‘Always doomed to fail’: VP Duterte rejects peace talks with NDFP after Masbate clash

Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte on Thursday, March 30, rejected the suggestion of Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Party-list Rep. France Castro to resume peace negotiations between the Philippine government and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), the political wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). Duterte “respectfully” warned the Marcos administration “not to fall into this trap” after Castro’s call for the resumption of peace talks due to the Masbate clash last week. “Castro’s assertion that the peace negotiations would address the root causes of the armed conflict was ludicrous. Instead, it would only give legitimacy to the absurdity of the terrorism perpetrated by the armed wing of the NDFP, the NPAs,” she said in a statement. “Negotiating with the NDFP is always doomed to fail,” the Vice President added. Peace talks between the government and the NDFP have been on-and-off scenario since the time of the late president Corazon Aquino, with Duterte’s father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, unilaterally terminating it in November 2017 because the government claimed rebels continued to do ambushes despite a previous ceasefire order. The death of CPP founder Jose Maria Sison in December 2022 led many to believe the New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the CPP, would lose its sense of purpose and would then be open to peace negotiations. But Duterte said the Masbate clashes between the military and the NPA, which has affected six towns and led to the cancellation of in-person classes, showed that the resumption of peace talks was ill-advised because these would only benefit the NPA and groups like that of ACT Teachers. She accused Castro of siding with the rebels after she called for forensic experts and the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) to investigate who the “real perpetrators” of the shooting were. “Castro’s call only confirms her duplicitous character — and was buttressed by her attempt to ‘lawyer’ for the terrorist NPAs,” Duterte said. She further called ACT Teachers “a fake representative of learners, educators, and other members of the education sector in Congress". Duterte and Castro have been exchanging heated words for a week since ACT Teachers urged the Department of Education (DepEd), which the Vice President heads in a concurrent capacity, to hire 30,000 public school teachers yearly and build more classrooms to address the gaps in the country’s education sector. The Vice President dismissed the group’s call, saying it was “impossible” and “unrealistic” to do so, and claimed the call was a tactic to divert from the issue in Masbate.