On New Yr’s Day 2026, Occidental Mindoro’s Barangay Cabacao witnessed a devastating act of state violence. An aerial bombardment and strafing operation by the Armed Forces of the Philippines killed 5 civilians – three Mangyan-Iraya kids and two scholar researchers – displaced 188 households, and led to the disappearance of 24-year-old Chantal Anicoche.
State authorities, led by the Nationwide Process Drive to Finish Native Communist Armed Battle (NTF-ELCAC), justified the assault as a counterinsurgency operation towards the New Individuals’s Military. But this framing obscures a extra troubling actuality: Cabacao sits inside a mineral-rich area the place Indigenous resistance has lengthy challenged the return of environmentally harmful mining operations, together with these linked to Agusan Petroleum. What’s introduced as “safety” is, in impact, the violent clearing of Indigenous land for extractive business.
This incident isn’t remoted. It exemplifies the Philippines’ entrenched apply of “red-tagging” – the systematic branding of Indigenous Peoples, activists, and environmental defenders as “communists” or “terrorists.” Enabled by the Anti-Terrorism Act (2020) and operationalized by means of our bodies such because the NTF-ELCAC, red-tagging creates the authorized and political circumstances for surveillance, harassment, and deadly power.
Nonetheless, what is commonly ignored is how local weather disinformation now features as a vital amplifier of this repression.
Local weather disinformation doesn’t merely mislead public understanding of environmental points. Within the Philippine context, it’s strategically deployed to bolster red-tagging narratives, portraying Indigenous resistance to mining, vitality, and infrastructure tasks as each anti-development and a risk to nationwide safety. By recasting environmental defenders as obstacles to “sustainable improvement” and even as “terrorists,” local weather disinformation supplies the ideological justification for state violence.
This convergence is deliberate. Narratives crafted by state actors and echoed by segments of the media falsely depict extractive tasks as “inexperienced” or “essential local weather options,” whereas concurrently criminalizing those that oppose them. In doing so, local weather disinformation transforms professional environmental protection right into a safety risk – thereby legitimizing coercion, militarization, and even extrajudicial violence.
The results are stark. The Philippines is the deadliest nation in Asia for environmental defenders and ranks fifth globally. Between 2012 and 2023, 298 environmental defenders have been killed, together with 17 in 2023 alone. Indigenous Peoples, who make up a disproportionate share of these killed, are on the heart of this violence.
On the similar time, the intensifying local weather disaster deepens Indigenous vulnerability. Ranked first globally for pure hazard danger in 2025, the Philippines exposes forest-dwelling Indigenous Peoples – already dealing with socio-economic marginalization – to heightened dangers of displacement, meals insecurity, and lack of livelihood. This makes the weaponization of local weather narratives towards them significantly insidious: these most affected by local weather change are recast as its enemies.
Asia Centre’s newest report, “Local weather Disinformation within the Philippines: Legitimizing Assaults on Indigenous Peoples,” identifies 4 key types of disinformation driving this dynamic: the fabrication of Indigenous consent; greenwashing of extractive tasks; promotion of false local weather options; and the deflection of state and company accountability.
Every of those mechanisms instantly reinforces red-tagging and its violent penalties.
First, portraying extractive tasks as “sustainable” whereas labeling Indigenous opposition as “terrorism” permits army coercion beneath the guise of improvement and local weather motion. Second, manipulated session processes – mixed with disinformation that obscures environmental hurt – facilitate pressured displacement from ancestral lands. Third, conspiracy narratives scapegoat Indigenous Peoples and activists, legitimizing authorized persecution beneath counterterrorism frameworks. Lastly, by framing resistance as a nationwide safety risk, these narratives create a local weather of impunity wherein enforced disappearances and killings grow to be justifiable.
Taken collectively, these patterns reveal an important perception: local weather disinformation isn’t incidental however instrumental. It’s a strategic instrument that strengthens red-tagging, aligns state violence with company pursuits, and normalizes the militarization of Indigenous territories.
The Philippine authorities’s “Entire-of-Nation” strategy exemplifies this convergence. Whereas ostensibly designed as a holistic safety framework, it has institutionalized the militarization of resource-rich Indigenous lands. Local weather disinformation sustains this mannequin by offering its ideological spine – casting extractive improvement as local weather motion, and Indigenous resistance as terrorism.
Purple-tagging, on this context, should be understood not solely as a safety apply however as a type of local weather disinformation in itself. It operates as a coordinated system that delegitimizes Indigenous claims, protects extractive industries, and permits state violence.
Considered by means of this lens, the Cabacao New Yr’s Bloodbath isn’t an aberration. It’s the predictable final result of a system wherein disinformation, militarization, and financial pursuits converge.
Addressing this violence due to this fact requires greater than condemning particular person incidents. It calls for dismantling the narratives that maintain them. So long as local weather disinformation continues to border Indigenous Peoples as enemies of improvement and safety, it’s going to stay a robust instrument for justifying their displacement, criminalization, and deaths.
This op-ed relies on Asia Centre’s report “Local weather Disinformation within the Philippines: Legitimising Assaults on Indigenous Peoples.” Obtain the total report right here. For extra details about Asia Centre, go to https://www.asiacentre.org.
