WHEN YOUR JOB IS TO RUIN PEOPLE’S LIVES: LORRAINE BADOY, RED-TAGGING, AND WHY NTF-ELCAC MUST BE SHUT DOWN

There is an older draft sitting in my folder that I almost forgot about. I wrote this commentary last year, when the pattern of red-tagging around Lorraine Badoy and NTF-ELCAC already felt impossible to look away from.

I never got to publish it, but the Supreme Court decisions, the civil case win of Atom Araullo, and the Professional Regulation Commission’s six-month suspension of Badoy’s medical license forced me to open it again and update it.

There are days when I scroll through the news and see the same names over and over.

Lorraine Badoy is one of those names, and behind her is the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, better known as NTF-ELCAC.

NTF-ELCAC likes to talk about peace, development, and ending insurgency.

And to be fair, the communist insurgency in the Philippines is real.

The New People’s Army has fought the state for decades, and the grievances that have fed that war, landlessness, poverty, abuse, broken services, and state neglect, are real too.

Any serious government has a duty to deal with both: reduce armed violence and address the reasons people keep getting pushed toward rebellion in the first place.

Helping rebels come home is valid.

Building roads, services, and real livelihoods in forgotten communities is valid.

Welcoming people back into civilian life before the armed group recruits them at the barangay level is a legitimate state goal.

If the government wants to end communist insurgency, it has to give people something better than war.

But when you turn that mandate into a weapon, something breaks.

When the agency tasked with ending insurgency starts targeting people who never held a rifle, never joined an armed unit, and never did anything more threatening than organize workers, defend ancestral land, or criticize the government, the mission has already been corrupted.

That is where the problem with NTF-ELCAC begins, and where it should end too.

WHEN YOUR JOB BECOMES PUBLIC CHARACTER ASSASSINATION

Lorraine Badoy-Partosa was not just some loud commentator on social media.

She was a former spokesperson and public face of NTF-ELCAC, and that distinction is important.

When someone like her speaks from a state-linked platform, she is not speaking as a random citizen throwing opinions into the void.

She speaks with the borrowed force of government behind her, and in this country, that comes with consequences.

From that position, and later from her seat at SMNI, she used the language of counterinsurgency to drag activists, journalists, rights defenders, and even a sitting judge into the label of communist terrorist supporter.

In the Philippine setting, that phrase has never been neutral.

It does not arrive as an insult that hurts and fades.

It arrives as a signal, sometimes to people with guns, sometimes to agencies with watchlists, and sometimes to online followers already primed for hostility.

The Supreme Court has already described her attacks against Manila Regional Trial Court Judge Marlo Magdoza-Malagar as vitriolic statements and outright threats, finding her guilty of indirect contempt for posts that included asking whether it would be acceptable to kill the judge.

What the Court recognized there was something rights groups had been saying for years: the line between political criticism and incitement had been crossed, and someone with a government title crossed it.

Then came the civil case filed by Atom Araullo.

The Quezon City Regional Trial Court ordered Badoy and Jeffrey Celiz to pay around ₱2.08 million in damages after finding that their red-tagging and defamatory statements caused real, documented harm to a journalist’s life, career, and reputation.

[Side comment: nagbayad na kaya sila?]

The Commission on Human Rights called that ruling the first judicial application of a Supreme Court doctrine recognizing red-tagging as a threat to a person’s right to life, liberty, and security.

The case went beyond Atom himself; it tested whether courts in this country would finally treat red-tagging as a weapon rather than a harmless political opinion.

Then the Professional Regulation Commission delivered its own finding.

The PRC Board of Medicine suspended Badoy’s certificate of registration as a physician for six months, finding her guilty of unethical and unprofessional conduct tied to red-tagging health workers.

That broadens the picture considerably.

This is no longer just one controversial government mouthpiece being criticized by activists.

The Supreme Court, a trial court, and the body that licenses doctors in this country all arrived at the same basic conclusion through different channels: her conduct caused harm, and it crossed the line.

WHAT THE COURTS ARE REALLY SAYING ABOUT RED-TAGGING

One thing that often gets buried in these conversations is how far the law has already moved.

In May 2024, in Deduro v. Vinoya, the Supreme Court made something very clear: red-tagging, vilification, labeling, and guilt by association can threaten a person’s right to life, liberty, and security, and courts can issue a writ of amparo (a legal remedy protecting someone from illegal threats to life and freedom) to address it.

For years, red-tagging defenders operated as if the whole thing were just semantics.

Just words.

Just anti-communist truth-telling.

But the Deduro ruling cuts through that framing entirely.

In the Philippine setting, calling someone a communist or terrorist supporter is often part of a chain that leads to surveillance, threats, harassment, arrest, and sometimes death.

The Court knows this.

The Commission on Human Rights has said this.

The victims and their lawyers have been saying this since long before anyone in government was willing to listen.

The legal victories against Badoy show that institutions are finally starting to catch up with the reality victims have lived with for years.

The problem is that the law is moving faster than the political leadership, and that gap is where people keep getting hurt.

NTF-ELCAC AS A MACHINE, NOT JUST A PERSON

It would be easier if this story were only about Lorraine Badoy, because then you could remove one person and pretend the disease was gone.

But Badoy did not invent this environment on her own.

She thrived inside it, and the environment was built deliberately.

NTF-ELCAC was created under Executive Order No. 70, signed by Rodrigo Duterte in December 2018.

That origin is not incidental.

This was not some accidental office that drifted into bad habits over time.

It was built during a presidency that normalized red-tagging, vilification, threats, and the treatment of dissent as a security problem requiring military-style responses.

Karapatan’s 2025 statement calling for abolition says NTF-ELCAC has used billions of pesos in funds to vilify, harass, and endanger legal organizations and individuals, instead of addressing the root causes of conflict.

The Center for Environmental Concerns describes how environmental defenders have been falsely labeled as insurgents, which then opens them to further state attacks.

Amnesty International has called the task force a lost cause, saying the government is funding harassment and attacks against activists instead of abolishing EO 70 and ending red-tagging.

These are not fringe complaints.

They come from well-documented records of harm that have accumulated across years and administrations.

There is also the budget question.

The Commission on Audit flagged millions in NTF-ELCAC funds as unliquidated, with missing supporting documents and suspicious spending under its Barangay Development Program.

An agency that is both a documented rights violator and a misuse-of-funds risk does not look like a peace effort.

It looks like a political and financial instrument wrapped in the language of national security.

IS NTF-ELCAC EVEN NECESSARY

Here is the question that rarely gets asked with enough force: what exactly does NTF-ELCAC do that the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the Philippine National Police, the peace office, social welfare agencies, and local governments cannot already do?

The AFP handles armed operations against insurgent groups.

The PNP handles law enforcement and community security.

The Office of the Presidential Adviser on Peace, Reconciliation and Unity handles negotiations and reintegration.

The Department of Social Welfare and Development handles social services.

Local governments handle community programs.

Coordination mechanisms between these agencies already exist and do not require a separate multibillion-peso task force with a propaganda arm to function.

What NTF-ELCAC adds, beyond what existing institutions already cover, is a centralized anti-communist political machine with a public communications apparatus that can brand civilians as enemies without due process.

If the legitimate parts of its work, rebel reintegration, community development, and peace-building, were transferred to agencies already built for those purposes, the state would lose nothing except the capacity to run that machine.

That is precisely why abolishing it is not a concession to insurgency.

It is basic institutional clean-up.

WHAT MARCOS KEEPS SAYING AND WHY IT DOES NOT HOLD

After the Supreme Court’s Deduro ruling in May 2024, calls for NTF-ELCAC’s abolition grew louder and more specific. Marcos Jr’s response was to say there was no reason to abolish it, and then add something that deserves to be read carefully: “It is not the government that is red-tagging.”

That line tells you a lot about how he governs.

He does not see problems where they mostly are.

When courts, rights groups, unions, and international bodies all point at NTF-ELCAC’s record and say this agency has been used to harass and endanger civilians, Marcos’ first response is to look away and deny the connection.

When the Supreme Court says red-tagging threatens life, liberty, and security, he insists the government is not the source of the problem.

When a Duterte-era structure already carries years of documented abuse, he does not dismantle it.

He funds it more, and in March 2025 he was already planning to ask for additional money in the next budget season.

NTF-ELCAC responded to the Court’s ruling by claiming the decision also favored them, framing their continued labeling of civilians as truth-telling instead of red-tagging.

This kind of language is part of the pattern.

It takes a practice already recognized as dangerous and tries to wash it clean by relabeling it.

The effect on victims does not change because the agency found a softer phrase for what it does.

The danger remains. The target remains. The fear remains.

Marcos chairs NTF-ELCAC. He is not an outside observer weighing the evidence from a neutral distance.

He is defending an agency he directly leads, built by a predecessor he has sometimes tried to distance himself from.

And that creates an obvious question: if he genuinely wants to be different from Duterte, why is he so determined to keep one of Duterte’s most damaging executive orders alive and funded?

There is also a political dimension that rights groups have already flagged.

Karapatan listed what the administration appears comfortable living with: extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, hundreds of political prisoners, and millions of cases of threats and harassment tied to the climate NTF-ELCAC helped shape.

The Center for Trade Union and Human Rights warned that by refusing to abolish NTF-ELCAC, Marcos opens himself to the reasonable suspicion that he finds it useful, whether for surveillance, narrative control, patronage, or managing the political environment before elections.

A task force with a large budget, a national security frame, and a habit of labeling critics as dangerous is not neutral infrastructure.

It is a form of power, and someone benefits from keeping it intact.

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE FROM THE GROUND

Policy talk tends to flatten everything.

From a distance, red-tagging can look like a legal dispute or a media controversy.

From the ground, it is more personal and more constant than that.

It is the feeling of checking whether your name has started circulating in the wrong circles.

It is the quiet calculation that a post, a speech, a labor complaint, or an environmental campaign may have changed how the police or military see you.

It is ordinary civic life being reprocessed through the language of internal enemy management.

Some people relocate.

Some change routines.

Some stop attending meetings, not because they stopped believing in what they were doing, but because they have families and the risk is no longer abstract.

Some keep going anyway, but with a persistent awareness that someone somewhere has already decided what category they belong to.

When officials insist red-tagging is only an argument over words, they are describing something that victims experience as a daily calculation about safety.

The reputational damage is real.

The fear is real.

The danger is real, and it has been recognized as real by the highest court in the country.

WHY NTF-ELCAC MUST BE DEFUNDED AND SHUT DOWN

The case for abolition is no longer difficult to make.

You have court decisions recognizing red-tagging as a threat to fundamental rights.

You have documented patterns of abuse across years.

You have a task force born under Duterte, protected under Marcos, and built on a record that includes harassment, misused funds, and the consistent targeting of civilians.

You have a structure whose supposed good functions can already be carried out by existing agencies without the abusive machinery attached.

Abolishing NTF-ELCAC does not mean surrendering to communist insurgency.

The state can and should respond to armed rebellion through legitimate security and peace-building channels.

But a democratic state does not defend itself by treating its own citizens as presumptive enemies, labeling legal advocacy as terrorism, and running a propaganda operation funded by public money.

Transfer the legitimate reintegration, development, and peace-building functions to agencies that already exist and can be held to clearer standards of accountability. Rescind EO 70.

Remove the political machine from the process, and then hold the people who ran that machine accountable for what they did with it.

WHERE THIS LEAVES MARCOS

My issue with Bongbong Marcos is not simply that he refuses to dismantle NTF-ELCAC.

It is that he refuses to see what is already plainly visible in court decisions, audit reports, rights investigations, and the accumulated experience of thousands of people whose lives were disrupted by red-tagging.

He does not see problems where they mostly are, and at this point, after this many rulings and reports and documented cases of harm, that refusal to see starts to look less like an honest disagreement about evidence and more like a deliberate choice about whose harm is worth acknowledging.

If Marcos genuinely sees NTF-ELCAC as a peace mechanism rather than a political instrument, then the courts, the Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty, Karapatan, the United Nations, and the victims are all wrong.

That is a very wide circle of error to defend, and it gets harder to defend every time a new judgment, sanction, or audit finding arrives.

Lorraine Badoy may be the loudest face in this story.

Duterte may have signed the executive order that created the machinery.

But Marcos, through deliberate refusal to dismantle it, has made the damage his own.

And for those of us who wake up, check the news, and still choose to write, that is something we cannot afford to ignore.