Oppose Marcos plans to use Filipino people's money to expand US military bases in Mindanao

Marco L. Valbuena, Chief Information Officer
Communist Party of the Philippines

December 03, 2024

The Filipino people must expose and resist the plan of the Marcos regime to establish a naval base at the 3,000-hectare PHIVIDEC Industrial Estate sa Tagoloan, Misamis Oriental, just outside Cagayan de Oro City. This plan, in fact, is part of the US push to further expand its military presence in the Philippines, particularly in Mindanao.

The scheme is being vigorously promoted and pushed by Defense Sec. Gibo Teodoro. Since 2022, Teodoro has served as an overly agressive American factotum. He has been tasked to pursue US plans to expand its military presence in the Philippines.

The Tagoloan naval base will be another US military facility camouflaged as a military base of the Philippine armed forces. It will complement the US facilities situated at the Lumbia airport in Cagayan de Oro, which is an "agreed location" under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA).

The Tagoloan naval base will expand the base of operations of US military forces in northern Mindanao, to complement their troop presence in Western Mindanao, in the central Visayas area, and throughout Luzon. It will allow easy access for US troops and military equipment to be used in counterinsurgency operations in the heart of Mindanao.

By further expanding its military presence in the Philippines, the US seeks to strengthen its foothold in the country, as part of its imperialist Indo-Pacific Strategy to encircle and contain its imperialist rival China. The US aims to stoke armed tensions in the South China Sea, to the benefit of the US military industrial complex.

Teodoro and Marcos' officials are keeping the Filipino people in the dark about the amount of public funds that will go to the construction of the Togoloan naval base on the false pretext of "operational security". According to reports, funding will directly come from the Office of the President, likely from so-called "unprogrammed funds".

At the same time, Teodoro is applying pressure on Congress to allot more money for the construction purportedly of a "humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HADR) warehouse" inside the Lumbia air base, which will serve the purposes of the US military forces inside the base.

The US military and the Marcos regime and its armed forces must be condemned for using "humanitarian assistance" as façade for building storage facilities for the prepositioning of US weapons. A similar "HADR warehouse" was constructed by American forces in Itbayat, Batanes a few months ago. However, this was revealed as having no supplies for disaster response when Batanes was ravaged by typhoon Julian in October.

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