Records show that the political assassinations or extra-judicial executions of suspected “enemies of the state” have escalated alongside other military-police operations such as forced mass evacuations, hamletting or herding of whole communities into military garrisons and the militarization of villages that has undermined civilian rule. This escalation became noticeable especially since Macapagal-Arroyo launched her own “war on terror” late 2001 in exchange for continued U.S. support for her regime and increase in U.S. armed presence in the country.
Deepening U.S.-Philippine military cooperation paved the way for reconfiguring the “war on terror” into an all-out war against the Left. Labeling the CPP-NPA and its suspected “front organizations” as “terrorist” became a strategy to give the Macapagal-Arroyo regime a new “ideological” bent to project the Left – and its alleged “front organizations” – as the country’s main problem and thus diffuse public criticism on the president’s constitutional legitimacy, corruption and other issues. The further aim is to vilify the Left as a “criminal” organization without any ideological and political cause making it subject to the use of full force by the state.
At the presidential level, this is the policy pursued by Macapagal-Arroyo’s COC-IS and the AFP’s current doctrines of anti-insurgency-terrorism as well as the OBL. An AFP document dated 2004, “Military Strategy for Combating Terrorism,” lumps the NPA with the ASG as a “terrorist group” justifying the use of “force on terror” by government’s internal security forces, namely, the AFP, paramilitary and the Philippine National Police (PNP).Force is used against the enemy’s “predetermined targets” such as its “critical vulnerabilities” and “support systems.” The AFP’s anti-insurgency-terrorism doctrine is at the heart of its strategy that commands implementation by all internal security forces through military and police operations.
