While waiting for the government’s stingy and slow aid, they have to activate their survival mode by pooling their resources to help each other. All these, the people have to do amid militaristic community quarantines. And as they say when it rains it pours, calamities from typhoons, earthquakes, farm infestation, among others, did not stop afflicting communities.
“During our meetings, he told us of his experience in Carbon during his younger years as an activist. He would sleep at Carbon,” a vendor said in Cebuano. “His enthusiasm in helping us was clear to us because he was always early and the first to arrive during our meetings.”
Described by the health department as “the first batch of fund transfers,” the P311.79-million ($6.2 million) SRA funds is a measly 2.6 percent of the unused P11.9-billion ($238.2 million) allocated for health workers’ Special Risk Allowance and Hazard Pay, which the Commission on Audit recently flagged.
A group of human rights lawyers in the Philippines said that the “overwhelming support” that the International Criminal Court received from approximately 1,530 individual victims and 1,050 families who fell victims of the government’s “war on drugs” may lead to a formal investigation.
“There is no excuse for the State to commit any form of human rights violation against any of its citizens, including Human Rights Defenders. Thus, the red-tagging of Northern Dispatch as a creation of the CPP and its personnel as communist front personalities constitutes human rights violations.”
Human rights group Karapatan documented 19 victims of enforced disappearances under the Duterte administration. This despite the Anti-Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance Act of 2012 supposedly in force.
“Karapatan-Central Visayas expresses indignation over another attempt of the state to withhold the body of a peasant rights advocate from her family…”
Kerima, after witnessing so much brutality wielded by the state against the rural poor, decided to take up arms. “She might have chosen a different form of struggle but she had the same revolutionary objective: to break the land monopoly of landlords and big corporations,” UMA said.
Various groups have called on the public to remain vigilant over public spending and the politicizing of government programs amid the still poor pandemic response and the looming national elections next year.
A total of P124.65 billion ($2.5 billion) were flagged from these nine government agencies alone, which could have been used to provide 12.4 million pandemic-hit families with much-needed aid amounting to P10,000 ($200).
Basta aktibista, markado ng estado.