End US-Philippines Counterinsurgency Tactics!
ILPS-US welcomes the release of Chantal Anicoche from the custody of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Her return back to the US was secured only through the collective strength of thousands worldwide demanding her release from a US-backed military with a bloody track record of human rights abuses. ILPS-US firmly denounces the Philippines government’s tactics of terror-tagging Chantal by associating her to Filipino revolutionary organizations disingenuously demonized by the state and stating she may be persecuted or face criminal accountability in the US. One does not have to look far into Philippines history to see the patterns of psychological warfare waged to intimidate people rightfully calling for justice.
Repression against individuals like Chantal and attacks on peoples organizations are a part of the historical brutal suppression of the Filipino people’s fight for national liberation extending back to the US’ colonization of the Philippines in the late 19th century and continues to this day as part of the US-directed counterinsurgency strategy carried out by the Philippine government. In fact, the Philippine government is using the opportunity to shift public focus on Chantal’s case from its brutal military actions of aerial bombings on the Mangyan indigenous people whom Chantal was in community with when she was taken. These bombings led to four deaths and the displacement of 188 families from an area that has been much sought after for its natural resources.
These are the same counterinsurgency tactics used by Zionist Israel under the guidance and protection of the US, to commit genocide on the Palestinian people and crush revolutionary forces resisting their oppression. They are also the same tactics used by Trump and his administration to criminalize migrants and brand Alex Pretti and Renee Good as "domestic terrorists" immediately after they were brutally murdered by ICE agents when it is actually the federal agents who are the ones terrorizing our communities and violently separating families. Similarly the Trump regime tagged fisherfolk and other boat crews in the Caribbean as “narco-terrorists” without providing any evidence, all to justify bombing them, seizing their oil resources, then kidnapping Venezuela’s President Maduro and his wife First Combatant Cilia Flores.
US imperialism establishes open fascist rule in its various colonies and semicolonies to protect the interests of monopoly capital by consolidating its economic, political, military and cultural control through its client states. As imperialist crisis intensifies and steps towards war against US rivals progress, the US employs more aggressive measures to push its neocolonies to eliminate the peoples’ movements who are actively protecting their people and lands from being plundered for corporate profit and preventing the use of the country as a launch pad and military force for US wars.
We must continue exposing Trump’s lies, corruption and weaponization of the state along with those of the US-puppet governments like President Marcos Jr. in the Philippines. US imperialism is the true terrorist of the people on a domestic and global scale. It is our duty to our future generations to continue building the mass movement of people’s resistance to stop the rise of fascism and bring down this rotten system!
Defend Our Communities! Defend Our People!
End US-Philippines Counterinsurgency Tactics Against the People!