Vol. VII, No. 15 - August 15, 2025

In his 2025 State of the Nation Address (SONA), Marcos Jr. bragged that “there are no more guerilla units left in the country”. This was not the first time he said so - he made the same claim in January 2024, when he insisted that there were no active New People’s Army (NPA) guerilla fronts as of December 2023.

But truth has a way of coming to light. Just weeks before his SONA, government troops clashed with the NPA in Butuan City and Masbate. Days after his speech, another encounter in Mindoro left two soldiers dead and four others wounded. If the guerrillas are gone, who are the Armed Forces still fighting?

Around 60,000-70,000 AFP and PNP combat troops or 118 battalions are currently deployed against the NPA throughout the country. Marcos Jr.’s 2025 National Expenditure Plan pours trillions into “counter-insurgency” operations, including a Php 7.8 billion allocation for the NTF-ELCAC’s Barangay Development Program—triple last year’s budget. This is not the spending pattern of a state that has supposedly defeated its enemy.

In May 2025, Marcos Jr. signed Memorandum Circular No. 83, adopting the National Action Plan for Unity, Peace, and Development (NAP-UPD) 2025–2028. It claims to “attain inclusive and sustainable peace,” but in reality, it is nothing more than the Marcos regime’s blueprint to crush revolutionary resistance. Patterned after the US “counterinsurgency” doctrine outlined in the FM 3-24 (Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual), it preserves the structures of poverty, corruption, inequality, and injustice—the very roots of armed conflict. Rather than addressing these structural problems, the NAP-UPD further promotes the militarization of communities, pouring resources into state repression while leaving the masses’ demands for land, jobs, and justice unfulfilled.

Instead of tackling the roots of war, the NAP-UPD institutionalizes the same policies that sustain it. It elevates the NTF-ELCAC as the central coordinating body, weaponizes the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), and deploys laws like the Terrorism Financing Prevention and Suppression Act to attack activists, human rights defenders, and community organizers.

This is despite multiple UN Special Rapporteurs recommending the reactionary government to abolish or repeal its “counter-terrorism” and “counter-insurgency” policies, particularly the ATA and the NTF-Elcac itself.

Behind Marcos Jr.’s fake bravado lies the rotten truth of the neocolonial state: a puppet republic chained to US imperialism, ruled by political dynasties, landlords, big comprador capitalists, and bureaucrat plunderers. The neocolonial state is a US imperialist vassal,dominated by political dynasties. Even the partylist system which was originally reserved for marginalized and underrepresented sectors in Congress, has been hijacked (is now dominated) by political dynasties, public works contractors, landlords, and business tycoons. Large tracts of land are effectively controlled by a few landed elites,enabled by loopholes in the government’s fake land reform program. The absence of national industrialization keeps the economy backward, dependent, and exploitative.

Mass poverty breeds social unrest, and the state’s only response has been repression. But repression (and especially Marcos Jr.’s denial) does not end resistance, it only deepens it. People resort to armed struggle because poverty, landlessness, and joblessness remain unresolved, and as long as government refuses to address these roots of conflict, the people’s war will rage on.