01/06/2026
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗮𝘀𝗸 𝗦𝗹𝗶𝗽𝘀: 𝗞𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗻’𝘀 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗿𝘂𝗶𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗣𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗔𝗿𝗺𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗴𝗴𝗹𝗲
The National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) strongly rejects the latest propaganda piece from Karapatan, which once again seeks to distort reality and evade accountability for the tragic fate of individuals who ultimately entered the underground movement and armed struggle.
This latest statement bears the unmistakable trademark of the CPP-NPA-NDF ecosystem: deny responsibility, romanticize death, rewrite narratives, weaponize grief, and convert every tragedy into propaganda.
Karapatan’s accusation that NTF-ELCAC is the “biggest NPA recruiter” is not merely false—it is a breathtaking exercise in hypocrisy from an organization that projects itself as a defender of human rights while repeatedly displaying a deeply selective and distorted sense of morality.
It speaks loudly for personalities aligned with communist causes yet has often been accused by critics of maintaining deafening silence over the suffering inflicted by the CPP-NPA-NDF on countless civilians, Indigenous peoples, barangay officials, former rebels, soldiers, police personnel, and ordinary Filipinos who endured decades of violence, extortion, intimidation, internal purges, and executions.
This is precisely why many Filipinos now ask whether Karapatan truly defends human rights universally—or only when the victims fit the ideological preferences of its comrades.
The central moral issue that Karapatan desperately wants buried is simple: people do not suddenly wake up one morning and become armed insurgents.
There is a process. There is a pipeline. There is recruitment. There is ideological conditioning. There is radicalization. There is underground work. There is eventual absorption into armed structures. Former rebels and surrendered cadres have repeatedly narrated how this process unfolds—beginning with seemingly legitimate advocacy spaces and ending in underground operations and armed struggle.
Karapatan may continue dismissing concerns raised against it, but publicly accessible records, media reports, and open-source accounts themselves have sustained difficult questions that cannot simply be erased through rhetoric. In 2021, Alexandrea “Alexa” Pacalda of Quezon and Glendhyl Malabanan of Palawan were identified as Karapatan members whom authorities later found participating in armed NPA activities, including appearing in a captured training video.
In the same year, Honey Mae Suazo, former secretary-general of Karapatan–Southern Mindanao, posted bail for Zaldy Canete alias ‘Ka Jinggoy,’ identified by authorities as leader of the NPA’s 1st Pulang Bagani Command. Media reports likewise cited former Karapatan-Negros secretary-general Fred Caña in relation to fundraising efforts for the cash bonds of Romeo Nanta, identified as head of the NPA Regional Operations Command–Negros Island; Hernando Llorente alias ‘Ka Adoy,’ identified as commander of the Northern Negros Front; and Faith Roseen Basergo alias ‘Ka Bea,’ identified in reports as an NPA political instructress.
In addition to this, Genelyn ‘Gemma’ Dichoso, former secretary-general of Karapatan-Quezon, later surrendered and was presented by authorities as having left the movement.
While Karapatan and allied groups have disputed aspects of these facts, they remain part of the public record and continue to raise legitimate questions regarding recurring intersections between personalities from legal activist spaces and individuals later publicly linked by authorities to underground and armed structures.
These accounts matter because they expose why the “terror-grooming” narrative strikes such a nerve. It reveals a painful and uncomfortable reality: critics of the movement have long argued that behind slogans of activism and rights advocacy lies a machinery that gradually pulls vulnerable young people into a cycle ending not in empowerment—but in funerals. Not scholarships, but rifles. Not communities, but armed encounters. Not a future—but graves.
Karapatan’s attempt to portray every decision to join armed rebellion as merely a consequence of “state repression” is intellectually dishonest and morally evasive. Such arguments erase accountability from recruiters, handlers, ideological operators, and organizations that have been accused of serving as gateways into underground structures. It removes agency from those who recruited and manipulated young people while presenting armed violence as some inevitable moral destination.
And perhaps this is Karapatan’s greatest deception: to portray every armed recruit solely as a victim of the State while refusing to confront the glaring fact that they were victims of a movement that promised liberation but delivered only abandonment, violence, and death.
Human rights cannot be selective. One cannot claim moral ascendancy while ignoring communist executions of suspected “spies,” internal purges, and the countless former rebels who themselves narrated experiences of manipulation and exploitation inside the movement. One cannot denounce alleged abuses on one side while refusing to acknowledge violence committed by ideological allies.
Karapatan may continue attacking NTF-ELCAC. It may continue manufacturing narratives and issuing statements designed to provoke outrage. But no amount of rhetoric can erase testimonies, public records, and the painful stories of those who eventually realized they had been deceived.
Because at the end of the day, no organization that repeatedly excuses, sanitizes, or romanticizes the movement that sends young Filipinos into armed struggle can credibly claim the mantle of moral authority.
And no amount of propaganda can conceal a difficult truth: there is nothing humane about a system that turns idealism into ammunition and youth into casualties.
Usec. Ernesto C. Torres Jr.
Executive Director
NS, NTF-ELCAC
