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The Resist US-Led War Movement joins the millions of Filipinos worldwide celebrating the arrest of former President Rodrigo Duterte, on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity. Duterte's arrest is a victory that was only made possible because of the relentless fight for justice and accountability waged by the Filipino people. Resist resolutely supports the people's pursuit of both accountability for the past crimes of the Duterte regime, as well as an end to those of the current president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who continues his predecessor's militarization of rural villages, aerial bombings, strafing, hamletting and other human rights violations in his US-armed and funded counterinsurgency campaign.
Duterte's war on the Filipino people Under the guise of his "war on drugs," Duterte orchestrated the killing of an estimated 30,000 people, waging a war on the poor and working people of the country while continuing to serve as an imperialist puppet. He did this all with US-provided weapons given to the Philippine National Police or in some cases directly into the hands of Duterte's private death squads. Anchored on Duterte’s Executive Order 70, which established the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, the Armed Forces of The Philippines and Philippine National Police implemented the joint counterinsurgency plan “Kapanatagan” (“Security”), unleashing vicious attacks on any person they deemed to be “communist” and organizations tagged as “communist fronts.” The anti-people policies spearheaded by Duterte and modeled after U.S. counterinsurgency strategies led to tens of thousands enforced disappearances, extra judicial killings and victims of torture and harassment by state forces. In 2017 Duterte declared Martial Law in the Bangasamoro region of Mindanao under the justification of the US's own designation of Mindanao as the so-called "Eastern Front of the War on Terror" by former US President Bush. Duterte oversaw five months of ruthless aerial bombardment, displacement, curfews, checkpoints, among other increased human rights violations. These acts displaced more than 200,000 people and paved the way for US imperialist exploitation of the natural resources in the region which holds the largest deposits of oil and natural gas in the Philippines worth hundred of billions in US dollars. Marcos: New puppet, continued attacks on the people Like his predecessor, Marcos Jr continues Duterte's legacy of terror on the people and subservience to his US warlords. His whole of nation approach to national security and counter-insurgency, another strategy model from US counter-insurgency doctrine, calls for the militarization of civilian agencies and functions, subsuming all the branches of government to military objectives and national security goals. Under Marcos, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and fascist terror continue to be a nationwide policy. Marcos came to power with full support from his US backers. What he needed to steamroll his Presidential campaign to victory was to build an unsteady relationship with the Duterte family to win over Duterte’s voter base. Upon consolidating power, Marcos decided to dispose of Duterte by prosecuting the arrest warrant of the ICC. This amounts to the US puppet Marcos cutting the strings with Duterte so that he can make full use of the ruthlessly militaristic state machinery that he inherited from Duterte, who in turn inherited it from decades of US overlordship. In April 2024 during the Trilateral Summit in Washington DC attended by the Philippines, Japan, and the US, Biden revealed his budget request for $128 million for Military infrastructure projects under the Enhanced Defense cooperation Agreement (EDCA)— Far more than the $109 million allocated by the U.S. in the last 10 years combined - with all bases being built in strategic locations facing China, including a military site being built at ground zero in Marawi City seven years after the siege ended. This skyrocketing militarization of the Philippines at the behest of the US war machine is the mantle that Marcos has willingly taken up to protect his own semi-feudal, semi-colonial economic and political interests using the Filipino people and land as a pawn in the US strategy of war against China in the process. The people’s fight for justice continues Just as the anti-US base movement of the Filipino people led decades of systematic campaigns against US military presence and formally ousted the US bases in 1992, the struggle for National Democracy and for an end to US military occupation of the Philippines continues to be one of the biggest obstacles to the US strategy of directing its puppet government to aid in its build-up to war against China. With the expansion of US military presence in the Philippines under Marcos, the peace-loving people of the world must stand and unite with the Filipino people's struggle against their country being used as a pawn of US-led war. While Marcos may have been the one to execute the arrest warrant against Duterte for his own political interests, it was the people who fought against every blow of the overwhelming fascist offensive of Duterte to bring this case to reality. It is the people, and only the people, who will realize justice, accountability, and lasting peace. Justice for the victims of the drug war! Cut military aid to the US-Marcos regime! US out of the Philippines!
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The International Migrants Alliance (US) and the Resist US-Led War Movement echo the peoples call, from the migrants inside and across the U.S. region resisting their detention at Guantanamo bay, and the 50,000 Cubans protesting outside to condemn use of the illegal decades-long occupation of Cuba in Guantanamo Bay by the US military, amidst the slew of fascist immigration executive orders since Trump came into office.
Militarized immigration enforcement and fascist terror The Trump administration has used US military bases and the so-called "whole of government immigration crackdown" to put shackled immigrants on U.S. military planes for deportation fights and sent at least 127 migrants in February to the U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The former/recent detainees described "small, windowless cells, constant lighting hindering sleep, inadequate food and medical care, and verbal and physically violent abuse from staff," labeling the conditions as "a living hell." The executive order of the President aims to prepare Guantanamo Bay to expand its capacity to transfer 30,000 migrants there. The Trump administration has also expanded federal agents’ arrests of people in the U.S. without documentation and abandoned programs like Temporary Protective Status (TPS) or the asylum process that gave some permission to stay. Just like his previous term, Trump inherited an immigration system used by both Democrats and Republicans for terrorizing and tearing apart migrant families to advance their profit-driven political projects. While this current moment recalls the horrors of voice recordings of crying children after being torn away from their families during Trump’s first term, or the images of migrant children being kept in literal cages inside warehouses, it must be remembered that this policy has been documented since at least US President Clinton’s mass deportation campaigns. Past President Biden deported around 1.5 million people, Bush Jr. deported around 2 million, while Obama deported a staggering 3.2 million, earning him the name “Deporter in Chief.” Conditions in detention facilities have been kept nightmarish by each of these Presidents as well, with over 50 deaths reported between 2017 and 2021 alone (and many more likely to have been not reported), and migrants suffering disease, starvation, and abuse by detention staff. Now Trump plans to expand ICE detention capacity to 151,500, with overall mass deportation plans that could reach a cost of $27 billion in its first year. Truly, Trump’s war on migrants is a war launched against the people long ago, but from his campaign threats during the election to his actions in his first month in office, it’s clear that things will only get worse, with the Guantanamo Bay detention of migrants signalling the worst.. Trump's openly fascist immigration policies target migrants and left-leaning movements equally as "enemies of the state," wielding repression and criminalization as militaristic tools to build up a narrative aligned with the Bush and Obama era’s "War on Terror" doctrine. Trump's targets, lumped into the category of "terrorists," have included everything from student activists fighting for Palestine, migrants at the border, loosely identified “Marxists” and “woke radicals,” and drug cartels operating within Mexico itself. Deploying ICE and CBP but also DHS, FBI, DEA, and ATF agents to round up migrants and other scapegoats, the War on Terror policy continues, with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth describing the base at Guantanamo Bay as “the front line of the war against America’s southern border.” Using the racist trope of "guarding against an invasion," the US is using the Southern Command of the US military to deploy forces, with an overall border program that is estimated to exceed $1 billion. Since Trump’s second term began and he immediately declared a “National Emergency” and closed the border, about 6,500 new active duty forces have been ordered to deploy to the southern border. Before that, there were about 2,500 troops already there, largely National Guard troops on active duty orders, along with a couple of hundred active duty aviation forces. In fact, Trump's "Whole Government Immigration Crackdown" is part of his shock and awe policy scapegoating immigrants for falsely causing the economic crisis that is underpinning the racist and xenophobic attacks of his administration and everyday Americans suffering the failure of both parties’ neoliberal, neoconservative, and fascist policies. A history of torture, intervention and impunity From Guantanamo Bay, the US spent the last century surveilling its hemispheric neighbors, plotting overseas coups, and torturing hundreds of “War on Terror” suspects. Since inception, the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay has faced ongoing legal, political, and international scrutiny regarding its operations. In the wake of Spain’s defeat in the 1898 Spanish American War, the US promised Cuba its freedom; it came with heavy caveats, including access to the 45-square-mile military base. Established in 1903, Guantanamo Bay has been under U.S. control for over a century, despite its location on Cuban soil. The US held Haitian asylum seekers in Guantanamo Bay starting in the early 1990s, being picked up by the US Coast Guard, and held without due process in the detention facility. Guantanamo Bay gained international notoriety in the early 2000s as a detention center for terrorism suspects. Numerous reports have documented human rights violations within its facilities, including long-term isolation, inadequate medical care, and documented torture. In addition, many people imprisoned there were found to have been detained indefinitely without trial. The cost of the Guantanamo Bay detention center has amounted to half a billion US dollars a year, pulling from what could have been spent on much-needed revenue for government services for the people. Such is the cost of the “War on Terror” forcibly paid for by taxes of people in the US, including undocumented immigrants. Militarism and forced migration are a cycle caused by imperialism War and militarism contribute greatly to forced migration. In the first 9 months of 2023, over 100 million refugees were displaced by war and conflict throughout the world, and this was before the genocidal Israeli war on Palestinians in Gaza even started. US imperialism and imperialist countries continue to wage and prepare for wars while subjecting the people of their colonies and neo colonies to policies of economic plunder that put their people into poverty. Local reactionary and fascist rulers wage war against their own people, often at the behest of these same foreign imperialist interests who provide them weapons, training and a cut of the future profits to enact brutal counterinsurgency wars. War devastates local economies and forces people and whole families to migrate for better opportunities abroad, fleeing violence, climate crises, and political repression as well, leaving them with no real choice - either starve or die at home or gamble on highly exploitative jobs far away from their family with still little chance of maintaining a sustainable livelihood. Forced starvation through blockades and sanctions has been a favored tactic of US imperialism - in Venezuela, Cuba, Afghanistan and many other countries. In Venezuela alone, these sanctions caused the people to be deprived of food and medicine, led to the death of over 100,000 and forced thousands to flee the country. The US is retaliating against Venezuela for asserting their sovereignty. Not only do they prohibit US-Venezuela trade, they coerce the entire world economy into ceasing exchange as well. But the Venezuelan people have frustrated attempts to break their sovereignty and continue to struggle to build a nation free of US imperialism in spite of crushing sanctions. One migrant, José, was detained in Renton, WA and recently transferred to Guantanamo from a detention center in Texas, alongside others deemed a “high-threat.” Contrary to the Trump administration’s blatant lies about the migrants being transferred to Guantanamo, José is a beloved father, husband, brother, son, and friend who fled violence from his homeland and supported his family and migrant community in Washington state. The Trump administration has cowered to the collective people power and removed all Venezuelans from Guantanamo Bay on Thursday, February 20th including José. He was then deported from Guantanamo Bay back to Venezuela. His family, IMA, and a community of migrant activists have been fighting alongside him for his freedom every step of the way. The fight is not over, we need to demand justice for the atrocities that José has had to live through at the hands of the US imperialist state. JUSTICE FOR JOSÉ! Many migrants and refugees from war are suffering fates similar to the “War on Terror” detainees at Guantanamo Bay and other US Black Sites around the world. In the end, war makers and fascists will always need a scapegoat to falsely lay blame on, subject to unimaginable torture, and, when no longer needed, disappear into the world where their fates become unknown. Such is the inherent relationship between militarism, forced migration, detention and mass incarceration, and fascist rule under the imperialist system. Who profits from these attacks? Who profits from this violence? The private prison executives that want the prospect of lucrative new detention center deals, since Trump's mass deportation plans would massively expand the largest immigration detention system in the world. Over 90 percent of all people detained by ICE in the U.S. are held in private detention facilities today. Who else benefits? The use of Guantanamo for Trump's mass deportation program gives the US the excuse to maintain its military outpost in the Caribbean after over 2 decades of “War on Terror” imprisonment, using the military base to stake out US influence over resources and riches to extract from the Caribbean and across the continent. Struggling to end the illegal military occupation and shut down Guantanamo Bay Where there is systematic oppression, there will always be peoples’ resistance. The enduring occupation of Guantanamo Bay has been a source of mass opposition, with Cuba asserting its sovereignty and the US maintaining its military presence. Though the US maintains around 750 military bases throughout the world, Guantánamo is a base in a sovereign nation whose government has described US presence as an “illegal military occupation.” For more than half a century, the government and people of Cuba have been demanding the return of the occupied territory in Guantanamo and an end to military activities in the area. They argue that the US military presence on their territory is not only illegal under international law but also violates the principles of self-determination of peoples. The mass protests of 50 thousand Cubans last month to demand the US withdrawal and oppose the US government's ongoing interference against Cuba's sovereignty are a powerful show of the people's willingness to struggle against the US’s fascist anti-migrant agenda and its illegal military occupation. There are growing mass protests across the US of migrant communities rejecting the militarized ICE enforcement in their communities, at the border, at detention centers, and all the way back to our homelands. This growing resistance shows that both in the host countries and in their home countries, migrants will struggle for an end to the US intervention in US colonies and neo-colonies. The people of the world have had enough of the policies that subject their people to the neoliberal plunder that forces their people into poverty and compels them to migrate. Migrants, survivors of detention, and all other peace-minded people will continue to fight against the abuse, detention, family separation and exploitation of Trump’s fascist agenda. In this way, the migrant justice and peace movements must be arm in arm, united in the struggle for a bright future out of the hands of the war profiteers and fascist strongmen!  The Resist US-Led War Movement asserts its grave concern over the looming war clouds and rising global military spending that overshadow US President Trump's so-called "Ukraine Peace Plan." What attempts to come across as a criticism of a vain and endless war in Ukraine by Trump hides instead a recalibration of US military priorities to other fronts of war while bluffing European powers into ramping up their war production and preparations for more severe conflicts to come. The War in Ukraine has just passed its third anniversary. Since then, over 58,000 Ukrainians and Russians have died with over 250,000 wounded, the majority of them Ukrainians. This is in addition to over 14,000 killed in the 2014-2022 Ukrainian Civil War. An estimated $155 billion in damages has been met on Ukrainian infrastructure, and approximately 2.4 million hectares of farmland has been damaged, leading to $1.5 billion lost for farmers in the country. 3.7 million are internally displaced in the country with 6.7 displaced abroad. Yet for 3 years, the US and Western leaders have refused to come to the table for peace talks, instead promising Kiev endless supplies of weapons so that it could win the war in their favor, regardless if they had to fight it down to the last Ukrainian soldier. Yet, all this took an unexpected turn in Washington, DC. In a shocking White House meeting covered by international press, Trump berated Ukrainian President Zelensky for relying too much on US military aid, for forcing conscripts to the front lines, for not thanking the US enough for its aid, and for "gambling with World War 3." Zelensky was then officially asked to leave the White House, notably without signing the much-spoken of mineral deal between the US and Ukraine that Trump had touted as the key dealbreaker for continuing military aid to the country. Instead, Trump froze all military aid to Ukraine the very next day. The TV-style drama of this incident truly was unprecedented in the history of US foreign policy meetings, but beyond the public entertainment factor that Trump has made the hallmark of his political tactics there exist deeper truths to what this moment represents for the current state of US-led war strategy. It is necessary to break down the different aspects of Trump's public accusations of Zelensky. First, it is indeed true that Ukraine has been facing a crisis in its soldiers' will to fight over the past year, with mere inches of territory being traded back and forth for every dozen or so fighters killed. War deserters have been rounded up and imprisoned, with many forced back to the front lines. The war has devastated the country, and there seems to be no end in sight as neither side has made significant gains in relation to the amount of fighters who have been killed on either side. Ukraine spent 36.7% of its GDP on its military in 2023, yet that only amounted to $65 billion, showcasing on the one hand how devastated its economy in general has been with social spending at all-time lows for its civilian population, and on the other hand how utterly reliant it has had to have been on foreign powers up against Russia's $109 billion at just 5.9% of GDP the same year. This leads into other aspects of Trump's tirade: relying "too much" on the US and, according to Trump and Vice President Vance, not being personally "thankful" enough to the President. Both of these accusations speak to a fundamental feature of the relationship between the US and Ukraine. The US is an imperialist power, and as such prefers to wage the majority of its wars through puppet regimes in countries on the periphery of its geopolitical influence while it enjoys the "peace" of being able to plunder the rest of the world through investment schemes and wage war against its exploited and oppressed people at home. Ukraine is one of these puppet regimes and has been ever since the CIA-backed "Maidan Revolution" in 2014 that overthrew Ukraine's independent government and installed one more friendly to Western influence and investments that immediately started a bloody 8-year civil war against Russian-speaking Ukrainian separatists in the Eastern Donbas region. NATO's Secretary General in 2021 promised eventual NATO membership to Ukraine, therefore solidifying a US and EU puppet regime right on Russia's doorstep to be the sacrificial lamb when Russia invaded in 2022 to protect its shrinking buffer zone between it and a military alliance that has existed to destroy it since the end of World War 2 and had looked for whatever reason possible to provoke a war against it that its own soldiers would not have to fight in. The current bloody war in Ukraine provided the golden opportunity. Kiev has fought both the 8-year civil war and the as-of-now 3-year Russia-Ukraine war with US and EU member-provided weapons. That is the nature of it being a puppet state. Such a state must exist in complete reliance on its imperialist master. When Trump berated Zelensky for this, he was hiding his own country's role in encouraging further war and military aid (including millions of dollars worth during Trump's first term) in order to weaken Russia's growing influence without sacrificing US soldiers. The difference now is that the US President has other priorities for his other puppets. The blanket support for the Zionist assault on Palestine and West Asia with fully-loaded US weapons could not be a starker difference in public messaging, but underneath the surface this puppet relationship is completely the same. Imperialists only care for their puppets when they are useful, and they are tossed aside and bled dry for what they are still worth (like Trump's rare earth mineral deal) when they no longer are. Zelensky and the rest of the Kiev regime are now paying the price for selling their sovereignty to US overlordship. To add insult to injury, Kiev's government took Trump's bating language at face value, and made a public statement thanking Trump for his supposed efforts to end the conflict, desperately hoping this would win back favor with the narcissistic President. This came a day after Zionist leader Netanyahu publicly did the same, calling Trump "the most pro-Israel President in American history." Regardless of the political charades being played, the puppets will always rush to lick the boots of the puppet master. The final accusation of Trump towards Zelensky requires the most critical eye of all of them. Who really is "gambling with World War 3?" The US has tried to use Ukraine against Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, using its age-old strategy of turning ethnic and national groups against one another. The US and its NATO allies have spent decades turning Ukraine against its nuclear-armed neighbor while using neoliberal schemes to dismember the economies of both. If anyone has been gambling with World War 3, it is the US. In fact, Trump's surprising abandonment of its puppet regime in Ukraine becomes less surprising upon looking at the other ways in which he is gambling globally with a potential World War 3. Freezing military aid to Ukraine comes a day after Trump unfroze $12 billion in aid to the Zionist military to continue violating its ceasefire with the Palestinian resistance and continue its genocidal assault while continuing its expansionist drive in Syria, Lebanon, and towards Iran. It came a day before Trump's aggressive tariffs towards multiple countries, including China, another nuclear-armed power the US has spent years decoupling its economy from so that it can wage war without losing profits. The stopping of aid to Ukraine allows the US to pivot further into its militarization of the Asia Pacific where the US aims to contain its main competitor and adversary, China. The recent Trump's freeze on global foreign aid, while exempting security aid to the Philippines to continue its war build up with Marcos as another puppet and the unfreezing $870 million in security assistance programs for Taiwan show the US's strain and stretching beyond the front of US led war with Russia, and the need to pivot forces to the pacific. Once again, in the gambling, Ukraine is only a pawn, the US is the true gambler. Finally, Trump's gamble is not just with the US's rival superpowers like China and Russia. By making such a public scene of Zelensky, he gambled with European NATO members' decisiveness to keep the war in Ukraine going at any cost. Trump's cabinet criticized NATO members at the recent Munich Security Conference, saying that members should be paying 5% of their GDP on military (a percentage higher than what the US even spends itself). Taking the bait, European members made promises to arm both Ukraine and themselves to the teeth without US support, with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer calling for a "coalition of the willing" to arm Ukraine until it wins against Russia and Vice President of the European Commission Kaja Kallas reigniting calls for an "Army of Europe" that would take the place of NATO. Stocks of European weapons manufacturers rose exponentially after these announcements, with Rheinmetall up 15%, Leonardo up 17.3%, Thales up 16.7%, BAE Systems up 14.3%, and Saab up 11.6%. Regardless of what agreements the US makes with Russia, the war in Ukraine will most likely not be ending anytime soon. Despite the dramatic row Trump's White House meeting with Zelensky caused amongst US allies, in the end the war makers and war profiteers all got what they wanted - a reason to crank out more guns and fighter jets and new opportunities for using them (and therefore buying more). Far from bringing peace, this will only bring more unnecessary deaths. It will also bring more damage to infrastructure and farmland, and with even more of Ukraine's public funds going to war spending, this will mean more devastated livelihood for the people. The war profiteers of Europe are willing to throw the entire population of Ukraine into the slaughterhouse of war or the hellsscape of economic ruin just to maintain their status quo of power and to keep the war industry booming. How should the peace movement respond to this moment? Of course, an end to the dire conflict should be welcomed, as the people deserve an end to the constant death and destruction of their country. But we must be wary of how any war ends, with foresight to how the war profiteers will use it to start another conflict as soon as they can. The most important thing to remember is that our government leaders are not interested in peace, especially not Trump who is just using an opportunistic moment to re-evaluate the US's war strategy. In the end, it is the people who make peace since the people are the ones most impacted by wars of aggression and militarism in all its forms. Our leaders will continue these public charades to try and fool us, but we must continue to raise our demands and take them to the streets where we can stand united against the US-led war machine. NATO and other US allies have never been this at odds with each other, so the peace movement must take advantage of this moment and expose the cracks. This movement will always be more united than the war makers ever can be! Finally, these imperialist machinations of the US show just how little it cares about the people living in the nations being oppressed by their puppet regimes. The peace movement must be firmly united with these movements for national liberation from semi-colonial oppression. Only then will the arbitrary moves of strongman governments like the US be challenged from the only force that can challenge them - the people themselves. This united movement is the only path towards just and lasting peace. |