From 2016 to 2019 alone, the public health program’s total budget allocation has been reduced significantly, varying from 15-percent to 28-percent cut.
For one, the budget for Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, the lead public hospital in the government’s effort to address the looming outbreak, has been slashed from P263 million in 2019 to P115 million in 2020.
“The police and military have mastered the art of preparing false documents to justify the filing of fabricated charges.”
The counterinsurgency policy is not only targeted against the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New People’s Army (NPA) but against perceived supporters or any groups standing in the way of the administration’s political and economic interests.
With all its pretensions for peace and development, Duterte’s counterinsurgency is brutal to the core.
In other parts of Samar and Leyte, and in the provinces of Bicol and Negros island, farmers like Pajares find themselves targets of the military’s counterinsurgency operations. The three areas were cited in President Duterte’s Memorandum Order No. 32, issued exactly a year ago, and which purportedly aims to quell “lawless violence.”
The hundreds of thousands of LRT-2 commuters affected by the shutdown are at the mercy of, to the say the least, an inefficient government agency and its inept private contractors that profit millions of pesos in taxpayers’ and commuters’ money.
The island of Negros has long been militarized supposedly to obliterate the revolutionary group Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People’s Army.
“They would call us, three or four at a time, sometimes to the barangay hall, sometimes to the municipal hall. The interrogations would start from 10 a.m. and end 10 p.m., no breaks.”
“He has not been pro-Filipino in his relations with US and China, not just in military affairs but even in the country’s economic affairs.”
Human rights group Karapatan documented 250 victims of extrajudicial killings and 10 victims of enforced disappearances from July 2016 until March this year. Moreover, nearly 370,000 civilians were affected by military bombings and 450,000 have evacuated due to military operations, Karapatan data showed.
While the government is riding on the popular call for cleanup of Manila Bay, harnessing free labor of volunteers for fishing out thrash in Manila Bay, it is, on the other hand, disproportionately blaming the poor and seeking their demolition in favor of reclamation plans and other real estate development.