Leody de Guzman to scrap NTF-Elcac, shift budget to CHR

Presidential candidate Leody de Guzman (Photo from his Facebook page)

MANILA, Philippines — If elected president, Leody de Guzman promises to redirect the funds of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac) to the Commission on Human Rights (CHR).

“That’s what we’ll raise because that’s what we need. We should not return to a situation of barbarism,” De Guzman said in Filipino in an interview on ABS-CBN News Channel (ANC). “We are already reaching a high level in recognizing human rights. We must develop that further.”

The labor leader said this after promising to abolish, within the first 100 days of his term, the NTF-Elcac, which has become controversial for its red-tagging.

After that, he said he would also increase the budget for the government’s COVID-19 response.

“‘That NTF-Elcac we will abolish and its budget we will use for COVID or for increasing the budget of [the Commission on] Human Right so we can further nurture human rights in our country,” De Guzman said.

On paper, the NTF-Elcac was established to promote development in barangays or communities allegedly being terrorized by rebels.

According to De Guzman, however, the NTF-Elcac has been acting on behalf of President Rodrigo Duterte.

“That’s the face, expression — concrete expression — of his character as a president that does everything by force, that does everything by threatening,” he said. “‘His kill-kill-kill policy was concretized there [NTF-Elcac]. So it has to disappear because it will really just execute Duterte’s will.”

Several lawmakers had also previously claimed that NTF-Elcac’s proposed budget for 2022, worth P28 billion, was just a form of pork barrel.

So they slashed its funding to just P4 billion because, as Sen. Sonny Angara explained, it was unable to properly explain how it spent its P19 billion budget for 2021.

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