[Amid the worsening COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines, the US
government is brokering a $2 billion arms sale to Rodrigo Duterte’s
repressive regime. The sale would only pour further fuel on an already
dire human rights catastrophe.] [[link removed]]

STOP THE $2 BILLION ARMS SALE TO THE PHILIPPINES  
[[link removed]]


 

Amee Chew
May 17, 2020
Jacobin
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_ Amid the worsening COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines, the US
government is brokering a $2 billion arms sale to Rodrigo Duterte’s
repressive regime. The sale would only pour further fuel on an already
dire human rights catastrophe. _

Policemen stand in formation at a quarantine checkpoint on April 2,
2020 in Marikina, Metro Manila, Philippines. Philippine President
Rodrigo Duterte on Wednesday ordered law enforcement to "shoot"
residents causing "trouble" during lockdown., Ezra Acayan/Getty Images


 

On April 30, the US State Department announced two pending arms
[[link removed]]
sales
[[link removed]]
to the Philippines totaling nearly $2 billion. Boeing, Lockheed
Martin, Bell Textron, and General Electric are the main weapons
manufacturers contracted to profit from the deal.

Following the announcement, a thirty-day window for Congress to review
and voice opposition to the sale commenced. It is imperative that we
stop this avalanche
[[link removed]]
of military aid for Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s regime.

Duterte’s human rights record is atrocious. If the arms sale goes
through, it will escalate a worsening crackdown on human rights
defenders and on dissent — while worsening an ongoing bloodbath.
Duterte is infamous for launching a “War on Drugs” that since 2016
has claimed the lives of as many as twenty-seven thousand
[[link removed]],
mostly low-income people, summarily executed by police and vigilantes.

In Duterte’s first three years of office, nearly
[[link removed]]
three hundred
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journalists, human rights lawyers, environmentalists, peasant leaders,
trade unionists, and human rights defenders were assassinated. The
Philippines has been ranked the deadliest country for
environmentalists
[[link removed]]
in the world after Brazil. Many
[[link removed]]
of these slayings are linked to military
[[link removed]] personnel
[[link removed]]. Now,
Duterte is using COVID-19 as a pretext for further militarization and
repression, despite the dire consequences for public health.

Around the world, and particularly for the United States, the COVID-19
pandemic has brought to the fore how increasing military capacity
means worsening average people’s well-being. The US government is
yet again grossly misallocating resources toward war profiteering and
militarization, rather than health services and human needs. The
Pentagon’s bloated budget of trillions has done nothing to protect
us from a public health catastrophe and has failed to create true
security. Only a complete realignment of federal priorities away from
militarization, here and abroad, and toward strengthening
infrastructures of care can do that.

Duterte’s Militarized Response to COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a pretext for Duterte to impose
military checkpoints, mass arrests, and de facto martial law
throughout the Philippines. As of late April, over 120,000
[[link removed]]
people have been cited for quarantine violations, and over 30,000
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arrested — despite the severe overcrowding in Philippine jails,
already exacerbated
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drug war. “Stay at home” orders are enforced by the police, even
as in many urban poor communities, people live hand to mouth.

Without daily earnings, millions are desperate for food. By late
April, a majority of indigent households had still not received
[[link removed]]
any government relief. A thousand
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residents in Pasay were forced into homelessness when their informal
settlement was destroyed
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in the name of slum clearance at the beginning of the lockdown, even
as the homeless are arrested and thrown in jail.

Duterte has placed the military
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in charge of the COVID-19 response. On April 1, he ordered troops to
“shoot dead
[[link removed]]”
quarantine violators. Human rights abuses immediately surged. The next
day, a farmer, Junie Dungog Piñar
[[link removed]],
was shot and killed by police for violating the COVID-19 lockdown in
Agusan del Norte, Mindanao.

Police have locked curfew violators in dog cages
[[link removed]],
used torture and sexual humiliation
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as punishment against LGBT people, and beaten and arrested
[[link removed]]
urban poor people
[[link removed]]
protesting for food
[[link removed]]. Beatings
[[link removed]]
and killings
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to enforce “enhanced community quarantine” continue. Other
government abuses are rife, such as the teacher
[[link removed]]
who was arrested simply for posting “provoking” comments on social
media that decried the lack of government relief, or the filmmaker who
was detained two nights without a warrant
[[link removed]]
for a sarcastic post on COVID-19.

Mutual Aid, Solidarity, and Resistance

In the face of widespread hunger, absent health care, and lethal
repression, grassroots social movement organizations have created
mutual aid and relief initiatives providing food, masks, and medical
supplies to the poor. Cure Covid
[[link removed]], a network of volunteers
across myriad organizations in the greater Metro Manila region, has
organized relief packs and community kitchens for thousands, while
engaging in community organizing to strengthen mutual aid. Movement
organizers are calling for mass testing, basic services, and an end to
the militarized COVID-19 response.

Kadamay [[link removed]] is a mass-based
organization of two hundred thousand urban poor people across the
Philippines that has been at the forefront of resisting Duterte’s
drug war and reclaiming
[[link removed]]
vacant housing for homeless people. In 2017, Kadamay led twelve
thousand homeless people
[[link removed]]
in occupying six thousand
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vacant homes that had been set aside for the police and military in
Pandi, Bulacan. Despite repression and intimidation, #OccupyBulacan
[[link removed]]
continues to this day.

With COVID-19, Kadamay has led mutual aid efforts and #ProtestFromHome
pot-banging actions, with videos
[[link removed]]
disseminated on social media, to demand relief and health services,
not militarization. In immediate reprisal for voicing dissent after
one pot-banging, the national spokesperson of Kadamay, Mimi Doringo
[[link removed]],
was threatened with arrest. In Bulacan, a community leader was taken
to a military encampment and told to cease all political activity
[[link removed]]
and “surrender” to the government or he would get no relief aid.

Efforts at mutual aid are being criminalized and targeted for
repression. Since late April, police have carried out mass arrests of
relief volunteers, besides street vendors and those seeking food. On
April 19, seven relief volunteers
[[link removed]]
from Sagip Kanayunan were detained while on their way to distribute
food in Bulacan and later charged with inciting “sedition.” On
April 24, fifty urban poor residents in Quezon City including a relief
volunteer were detained for not carrying quarantine passes or wearing
face masks. On May 1, ten volunteers
[[link removed]]
conducting relief with the women’s organization GABRIELA were
arrested while conducting a community feeding in Marikina City. This
targeting is no accident.

Since 2018, an executive order by Duterte has authorized a
“whole-of-nation approach” to counterinsurgency, through a broad
array
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of government agencies, resulting in increased
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repression
[[link removed]]
against community organizers and human rights defenders generally.

The crackdowns against mutual aid and survival have prompted campaigns
on social media to “stop criminalizing care and community
[[link removed]].”
Save San Roque [[link removed]], a network
supporting the resistance of urban poor residents against demolition,
has started a petition [[link removed]] to immediately
release relief volunteers and all low-level quarantine violators.
Human
[[link removed]]
rights
[[link removed]]
organizations
[[link removed]]
are also petitioning
[[link removed]]
for the release of political prisoners, many of them low-income
farmers, trade unionists, and human rights defenders facing trumped-up
charges, including the elderly and ill.

As a direct result of the government response focused on
militarization, rather than adequate health care, food, and services,
the Philippines has among the highest number of COVID-19 cases
[[link removed]]
in Southeast Asia, and the pandemic is quickly worsening.

Colonial Roots

Today’s US-Phillippine military alliance has its roots in the US
colonization and occupation of the Philippines over a hundred years
ago. Despite granting the Philippines independence in 1946, the United
States has used unequal trade agreements and its military presence to
maintain the Philippines’ neocolonial status ever since. For
decades, propping up oligarchic rulers and preventing land reform
guaranteed the United States cheap agricultural exports. The US
military assisted with countering a string of continual rebellions. US
military aid still continues to help corporate extraction of
Philippine natural resources, real estate monopoly, and repression of
indigenous and peasant struggles for land rights — particularly in
Mindanao, a hotbed of communist, indigenous, and Muslim separatist
resistance and the recent center of military operations.

The Philippine armed forces are focused on domestic counterinsurgency,
overwhelmingly directing violence against poor and marginalized people
within the country’s own borders. Philippine military and police
operations are closely intertwined. In fact, historically the
Philippine police developed out of counterinsurgency operations during
US colonial rule.

The US military itself maintains a troop presence in the Philippines
through its Operation Pacific Eagle and other exercises. In the name
of “counterterrorism,” US military aid is helping Duterte wage war
on Philippine soil and repress civilian dissent.

Since 2017, Duterte has imposed martial law on Mindanao, where he has
repeatedly dropped bombs
[[link removed]]. Military attacks
have displaced over 450,000 civilians
[[link removed]]. Carried
out with US backing and even joint activities
[[link removed]],
Duterte’s military operations are shoring up the corporate
land-grabbing
[[link removed]]
of indigenous lands and massacres
[[link removed]]
of farmers
[[link removed]]
organizing
[[link removed]]
for their land rights. Paramilitaries backed by the armed forces are
terrorizing indigenous communities, targeting schools and teachers
[[link removed]].

In February, prior to the announced arms deal, Duterte nominally
rescinded the Philippines–United States Visiting Forces Agreement
(VFA), which allows US troops to be stationed in the Philippines for
“joint exercises.” On the surface, this was in response to the
United States denying a visa
[[link removed]]
to former drug war police chief Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa. However,
Duterte’s revocation of the VFA is not immediately effective, and
only begins a six-month process of renegotiation. The proposed arms
sale signals that Trump intends to strengthen his military backing for
Duterte. The Pentagon seeks to maintain a close military
“partnership.”

End US Military Aid

A growing international movement, in solidarity with indigenous and
Filipino communities, is calling for an end to military aid to the
Philippines. US direct military aid to Duterte’s regime totaled
over $193.5 million
[[link removed]]
in 2018, not counting pre-allocated amounts and donated weapons of
unreported worth. Military aid also consists of grants to purchase
arms, usually from US contractors. Relatedly, the US government
regulates the flow of private arms sales abroad — such as the
current proposed sale. Sales brokered by the US government are often a
public subsidy to private contractors, using our US tax dollars to
complete the purchase. Congress must use its power to cut the pending
sale off.

The latest proposed $2 billion arms
[[link removed]]
sale
[[link removed]]
includes twelve attack helicopters, hundreds of missiles and warheads,
guidance and detection systems, machine guns, and over eighty thousand
rounds of ammunition. The State Department says these, too, would be
used for “counterterrorism” — i.e., repression
[[link removed]]
within the Philippines.

Due to lack of transparency and Duterte’s deliberate
[[link removed]]
efforts
[[link removed]]
to obscure aid flows, US military aid may well end up providing
ammunition to the armed forces waging Duterte’s drug war, to
vigilantes, or to paramilitaries, without public scrutiny.

Duterte is using the pandemic as a pretext to continue crushing
political opposition. He has now assumed special emergency powers.
Even prior to the pandemic, in October 2019, police and military
raided
[[link removed]]
the offices of GABRIELA, opposition party Bayan Muna, and the National
Federation of Sugar Workers, arresting over fifty-seven people in
Bacolod City and Metro Manila in one sweep.

Repression is quickly escalating. On April 30, after weeks of police
intimidation for conducting feeding programs, Jory Porquia
[[link removed]],
a founding member of Bayan Muna, was assassinated inside his home
[[link removed]]
in Iloilo. Over seventy-six protesters and relief workers were
illegally arrested on May Day
[[link removed]],
including four youth feeding program volunteers in Quezon City, four
residents who posted online photos of their “protesting from home”
in Valenzuela, two
[[link removed]]
unionists holding placards in Rizal, and forty-two people conducting a
vigil for slain human rights defender Porquia in Iloilo. Sixteen
workers in a Coca-Cola factory
[[link removed]]
in Laguna were abducted and forced by the military to “surrender”
posing as armed insurgents
[[link removed]].

The US war machine profits its private contractors at our expense.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Boeing relied on the Pentagon for a
third
[[link removed]]
of its income. In April, Boeing received a bailout of $882 million
[[link removed]]
to restart a paused Air Force contract — for refueling aircraft that
are, in fact, defective. But for-profit weapons manufacturers and
other war profiteers should have no place steering our foreign policy.

Congress has the power to stop this but must act swiftly. Rep. Ilhan
Omar has introduced
[[link removed]]
a bill to stop arming human rights abusers such as Duterte. This
month, the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines
[[link removed]], Communications Workers of America, and others
will launch a bill specifically to end military aid to the
Philippines. In the meantime, we must urge Congress to stop the
proposed arms sales to the Philippines, as this petition
[[link removed]] demands.

The COVID-19 pandemic is showing the need for global solidarity
against militarization and austerity. In taking up the fight against
the deep footprint of US imperialism, here and abroad, our movements
will make each other stronger.

_Amee Chew has a doctorate in American studies and ethnicity and is a
Mellon-ACLS Public Fellow._

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