The alleged abduction or surrender of two environmentalist activists, Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano, is getting to be an intriguing episode. For now, it looks like a competing propaganda warfare between the human rights groups identified with the political left and the military.

It is birthing speculations as to what exactly the incident is all about.

It started with the reported disappearance of the student activists on 2 September in Orion, Bataan. They were supposed to be preparing for an outreach activity in communities affected by proclamation projects.

The military was accused of being behind the disappearance. The government denied it had anything to do with the missing activists. The other week, the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, or NTF-ELCAC, held a press conference claiming that Castro and Tamano gave themselves up and executed affidavits admitting being part of the communist movement and that they left it to rejoin society.

Last Tuesday, the NTF-ELCAC held another press briefing and announced that it would present Castro and Tamano, who would confirm the contents of their signed affidavits.

Instead of validating their alleged "voluntary surrender," the two activists in the press conference on 19 September accused the military of abducting them while walking in Bataan. They belied the claim of the army and the police that they sought government help because they wanted to leave the communist movement. They claimed that the soldiers forced them to sign their sworn statements.

Human rights group Karapatan called for an independent investigation into the alleged abduction of the activists.

It wants those involved in the abduction of Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano, including the NTF-ELCAC, to be held accountable. It also wants the NTF-ELCAC abolished.
NTF-ELCAC expressed surprise by the turnaround of the two "surrenderers."

Meanwhile, Secretary of National Defense Gilbert Teodoro, in an interview, said the military would be filing perjury charges against the recanting activists for making it appear that the soldiers forced them into signing their affidavits.

An interesting sidelight of this incident is that the parents of Tamano, particularly her step-father Enrique Manalastas, claimed in an interview that they believe their daughter's original statement. He surmised that it was Castro, allegedly a self-confessed member of the New People's Army or NPA, who orchestrated the reversal of the statements of the two.

He believes that Castro did it to embarrass the government as she has been part of the armed groups for a long time. He expressed hope that their daughter Jhed would finally leave the communist group.

Given the expertise of the local communists, New People's Army and their front organizations in the art of political propaganda, it is more credible that the incident was a well-planned tactical propaganda against the government to support their relentless narratives about the alleged government's employment of abduction, enforced disappearance, and fake or forced surrender to break the armed movement.

The communist insurgents are losing in the armed struggle. Their number has been decimated owing to deaths in armed clashes with government troops or the deathly purge of suspected government infiltrators, mass surrenders of those who have either seen the futility of their cause or have been encouraged to go back to the fold of the law due to the government's socio-economic programs in the depressed barangay where they operate.

The organized fronts of the National Democratic Front and the NPA are using anti-government propaganda warfare to entice young, impressionable minds to join them. Their comrades in Congress, whose numbers have dramatically decreased because of electoral defeats, have been exceptionally boisterous in attacking the government for what they describe as its failure to respond to the needs of the masses, the corruption of its officials, the spiraling of prices of basic commodities and other perceived neglect and indifference of the government to the millions of lowly citizens who remain poor.

These groups' pretense of fighting for the welfare of the Filipino people has already been unmasked, and they have employed treachery, demagoguery, and disinformation to advance a cause that a vast majority of the people has already rejected. The armed rebellion is in the twilight of its existence. The very fact that it has not succeeded in overthrowing the government after more than 50 years of armed struggle is eloquent and indisputable proof that it is a failed movement.