Neoliberalism is a set of economic policies emphasizing free trade,
privatization, and the retreat of the state. In recent years social movements have
emerged in many nations challenging its master narrative of unlimited progress
through unfettered markets; states embracing neoliberalism have often engaged in
violence to suppress these movements. In the Philippines, social movements have
emerged to oppose neoliberal policies, resulting since 2001 in widespread
extrajudicial killings of social movement participants. The killings must be
understood in the context of Filipino society’s domination by an oligarchy whose
privilege has been increased by neoliberalism’s disavowal of wealth redistributionand by the enhancement of the state’s coercive powers during the “War on Terror.”Extrajudicial killings in the Philippines demonstrate neoliberalism’s propensity for violence through state terrorism.
Terrorism is designed to render people timid and compliant by inculcating them
with fear. To terrify is to frighten greatly, to instill intense fear, to drum up
images of horrible disaster, brutal punishment, or death hovering just around the next corner, or the one after that, or at least some proximate corner- out of sight, waiting to pounce, to strike arbitrarily to perhaps target YOU.
State terrorism emerges from three types of political struggles: oligarchic, where an oligarchy is attempting to maintain its hold on power and is resisting calls for wealth redistribution; ethnic, where a dominant ethnic group is attempting to control other ethnic groups; and ideological, where a group of ideologues is attempting to impose its vision on the rest of society.
The term “neoliberalism” refers to a set of economic polices emphasizing
free trade, privatization, deregulation, and the retreat of the state from matters of
wealth redistribution and social service provision. “Neoliberalism” is a theory proposing the advancement of human welfare through the liberation of entrepreneurial freedoms within “an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade”. Adding the prefix “neo” to “liberalism” indicates that neoliberalism is a revival of the teachings of the classical liberals, such as Adam Smith, who saw social order emerging as the consequence of everyone each seeking their own interest. A term frequently used in conjunction with neoliberalism is “globalization.” Globalization is the tendency for economic interdependencies to occur on a global scale; although activities have occurred on a global scale for years, neoliberalism, with its heavy emphasis on free trade, has led to such an amplification of globalization that Ward and England (2007, 12) call globalization the “international face of neoliberalism.”
Neoliberalism is often described as “an international project to reclaim, reconstitute, or establish capitalist class privilege and power, dating from
the 1970s” (Heynen et al., 2007, 290). Neoliberalism may, therefore, be regarded as an excellent example of a “revolution by the privileged.” Neoliberal theorists were not talking about workers in factories or peasants on plantations; to them the “free individual” meant the entrepreneur, the capitalist, the boss, and to them “freedom” meant the opportunity to make money. These theorists were against the state because it might limit the freedom of the rich to make money and could lead to a redistribution of wealth (Peet and Hartwick, 2009). Given neoliberalism’s status as a revolution of the privileged, it is important to note that neoliberalism is quite different from what many call “political liberalism”. Neoliberalism is by no means a “progressive” movement seeking social equality but is, instead, a variant of traditional conservative political views augmented with a hyper-capitalist
perspective on wealth’s production and distribution.
States adhering to the principles of neoliberalism often act to destroy social
movements that oppose neoliberal policy prescriptions. In the developing
countries, the role of the neoliberal state quickly assumes that of active repression even to the point of low-level warfare against oppositional movements.
Many developing countries, supported militarily by the United States, have implemented a system of repressions and liquidations to ruthlessly check activist movements. The Philippines is an ideal candidate for state terrorism because of its
oligarchic socio-political structure, and also, as the present section argues, because its elites are dominated by ideologues aggressively implementing the principles of neoliberalism: the Philippines has long been reputed to be among the most pliant in Asia to the neoliberal prescriptions of the Washington consensus.
Assassinations have occurred in the Philippines since the American colonial
period (McCoy, 2009). These are not confined to people involved in political
activism, as demonstrated by the killing of street children, petty criminals, and drugdealers in Davao City (Human Rights Watch, 2009). However, since 2001 there has been a wave of assassinations targeting activists involved in left-wing causes. According to Karapatan5 (2010), from 21 January 2001 until 30 June 2010, 1,206 activists have been killed in the Philippines (see Table 1). The killings peaked in 2006 when 235 people were killed, exhibited a downward trend during 2007 (100 victims) and 2008 (90 victims) and then showed an upsurge during 2009 (130 victims) before falling off during the first half of 2010.
Agreement is widespread that most killings can be attributed to the government in general, and to the AFP in particular. Instead of an unrelated series of murders carried out by criminals, the killings “constitute a pattern of politically targeted extrajudicial executions” (Amnesty International, 2006, 2). The term “extrajudicial executions” is used because they are “unlawful and deliberate killings carried out by order of the government or with its complicity or acquiescence”. Human Rights Watch (2007, 25) similarly held the state responsible, concluding that “our research, based on accounts from eyewitnesses and victims’ families, found that members of the AFP were responsible for many of the recent unlawful killings.” Franco and Abinales (2007, 315) concluded that “agreement is widespread that the killings have AFP written all over them.”
In this context, the complicity of the Philippine government and the neoliberalist oligarchy is illustratrated. The elite will not let it happen that their stright path to wealth is hindered by activists and Human Rights advocates. They have to resort to extreme terrorism and murder.
The context for the killings is the forty-two year old conflict between the AFP and the NPA (see Table 2 and Figure 2), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). Since the reestablishment of the CPP along Maoist lines in December of 1968, and the inception of the NPA in March 1969, this conflict has claimed over forty thousand lives and appears to show no sign of imminent conclusion (Santos, 2010). Since the 1996 peace accord between the Philippine government and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) the secessionist conflict between the AFP and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) has attracted substantial media attention.7 Nevertheless, the AFP-MILF conflict is confined to the vicinity of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) (Santos and Santos, 2010). In contrast to the MILF, the NPA (with approximately 7,000 armed cadres and a nationwide presence) is considered the most serious threat to the security of the Philippines because it operates in all
regions of the archipelago with the notable and important exception of the ARMM
(Santos, 2010). According to Adolfo Espuelas (2008, 1), a Major in the Philippine
Army, the NPA is the most serious threat to the security of the Philippines, “because of the breadth of its influence and the seriousness of its political
struggle.”
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