The Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR) joins Church organizations in condemning the P8.1 billion budget allocated for the government’s anti-insurgency task force for 2026. The fund will be spent the way the agency’s budget has been spent in previous years – for human rights violations and corruption.

On Wednesday, Caritas Philippines and the Episcopal Commission on Social Action, Justice and Peace (ECSA-JP) called on the government to review the NTF-ELCAC’s budget, which will be allocated for areas that have supposedly been “cleared” of the insurgency. They said the fund will be used to “undermine justice, human dignity, and democratic participation,” and we whole-heartedly agree.

In response, the NTF-ELCAC said on Thursday that the amount will not be spent by the agency, but by the Barangay Development Program (BDP), which is supposedly a “development intervention” that is implemented by various government agencies delivering services such as “basic roads, schools, clinics, water systems, electricity, or livelihood support.”

The NTF-ELCAC coordinates and integrates the implementation of the BDP under the government’s counter-insurgency framework. Both the government agency and the policy framework cannot be trusted by workers and Filipinos. Funds allocated to these have only been used for various rights violations and corruption.

The NTF-ELCAC’s history indicates that the P8.1 billion fund will be used for intelligence gathering, harassment, and other rights violations directed at not only the armed rebel group New People’s Army or NPA, but legally-existing workers’ unions and grassroots organizations. It will most likely be used to reward police, military and para-military personnel who carry out attacks on these organizations and their members.

The fund will also most likely be pocketed by corrupt local officials who are in cahoots with the NTF-ELCAC. If the real purpose of the fund is barangay development, then it should have been allocated to, and should be spent by, relevant government agencies, not under the BDP or by the NTF-ELCAC.

The only reason that the funds are being coursed through the BDP, which has NTF-ELCAC’s bloody and dirty hands all over it, is because the funds will be used for counter-insurgency purposes. We have time and again argued that genuine development is the government’s most effective solution to insurgency – not human rights violation and corruption masquerading as development initiatives.

We are calling on President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, and all sectors of Philippine society who stand for democracy, human rights, transparency and accountability, to condemn the P8.1 billion NTF-ELCAC budget and to work to rechannel this fund to government agencies mandated to implement development programs.

#AbolishNTFELCAC