By cancelling the scheduled talks with the NDFP, GRP President Duterte is showing he no longer has need for peace negotiations with the NDFP amid waging a triple war of death and destruction under its US-supported martial law rule. His order today to rearrest the NDFP’s consultants is a violation of the JASIG and violates their democratic rights under the CARHRIHL. It is a strongman’s act of bad faith aimed at bullying the NDFP to bow to his terms of surrender.

Duterte continues to lay the foundations for authoritarian rule under US imperialist tutelage. He is completely intoxicated with martial law powers. He is mistaken in thinking he can suppress the Filipino and Bangsamoro people and their revolutionary forces in their resistance to the oppression and exploitation by the ruling oligarchy and their US imperialist masters.

Duterte, however, is succeeding only in stoking the broad masses of the Filipino and Bangsamoro people to unite, wage mass struggles and and armed revolutionary resistance.

Hundreds of people daily are joining the Party-led revolutionary mass organizations among workers, peasants, youth, women, as well as among the national minorities and Moros. They are supporting and joining the NPA across the country. Tempered by its experience in waging people’s war, the NPA is ever capable of resisting martial law and strengthening itself.

(see “Account of July 19 Arakan incident”)

Information Bureau

Communist Party of the Philippines

20 July 2017