TAKING cue from the most recent pronouncement of a top Palace official, the government sees the proliferation of community pantries across the archipelago as a well-orchestrated scenario, and not as spontaneous or random act of kindness.
No less than National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon made the confirmation a day after the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) admitted doing some background check on the persons behind the sprawling community pantries giving away food to the needy.
According to Esperon, himself a former Armed Forces of the Philippines chief of staff, the government was looking at possible links of community pantry organizers with some rebel groups even as he claimed that some persons are planning to “weaponize” the community pantries as part of their agenda to destabilize the government.
“We also look into organizers especially if they advertise their organization that would be traced to the legal fronts of the front organization of the CPP-NPA. We would also like to look into possible participation of personalities that may have other agenda that may tend to turn these projects for political and agitational purposes,” Esperon was quoted as saying in a press briefing with reporters.
Community pantry organizers on Monday assailed what they aptly referred to as red-tagging by the NTF-ELCAC, and expressed fear for their safety amid the profiling of local policemen and social media posts dragging them as communists.
It was then that the Maginhawa community pantry organizer Ana Patricia Non temporarily closed the pilot kiosk, which resumed a day after the Quezon City government guaranteed her safety.
Esperon has denied profiling of the community pantry organizers. “We are not investigating. We are just looking into it. But investigation is already something else that you would call, and get statements. Iba na ‘yun,” Esperon noted.