DAVAO CITY,Philippines – The National Democratic Front of the Philippines has assailed the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte for spreading what it called as malicious insinuations by implicating the New People’s Army into the spate of killings of local officials in the country.
“The Duterte regime is making these ridiculous accusations in a futile attempt to muddle what Duterte himself had already impliedly admitted when he said that Mayor Antonio Halili of Tanauan City was killed because of his involvement in the illegal drug trade,” the NDFP said in a statement on Monday.
The group added that even the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency had also made disclosures that some of the mayors and vice mayors killed were indeed on the government’s list of “narco-politicians.”
The growing number of local government officials getting killed, the NDFP said, is part and parcel of the Duterte regime’s brutal campaign against illegal drugs that has already killed more than 20,000 people.
Earlier in the campaign, the police had even engineered the gangland-style murder of Albuera Mayor Rolando Espinosa right inside his jail cell, and boasted about it, the group added.
By making such false accusations, the NDFP said that the Duterte regime is not only trying to hide its hands in these killings but also the NPA the scapegoat in a malevolent scenario-building scheme to justify the imposition of nationwide martial law.
“Scapegoating the NPA for the killings dovetails the AFP’s (Armed Forces of the Philippines) other wild accusations of a supposed conspiracy between the Church and the Left to oust Duterte which even has an October timeline, according to Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana,” the group pointed out.
The statement also emphasized that Duterte is unmistakably treading the Marcosian path as he is currently training his sights on the NPA.
Under a tyrannical rule, the NDFP said Duterte will “cast a wider net of repression, eliminating every critic, every dissenter, every protester and every actual or potential rival to his power.”
The group also made a call to all freedom-loving Filipinos to unite to thoroughly expose and firmly oppose Duterte’s Marcosian tactic of scapegoating the revolutionary forces in his bid to install a dictatorship.
“Only the Filipino people’s resolute resistance in the face of repression can stop Duterte from continuing with his lies and deceptions and stay his iron fist from smashing the people’s rights and liberties,” the NDFP said. (davaotoday.com)
