Amidst congressional deliberations on the proposed 2025 national budget, the Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR) calls on President Ferdinand Marcos Jr to abolish the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) now and heed the numerous bases and calls for the agency’s abolition.

Since its founding, the NTF-ELCAC has called for, implemented, and justified various violations of labor and human rights in the country. It has blood in its hands, having coordinated repression campaigns against labor organizations and the entire civil society in the country. It has consistently defended all the major rights violations in the country and even the lesser-known ones.

The NTF-ELCAC is responsible for the numerous cases of harassments faced by unionists and labor activists, as well as the arrest and detention of 27 political prisoners from the labor sector, the disappearance of 2 labor activists, and the extra-judicial killings of 72 labor activists.

The NTF-ELCAC is also responsible for red-tagging almost the entire civil society and opposition in the Philippines. The Supreme Court has ruled in May that red-tagging poses a legitimate threat to Filipinos’ lives and rights. The NTF-ELCAC should be held accountable for its numerous crimes, not lavishly funded.

The NTF-ELCAC’s role in labor violations in the country is so clear that two United Nations Special Rapporteurs – Ms. Irene Khan on freedom of opinion and expression and Mr. Ian Fry on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change – called for the NTF-ELCAC’s abolition.

The NTF-ELCAC is demanding a budget of PhP 8.7 billion for 2025 supposedly for its aid program for barangays which have been cleared of the Communist insurgency’s influence. We have every reason to doubt whether the PhP 10 million allocated to each barangay really goes to development programs, or merely to intelligence work and dirty operations against suspected supporters of the Communist insurgency. 

The lack of public and full accounting of the agency’s funds does not inspire trust. We have every reason to believe that corruption plagues the NTF-ELCAC’s huge budget allocations in recent years: PhP 19 billion in 2021, P17.1 billion in 2022, PhP 10 billion in 2023, and P10.3 billion in 2024.

The funds that have been lavishly poured on the NTF-ELCAC should have been spent on much-needed education, health and housing services. By not abolishing the NTF-ELCAC, Marcos Jr is making himself vulnerable to speculations and accusations that he will use the agency to boost his campaign kitty for the mid-term 2025 elections.

The NTF-ELCAC is one of the gruesome faces of the fascist Rodrigo Duterte regime. There are indications that Marcos Jr is trying to distance himself from his predecessor, causing Vice-president Sara Duterte, the former president’s daughter, to resign from his Cabinet. Abolishing the NTF-ELCAC is one concrete way that the Filipino workers and people can benefit from Marcos Jr’s attempts to distance from his predecessor, all of which appear to be a mere charade until now.