US Militarism Remains Front and Center for Many Filipino Voters in 2024

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Communities Beyond Elections

One of the largest and most visible contingents marching outside the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago this past August was the “U.S. Out of the Philippines.” Its participants included Malaya Movement, Chicago Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (CCHRP), AnakBayan Chicago, and AnakBayan at UIC. The contingent was calling for the end of U.S. militarism in the Philippines, the largest recipient of United States military aid in the Asia-Pacific region.

In recent years, the U.S. military has increased its presence in the Philippines, with the addition of new bases, building on the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement and a 2023 commitment of $82 million of infrastructure investments in these new sites. As recently as July 2024, the U.S. promised $500 million in military aid to the Philippines in its bid to challenge China.

While this aid has provided financial support for the country’s military operations and infrastructure development of the U.S. military bases in the Philippines, it has also included the sales of weaponry such as firearms, assault weapons, combat shotguns, missiles, rockets, bombs and mines, among other kinds of weaponry. As activists and critics of the continued U.S. military presence in the Philippines have repeatedly decried, this kind of military aid has also helped advance the ongoing military operations that have led to the suppression of political dissent and social movements in the Philippines.

As Secretary General Cristina Palabay of Karapatan, a coalition of civil society organizations working on human rights issues, noted last month in response to the increased military aid from the U.S., “The so-called aid and overall increase in security and military budgets indicate a shift toward warmongering that will worsen the Philippines’ already dire human rights situation.” Palabay was referred to the extrajudicial killings, bombings, arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, abductions and illegal arrests that continue to proliferate under the Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos regime and are widely documented by various global monitoring bodies.

As of October 2024, there have been over 800 documented extrajudicial killings as part of the Marcos administration’s continued support of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs” campaign. Press freedom continues to be restricted, and journalists continue to be killed or attacked for their critiques of the Philippine state, as documented in a 2023 Human Rights Watch report. Activist and social justice organizations including labor unions and Indigenous communities like the Lumad continue to be subject to “red tagging,” which the Philippine Supreme Court has finally recognized as a set of activities that include “threats and intimidation to discourage ‘subversive’ activities.”

This same U.S. military aid also enables the detrimental effects that military bases have had on the Philippine economy and the gender violence enacted by U.S. military troops. The Visiting Forces Agreement that was signed in 1998 not only provided the U.S. with the ability to send U.S. military personnel to the Philippines and conduct joint military exercises known as “Balikatan,” but it also maintained that all U.S. military personnel remain under the jurisdiction of U.S. criminal courts, effectively granting them impunity.

As such, in the case of two high-profile cases of gender violence committed by U.S. military personnel — one resulting in the death of a trans woman, Jennifer Laude, and the rape of a Filipina cis woman, “Nicole” — both were acquitted or pardoned in the U.S. court system. As scholars like Victoria Reyes have noted, military bases often become “global borderlands” that threaten Philippines’ sovereignty. Other scholars have also presented the “military base itself as a cultural artifact of colonial dominance” with working and living conditions that subject Filipino women to low-wage labor and sexual harassment and violence, while creating a “rest and recreation” landscape for U.S. military personnel.

So, what does all this mean amid a highly contentious U.S. presidential campaign? What are the issues that this very diverse group of communities want their elected leader to champion?

In the swing state of Nevada, where Filipinos comprise the majority of Asian American voters, the Harris campaign is actively running ads that “engage with Filipino American voters as they gather to celebrate the richness of Filipino food and culture” in celebration of October as Filipino American History month. Surely our communities and histories represent more than just food and entertainment!

We must work toward reframing the understanding of the “Filipino American community” as one that is not monolithic. Our lives and concerns are better addressed through the lens of social justice. We ought to foreground how our histories of struggle and triumph point to the need to dismantle the ideologies of capitalism, white supremacy and imperialism that are engines of the inequalities our communities face. As the conveners of the Filipino American Agenda 2024 explained, the issues that are important to consider for this upcoming election include “economic justice and worker rights,” “addressing the housing crisis,” the “right to affordable and relevant education,” “immigration rights,” and “health and wellness,” to name a few.

In 2023, 62 percent of the total U.S. federal discretionary budget went toward U.S. militarism, while only 7, 6, and 5 percent went toward housing, health care and education, respectively. In terms of comprehensive immigration reform, which is another issue of concern for Filipinos, we should know that in 2023, of the $51 billion that went to Homeland Security, half of that was funneled into detentions and deportations instead of programs that address pathways to citizenship and redress visa issues that lead Filipinos to be exploited by unscrupulous labor recruiters and employers.

Anyone who wants to champion the interests of Filipino Americans must chart a direction away from the expansion of the U.S. supply of arms, both in the Philippines and globally. In our own organizing to advance these demands, we must see U.S. militarism through a wider lens, given that this same vehicle is not only supporting an authoritarian regime in the Philippines, but also an ongoing genocide in Gaza and devastation in Lebanon, while failing to address our needs at home.

In her statement at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Harris put forth an agenda that supports “Israel’s right to self-defense” while acknowledging the “suffering” of the Palestinian people. The U.S. cannot have it both ways: The military aid the U.S. is supplying to Israel is a key culprit in the suffering of the Palestinian people. As I previously argued, we need to “understand the ineligibility of Israel’s articulation of self-defense as a legitimating defense of their continued occupation and siege of Palestinians. Israel has weaponized international law in ways that allow it to create the conditions for manipulating existing laws, including humanitarian laws, to justify their incursions in the occupied territories.”

Numerous scholars and activists have called on us to reject this logic and legacy, and instead, join and strengthen the Palestinian solidarity movement by building power in various sectors — workplaces, campuses and community organizations. To build power is not only to point to these confounding logics that allow for the weaponization of war, literally and metaphorically, to go on, but also to intervene in the misplaced silence that results from us not speaking out in support of Palestine for fear of being dubbed “antisemitic.” It is about building a collective voice guided by a moral compass that calls on us, in fact, commands us, to take a principled stance. As scholar Nadine Naber painfully expressed, “There are no silent vigils during genocide.”

At this moment of heightened divisiveness in electoral rhetoric, it is especially imperative for us to identify the issues that connect us with other communities. Just last month, the U.S. committed another $8.7 billion in U.S. aid to Israel in support of its military operations. In just one year, since October 7, 2023, U.S. aid to Israel totaled $12.5 billion in taxpayer money. Currently, the same U.S. military machine that is arming an authoritarian regime in the Philippines is also arming Israel. It is the same machine that is helping to displace Palestinians as well as Indigenous Lumad communities in the Philippines. It is the same machine that is enabling the repression of dissenting voices against authoritarian regimes around the world.

Thus, when Filipino activists cry out “U.S. Out of the Philippines,” they are calling for not just the end of neocolonial relations in the Asia Pacific, but also the severing of all U.S. military ties — including those that are aiding and abetting the genocide in Gaza and the escalating death toll in Lebanon.