Deal with the devil

From the supposedly still united UniTeam, here, mare, is the latest:

Vice President Sara Duterte on Monday said the government’s nod to resume peace talks with the communist National Democratic Front (NDF) is “an agreement with the devil.”

On the other hand, Speaker Martin Romualdez said hours later that the resumption of negotiations “is a moral imperative.” Yesterday, the House supermajority also expressed full support for the talks.

In a recorded message, the VP urged President Marcos to reconsider the decision to resume the peace talks. The reconsideration, she declared, would “honor the memory of those who died in the senseless and bloody attacks” staged by communist rebels.

She released the message on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the National Task Force to End Communist Armed Conflict, of which she is the co-vice chair. The NTF-ELCAC was created by her father Rodrigo Duterte in 2018 after he gave up on peace talks with the NDF amid his word war with Jose Maria Sison.

Joma Sison, who founded the Communist Party of the Philippines during the first Marcos administration, died in exile in the Netherlands on Dec. 16 last year. This was a few months after the Armed Forces of the Philippines declared “strategic victory” over the CPP and its military wing the New People’s Army (NPA).

Security hardliners (Rodrigo Duterte is not alone) attribute that strategic victory partly to the aggressive campaign launched by the NTF-ELCAC not only against the NPA but also against the communist effort to win hearts and minds, particularly in the countryside and among the youth.

Rodrigo Duterte and the NTF-ELCAC went after groups he described as communist front organizations, preventing them from organizing at the grassroots and campaigning against them on the political front.

Based on the results of the 2022 elections, the campaign worked; the left-leaning progressives, who have consistently denied communist links and lamented being red-tagged, were trounced at the polls.

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Bringing the battle to learning institutions appeared to be a focus of VP Sara in her role as education secretary, in which she has often harped on the security aspect of formal