BY LAURENCE MARVIN CASTILLO
IN MID-JUNE 2020, a Filipino supporter of President Rodrigo Duterte who is based in Melbourne, Australia appeared in an online broadcast of Rekta Aksyon, a “public service” program hosted by the Philippine National Police bureau in Central Luzon.
This supporter claimed that progressive Filipino organizations in Australia like Migrante, Anakbayan and Gabriela solicit donations from Australians to buy weapons for the armed revolutionary group New People’s Army.
There is nothing new to the accusation; similar broadcasts that feature interviews with Duterte supporters overseas are uploaded on Rekta Aksyon’s Facebook page, seeking to discourage membership in, or support for, progressive mass organizations.
It is easy to suspect that Filipino taxpayers’ money is being used to fund these smear campaigns; in the broadcast that featured the Melbourne-based guest, it was mentioned that the government has set up a program to support Filipino “frontliners” (read: Duterte supporters) through the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict.
Formed as the command center of Duterte’s counterinsurgent machinery, the task force has been allotted millions of pesos, part of which some of its officials have reportedly spent on lavish junkets abroad, hoping to discourage “funders” of groups accused of being communist fronts.
With the governments’ push to implement the recently-signed terror law, the agency has become more aggressive in its disinformation campaign of tagging progressive organizations and individuals as communist fronts and terrorist supporters.
The overseas reach of counterinsurgency propaganda reveals something about the Philippine government’s paranoia over the growing discontent felt by migrant Filipinos, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
From the time it was elected in 2016 until the current global crisis, the Duterte administration has actively sought migrant Filipinos’ support and approval — and there is a perception that it has been successful in this undertaking. This perception can be explained by a number of factors, one of which relates to the role of social media in influencing how OFWs form their opinions about politics in the home country.
Crucial to this social media landscape is the proliferation of regime-supportive and possibly regime-sponsored fake news pages and trolls that disseminate fascist articulations and imaginaries to concoct a fiction of national economic and political stability, even when such fiction is belied by the very conditions compelling Filipinos to turn to overseas work.
Indeed, one can read Duterte’s appointment of Mocha Uson, pro-Duterte social media influencer and former Communications assistant secretary, to the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration as a gesture of further linking OFWs to the regime’s disinformation strategies.
Upon the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic and the various crises attendant to it, the Philippine state’s instrumentalist relationship to the country’s migrant workers has become even more visible. (To be continued/Bulatlat.com)
