#ColorMeRED

Two main goals drive the Red-Tagging hysteria of the Duterte regime’s thugs:

• Cover up crime and corruption and other abuses by government officials and their patrons;
• Evade accountability;
• Snuff out the spreading fires of resistance to its tyrannical rule.

The government crows about high approval ratings for Duterte. It cannot hide the reality that pops out on closer scrutiny of those vaunted survey results.

When asked about issues that directly impact on daily life, citizens across the country have stressed their rejection of the brutal responses to problems like drugs and corruption, poverty, and the COVID19 pandemic. They stand firm against Duterte’s policy of allowing Beijing to grab our water and land resources.

People fear their families are vulnerable to becoming targets of his so-called drug war. They overwhelmingly repudiate the government’s whimsical and cruel methods that often leave no room for due process.

The public knows this is a senseless war that has not made a dent in the drug problem. Duterte has had to fudge figures on addiction to justify the continuing bloodbath. He has tried to conjure a fantasy of an all-powerful enemy. Yet his actions betray the lies that frame his fake heroics against criminals.

Do not forget that this President tried to dismiss the disappearance of a P6-billion shabu shipment, which eventually found its way to Mindanao and the Visayas.

Do not forget that he PROMOTED officers involved in the earlier entry of a shabu shipment of similar size and value.

Do not forget that he placed police officers in top positions despite their documented links to drug-related scandals.

Do not forget the penal service anomalies that favoured powerful criminals nor the fact that his appointees have walked free.

Duterte rails against corruption. This is empty noise. Again and again, he has dismissed charges when these involve HIS appointees.

The same martial tactics employed to manage the COVID19 pandemic crushed millions of lives already in the grip of poverty in the name of public health.

And yet the government wasted the lockdown by ignoring calls to effect urgent steps recognized globally as requisites for containing the pandemic.

Instead, to cover up criminal negligence, government hoods attacked people in the thick of relief efforts – simply because they insisted on calling attention to problems that Duterte’s generals could not and would not fix.

The pandemic simply offered the corrupt new avenues for diverting tax monies. It also offered a convenient excuse for silencing dissent.

Now “recovery” has become a catch all term to excuse even more corruption and stupidity, like an expensive dolomite beach. It has become a platform for launching large scale development programs that threaten wide swathes of indigenous lands and waters.

Yes, let us stand for the rights of Liza and Angel and Ella to speak up and speak truth to power.

But never forget that we should stand up for everyone’s rights to do the same, whether they are powerful celebrities or humble farmers and workers.

Let’s cut through the fetid smokescreen and focus on the color that sends Duterte and his aides into a tizzy.

This government sees RED whenever its crimes are exposed, whenever people speak up against its unjust actions, whenever people rise to defend human rights and civil liberties, whenever they try to fill up the vacuum in governance, whenever they rush to rescue those caught in the maws of a brutal regime.

The government uses RED as a signal for attacks against critics and a warning to all those waking up and crawling out of the noxious blanket of lies it has thrown across the country.

Tyranny, then and now, has always been in the service of corruption. Tyranny’s goal is forcing people to become blind and deaf and mute. This is why media and truth-tellers have come under fire.

For every lie thrown out there is a person muzzled whether by threats, or jail, or death. Never forget that.

There is only one response to tyrants. Defiance.

Speak out at every opportunity. Magnify every cry for justice and accountability. Reject all excuses for a clampdown on free expression.

In its desperation to halt the march of truth, this regime has unwittingly made RED a badge of honor.

It should be.

RED is the blood that runs in our veins, the blood that heroes and martyrs have offered to give us the rights this regime seeks to steal. RED is the blood of the tens of thousands sacrificed to the false gods of law and order, the blood of every activist and rights defender murdered, the blood of our children and our grandchildren who do not deserve to inherit a wasteland where might is the only thing that matters.

I am RED. And I am proud of it.