Eufemia Cullamat was inspired to join the Philippine Congress after three people were killed in 2015 while protesting mining in her hometown of Lianga, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. Instead of finding justice, she’s now stuck in Manila, barred from returning home.
In 2020, Cullamat was among a group of opposition lawmakers who lodged a petition objecting to the country’s controversial anti-terrorism law. Then, in 2021, she and other progressive representatives questioned a planned increase in funding for the Philippines’s anti-communist task force, which has used the country’s expanded definition of terrorism to label activists as communists, a dangerous practice called “red-tagging.”
The next day, Cullamat said, that same task force pressured leaders in Lianga to declare her “persona non grata,” a nonbinding yet dangerous declaration that she is unwelcome in her community, meaning she has been labeled a communist and cannot return home for fear of facing persecution. She has been stranded in Manila ever since.
“My mind is still with my community. I still keep on thinking of them,” said Cullamat, now a spokesperson for the Sandugo Alliance, an Indigenous movement. “I can’t do my work with them anymore.”
When the anti-terrorism bill was still being debated, colleagues who supported its passage promised Cullamat that it was not meant to target progressive groups—or even communist groups themselves—and would not affect activists or ideological opponents of the government. Yet that’s exactly what it has done. The law has thus far been used not to capture terrorists but to arrest farmers.
Calling activists terrorists is common in the Philippines and in much of the global south. Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte made such accusations by the hundreds against environmental and Indigenous rights defenders, including Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, then the U.N. special rapporteur on Indigenous rights.
But the anti-terrorism law has given a newfound legal bite to these accusations and one that could serve as a disturbing model for other states.
For starters, calling people terrorists has an immediate rhetorical impact. “You can’t say you’re pro-terror. It’s a word that can only mean a negative thing,” said Dan Berger, a historian of social movements and the carceral state.
Last March, Michel Forst, the U.N. special rapporteur on environmental defenders, cautioned the French government after Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin labeled climate protesters “eco-terrorists.” Months later, in June, Darmanin issued a decree outlawing the climate group Earth Uprising, and French police arrested 18 of its members after several violent clashes.
Germany and the United Kingdom have also started surveilling and arresting activists using harsher laws. German police conducted nationwide raids on the direct action group Last Generation in May 2023, and Metropolitan Police arrested dozens of Just Stop Oil protesters in London immediately after the country enacted new anti-protest laws in October.
In the United States, dozens of people involved in protesting the construction of a police training campus in Atlanta have been indicted for allegedly violating the state of Georgia’s anti-racketeering law, which was originally designed to fight organized crime. Five people also face domestic terrorism charges. And in 2017, the Intercept reported that U.S. authorities worked with a private firm to use counterinsurgency tactics, such as surveillance and intimidation, against opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The recent use of anti-terrorism laws has “renovated and reinvigorated” an existing pattern of targeting radical opposition in the United States, Berger said, passing through eras including McCarthyism in the 1950s and the Black Panthers of the 1970s and up to the surveillance and arrests of environmental activists in the 2000s.
Some scholars, Berger included, question the utility of anti-terrorism laws in the first place; they “often make illegal things that are already illegal,” he said, and open the doors wide to abuse. Perhaps as a result, governments have found them useful in other ways. Under Duterte’s successor, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the existing practice of red-tagging political opponents has become far more methodical.
After the anti-terrorism law was passed, the country’s Anti-Terrorism Council (ATC) declared that the Philippine Communist Party and its armed guerrilla unit, the New People’s Army, were terrorist groups, despite sponsors earlier assuring Cullamat that there were “measures and safety nets” to avoid abuse against activists along with those two groups, she said.
For more than 50 years, communist rebels have sought to overthrow the Philippine government in an armed rebellion. But the authorities have also used the rebellion as an excuse: People from sympathizers to unrelated progressives are often thrust under the same umbrella and subject to legal persecution as supposed terrorists. This gives authorities a wider selection of tools with which to harass activists. For instance, they can be branded communists and exiled from their own communities, as Cullamat was while still in Congress.
The ATC can also designate citizens as “terrorist individuals,” as it did last June to four leaders of the environmental and Indigenous rights group Cordillera Peoples Alliance. The four had faced terrorism charges until just one month earlier, when a court threw the charges out. But the new designation has allowed authorities to keep the organization from functioning, and scare away its members, without filing criminal charges.
“The ATC is not a court, but it’s making court decisions,” said Windel Bolinget, one of the four leaders. Their bank accounts were frozen the day after the council’s designation, he said, cutting off access to foreign donors and forcing them to cancel some ongoing programs.
The United Nations has expressed concern over the situation, Bolinget said, and local officials have passed resolutions supporting the Cordillera Peoples Alliance. But now that they’ve been labeled as terrorists, they can be detained indefinitely, “and there’s no way to challenge it,” he said. “If this goes badly, it opens the floodgates.”
Cullamat, who left Congress in 2022 after a three-year term, feels that the anti-terrorism law has only emboldened the state and private mining and logging firms in her homeland.
In 2021, six years after the killings that inspired her to join politics, three Indigenous people, including a 12-year-old, were killed in Lianga by the military, which claimed they were members of the New People’s Army.
“Our way of living has changed,” she said. Villagers who practiced sustainable agriculture have been displaced by illegal loggers. “People are afraid to protest,” she added. “It’s saddening
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