On July 30, combined elements of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) arrested my wife, Christina Pasion, and Indigenous community organizer Binay Serrano in an early morning raid in Cabuyao, Laguna. My wife, an American citizen, has been detained in Camp Bagong Diwa under the custody of the Bureau of Immigration. For months, the AFP has maliciously red-tagged my wife, baselessly painting her to be a terrorist on social media, endangering her life. I am disgusted to know that the US is funding this repression, having authorized $2.5 billion more of our taxpayer dollars to the Philippine military over the next five years.
Why was my wife arrested? Because she, along with over 700 other political prisoners in the Philippines (and hundreds more disappeared or killed), has dared to stand alongside the impoverished and forgotten peoples of her motherland. Because she dared to ask why so many families like hers have to be torn apart by forced migration. Because she wanted to understand why Filipinos have no other option but to immigrate to a country that terrorizes them with ICE raids while poisoning the Philippines itself with strip mine runoff. This is why she, like so many other Filipino Americans, decided to go back to the Philippines to walk alongside the most oppressed in witness and accompaniment. And for that fundamental kindness, she was declared an enemy of the Philippine state.
The arbitrary detention of my wife Christina is the most recent in a series of escalating attacks on activists and US citizens by the Marcos Jr. government. Just 4 months ago, 19 were massacred in Toboso, Negros Occidental, by the AFP. Two of the victims were Filipino Americans Lyle Prijoles and Kai Sorem. On January 1 of this year, the AFP dropped bombs on an Indigenous Mangyan community in Abra de Ilog, Occidental Mindoro, killing at least five and displacing hundreds of families. In the aftermath of the bombing, another Baltimore-based Filipino American went missing, Chantal Anicoche, only to be surfaced by the military in what is widely believed to be a manufactured video. Chantal was held in a military camp for a month before being blacklisted and deported back to Maryland. In the past year, four other US-based activists have been blacklisted and denied entry into the Philippines: Copeland Downs, Gordon Mutch, Julie Jamora, and Rev. Sadie Stone.
This month marks seven years since the attempted assassination by suspected state forces of Brandon Lee in Ifugao. He was paralyzed after being shot multiple times in front of his daughter. This attack on his life came after a years-long red-tagging campaign against him for his work alongside Indigenous communities resisting mining projects. His case has been closed by the Philippines due to a “lack of evidence.” The bullets they are looking for are embedded in his body.
What we are seeing is an alarming trend of repression under Marcos Jr., who has portrayed his administration as turning a new page from the bloody drug war killings of his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte. This is a lie, and I hope to see Marcos Jr. join him at The Hague.
Since Marcos Jr. came into power in 2022, he has made countless concessions to the US in return for more and more foreign military financing to support the AFP in its counterinsurgency operations. The country has been in a state of civil war for over five decades between the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP), an armed conflict rooted in hundreds of years of colonial, feudal, and fascist exploitation and oppression. The red-tagging of my wife, along with countless other activists, intentionally conflates civilians and combatants — a war crime. The US military treats the archipelago, home to over 100 million, as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” from which to launch war with China. US-Philippine economic agreements such as Pax Silica and the Luzon Economic Corridor serve to build a logistical backbone for US military bases at the expense of a self-sustaining economy for the Filipino people.
I want my wife released and back here safe with me. So long as she remains in Philippine state custody, her safety cannot be assured. The Bureau of Immigration has routinely lied to her legal team regarding their plans and actions. They have subjected Christina to repeated interrogations without the presence of her legal counsel in an attempt to coerce false confessions. It is in these moments that I am truly thankful for how wonderfully bull-headed she is. The arrest of my wife has only reaffirmed what we have long known: the neocolonial relationship between the US and the Philippines must end.
I will fight for my wife’s release, and I will continue to fight alongside so many others to end US support for human rights abuses in the Philippines. Alongside my colleagues in the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP), we have worked tirelessly to oppose security aid to the Philippine military and police, to campaign for accountability in the massacres and attempted assassinations, to end destructive and exploitative economic deals.
What good does it do us here in Baltimore to be funding billions of dollars worth of war crimes in the Philippines?
Vivian Pasion is a Baltimore-based human rights advocate, Educational Officer of the Baltimore Committee for Human Rights in The Philippines, and all around wife-guy. For more information, follow @baltCHRP on Instagram.