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A year since the world’s longest and strictest lockdown was imposed, health workers here in the Philippines are still dying due to the dreaded virus – the latest is a unionist in a government hospital.
“How can [the judiciary] distance themselves [from the police action] if they themselves signed the documents used to make the operations seem legitimate?” - Defend Southern Tagalog
The assumption that education at the basic level should go far beyond the conventional essentials should inform the country’s return to face-to-face classes. Because not everyone can go on to college — where it is presumed that imparting a commitment to civic responsibility and respect for the Bill of Rights are part of the curricula (but often are not) — developing among the young the capacity to make informed decisions as citizens charged with deciding the future of this country should be among the fundamentals of basic education.
The Calabarzon killings were actually the latest of the killings that have provoked such condemnation. Still unresolved are the killings of nine Tumandok indigenous community members in similar police operations in Panay Island last Dec. 30, the attempted slaying of the Tumandoks’ lawyer in Iloilo, as well as the killing by police anti-drug operatives of the mayor of Calbayog City.
"The arrest came days after the DILG release a memorandum tagging ACT and other progressive groups in the public sector as a communist terrorist groups."
Once the aerotropolis is built, the hazards of the storm surfaces and high tide would be more pronounced - especially since we’re in the Philippines, a country hit by tens of typhoons a year. And this will only get worse as storms get more violent and sea levels rise due to climate change - and in fact, destroying mangrove trees release tons of carbon dioxide due stored in their soils.
“Domestic remedies have been ineffective at providing redress and at halting continued abuses. The power imbalance between victims of state violence, and perpetrators who have the backing of government apparatuses, is grave. Structures to redress this imbalance are lacking.”
“Not only is it an underhanded threat against Judge Quisumbing-Ignacio, it also seeks to undermine the independence of all judges and the courts handling similar cases.”
“Such huge debts but we never got even five kilos of rice. And we will be the ones to pay those debts through our taxes. My grand-grand children might end up paying for those.”
"Duterte failed. Duque failed. They should be held accountable."
“Time and again, we have reminded authorities that neither the pandemic nor their grave ignorance of the law or dumb over-zealousness is an excuse to trample upon basic rights and curtail freedoms.” -- NUPL
Instead of addressing homelessness, the Philippine government has recently lifted its earlier memorandum, ordering the postponement of demolition and eviction of poor communities.
She graduated in 2014 feeling on top of the world, not because she was one step closer to escaping the life she left behind in Batangas, but because she finally understood her role as a daughter and a daughter of the nation.
While government officials and personalities have breached protocols and got away with it, nearly 600,000 Filipinos, mostly poor, have been warned, ticketed, fined, and charged over quarantine violations.
Exactly a week since the "Bloody Sunday," our Southern Tagalog correspondent Justin Umali sits down for a huntahan to discuss the context behind the series of police operations that killed nine, and arrested three.
For weeks now, the Philippines is experiencing a surge in the number of daily COVID-19 cases. The government, however, is responding to the pandemic as if it were only yesterday – still clueless, still grappling, still militarist.
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