, 2006 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Now, it appears that Palparan has also disappeared from the National Bilibid Prison. “Justice for Nenita is not found in words of regret. True justice means dismantling military camps in our territories, ending militarization and bombings, and respecting our right to self-determination and ancestral land,” Bai insisted. The organization emphasized that Indigenous women bear the brunt of militarization. “We are mothers robbed of husbands, children left without mothers, and communities stripped of livelihood and security.” #
