“Both the Philippine and U.S. governments are labeling activists and human rights advocates as ‘terrorists’ to establish a culture of impunity to get away with blatant crimes against the people. It is the Philippine military that attacks its own people that ?is the true terrorist”
By Rein Tarinay
TORONTO – Filipino-American community organizer Chantal Anicoche is reportedly back in the United States after weeks in military custody following strafing and aerial bombings in Abra de Ilog in Occidental Mindoro on January 1, but US progressive groups condemn the Philippine government’s insistence on labeling her a terrorist.
While groups welcomed Anicoche’s release, they emphasized that she and the communities and organizations she was with remain in danger.
Citing the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), Bagong Alyansang Makabayan-USA said Anichoche may face criminal accountability in the U.S. for her supposed “admissions” to being involved with Filipino revolutionary organizations.
State-sponsored lies
Over the past weeks, the state and the NTF-ELCAC has waged a well-oiled disinformation campaign through its social media accounts, terror-tagging Anicoche and human rights groups while justifying the Mindoro bombings.
Trolls have repeatedly posted the same script and narrative: That Anicoche had been “rescued” and was under NTF-ELCAC’s “care”, and that she was safe in military custody.
Meanwhile, these are the same armed forces that dropped bombs on her and the Indigenous communities she chose to serve.
Bayan USA and Migrante USA along with other Filipino progressive groups in the diaspora assert that it is not a crime for children of migrants to go to their homelands to learn firsthand about the conditions of the most exploited.
The real terrorist
“By continuing to associate her with groups that the NTF deems as ‘terrorists’, the Philippine state actively puts Chantal and Filipino advocacy organizations at risk of state attack. Here in the U.S., Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who also chose to stand up for marginalized and undocumented migrant communities here, were both labeled as ‘domestic terrorists’ by the Trump administration to justify their murders at the hands of ICE,” said Nieves Asuncion of Bayan USA, an alliance of progressive organizations that had campaigned for Anicoche’s release.
Asuncion said the governments of the Philippines and of the US label activists and human rights advocates as “terrorists” to “get away with blatant crimes against the people.”
Asuncion added: “It is the Philippine military that attacks its own people that ?is the true terrorist.”
Mimi Juayan, secretary general of Migrante USA, said it was “an insult to youth and students that the Philippine government tries to discredit their genuine concern and care for their communities as merely a result of ‘terror-grooming’.”
NTF-ELCAC has been using the “terror-grooming” narrative to portray activists and rights defenders as naive people who are “fooled” into taking up arms against the government. Equating activism with being combatants, sympathizers and supporters is part of that narrative.
“This takes away from the agency of each young person to think critically and be involved in social issues. But for a government that actively cuts funding to education while increasing funding to military programs and agencies, their actions come as no surprise,” Juayan said.
Juayan said the Armed Forces and the NTF-ELCAC have been doing “publicity stunts” like Anicoche’s supposed rescue to divert attention from crimes like bombing communities, forced displacement and murder as well as “their backing of big mining and real estate companies that have long committed crimes within Mindoro.”
In recent weeks, one of the survivors of the Mindoro bombing, Stephanie Borinaga, a member of the national secretariat of Anakbayan, denied the lies and claims of NTF ELCAC that she was a victim of “terror-grooming”.
“Contrary to the lies of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the NTF-ELCAC, I am not missing and I did not join the New People’s Army,” Borinaga said in a Facebook video that has since been taken down.
Youth group Anakbayan said it has “received several reports on the sudden deletion of the video statement after the government’s social media troll army tried to drown out the post.” (AMU, JDS)
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