It was back in September 2021 when Jazmin “Minet” Aguisanda-Jerusalem received a phone call from some farmers that her NGO was helping outside the eastern Philippine city of Tacloban. “They said, ‘the Army is telling us to come and stage a rally outside your office,’” recalls Minet, the executive director of the Leyte Center for Development (LCDE), which provides humanitarian relief to the region’s poorest. “The Army even said they will provide transportation and food.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]As beneficiaries of the LCDE, the farmers were reluctant to attend. But then Minet began receiving more phone calls from friendly journalists saying they had been “invited” to cover the protest. Sure enough, that Sept. 21 around 20 bewildered people turned up and fastened placards to her office gates that had all clearly been written by the same hand that accused the NGO of supporting local communist rebels. “Apparently, some people were forced to attend,” Minet tells TIME.
It wasn’t the first sign of brewing trouble for the LCDE, which provides livelihood emergency aid, including rain gauges, sleeping mats, blankets, solar lamps, and other equipment to better prepare for typhoons or floods, to around 3,000 families comprising 21,000 people annually.
By highlighting lapses in public services, the LCDE had occasionally rubbed up against officialdom, and Minet had received regular intimidation and occasional death threats. The fact that the LCDE works in arcane mountainous regions of the Philippines where rebel groups also operate had periodically been used as a cudgel by security forces looking for a scapegoat. “Maybe the state armed forces put us in the same basket as the community whom they believe are supporting the rebels,” says Minet.
But overall, their relations with the government were robust as evidenced by several high-profile awards. But what had been a periodic annoyance became crippling last May when five bank accounts of the LCDE and related persons—including Minet and her son, who is not even an employee—were suddenly frozen by the national Anti-Money Laundering Council.
Also frozen were the bank accounts of two suppliers where the LCDE sources relief donations and even a local mechanic where they had recently got their Toyota Hilux repaired at a cost of some $300. While intimidation is sadly par for the course for local NGOs in the Philippines, the freezing of the bank accounts was devastating. The authorities even rescinded the Hilux’s vehicle registration so they would have no way to reach far-flung villages.
The LCDE case was bizarre in many ways but none more so that no criminal case was filed for six months after their accounts were frozen. And when charges for financing terrorism were brought against Minet the following November, the prosecutor dismissed them a month later for lack of evidence. But their accounts remained frozen, and in February three more charges of terrorism financing were levied against Minet so that she was forced to post 600,000 pesos ($10,500) bail. Mounting challenges were making it more and more difficult to keep fighting. After 37 years of helping society’s most vulnerable, “We’ve had to stop operations,” says Minet.
The Philippines has a long and unfortunate history of NGOs under attack. In 2023, it was the most dangerous country for climate activists, accounting for 17 of 197 murdered or “disappeared” worldwide.
That nadir occurred under the term of autocratic ex-President Rodrigo Duterte, under whom climate activists were often “red-tagged,” which refers to the labeling of individuals or organizations as communists, subversives, or terrorists to discredit and silence them. After Duterte came to power he formed the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, or NTF-ELCAC, as part of a “whole of nation” effort to finally quash leftist rebel groups. However, the true targets were often indigenous leaders, anti-mining advocates, environmental restoration campaigners, and community organizers.
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In February 2020, Marissa Cabaljao, the spokesperson of People Surge, a network of disaster survivors also in Tacloban, was arrested and charged with terrorism offenses after a raid at her office. She has lived in hiding away from her family ever since.
Marinel Sumook Ubaldo was also red-tagged under Duterte when at 22 she organized the Philippines’ first youth climate strike in 2019. Today, she works in Washington D.C. for the League of Conservation Voters environmental advocacy group and has testified on climate issues at the U.N. and U.S. Senate. “The scary thing was they also tried to intimidate my family, telling my parents to get me to stop,” she tells TIME. “And even our local government unit was part of those people that were intimidating me.”
Despite the new administration of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. declaring “red-tagging” would end, the practice of using terrorism charges has become more widespread, say human-rights groups. “While red-tagging is not as bad as during Duterte’s time, ‘terror-tagging’ has worsened,” says Carlos Conde, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch based in Manila. “That’s the most worrisome part.”
The Philippine Justice Department didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment from TIME for this story, although the Marcos administration has previously denied red-tagging. However, the reason behind the surge in terrorist-related prosecutions is an open secret.
In June 2021, a year before Marcos came to power, the Philippines was placed on the inter-governmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF) “grey list” due to a lax approach to countering money laundering and the financing of terrorism, meaning the country was subject to increased monitoring and potential economic penalties. Suddenly, prosecuting these crimes was thrust to the top of the security agenda and every ambitious army and police official was incentivized to find easy targets. The presumption is that job security—as well as promotions, funding, and possibly bonuses—were linked to progress on this score. At last count, some 64 NGOs across the Philippines are facing criminal charges including financing terrorism or even murder.
“It’s about money,” says Minet. “We’re just pawns in this numbers game.”
The targeting of NGOs and activists is especially damaging given the Philippines is consistently ranked as among the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change. “Local partnerships are eroded when NGOs or grassroots groups are red-tagged,” says Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the Philippine Red Cross. “The shrinking of the civic space makes climate and environmental organizations reluctant to engage in public discourse for fear of reprisal.”
But the Philippines is far from an isolated case. Minet’s experiences follow a worrying pattern of civil society from Australia and India to the U.K. reporting dwindling space and more legal hurdles to their advocacy. Even the U.S. is not immune. President Donald Trump’s gutting of USAID has ripped some $75 billion from the world’s poorest people, including $104 million from the Philippines, while his withdrawal from the WHO stands to slash some 12% from the organization’s $6.8 billion annual budget. But perhaps more damaging has been his administration’s assault on critics—especially foreign students and even green card holders—that has cast a pall over climate activism in the world’s top economy, not least since Trump once again withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement.
“This is not even Duterte 2.0,” says Ubaldo of the current climate of fear engulfing environmental advocacy in D.C. “This is 10 times what we experienced in the Philippines. I don’t feel safe here.”
It’s a feeling shared some 8,500 miles away by Minet, who had her latest court hearing on Thursday, when the judge indicated she would rule on a petition to dismiss at their next hearing on July 14. In bitter irony, the Philippines was removed from the FATF grey list in February, yet the “persecution,” as Minet puts it, of environmental NGOs continues to spiral.
“President Marcos is trying to tell the diplomatic and international community that all is well in his administration,” says Minet. “But our situation is getting worse. Our voice needs to be heard.”
