Category: Opinion

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#Bulatlat20: 20 years of of fearless reporting on human and people’s rights in the Philippines

#Bulatlat’s human rights reporting is true to its name – to search, probe, investigate, inquire, unearth facts. Its stories chronicle the facts, circumstances and travails of human rights victims, as individuals and collectively, while providing the political and socio-economic contexts. Cite any human rights case in the past twenty years and google them to look for accurate, well-written and relevant stories pertaining to these cases, and you may most probably find them on #Bulatlat’s website.

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Opinion | In defense of our red (tagged) comrades in the ivory tower!

These red (tagged) comrades were not responsible for the phasing out of jeepneys, for rampant violations of human rights, for the collapse of our agriculture. They took up arms precisely because they know that the peaceful means to achieve genuine social change is irresolvable in the current existing system. They realized that it was the existing system, which is unsustainable, that is utopian rather than the alternative future that they were willing to die for. They were not dreamers! They were realistic! Like the 1968 French student rebellion, they demanded the impossible!

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Opinion | Sonya Gregorio’s ‘I don’t care’ as subversion

That the explicitly murderous rhetoric of, and the culture of impunity bred by Duterte has enabled this atrocity, is a glaring fact of our current life. From injunctions like “… kaunting pagkakamali lang barilin mo na,” to promises that no policemen would ever go to jail, everything that Duterte has been saying and doing has provided the very conditions for these atrocities to emerge and fester.

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What is the weight of a monument?

Like the Bantayog ng mga Bayani memorial in Quezon City, dedicated to a wide segment of Martial Law martyrs from community leaders such as Dulag to fighters of the New People’s Army in resisting the Marcos dictatorship, or the 1933 Bonifacio Monument in Caloocan honoring revolutionary heroes of the Katipunan who fought for independence from Spanish rule, the Anti-Chico Dam Struggle monument represents a step foward in committing our histories of resistance to public memory in more permanent form. To demolish it would be a grave disrespect of cultural and social history at the very least.

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