Like Marcos before him, Duterte has now become the No. 1 recruiter of the New People’s Army (NPA). His corruption and anti-people policies have inflicted greater sufferings on the people resulting in widespread indignation and fueling resistance.

Duterte’s corruption was put on public display by the recent purchase of two luxury jets worth P2-billion each for his personal use. Using the people’s money, Duterte satisfied his lust for high-style travel and rubbed salt into the wounds of millions who suffer daily his regime’s failure to address the breakdown of public transportation.

While he spends billions of pesos on his whims in the form of so-called discretionary funds, Duterte has ignored the clamor for salary increases of hundreds of thousands of public school teachers, nurses and government employees who struggle daily to make ends meet. He has also dismissed with contempt the widespread opposition of drivers and operators and other transport workers to the pro-business jeepney phaseout plan.

Duterte is completely indifferent to the widespread problems of joblessness, low wages, high prices, lack of access to education and health services, and so on.

Instead of addressing the social and economic plight of the people, Duterte and the AFP/PNP have obsessed themselves with “ending the local communist armed conflict.” Under his overarching “counterinsurgency” plan, Duterte has ordered intensified state acts of repression in a futile attempt to silence the people and make them bow to his tyrannical rule.

Duterte and his military and security officers, however, are succeeding only in inciting more resistance in their overzealous drive to tag all opposition as communists, communist recruiters, sympathizers or collaborators. Duterte is creating more and more enemies by red-tagging youth activists, workers and peasants, as well as teachers, journalists, religious people, Lumad community schools, film makers, artists, and so on. They are being put under surveillance, threatened, persecuted, arrested, detained and/or murdered.

Duterte’s reign of undeclared martial rule, widespread violation of democratic rights and political repression are the most glaring aspect of the rottenness of the ruling system and rationale of the need for the people to wage national democratic revolution.

Duterte is inciting widespread hatred for his regime. Duterte’s oppression, corruption and treachery, are negative examples which are generating widespread animosity and teaching and convincing more and more people to support or join mass struggles and all forms of resistance.

With his anti-people and anti-poor policies, Duterte is actually helping the Party and the NPA by creating conditions favorable for widespread recruitment . Through red-tagging and undeclared martial law nationwide and shutting down by degrees all avenues of seeking redress within the legal system, Duterte is pushing more and more people to join or support the revolutionary underground and the armed struggle.