The National Democratic Front (NDF)-Mindanao stands with the Bangsamoro people in confronting the deepening crisis in the peace process under the regime of Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
What is unfolding is neither delay nor mismanagement of the peace agreement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front—it is the necessary outcome of a reactionary state bound to imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism. The peace process is being implemented in a manner that preserves ruling class control over Moro land, resources, and political authority, ensuring the continuity of a semi-colonial and semi-feudal order that denies the Bangsamoro their right to genuine self-determination.
The Bangsamoro question is a national question rooted in land dispossession and national oppression. The majority of Moro people remain landless peasants and poor fisherfolk, with up to 70% living in poverty and lacking access to basic services. This condition is the product of a long historical process through which land and resources were systematically transferred to the alliance of landlords, comprador bourgeoisie, and bureaucrat capitalists in partnership with imperialist interests.
From the Jabidah Massacre to the Manili Massacre and the Palimbang Massacre, the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. carried out systematic state terror to crush Moro resistance and forcibly integrate Bangsamoro into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal order. These were not isolated atrocities but coordinated acts of class violence—clearing the ground for landlord domination, bureaucrat capitalist accumulation, and imperialist penetration of Moro ancestral lands.
This same counterrevolutionary logic governs the state’s engagement in the peace process. The betrayal of the 1976 Tripoli Agreement revealed a persistent pattern of treachery: the ruling classes negotiate only under pressure from armed struggle, concede only in form, and sabotage agreements once coercive power is restored. Peace negotiations are not neutral—they are integral components of counterinsurgency, deployed alongside military suppression, political co-optation, and economic restructuring to weaken, divide, and contain revolutionary movements.
Subsequent regimes have not broken from this pattern—they have deepened and systematized it. Under Rodrigo Duterte, militarization in Mindanao intensified under heightened fascist conditions. Duterte declared martial law across Mindanao in 2017 and ordered the siege of Marawi, where large-scale aerial bombardment and ground operations reduced much of the city to ruins. The destruction of Marawi—long regarded as the center of Islamic faith and culture in the Philippines—resulted in civilian deaths and the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Maranaos.
This operation was carried out with direct support from foreign powers, particularly the United States, and was used to justify prolonged military presence, expanded counterinsurgency operations, and tighter state control over Mindanao. Reconstruction that followed has been marked by delays, restricted return of residents, and the reorganization of land and urban space in ways that favor state and corporate interests.
Rather than resolving the roots of conflict, the Duterte regime’s actions in Marawi exemplified how militarization, destruction, and reconstruction are used in combination to suppress resistance, reorganize territory, and deepen imperialist and elite control over Moro lands.
Under Marcos Jr., this same class character persists in a more consolidated form. If Marcos Sr. relied on overt fascist repression and Duterte on intensified militarized rule, Marcos Jr. advances a dual strategy: sustaining militarization while projecting a facade of “peace,” “normalization,” and “development.” This is not merely the weakening of the peace process—it is its structured and ongoing sabotage, aimed at stabilizing and legitimizing relations of domination.
First, the regime enforces disarmament without prior resolution of the conflict. While around 65% of combatants and 64% of weapons have been decommissioned, thousands of former fighters and their families remain without land, livelihood, or adequate support. Disarmament is imposed without addressing landlessness and poverty—the very roots of the conflict—revealing a policy aimed at neutralizing Moro resistance while preserving the conditions that produced it.
Second, militarization continues under the guise of counterterrorism. Military operations are used to clear, secure, and hold areas targeted for plantations, mining, and energy projects while suppressing community resistance. In Amai Manabilang, Lanao del Sur, more than 2,000 households face displacement due to an 8,000-hectare plantation project backed by corporate, state, and local elite interests. Land grabbing, arrests, intimidation, and destruction of crops are instruments of accumulation and control.
Third, land conversion for agribusiness in these militarized areas is a direct expression of imperialist plunder and semi-feudal exploitation. In Maguindanao, more than 7,150 hectares are already devoted to banana plantations, while over 100,000 hectares are targeted for oil palm expansion. In Basilan, at least 12,000 hectares are set for oil palm development alongside a processing plant, extending plantation control across Mindanao. These projects, advanced through BARMM economic programs, are controlled by multinational corporations in alliance with big landlords and comprador elites and enforced by the reactionary state. They lock Mindanao into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal order, reinforcing its economic role as a source of raw materials, cheap labor, and superprofits for foreign capital.
Land is monopolized by a few, while Moro and Indigenous communities are dispossessed, driven into landlessness, and forced into precarious plantation labor. Food sovereignty is destroyed, and dependency is deepened. In Upi, Maguindanao, conflicts between Moro and Indigenous Peoples are misrepresented as intercommunal disputes. In reality, they arise from the failure of genuine land reform and the denial of self-determination under a system that thrives on division. These divisions are systematically reproduced and exploited to weaken resistance and open ancestral lands to plantation expansion.
The expansion of oil palm, rubber, and banana plantations intensifies these conflicts by encroaching on contested territories and pitting oppressed communities against each other, while protecting the interests of landlords, corporations, and their state backers. Militarization is not neutral—it is the armed enforcement of class rule in the countryside. Through counterinsurgency operations, paramilitary forces, and coercive state violence, territories are secured for capital and resistance is crushed. Since 2018, more than 100 Indigenous Peoples—majority from the Teduray tribes—have been killed in this context. These killings are not isolated abuses but part of the machinery of repression, clearing land, silencing opposition, and ensuring the unimpeded expansion of plantation economies.
Fourth, the regime, in coordination with the Bangsamoro government, is restructuring the region as a frontier for extractive industries. Oil, coal, and natural gas exploration are being promoted across Bangsamoro, including in the Cotabato Basin and the Liguasan Marsh—critical sources of livelihood for Moro communities. These projects reorganize control over land and resources in favor of imperialist and corporate interests, displacing communities and undermining local economies under the guise of development.
Fifth, US military presence directly sustains this system of domination. Through agreements such as EDCA, US forces maintain access to military sites across Mindanao and the Philippines, enabling surveillance, troop deployment, and joint operations as part of a broader imperialist strategy. Since the designation of the Philippines as a “second front” in the US War on Terror in 2001, to the formation of the Task Force Pacific Eagle-Philippines in 2017 based in Western Mindanao, US forces have been embedded in counterinsurgency operations in Mindanao. From intelligence support during the 2017 Marawi siege to ongoing surveillance operations—as evidenced by the 2025 crash of a US military-contracted aircraft in Maguindanao—this presence strengthens the Philippine state’s capacity to suppress resistance and secure areas for imperialist investment.
Sixth, the situation in Marawi exposes how displacement is prolonged and institutionalized under state-led reconstruction. Years after the siege, tens of thousands of residents remain displaced, while access to their communities continues to be restricted. Reconstruction prioritizes infrastructure and commercial development over the return of displaced families. Land is reorganized in favor of state and corporate interests, consolidating control over strategic urban and economic spaces while excluding those who were displaced.
Seventh, there is no genuine political autonomy. The Marcos regime, as did the Duterte regime, continue to subject the Bangsamoro Transition Authority (BTA) to Manila’s political and military dominance to favor of political dynasties and local elites. These forces act as agents of the comprador bourgeoisie, landlord class, and bureaucrat capitalists, ensuring that political authority in Bangsamoro remains aligned with ruling class interests. Sections of Moro leadership are integrated into this structure, facilitating the consolidation of reactionary control.
Taken together, these conditions reveal the real character of the peace process: it is not a pathway to resolution but a mechanism of counterrevolution. It operates within and reinforces a system defined by land monopoly, economic dependency, and political subordination. It manages, contains, and restructures resistance within the framework of ruling class power.
Peace negotiations under a reactionary state function as instruments of pacification. They fragment revolutionary forces, co-opt leadership, and institutionalize domination. Agreements that do not dismantle the structures of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism cannot deliver justice—they reproduce exploitation and oppression in new forms.
The Bangsamoro struggle is inseparable from the broader struggle of the Filipino people. Moro, Lumad, and Filipino masses confront a common enemy in the alliance of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism. Their struggles are united not only by solidarity, but by shared material conditions and a common revolutionary objective: the dismantling of this ruling system.
As long as the material basis of oppression remains—landlessness, foreign control, and militarization—no peace agreement can resolve the conflict. The Bangsamoro struggle will persist, develop, and advance in forms that confront these conditions.
In the final analysis, the Philippine state that oversees the current semicolonial and semifeudal system is incapable of delivering genuine peace in Moro lands. Any “peace process” it advances is necessarily limited, deceptive, and ultimately reactionary. It functions not as a pathway to liberation, but as a mechanism to secure domination and neutralize resistance.
What the reactionary state consistently underestimates is the depth and continuity of Moro resistance. From anti-colonial struggles against Spanish and American rule, through successive puppet regimes—from Ferdinand Marcos Sr. to Rodrigo Duterte and now Ferdinand Marcos Jr.—the Bangsamoro people have sustained a long and heroic tradition of struggle for land, justice, and self-determination.
No amount of deception in peace negotiations, no level of militarization, and no scale of imperialist intervention can extinguish this resistance. It endures because the conditions that give rise to it persist.
So long as there is no genuine self-determination, and so long as the Moro people remain dispossessed, the path to liberation remains the path of revolutionary struggle—advanced by the Bangsamoro people together with the Filipino people.
Uphold and defend Bangsamoro self-determination!
Resist land dispossession, militarization, and extractive expansion!
Advance the people’s struggle against imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism!
The post Assert Bangsamoro Self-Determination! Expose the Marcos Jr. Regime’s Sabotage of the Peace Process appeared first on PRWC | Philippine Revolution Web Central.
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