The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) calls on the Filipino people to unite and fight the enactment of the fascist Anti-Terror Law. When enacted to law, it will further reinforce the tyrant Duterte’s martial law regime and aggrandize his military cabal—Delfin Lorenzana, Eduardo Año and Hermogenes Esperson—with even more powers to perpetuate their reign of terror in the name of “fighting terror.”

The railroading of the bill by Duterte’s minions in Congress has roused widespread indignation. It was prioritized at a time that people are demanding funding for free mass testing and other urgent measures to manage the Covid-19 pandemic, and while millions grow increasingly desperate as a result of the regime’s incompetence combined with its obsession to control people’s freedoms and bullheaded insistence to establish a “new normal” of militarist and neoliberal policies.

The threats of the Anti-Terror Bill against the people’s fundamental rights amid the Covid-19 pandemic have outraged the Filipino people. The regime’s actions over the past months–from the non-health military lockdown to the shutting down of ABS-CBN, from the arrest of critics and jeepney drivers to aerial bombing of rural communities, from checkpoint arrests and inhumane punishment of tens of thousands to the recent killing of urban poor leader Carlito Badion, from the anomalous procurement of overpriced PPE sets and testing equipment to the plunder of billions of pesos in emergency spending–give the people a glimpse into the gross abuse of power which Duterte and his ilk are set to commit with the Anti-Terror Bill.

By forcing the enactment of the Anti-Terror Law, the Duterte regime has further isolated itself from the people. It has suspended the termination of the Visiting Forces Agreement in the hope of getting the military and political support of the US government. But internationally, Duterte stands along with Trump for being extremely hated by their peoples.

The Party urges all democratic sectors–health workers, drivers, women and children, media workers, artists and cultural workers, teachers, government employees, the youth and students, movie and television personalities, small professionals, urban poor and unemployed, the religious–to unite and bring together all their grievances and aspirations.

The Filipino people are being galvanized to take action. They must assert and protect their democratic rights now before they are all taken away by the fascist regime. The Filipino people must get organized. They must demand freedom of the press and freedom to express. They must fight, push back and protest fiercely.

They can turn campuses and other public spaces into freedom-zones where they can collect the people’s strength in numbers. They must quickly prepare their ranks, educate the broadest number of people, heighten their determination and be ready to lock horns with the regime’s anti-democratic forces until the Anti-Terror Bill is junked or until Duterte is ousted.

Indeed, the Filipino people’s democratic forces stand on moral and political high ground. Unite and demand an end to the corrupt, incompetent, fascist and puppet regime. Build a broad humanitarian front government to address the urgent health, socio-economic needs of the Filipino people amid the pandemic.