On November 18, 2016, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos was buried with military honors at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, despite massive protests from civil society groups.
The nation cries; Marcos is not a hero, but a mass murderer. Under the Marcos dictatorship, there were 3,257 extrajudicial killings, 35,000 individual tortures, and 70,000 were incarcerated in total.
Among the fallen is Macliing Dulag, who was martyred in 1974 by elements of the 4th Infantry Division of the Philippine Army, uniting the peoples of the Cordillera against Marcos’ Chico Dam project. The regime attempted to build a 1,000MW hydroelectric power plant along the Chico River with World Bank funding. Up to 100,000 people would have been displaced if not for the resistance of the Cordillera people against Martial Law.
The dictatorship also accelerated deforestation by encouraging log exportation to Japan to pay for accumulated foreign debt. The 1970s and 1980s saw an average of 2.5% of Philippine forests disappearing every year, which was thrice the worldwide deforestation rate.
Fast forward to contemporary times, the ghost of Martial Law still haunts us as a nation. From 2016-2020 under Duterte, 166 land and environmental defenders were killed, doubling the body count from the previous regime. The Build Build Build program, the return of large-scale mining and other unsustainable extractive projects scream Marcos cronyism, not to mention the tireless attempts to resurrect the Kaliwa Dam project.
Marcos Jr. himself is no stranger to extractivism. The Romualdezes, relatives of ex-First Lady Imelda Marcos, are one of the biggest mining elites in the country. As we speak, the election warchests of these fascists are overflowing with wealth from our natural resources.
Despite these atrocities, historical revisionism has always been in the playbook of fascists. Even today, with the 2022 elections looming, the Marcos-Duterte propaganda machine has been fabricating narratives of unsustainable development, taking advantage of the bankrupt educational system. Armed with social media tactics and strategies, their machinery is a force that is ready and willing to burn our future.
Now, amidst the greatest challenge of our times— climate change and mass extinction— we, the undersigned, are calling on Filipino voters to:
- Uphold and defend the human rights of environmental defenders
- Scrutinize the environmental track record of all candidates, including pronouncements
- Campaign and vote for candidates who will uphold and protect the environment, including support the calls to end extractivism and other environmentally destructive projects in the country
At this critical point of history, we vote for our survival with the eyes of future generations upon us. Unless environmental plunderers and their protectors are rejected by the electorate, our nation’s children might not have a future.
