To the brink

Former president Rodrigo Duterte.

"To the brink" was also published by The Manila Times on 7 February 2024.

Former president Rodrigo Duterte has a reputation of being a strong man and a strong mouth, although no one could tell which one preceded the other.

At a “prayer” rally in Davao held on 28 January 2024, he was at his usual blabbering self as he denounced attempts to change the constitution through people’s initiative.

He addressed the troublemakers and prepped a junta-like takeover by the military:

“Wala kayong prinsipyo, mukhang pera kayong lahat. 'Yan ang totoo. Kaya ang gusto ko pag nagka-letse-letse na, pumasok ang military…palitan ninyo lahat, arestuhin ninyo kasi nagsasayang ng pera at yung ginagastos nila is a fraud. Swindling ang ginawa nila. You must account for the wasted money or the money that you bought the signature of the Filipino…bribery."

Reminiscent of his calling Richard Gordon being “a fart away from disaster,” he asked: “Bakit pumasok sa utak ninyo 'yang people’s initiative? Anong nakain ninyo? There’s nothing wrong with the Constitution right now." He charged that the true agenda of people behind the people’s initiative was to perpetuate themselves in power.

In his diatribe against Gordon, who was a sitting senator at the time and had criticized him for the series of appointments of retired military officials to key civilian positions in government, Duterte was referencing brain cells that dripped towards the visceral parts, ready to bomb out as the dreaded smelly air. Gordon also chaired the Senate committee that probed anomalies in the procurement of COVID 19 supplies involving Pharmally Corporation, eventually drafting a report that recommended the filing of plunder charges against Duterte, among others, as soon as he stepped out of office.  

In keeping with the grain of the metaphor, the two separate public rallies two Sundays ago had the flair of two camps trying to out-fart each other. Another serving of that kind could well drive either of them to the brink of aborting a partisan union, if a divorce has not yet happened, flirting disaster for a political marriage that has been arranged for convenience in the first place.

One wonders why these show of forces—one organized by Malacañang in Manila and the other by a Malacañang-like overlord in Davao—needed to be mounted on the same day when both camps had at least 700 days left in the calendar to square off for the next mid-term elections. The inuendo is that neither event was a prayer rally nor a kick-off blast, but one to sieve which of the freeloading minions were friend or foe. The likes of Gloria Arroyo and other prominent politicians that joined Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr.  in the Manila rally have been known to aim for the best of both worlds, but the required logistics kept them from wielding the perfect art and the practice of traditional politics. 

The opposition to charter change is best left at the hands of anyone other than Duterte. While in power, he tried but failed to revise the constitution. In 2019 media interview, he called the 1987 Constitution provision on the country’s exclusive economic zone “senseless and thoughtless,” further defaming it as a piece of “toilet paper.”

The use of what his spokesperson described as yet another metaphor came out in the context of a 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruling that “China’s claim—including its nine-dash line, recent land reclamation activities, and other activities in Philippine waters—were unlawful.” China trashed the ruling and, consistent with its snub of the proceedings that led to the decision, did not recognize PCA’s jurisdiction on the issue, a position that China has since defended by taking bullying and aggressive actions to the detriment of the Philippine government’s exercise of sovereignty.

The treacherous bent of the man showed throughout the whole time he represented the country. But no one in Congress dared to impeach him, probably out of fear from losing either physical or financial wellbeing, or both.

Two days after his expletive-littered rant, he called for the secession of Mindanao from a sovereign country whose constitution provides that its territorial integrity is inviolable.

When he was president, he bombed Marawi City to its ground to kill rebels who espoused the same cause. What makes Duterte and the Maute group different is that the latter employed arms to achieve their ends, although he reportedly got licenses for more than 300 firearms two weeks before he stepped down from office.

Duterte warned that President Marcos, Jr. risked being ousted from power unless the latter stopped the charter change drive, perhaps suggesting that public opposition to it constitutes the magnitude of the 1986 people power revolution that toppled the government of his father, the late Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. Despite the obscene manner by which the people’s initiative has been undertaken, I would think that the warning seems presumptuous at this point. The Joseph Estrada parallel is closer to this case—he who fell from power on account of greed and betrayal among friends.    

I would also attribute to friendship as the force that allowed the burial of the late president Marcos, Sr. at the Libingan ng Bayani, as well as the dodging from jail time for convicts like his wife Imelda Marcos and those charged for plunder like Jinggoy Estrada, Juan Ponce Enrile, Gloria Arroyo, among others. 

The charge that Bongbong Marcos Jr. is a drug addict, debunked promptly by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), was probably meant to mount a compelling call to action.

Duterte knows if he has been lying all his life, otherwise he discriminates if his drug war killed thousands of drug suspects while the one he believes is a user beyond doubt lives another day to in fact rose to succeed him. In the end, whether he or PDEA is a liar is of lesser consequence than the troubled mind his blabbering strong mouth has exposed.   

President Marcos rebrands his administration

The harder the government presses to sell “Bagong Pilipinas” (New Philippines), the easier it is to recall old, broken promises. 

A few months after President Bongbong Marcos assumed office, he issued an Executive Order and a Memorandum Circular launching the “Bagong Pilipinas Campaign as the Administration's Brand of Governance and Leadership.” Dated 3 July 2023, the Circular defines Bagong Pilipinas as “the overarching theme of the administration’s brand of governance and leadership, which calls for deep and fundamental transformations in all sectors of society and government and fosters the State’s commitment towards the attainment of comprehensive policy reforms and full economic recovery.” The directive also calls for all national government agencies to use communication tools with the “Bagong Pilipinas” logo.

The punch line of a well-received State of the Nation Address he delivered before Congress on the same month proclaimed that the “Bagong Pilipinas has arrived”. 

Amusing how the organizers of the event at the Luneta on 28 January 2023 could call it “kick-off rally” when Malacañang has already kicked around much of the pre-selling. It was a show meant to entertain a crowd. However, instead of charging fees for those who wished to be entertained by it, some were paid just to make themselves available to become part of the audience. They even lured the destitute which, in another place, should be a win for humanity. Prior to the event, the Presidential Communications Office (PCO) announced that the Department of Social Welfare and Development would distribute cash to beneficiaries of its Assistance to Individuals in Crisis Situations program.

Reports said that by the time President Bongbong Marcos stood up to deliver his speech (serving as the highlight of the event, everything else were mounted to lead eyes and ears to it), crowd estimates ranged from 200,000 to 450,000. Among other things, he told the crowd that ‘sa Bagong Pilipinas, bawal ang waldas’ (in English, wasteful spending is not allowed in New Philippines, or something to that effect) in a show that cost the taxpayers at least Php29 million, according to PCO records. Of these expenses, Php5.3 went for “Entertainment Services”. It will probably take an eternity for the Commission on Audit months to count the total cost spent for per diems given to government employees who were required join the rally as these kinds of expenses are normally not reported as such.

What marketing for the new brand does is present an improvement offer, which forces people to admit past failures. The future of Bagong Pilipinas struggles to glimmer against the backdrop not only of a predecessor’s rule who envisioned a “Bagong Lipunan” (New Society), but also by the profile of a profligate, lying, and allegedly thieving younger version of the successor.

Reconciling the fresh rebrand with the mascot’s record is a challenging task. Marcos Jr. has been known for his profligate spending while attending college abroad, also at the taxpayers’ expense of course, which included support for a party-going lifestyle, watching Formula 1 races and rock band concerts, an addiction that he indulges in up to this day. Just recently, he watched an out-of-town concert using a publicly funded chopper for transport.

He claimed to have earned a bachelor’s degree at Oxford University in London, only to balk when the school debunked the accuracy of the claim.

Citing a Supreme Court decision, a former commissioner of the now-moribund Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) said during the 2022 electoral campaign period that then presidential candidate Bongbong Marcos was responsible for “hiding the wealth his family unlawfully acquired during the administration of his late father.” A 2003 Supreme Court ruling established the "undeniable circumstances" and an "avalanche" of documentary evidence against the Marcoses who, the same ruling said, “failed to prove they lawfully acquired $658 million plus interest deposited in Swiss bank accounts.”

An article featured in the University of the Philippines’ Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies published photocopies of Swiss Credit Bank documents that showed his parents (Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and Imelda Marcos) had signed with fictitious names as William Saunders and Jane Ryan, respectively. An account with Citibank in New York in the name of Fernanda Vazquez has also been suspected of being owned by Imelda.

The PCGG estimated that the Marcos family's ill-gotten wealth amounted to billions of US dollars, from a low of 5 billion to a high of 10 billion. The government has reportedly recovered a total of Php170 billion (or around 3 billion dollars in today’s exchange rate) of the stained money since 1986.

When the late Ferdinand Marcos Sr. became president in 1965, the Philippines and South Korea have almost identical Gross Domestic Product per capita incomes. Since then and up to the point of his outer in 1986, World Bank data in current US dollar shows that South Korea’s per capita annual income had risen to $ 2,800, while that of the Philippines wallowed at $600. The average in the rural areas was even worse, hovering at about $100. (For context though: the widening gap between the two countries accelerated even after the Marcos Sr. years, suggesting that Marcos was not entirely the problem.) Equally noteworthy were his outputs in putting up infrastructures, although mostly funded by scandal-marred foreign borrowings) which continue to provide public benefits up to this day.     

Governments at all levels, regardless of who the president is, have never been corrupt free, yet even dirty money may find its way back into the hands of honest labor, helping stimulate economic activity in poor communities. What distinguished corruption during the Marcos Sr. era was that his cronies brought their loot out of the country at the first sign of incoming turbulent weather, perhaps typified by the Dewey Dee caper in 1981. Reportedly fronting Marcos Sr., Dee left the country with millions of unpaid debts, igniting a bank run that further stomped the economy already wobbly under the weight of kleptocracy and overall public distrust in his administration. Inflation rate in 1984 leveled at 50 percent, and as what pollster Mahar Mangahas described as a rare mood meter reading, the pessimists (30 percent) outnumbered the optimists (26 percent).

And yet recovering the stolen money was not the biggest issue then, contrary to what many cash-strapped Filipinos would want history to be written; it may not still be even now. While much of the hidden wealth issue remains unresolved and the stealing of public funds remains rampant up to this day, it is the murder of people that hurts the soul of the nation. The wounds inflicted by state-sanctioned summary killings are beyond healing; the psyche that drives the killings today are likely to be farts (to use a Rodrigo Duterte metaphor) of a residual anger generated by armed conflicts that happened during the dark days of martial law. We have seen enough to know that summary killings and other quick fixes of law enforcement that oversteps due process create more problems than what they intend to address.

The present administration has so much work to do to address the failures of the past, particularly in the protection and promotion of human rights. Facing up to the same broadside of mass murder that blighted the Duterte administration will determine if Bagong Pilipinas is true to its meaning or, like the kick-off rally, it is all for show.

A market-driven church

The Manila Times cartoon on 21 February 2024

"A Market Drive Church" was also published by The Manila Times on 21 February 2024.

Asked which commandment in the law is the greatest, Jesus Christ replied: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." The increasing number of mall chapels, like many innovative reforms that are in the works in the Catholic Church today, is indicative of a ministry that tries to keep in touch with the times. However, the other somewhat dissenting commentary may also suggest of signs that we are loving our God with half of our heart, a third of our soul, and a fourth of our mind.

Two years ago, the Archdiocese of Manila launched a mission chapel at Landmark, right at the heart of Makati's business district. In a mass, His Excellency Manila Archbishop Jose F. Cardinal Advincula told the chapel goers:

"Although your residence is not here in the mall, your “lived space” is spent here because of work or because of the mobility of your lifestyle. The church wants to be close to you. She wants to accompany you where you are and whenever you need her maternal guidance."

By "work" Bishop Advincula could be referring to entrepreneurs and wage earners who must work on a Sunday and are therefore unable to attend Sunday masses in their respective parishes. Firms in service-oriented industries like parlors, restaurants, grocery stores, payment centers, clinics, among many other outlets, get most of their customers on weekends; opting to close these establishments on the Lord’s Day can mean leaving so much money on the table. The unspoken word is that money is God, to be loved with all our heart.

Globalization has further reshaped the workplace. Call center agents, for example, who are attending to overseas clients need to work outside "normal" working hours. Companies with offshore counterparts adjust to work hours and workdays in other countries.

By "mobility of lifestyle" the bishop was probably referring to several things, including what has been called "mall culture." The country is home to a thousand shopping malls. These malls have dominated the urban landscape and captured the fancy of city dwellers. It is indicative of how consumerism has transformed the local lifestyle. For decades now, the country's economy has been propelled in large part by domestic consumption.

The theological basis for the church mission in malls shifts from a focus on people going to places of worship to one that brings the ministry to people. The church sees a community in malls; therefore, it must send its ministers to attend to the spiritual needs of the flock in these communities. Where the COVID 19 pandemic has given rise to the phenomenon of virtual worship, changing lifestyles are giving occasion for redefining physical space and the way the communities are making the places of worship evolve.

It used to be that the physical structure of worship stands out at the center of the town, often across the municipal hall. Such a landmark symbolizes the community’s unequalled love for God. Mall chapels, being a fixture within a larger structure of commerce, symbolize the subjugation of the love of God to the love of money.

But one can find redemption in holy masses being heard in malls. Not too long ago, believers went to mass in their "Sunday's best." Now, in my local parish, I can see parishioners coming to mass in sandals, wearing shorts and tees, not much unlike the one who just bought suka from the sari-sari-store. This is not by any means a way to judge anybody, because how we praise God cannot be measured by how we look. But if I were hosting a party, I would prefer the partygoers to show more respect. And the Lord our God is host of every eucharistic celebration. In that sense masses in malls are to be uniquely valued because people tend to dress better inside malls than inside a local parish church. 

Again, how we dress up and how the physical structure of the church is built are just symbols that do not necessarily reflect the true value of our relationship with God. But if we go solely by them, there is doubt if indeed we love the Lord Our God with all our heart, our soul, our strength, and our mind.

Bringing the ministry of the church closer to the people justifies how Jesus reached out to all, sinners and saints alike. He did not wait for people to come to him, he delivered God’s word to them—from village to village, from house to house, from hilltops and beachfronts to synagogues.

On the hunt for the one lost sheep, today’s mission chapels mimic the early years of evangelization. Perhaps it is impossible to match the zeal of the early missions as they were driven by the pre-Second Vatican Council preaching that there was no salvation outside of the Catholic Church, but one cannot discredit as ungrounded the totality of church reforms that had taken shape under the present papacy.   

Yet finding piety in a house of commerce is a hypothetical proposition at this point. Here is an idea, from the perspective of the church, that hopes for the conversion of a commercial experience to one that is spiritual or, from the perspective of mall owners, that foot traffic generated by the chapel can be converted to sales. The complementarity remains to be proven in the same way that risks of chapel goers moderating their spending sprees to save something for the poor may hurt businesses in the end.

Can Peter’s successor, in whose hand’s Jesus has accorded such a wide latitude of discretion that “whatever he binds on earth will be bound in heaven,” consider more tweaking of the rules, such as in assigning the Lord’s Day to whatever day in the week, depending on a person’s day-to-day inclination?  

The church, of course, has been flexible throughout the ages. Asked why Moses allowed divorce, Jesus said: "Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way." In other words, Moses adapted to the wishes of the market.

Contraception and homosexual acts used to be taboo, but Pope Francis recently decreed that a form of sub-sacramental blessing can be given to those who seek it for same-sex unions. Nothing can pre-empt and frustrate procreation more effectively than same-sex unions. In the context of the LGBTQ+ community’s fair lobby for recognition, equality and respect, the pope preaches understanding, compassion, inclusivity, and openness. He urges his church to open its doors to all, sinners and saints alike. Like Moses, he unsettles the norm to satisfy the market.

Bums

President Bongbong Marcos and former president Rodrigo Duterte. Photo by abs-cbn.

"Bums" by Ingming Aberia was also published by The Manila Times on 28 February 2024.

He who unfollows the rules is either a maverick or a bum. Mavericks are of two kinds. When people believe them, they are, at one extreme, called prophets; when people don't believe them, they are, at the other extreme, swatted away like a nuisance or discarded as mental cases. In a hostile political environment, those who populate both ends of the spectrum and everyone else in between can attract the ruler's ire, as in the case of many of our heroes who ended up being trolled, ostracized, persecuted, and even condemned to death.

There are two kinds of bums, too. There are the bullying kind who pick fights against those who are not their size but quit the battle when they find their match; and then there are the misfits who think they are saviors but are in fact deserters.

The latest disappointment comes from the mouth of President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, Jr.  

Asked (for the nth time) in an impromptu interview if he would allow the International Criminal Court (ICC) to conduct a probe into the country’s war on drugs, the president said “no”.

Although supported by a broad segment of the population, the war on drugs mounted by the government of former president Rodrigo Duterte, Marcos' predecessor, was responsible for thousands of deaths of suspected drug users, many of them in drug raids conducted by government forces in urban poor neighborhoods.

Death toll estimates vary, from a low of 3,891 to a high of 30,000. The government's Drug Enforcement Agency puts the total at 6,201, while the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has it at 8,663. In a 2019 interview, then Philippine National Police spokesman Col. Bernard Banac said that at least 29,000 cases of killings categorized as deaths under inquiry (DUI) have been recorded nationwide.

In 2020, the World Organisation against Torture and the Children's Legal Rights and Development Centre reported that "at least 129 children have been killed in the Philippines' four-year war on drugs, most by police or allied assailants, but they may only represent a fraction of the toll...the tip of the iceberg, because it is only those cases that we were able to document and verify, there may be many more in the country..."

Within a year of the drug war, Amnesty International charged in a report that the police were being paid between Php8,000 to Php15,000 per kill. Police interchangeably used the terms “encounter” and “nanlaban” (fought back) to justify the killings as part of a legitimate operation.

“We’re paid in cash, secretly, by headquarters…There’s no incentive for arresting,” the report added, anonymously quoting a policeman. As a result of the cash incentive, said the cop, “it never happens that there’s a shootout and no one is killed.” Duterte even repeatedly encouraged private citizens to join him in his murderous rampage, making it easy for anyone to settle scores with a handy alibi. In one such occasion, he told a returning group of overseas Filipino workers that “if you lose your job, I’ll give you one. Kill all the drug addicts.”

The Duterte drug war enjoyed broad public approval, especially in its early years of implementation. A 2017 Pulse Asia survey showed that 88 percent of respondents expressed support for it. In 2019, a Social Weather Station survey showed that 82 percent of the respondents expressed satisfaction with how the drug war was being waged, although an almost equal number (76 percent) of respondents thought human rights abuses were committed by law enforcers. Duterte himself benefited from high satisfactory ratings throughout his term, from a “low” of 45 percent in 2018 to a high of 79 percent in 2020.

The DUI cases and the persisting climate of impunity—of the investigations that reached the courts, only three murder cases involving teens Kian delos Santos, Carlo Arnaiz and Reynaldo de Guzman have prospered, resulting in conviction—indict the country’s judicial processes. The willingness and the effort to hear thousands of drug war cases are patently scarce. Only the intervention of someone not beholden to wielders of political power like the ICC can plug the go-to gaps.

Duterte, Marcos and the International Criminal Court

The International Criminal Court in The Hague.

When he was a senator, Bongbong Marcos signed the 2011 Senate resolution for the ratification of the Rome Statute of the ICC. The late Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago who sponsored the ICC resolution, said:

"If the state is already investigating or prosecuting its own head of state or similar official, the Court will not intervene. But if the state is unwilling or unable to prosecute, then the Court will try the case in The Hague. By concurring in the ratification of the Rome Statute, the Philippines will help the Court to end the culture of impunity and affirm our position as a leading human rights advocate in Asia."

Threatened by an ICC suit, Duterte unilaterally pulled the Philippines out of the Rome treaty in 2018. The withdrawal took effect a year later. But last year, the ICC dismissed the Philippine government’s appeal to defer its investigations on the drug war killings, claiming to have assumed its jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed from 2011 until 2019.

Duterte’s drug campaign unfollowed the rules, but he quickly quit the battle and untied his responsibility for it when he found his match. Now Marcos takes a no-harm, no-foul, do-nothing approach to the issue of the inviolability of human rights. It is like playing iwas pusoy—a safe refuge for bums. In that same interview, he rationalizes that he has yet to see answers to the question of jurisdiction and sovereignty.

Will he change his mind based on evidence? Marcos said no. “It’s not about the evidence. It’s about the jurisdiction of the ICC in the Philippines. They could produce as much evidence as they want. But they could not act upon it in the Philippines, that is the point.”

Did he, based on evidence, work with Philippine judicial processes so there would be no need for ICC to intervene? No. After more than two years in office, he has not done anything rim-rattling to show he cares for the truth, for justice, for social conscience.

Both Marcos and Duterte recognize the hand of God in their rise to the presidency. In the 2022 presidential campaign, he said that God had other plans for him after he lost his vice-presidential bid to Leni Robredo. As the deadline for substituting candidates approached in 2015, Duterte mumbled something like: "Well, let us see. I don’t know. I leave it to God. If he wants me there, he will place me there. Ganoon iyan. It’s God’s play. It’s not ours.”

They think they are sent by God to save his people but are nowhere to be found when the higher call of truth and justice beckons. They are unfit to think or do something sensible when it matters. On the promotion of human rights, they are bums.