This September 21, we commemorate the 54th anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s declaration of Martial Law in 1972 with stronger people’s armed resistance in service to the national democratic revolution. As we continue to wage people’s war, we salute and give the highest honor to those who resisted Martial Law and remember the violence inflicted on the Filipino masses both in the past and present regimes.

For COMPATRIOTS-NDFP, the revolutionary organization of overseas Filipinos, the lessons of Martial Law remain urgent for our times. Under Marcos Jr., violence and repression continue through deep-seated poverty and hunger, militarization, red-tagging, trumped-up charges, enforced disappearances, and killings of activists, human rights defenders, journalists, and members of rural and Indigenous communities. The killing of 19 people in Toboso, Negros Occidental earlier this year—including community journalist RJ Ledesma, UP student leader Alyssa Alano, peasant organizers Maureen Santuyo and Errol Wendel, and overseas Filipinos Lyle Prijoles and Kai Sorem who chose to return home and serve rural communities—shows the grave consequences of militarization in the countryside. Military operations continue to threaten communities, displace families, and place civilians in danger. Filipinos are demanding justice, dignity, democracy, and peace while the government continues to answer social problems with military force and state terrorism.

At the same time, Marcos Jr. is dragging the Philippines deeper into the strategic and economic agenda of the United States. Through Pax Silica and the Luzon Economic Corridor, the government is further opening the country’s strategic industries, resources, infrastructure, and labor to initiatives shaped around US-led technology and supply chains to fuel its war machine. Critical minerals, semiconductors, energy, and other resources are being positioned for foreign economic and geopolitical interests. This only tightens the control and class oppression of US imperialism on the Filipino people through their local intermediaries: the compradors, landlords and bureaucrat capitalists.

We are told that Pax Silica will give jobs to Filipinos, but we know from history that the Marcoses have only set the conditions to drive Filipinos to leave the country and find jobs elsewhere. During the Marcos Sr. dictatorship, the government institutionalized the labor export program through the 1974 Labor Code and the creation of the Overseas Employment Development Board. What was presented as a response to unemployment became a lasting policy of labor export.

Decades later, millions of Filipinos continue to leave because decent and secure livelihoods remain impossible to find in the Philippines. Filipinos who were forced to become migrant workers face exploitation, discrimination, and separation from their families. This labor export program has only worsened overtime as the few regulations to “protect” overseas workers have since been loosened or completely removed, and as both the Philippine and other foreign governments have further liberalized the “trade” of Filipinos as a cheap commodity. The most brazen expression of this profit generating racket is the establishment of the Department of Migrant Workers, which consolidates the government bureaucracy responsible for the de facto trafficking of our people overseas.

COMPATRIOTS-NDFP is one with Filipino workers, peasants, fisherfolk, Indigenous peoples, youth, women, and the entire Filipino diaspora who continue to struggle for justice and a dignified life. We oppose the anti-people economic policies, militarization of communities, political repression, and invitation of imperialist plunderers that place Philippine resources and labor at the service of foreign interests and their local puppets. We call for an end to military operations that endanger the masses in the countryside, and we call for justice for those killed under the regime of a dictator’s son.

As we commemorate 54 years since Martial Law, it only becomes clearer that the path to just and lasting peace is armed revolution, the primary forces of which—the red warriors of the New People’s Army, who they themselves come from the ranks of the most oppressed and exploited toiling masses of peasants—began consolidating under the Marcos dictatorship. Let us rally our support to the national democratic revolution with socialist perspective taking place in the Philippines! We ourselves must return to the homeland and join the armed revolution for just and lasting peace!

Revolutionary honor and tribute to the victims of martial law!

Fight revisionism in history and advance the national democratic revolution with a socialist perspective!

Down with imperialism, feudalism, bureaucrat capitalism!

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