BAGUIO CITY — The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) is urging President Rodrigo Duterte to reverse the hero’s burial accorded to former strongman Ferdinand Marcos, warning that the president could eventually face isolation.
The CPP denounced the government for having honored the late dictator as a hero with full military honors in a funeral carried out in secret at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.
“In ordering his military honor guards to bear the tyrant's casket in a hero's funeral, Duterte exhibited gross disrespect and insensitivity to the Filipino people's sufferings under the brutal martial law rule and to the martyrs and heroes of their epic resistance,” the CPP said.
“It was an act of great reversal of the historical judgment of the Filipino people against the US-Marcos dictatorship and a completion of the political resurrection of the Marcoses.”
The CPP said it is supporting organizations and various sectors of society, especially the students and youth, in launching street protest actions to demonstrate their indignation and protests.
Duterte, the CPP said, risks facing mounting protests and isolation, as it advised him “to reverse this historical wrong.”
“Instead of paying tribute to Marcos, Duterte should support the people's demand to hold Ferdinand Marcos, as well as Imelda and their children, accountable for the crimes of plunder and violations of the people's civil and political rights,” the CPP continued.
“By giving Marcos a hero's burial, Duterte has succeeded in stoking the anger and rage of the victims of the US-Marcos dictatorship as well as of the younger generation of Filipinos who are highly conscious of the lessons of martial law and indignant of the innumerable crimes of the fascist tyrant,” it pointed out.
“In ordering the AFP to give Marcos hero's honors, Duterte is proving himself a rotten trapo (traditional politician) who has no qualms working with the worst of the bureaucrat capitalists and gives premium to paying political debt and political loyalties even to the detriment of the people's aspirations for historical and social justice,” the CPP said in yet the harshest words it called the president which earlier it considered an “ally” and a leftist.
“He must stop effusively praising Marcos' mythic brilliance which makes him sound like a loyalist, and end making suggestions about reviving such hallmarks of Marcos's martial law as the constabulary and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.”