The National Democratic Front in Southern Mindanao calls on all democratic and revolutionary forces in the region to militantly protest and proclaim the real state of the country during tomorrow’s expected spectacle of the nation address of the illegitimate Ferdinand Marcos Jr. regime.

The Marcos II regime—whose veneer of authority is tenuously built upon his family’s legacy of bloodshed, corruption, and deception—will undoubtedly weave a denialist and historically-distorted version of the state of the nation. In response, the Filipino people must wield all forms of historic resistance that toppled the first Marcos dictatorship, especially the growth of the revolutionary armed struggle and national democratic movement that tyrants in the intervening years evidently have come to fear up to this day.

At an unprecedented time of widespread food crisis, worsening unemployment, and all-time high inflation rate beleaguering the economy still reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic, Marcos Jr.’s denialist attitude toward the country’s pressing issues clearly indicates a mere continuity of the previous Duterte regime’s miserable failures. By all indications, the Marcos II regime is on track to reinforce imperialist-dictated policies, the rotten political dynasties and crony system, and the counter-insurgency rampage of the semi-colonial and semi-feudal state.

From Duterte to Marcos Jr., the same neoliberal policies that have caused widespread displacement of peasants and Lumad, depressed wages and unemployment of workers and other such miseries will further condemn our productive forces to destitution. Just recently, Davao City is salivating over a total of 105 hectares of land, some of which have been tilled by farmers and Lumad for decades, to convert into agro-industrial economic zones and usher in more foreign-owned large-scale agri-plantations, semi-processing and manufacturing plants.

From Duterte to Marcos Jr., the destructive practices of foreign-owned open-pit and large-scale mining in the region continues to wreak havoc to host communities and the environment. Davao Oriental, for instance, is blind and deaf to widespread demands to stop the mining activities in Mati City and Banaybanay town, following months of heavy floods and river pollution. Instead, Arc Nickle Resources, the mining company responsible for the discoloration and heavy siltation of Mapagba River, has been allowed to continue its operations. To counter popular resistance, the provincial government decided to delegate an ex-general to take over the “regulation” of the pro-capital and ecologically-destructive practice.

From Duterte to Marcos Jr., the fascist AFP and PNP and their armed paramilitaries will further sow terror in the lives of the masses, especially in the countryside, with the avowed continuation of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict. Davao City’s Peace 911 and other so-called provincial task forces will continue to target civilians for fake or recycled surrender ceremonies to bolster the regime’s counter-insurgency portfolio. While the revolutionary forces continue to express their openess to the formal GRP-NDFP peace talks, the Marcos II regime’s warmongering security department has firmly shut the door to the negotiations. Instead, the AFP in the Southern Mindanao is ironically peddling “localized peace talks,” despite having declared all but one province in the region to be “insurgency-free.”

In the run-up to his first SONA, Marcos Jr. is inadvertently exposing the illegitimacy of his regime. For someone who claims to have garnered the biggest reactionary electoral mandate in history, his paranoia is otherwise reeking in his clamping down on peaceful protests, banning even of political shirts and wardrobe, and the superfluous deployment of more than 20,000 police as security detail for the SONA. The masses are therefore certain that the objective abject conditions or legitimate demands of the toiling masses will not be represented in tomorrow’s SONA, in the same way that Marcos Jr. will never acknowledge, much less apologize, for his family’s innumerable crimes.

Being grounded on truth, the demands of the people for genuine land reform, national industrialization, living wages, and other democratic interests will serve as a formidable counter-narrative to Marcos’ glossed over version of the state of the nation and systemic revision of history. The masses will continue to fight along the national democratic line because they know that it is only through such course will they be able to effect genuine change, and never from an illegitimate regime installed through a stolen reactionary “electoral victory.”