A post declaring that “Team Damaso” is the real “Team Patay” has also been uploaded in Facebook, asking why Bacolod Bishop Vicente Navarra has not done anything about the erring priests (except perhaps, in the manner of Benedict XVI, transfer them to other parishes?).

Padre Damaso is widely and mistakenly assumed to be the arch-villain of Jose Rizal’s Noli me Tangere. But only when the debate on the Reproductive Health bill reached its weirdest heights in 2010 — one would think that everyone, even the Church, could agree on the need to provide people reproductive health information — was the name Damaso thrust into the consciousness of those Filipinos unfamiliar with the novels of Rizal and their characters.

The name was frequently mentioned in the mid-1950s when the bill mandating the inclusion of the works of Rizal in high school and college curricula was being debated — and vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church. Since the Rizal bill passed into law, it’s been generally assumed that the Philippine world the novels of Rizal reproduced was fairly close to the reality in his time, and that priests like Damaso did exist, and probably still do.

The renewed notoriety of Padre Damaso in 2010 was mostly the doing of Intramuros tour guide Carlos Celdran, who, to protest the Catholic Church’s opposition to the RH bill, held up a placard with the word “Damaso” on it during an ecumenical service at the Manila Cathedral.

But for the title of Most Evil Priest in the Noli, Damaso had at least one rival, the sinister, scheming and violent Padre Salvi, who attempted to have Crisostomo Ibarra killed, and who very likely raped Maria Clara. For most Filipinos who have heard the name, however, Damaso was the quintessential friar — a “Father” twice over, being both priest and biological father to the modest, unassuming, obedient and loyal woman who’s been assumed to be, again mistakenly, Rizal’s model Filipina.

Maria Clara being illegitimate as well as too weak to have a mind of her own, she could hardly have been Rizal’s ideal. Rather was she the symbol of the bastard culture that was the perverse product of the encounter between native culture and alien greed. That the latter was represented by a priest speaks volumes about Rizal’s insight into the role of the institutional Church in putting in place the victim culture exemplified by Maria Clara’s rape.

On the literal level, Padre Damaso’s fatherhood, Rizal was also saying, was not only contrary to the Church’s own proclaimed values. It was also the prime indicator of how badly damaged, damaging and hypocritical the Church had been, demanding among the faithful compliance with the highest moral standards while its own priests violate them with impunity.

At the core of the current, practically world-wide anger over pedophiliac and other erring priests is both outrage over that hypocrisy and what amounts to a double standard of morality. But there is also discontent over the Church’s centuries-old state of denial over the realities of human sexuality evident in the tradition of priestly celibacy and the focus on abstinence as the solution for everything from spacing births to avoiding sexually-transmitted diseases like AIDS.

The Church has certainly had its share of priest-Lotharios and even popes. Among the latter and the most notorious was Alexander VI, who, it is true, is tagged an anti-Pope in Church history, but who nevertheless demonstrated in his time not only the hunger for the pleasures of the flesh whose reality the Church has been trying to deny for centuries, but also the lust for the temporal power that for a very long time led popes to build armies and forge political alliances.

In the Philippines, even the most devout will concede knowledge of this priest or that’s cohabitation, if not fatherhood. It’s the stuff of gossip in many communities, although it doesn’t stop the faithful from hearing mass from the same priest every Sunday. After all, as certain bishops proclaim, he has very likely “repented, and even reformed.”

But the tepid Church response to priestly indiscretion, as well as that of the faithful, is still proof positive not only of priestly power and status, but also of the compartmentalization in certain Catholic lives that allows the devout to steal and murder and rob from Monday to Saturday, while reserving Sundays for the observance of even the most fanatical devotion.

Some of the most devout Catholics have also been the most devout murderers and torturers. Nearly every crook and killer, human rights violator, kidnapper and rapist, jueteng and drug lord, was once a child celebrating his or her first communion, who as an adult still crosses him/herself when passing a Church, and goes to mass every Sunday.

But there are priests and priests as there are Catholics and Catholics, among whom there has been no lack of devotion to both Church and justice, to Catholicism and compassion, to change, even to revolution and all the other human virtues. To this category belong the priests, and not a few nuns as well, who gave their lives in defense of the poor and powerless during the martial law regime.

It was they rather than the bishops in their palaces who braved bullets and bayonets, torture and murder to defend the human person. In the remote communities today where State violence rules, they continue fighting, no matter the cost to their lives and fortunes, for the rights of the voiceless, for principled peace based on social justice, and for a better world. Unlike those modern day Damasos and Salvis whose claims to humanity are limited to admitting their moral weakness and the fathering of children, they are among the true fathers of this nation and its people.

(BusinessWorld)

It demonstrated its incompetence when it comes to crises with startling clarity during the Rizal Park hostage crisis of August 2010. It ignored calls from the Hong Kong government, which was concerned with the safety of its citizens; made having dinner in a Chinese restaurant a priority over saving lives; left decision-making in a developing international incident to the police; and generally behaved with the insouciance of a mindless schoolboy.

It is currently demonstrating its cluelessness over both the history of, and the bases for, the Philippine claim to Sabah, and incidentally about such Philippine laws as Republic Act 5446. RA 5446, noted former Senator Richard Gordon, defines the baselines of the territorial seas of the Philippines, in effect including Sabah as part of Philippine territory. The Aquino administration has also misplaced three letters from the Sultan of Sulu asking for its intervention in pursuing the claim to Sabah.

Like a spoiled and arrogant brat who’s lived most of its life in a gated enclave, the Aquino administration is also incapable of imagining (1) the consequences on the lives and safety of Filipino citizens of less than well-thought out, and outrightly stupid statements; (2) the impact on the Philippines’ long standing and legitimate claim to Sabah of the same statements; (3) what human suffering and even death is like among ordinary people, meaning not only the 200 or so followers of the Sultan of Sulu who’re now in Sabah, but also the 800,000 Filipinos who live in Malaysia; and (4) a situation in which the country it currently has stewardship over, can stand among equals rather than being practically everybody else’s doormat.

Like a junior high student government, the Aquino administration also needs an adviser to tell it what to do. But not just any adviser: not an expert from, say, the National Historical Commission or the Department of Foreign Affairs. It has to be the US, behind which it also hides when threatened by the Chinese school-yard bully, and to whose wishes, such as a quick end to the Mindanao conflict with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, it supinely defers.

Over the last two weeks, however, it’s been demonstrating that it might also have Malaysia as adviser, with Benigno Aquino III also acting as the latter’s spokesman. Practically on Day One of the Sabah crisis, he echoed the authoritarian government of that country’s issuance of ultimatums and deadlines, which Malaysia interpreted as his way of saying that he wouldn’t mind if its security forces arrested and attacked the 200 or so followers of the Sultan of Sulu currently in Sabah.

While Filipinos are being killed in territory over which the Philippines has legitimate claims, Mr. Aquino has also alleged a conspiracy which he himself says he can’t prove, and threatened to file unspecified charges against the Sultan of Sulu. Far from being concerned over the lives and safety of Filipino citizens, he’s more interested in punishing them, which to the Malaysians sounds like clearance for them to do what they please, including indiscriminately dropping bombs on the men and women followers of the Sultanate, and harassing, rounding up, and deporting Filipinos.

And yet, he’s supposed to be President of the entire Philippines, and not only of his family, his relatives, his classmates, his shooting buddies, his fellow landlords, and the elite members of the Christian majority. The Philippines is allegedly also a sovereign nation, the Constitution of which Mr. Aquino has sworn to defend and the rights of whose citizens, whether at home or abroad, the State of which he is currently head is mandated to protect.

But Mr. Aquino and company’s indifference to Filipino rights is no longer news. Since 2010 they’ve been ignoring calls to do something about the human rights violations — the abductions, the harassment, the enforced disappearances, torture and extra-judicial killings — that are routinely committed by the military in the Philippine countryside, as well as the killing of journalists and media workers among whom there’s a goodly number fighting corruption and environmental destruction, and exposing human rights violations.

If the Aquino administration is unable — unwilling seems to be the more likely case — to do anything to help dismantle the culture of impunity that allows and encourages human rights violations and extrajudicial killings, it is even more unlikely to do anything to look after the safety and well-being of the Filipinos currently in territory the Philippine claim to which Mr. Aquino has described as “hopeless.”

In that description of the Sabah claim as “hopeless” lies a clue to the peculiar mindset of the clutch of bunglers now in power who think they’re actually running a government. It is the sense that some things are just not worth doing because they require too much effort.

Putting an end to the warlordism that makes a mockery of elections and makes extrajudicial killings as easy as swatting flies is hopeless because it requires some work. Accelerating the pace of the Ampatuan Massacre trial? Hopeless because too difficult. Stopping human rights violations? Hopeless. Doing something to halt the killing of journalists? Too hard.

On the other hand, it doesn’t take too much effort to deliver a speech criticizing the news media for irresponsible reporting, does it? Neither is it too hard to deliver a speech which makes even more irresponsible statements likely to tie the Philippine hand in the pursuit of its claim to Sabah, which Mr. Aquino, in self-fulfilling prophecy, has himself made “hopeless.”

Some of the candidates for the Senate of UNA (United Nationalist Alliance) have suggested that by putting Filipino citizens in an already bad situation in even greater harm through his statements and by putting Malaysian interests ahead of those of the Philippines, Mr. Aquino is courting impeachment on charges of violating the Constitution and betrayal of public trust. Given the gravity of his blunders and their consequences, particularly his talent for making a bad situation worse, impeachment is an option no one should be dismissing.

(BusinessWorld)

In the aftermath of EDSA 1986, the military goons who had propped up the dictatorship with their bayonets launched coup after coup against the Corazon Aquino administration and assassinated labor and student leaders involved in the overthrow of the Marcos terror regime. In various interviews, they declared that they had launched the coup attempts for “democracy,” and implied as well that the people they had killed or had attempted to kill deserved that treatment because they were “communist terrorists.”

Nowadays raids on communities, arbitrary arrests, abductions and enforced disappearances have become “development” efforts in the deceptive language of a military apparatus whose corruption and fascist ideology have withstood the half-hearted attempts by every administration since Marcos to uproot and replace it with something approaching human decency.

This is the kind of gall, the effrontery and sheer impudence, that’s running riot in this country, where the worst claim to be the best, torturers say without flinching that they’re for human rights, and the vilest creatures have the audacity to accuse their moral betters of committing the crimes they themselves habitually inflict on others.

And then there’s Imelda Marcos, who’s in a class by herself.

Ferdinand Marcos’ widow and Minister of Human Settlements said in a recent interview with the Japanese news service Kyodo News timed with the 27th anniversary of the EDSA mutiny that overthrew her late, unlamented dictator of a husband that her son Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. should be President of the Philippines.

Her son, she said, “is well-educated and he is prepared. And his record in Ilocos is very good. He has been a good executive.” In addition to Marcos Jr.’s possession of degrees from the United Kingdom’s Oxford University and the Wharton School of Business in the United States, his mother also said he had been “molded, even as a child, in an atmosphere of service to people. He knows exactly what leadership is.”

Marcos Jr. may indeed have been a good executive, although it could be argued that being governor of a province, especially a province like Ilocos Norte where the Marcoses are assured of the support and even adulation that earned for it in Marcos Sr.’s time the preferential treatment he withheld from other, less adoring provinces, isn’t the same as running an entire country.

But granting that Marcos Jr. has the executive ability to do so, what his own father’s regime hopefully taught the country was that neither administrative ability nor political acumen — even brilliance, or at least the guile his enemies grant the older Marcos had plenty of, isn’t enough without the moral compass, the compassion, the plain humanity and even just the imagination that can prevent a President from ruining a country and attacking his own people. As guileful as Ferdinand Marcos was, he had neither the imagination to create in these islands the alternative society the best and the brightest have been fighting for since the Spanish period, nor the empathy for human suffering that could have prevented his regime from turning into an elite instrument of murder and torture.

To this very day, no Marcos has ever admitted that reality. Marcos Jr. himself said only last September 21, 2012, the 40th anniversary of the declaration of martial law, that “My father was always one to comment on current events and history, and the conversations I had with him cumulatively over the years gave me a more complete, if not complex, picture of the context in which martial law was declared.”

And what was that context with which he became acquainted? Was it perhaps Marcos Sr.’s desire to remain in power beyond the two-term limit in the 1936 Constitution and his wanting to be President forever? Or did Marcos Sr. acquaint him with one of the primary reasons why he declared martial law, which was the increasingly deadly contention between the traditional landed elite that had made the shift to industry like the Lopezes on the one hand, and on the other, the upstart bureaucrat capitalists, of which Marcos himself was the exemplar, who coveted their assets and thought the former an impediment to their quest for unlimited pelf and power?

Did Marcos Sr. perhaps acquaint his offspring with the reality of US support for dictatorships such as his, Suharto’s of Indonesia, and Stroessner’s of Paraguay so long as they were anti-communist, thus assuring the worst dictatorships not only of US political patronage but also of economic and military aid?

Or was it none of the above, Marcos Sr.’s official justification for martial rule being to “save the Republic and reform society” – through which buzz words he suggested that he was only being nobly moved by love for the democracy that, as limited as it was, nevertheless did bar him from another term, and did have a Constitution with a liberal Bill of Rights that he immediately suspended on September 21, 1972?

An even more interesting question because of the probable answer is whether Marcos Sr. also passed on to Junior the limitless appetite for wealth that qualified Senior for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records. Did Junior also learn at his father’s feet the imperative to seize absolute power as the precondition for accumulating as much wealth as possible, and to amass yet more, and yet more – and still more?

The sins of the father, we are told, should not be visited on the sons. And yet, are not children nurtured by their parents on, among others, what values they should hold most dearly?

Could among those values be the unbridled lust for the material things that could only be assuaged by its companion, absolute power — for, as Mrs. Marcos told her Kyodo News interviewer, “all the jewelry, all the paintings, all the buildings I could afford”?

It is of course possible that Marcos Jr. is the President this country has been waiting for — the leader who will finally take it to that long promised land of peace, justice, prosperity and independence that it has so far failed to reach. But it is also possible that he isn’t, and is in fact truly his father’s son. The possibility of the second is a risk the Filipino people can no longer afford to take — not at this time, and not ever again.

(BusinessWorld)

Philippine elections themselves have been far from the democratic exercises that in 1986 the progressive forces of the anti-dictatorship resistance hoped would emerge from the martial law experience. They expected the flowering of authentic democracy with the political ascendancy of workers and farmers — the most marginalized sectors in Philippine history — for the sake of the just and equitable society that for three hundred years and despite the Revolution of 1896 had eluded the Filipino nation.

In fighting the dictatorship, the workers and farmers, the students and professionals that constituted the main force of the resistance were also fighting for a new beginning. What they got instead was the restoration of the pre-martial law ancien regime: of that distinctly Filipino phenomenon, elite democracy.

Elite monopoly over political power had denied the majority the right to shape their lives and future since the Commonwealth period. Marcos and the bureaucrat capitalists he represented may have been overthrown. But in 1986 the very same power brokers of Philippine society that had supported the dictatorship made sure that the poor and the powerless would remain as marginalized in the post-EDSA period as the latter had been before Marcos shattered the myth that the Philippines was the show window of democracy in Asia.

The same basic-sector forces had also fought for an end to the abductions, enforced disappearances, torture, and extra-judicial killings in which the regime and its military thugs had become such experts. But even before Marcos had left for the embrace of his US allies in Hawaii, Juan Ponce Enrile was already instructing his RAM henchmen to secure the dossiers on activists and oppositionists military intelligence had been amassing for years and on which the arrests of 1972 onwards had been based.

Elements of the so-called Reform the Armed Forces Movement were to figure prominently not only in the attempts to restore authoritarian rule after EDSA 1986, but also in the assassination of labor and student leaders. Far from being reformed, the military has remained the same as it has been since Marcos gave it a taste of the wealth and power the use of force makes so easily available. Today the most corrupt of State institutions, it is also the most brutal in the use of the very same methods of suppression — abductions, enforced disappearances, torture and murder — it learned so well during the Marcos dictatorship.

One need not take up arms to be so targeted, as the cases of Jonas Burgos and other disappeared and tortured demonstrate. Such advocacies as environmental protection and the defense of human rights are enough. Indeed, even dissent and free expression — among the pillars of a truly democratic State — are still under threat today as they were 27 years ago.

The threat is as rooted in law as it is in State hostility to any challenge to the political, social and economic dominance of the few over the many. A police and military establishment that views citizen access to information, press freedom and free expression is today amply supported in both what exists in law and what does not.

Although the Marcos dictatorship collapsed in February 1986, or 27 years ago, at least two bills restrictive of access to information, free expression, and press freedom became law in August and September last year. Despite a two- decade campaign, the country still has no Freedom of Information Act. The killing of journalists is continuing, with 129 killed for their work since 1986. Harassments and threats including the filing of criminal libel suits to silence critical practitioners are similarly continuing.

The trial of a veritable handful of the hundreds suspected of masterminding, implementing and otherwise participating in the worst attack on the press and media in history — the Ampatuan Massacre of November 23, 2009 — is proceeding so glacially some witnesses have already been killed with similar impunity.

The persistence of impunity — the exemption from punishment of even the worst criminals — has been blamed on journalists’ lack of training — or on their being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or on their failure to scan their immediate surroundings for possible threats. As for activists who have similarly been victimized by local officials and warlords and by police and military men acting in collusion with them, the excuse is the same as it was during the martial law period — they’re trouble makers, communists, or even terrorists worthy of torture and assassination.

These assaults on whatever remains of democracy in these isles of fear are the direct consequences of a State whose fundamentals have not changed despite the overthrow of the Marcos regime in 1986. The rule of a handful of families — the political dynasties whose presence and dominance in government has become so obvious only the most stupid will deny it — continues because State violence has kept the majority powerless, and therefore unable to address the historic burdens of poverty, social injustice and structural violence that has been its lot for centuries.

Elections are contests among the moneyed and already powerful, and public office the domain of a handful. The fruits of economic progress, although nurtured by the labor of the many, are the monopoly of a few. A land tenancy system once described as among the worst on the planet is substantially intact, the efforts to reform it foundering on the shoals of a Congress dominated by landlord interests and their surrogates. Independence and sovereignty, today dismissed as luxuries no nation except the most powerful can afford, are habitually traded off for limited, even imaginary gains by a political class that has never been committed to either.

Every political upheaval from the Revolution of 1896 to EDSA 1986 has been driven by the aspirations for freedom, justice, prosperity and peace of the vast majority of the Filipino people, and by the promise of their realization. Each one has instead led to the frustration of those hopes — indeed to their very opposite. Could it be that this country is destined to remain in the margins of history, immune from the great transformations that have shaken other nations, and, despite its people’s best efforts, doomed to remain in the same place it has been for decades?

(BusinessWorld)

The ultra-conservatives recently demonstrated their influence over such secular entities as the country’s courts and its laws (they succeeded in getting tour guide Carlos Celdran convicted of “offending religious feelings” for holding up a placard with the word “Damaso” on it during a church gathering in Manila). They’ve also threatened to campaign against those candidates for the Senate and the House of Representatives who supported, or worse, were among the sponsors of Republic Act No. 10354, or the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012.

Despite recent ultra-conservative muscle-flexing, however, Ratzinger’s decision to resign as Pope for reasons of age and health comes at a far from ideal time for the hardliners of the Philippine Church.

Not only has the Catholic Church in the Philippines been losing the faithful to other churches. Philippine Catholicism is also developing into a Church of fast food faithful — a church of people who call themselves Catholics but who choose to observe from among the Church’s smorgasbord of doctrinal precepts, teachings and political preferences only what suits them.

Church involvement in politics — which Ratzinger before he became Pope and while head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Inquisition) upheld as a doctrinal principle — has only rarely yielded the desired results in the Philippines.

The supposedly faithful have often ignored such allegedly morally based instructions as who to vote for. Two instances are illustrative, and they involve the election of Presidents: that of Fidel Ramos in 1992 and of Joseph Estrada in 1998.

Both won despite a Church campaign against them, Ramos for being Protestant, and Estrada for his alleged incompetence (the late Archbishop of Manila, Jaime Cardinal Sin, said then that the election of Estrada would be “a disaster”). Ramos’ victory was all the more surprising in the context of the Church’s seemingly pivotal role in the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos only six years earlier.

The Church did help remove Estrada from office in 2000 in what has come to be known as EDSA 2, but was only one of several forces involved in the process, among those forces being the business community, civil society groups, and left-wing formations.

The Church role in EDSA 1986 has itself been exaggerated. For well over a decade the Church had favored a policy of critical support for the Marcos dictatorship, the policy being more supportive than critical. When the Church did position itself against the regime, it was in support of what was likely to be the winning side, and to halt the brewing rebellion in the priestly ranks against what progressive clergy regarded as a policy of Church collaboration with the regime.

The overthrow of the Marcos regime had in fact been in the making since the declaration of martial law. By 1986 a broad alliance of anti-dictatorship groups had developed even as various armed groups including the MNLF and the NPA were challenging it in the Philippine countryside. The Church had no choice but to join the resistance to the regime it once supported.
If many Catholics obey Church dicta about politics only selectively, so do they observe such other mandates as its opposition to artificial means of spacing pregnancies, and the use of condoms for safe sex only when it suits them.

And yet Ratzinger even before he was Pope had a number of times condemned the use of condoms, and like his bishops in the Philippines and their surrogate political groups, had even claimed that condom use made the spread of AIDS more likely, their proferred solution to the global AIDS epidemic being the Church mantra of abstinence. The truth of that claim is, of course, completely denied by the facts, non-condom use being the companion of the spread of AIDS in several African countries.

As for the use of abstinence to space pregnancies, that’s an option few people who describe themselves as Catholics are willing to take, hence the popularity among the Filipino middle-class of such artificial means of birth control as condoms and the pill rather than the Church-preferred rhythm method. Among the more recent indications of Catholic sentiment in this country was the overwhelming support, some 70 percent, for the RH bill when it was being debated in Congress.

That wasn’t lost on the country’s politicos, who for years had believed that there’s such a thing as a Catholic vote despite evidence to the contrary. The result was the approval of RA 10354 and its signing into law by the supposedly devout Catholic Benigno Aquino III.

The institutional Church’s response to the slide in its influence over the flock has been to bully government officials, including Aquino, whom one bishop once threatened to ex-communicate for his support for the RH bill. It has also emphasized, a la certain Muslim groups, and echoing Ratzinger, the fundamentals of Catholicism in opposition to the pro-people involvement of nuns and priests in such issues as environmental protection, militarization, and human rights violations.

The ensuing tendency of activist priests and nuns to condemn the dominant structures of power and social relations in the poor countries of the world Ratzinger had denounced as legacies of liberation theology — which his patron Pope John Paul II had taken great pains to expunge among the clergy — and as “too Marxist.”

And yet it is this kind of involvement that has brought both priest and Church closer to the people of the communities and nations besieged worldwide by unjust social and political structures, environmental destruction, imperial dominance, and the resulting poverty and injustice that’s the fate of billions.

Rather than affirm the need in such a world for a preferential option for the poor and oppressed, and to fight for them, the institutional Church has chosen to align itself with the powerful and their interest in keeping things as they are. Its irrelevance to the realities of the human condition helps explain why it’s losing adherents to other churches while many of those who do stay with it do so mostly out of habit.

(BusinessWorld)

What the Comelec did was conduct a trial run of the entire ballot-casting process, from the initialization of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines to the transmission of votes from the precinct level to the municipal canvassing centers, then to the provincial canvassing centers, and finally, to the national Comelec computer server.

But whether mock elections or trial run, the test did bring to light some problems Comelec Chair Sixto Brillantes dismissed as “mere glitches,” and nothing to really worry about.

Obviously no tech-savvy computer maven, Brillantes attributed the failure of a PCOS machine at a precinct at the University of the Philippines Integrated School — one of 20 nationwide involved in the test — to the machine’s having been in storage for three years since the last time it was used in 2010, and the possibility that it was “rusty.” He also ventured the opinion that maybe what the machine needed was a longer warm-up period, somewhat like a basketball player who has to do a bit of calisthenics before getting into a game.

The glitches — including the machine’s rejection of the board of election inspectors chairperson’s password — occurred in the context of concerns among election watch groups over the Comelec’s purchase of the PCOS machines of the Smartmatic company, and their suggestion that maybe the Comelec should have looked around for another provider with a more technologically reliable device than Smartmatic’s machine.

While his observations about “rust” and “warming up” sounded like a joke, they did remind the voters of the election watch groups’ doubts about the reliability of the machines. What’s more, since he’s Comelec chair and should know what he’s talking about, his observations did seem authoritative, reviving The Question That Refuses to Die in connection with the country’s venture into automated elections: How Reliable Are The PCOS Machines, or, Can We Be Sure of the Automated System Results?

For his part, Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez stayed away from offering any technical reason for the glitches. Instead he suggested that one of the malfunctions the test revealed, the PCOS machine’s rejection of voter ballots, could have been due to “ballot mishandling” by the (mock) voters. You have to give it to Jimenez. That approach usually works. Don’t blame the technology or, for that matter, the Comelec. Blame the victim — the voter — instead.

Not that voters can’t be blamed for even worse errors, oversights, and plain cluelessness than failing to correctly feed a piece of paper into a machine. Voter readiness for every election ever held and will still be held in this country including the May 2013 elections is a far more crucial issue than the technology involved in the process.

Either the PCOS machines accurately record the results or they don’t. But exactly what difference would it make if a voter can’t tell the difference between one candidate and the next because there’s really none in most cases, and as a result cast his or her vote for no particularly meaningful reason?

This isn’t even to consider what happens in those areas the warlords control where votes-on-command are the rule. Granting the accuracy and reliability of the PCOS machines, the results in those places are likely to reflect, rather than the people’s will, the will of local tyrants — and of the national officials with whom they’re in alliance, or in some other way linked.

These problematic areas aside, the likelihood is that most voters will continue to behave as they have for years: they’re likely to vote on the basis of name recall. Name recall in turn depends on whether a candidate is well-known to begin with, or has made such an impression on the electorate that he or she is likely to be in the voter’s mind when the latter fills up his ballot.

In most cases, being well-known depends on whether the candidate is from a family whose members have been in government for some time, preferably as elected officials: in short, whether he or she belongs to that species known as political dynasties, or is from a family with a name no one knows.

As for the second alternative, the usual route to being remembered is by pandering to what are thought to be the voters’ expectations — among them the candidate’s capacity to attack his opponents in the most colorful, masa-friendly language possible, which means making sure that the audience is not bored by “serious” discussions; his readiness to act like a show business personality, which means singing and dancing; and, for a lucky few, just looking pretty on stage.

And then there’s the media factor. A huge election war chest guarantees media, especially radio and TV exposure, not only through paid political ads. The practice of interviewing candidates as if what they have to say matters as news, but who have paid off certain radio and TV stations for the privilege, has been more or less institutionalized, thus assuring the wealthiest candidates maximum media exposure. It does make money the determinant of election results, but only the naïve would expect the media organizations concerned to care enough to stop doing it.

The by now conventional solution offered to address these problems is voter education. There is no lack of advocacy groups focused on this necessity, their advice to voters usually being to demand from candidates what programs, if any, they intend to implement to address the issues — unemployment, rising prices, economic issues, human rights, etc. — that concern them.

Only in rare instances have such demands been met, most of the candidates for public office having no such programs, since what pass for platforms of government in the parties they happen to belong to at the moment consist of motherhood statements against which few can argue.

The result are elections that make it virtually impossible to select leaders armed with the vision and will to change anything, or even to make anything work — in which voter choices are almost never made on the basis of what the candidate and his party stand for, since neither really stands for anything except the quest for power and its perks.

Rather than resolving the complexities of automation, the very bottom line in any hope for meaningful elections is the making of truly informed choices. Philippine elections will continue to be mock elections otherwise.

(BusinessWorld)

The “bill” Senator Francis Escudero was referring to is the Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013, which both houses of Congress had ratified as of last Monday. Some 10,000 complainants in a class action suit filed in Hawaii, USA against the Marcoses will be compensated for the illegal arrest, detention and torture they suffered during the martial law period.

The funds will be sourced from the billions in Swiss bank accounts the Philippine government has recovered of the wealth Ferdinand Marcos amassed during the 14 years (1972-1986) he wielded absolute power by placing the country under martial rule, abolishing Congress, suspending the Bill of Rights, and suppressing all opposition with the collaboration and support of the military and the defunct Philippine Constabulary of which the Philippine National Police is the successor.

Because it took 27 years from the declaration of martial law in 1972 before the Act was passed, however, many of those subjected to various abuses, including rape, beatings, water-boarding, electrocution, and injections of truth serum, have since died. University of the Philippines Professor of Filipino and Philippine Literature Monico Atienza, for example, who was detained for years and tortured while in the hands of Marcos’ military thugs, died a few years ago.

Although Atienza was among the most severely tortured martial law detainees—he was beaten, injected with truth serum, his genitals burned among other atrocities—he refused to be a complainant in the Hawaii class suit because, he once said, he fought the Marcos regime out of principle, and not in expectation of any reward.

Most of the 10,000 complainants did not expect any reward either. But they filed the complaint to put it on record and to contribute to the imperative of seeing to it that the detention and torture they suffered, and the enforced disappearance and murder of their fellow activists, do not happen again.

Unfortunately, however, they do happen still. Senator Escudero’s statement and that of other government officials, congressmen and even NGO personalities assume that the violation of human rights—the illegal arrests, detention and torture, the enforced disappearances and the murder of activists—have stopped since the end of the Marcos period. The fact is that they have not, despite EDSA 1986, the restoration of the Bill of Rights, and the succession of administrations after Marcos that were supposed to have presided over the restoration of democracy.

Political prisoners are still in the country’s prisons. The most recent count says that 385 are detained in various detention centers all over the Philippines. Of this number, 170 were arrested, many charged with common crimes, during the last two years since Benigno Aquino III came to power.

The son of press freedom icon Jose Burgos, Jonas Burgos, was abducted and has since been unaccounted for since 2007. University of the Philippines students Karen Empeno and Sherlyn Cadapan, abducted in 2006 and whose fate is still unknown, underwent unspeakable torture including gang rape, according to a worker-witness who managed to escape from his military abductors.

Almost routinely are remote communities occupied by troops, their residents harassed and threatened, tortured and even killed. Students from the University of the Philippines on field work have also been singled out for verbal and physical abuse by the troops of the very same Armed Forces of the Philippines that claims to be “human rights advocates and protectors.”

And yet Mr. Aquino has declared that human rights violations are the products of “leftist propaganda,” in apparent ignorance of what the military and police—whom even the US State Department has identified as responsible for most of the violations of human rights in the Philippines—are doing.

The key to understanding why the most vicious feature of the martial law period—the widespread violation of human rights—has survived is the understanding of the methods, perspectives, and material interests of the police and military bureaucracies as the sole custodians of the use of State violence in preserving an unjust order. Those methods, perspectives and interests are themselves derived from the fascist ideology and organized violence of the martial law period, which neither the police nor the military has questioned, much less deviated from despite the passage of 27 years.

The martial law period’s legitimization of State violence as the first and last recourse in addressing dissent, protest and social unrest invested the police and military with unprecedented power during the 14 years of Marcos and military rule. In the process the reality of unlimited power inculcated in the police and military bureaucracies a sense of entitlement as well as exemption from accountability.

The impunity—exemption from punishment—to which they have been accustomed has emboldened the police and the military, despite EDSA and the restoration of the Bill of Rights, to continue in their accustomed paths of violating human rights, in addition to engagement in the corruption that surged during the martial law period and that’s continuing today—but about which nothing is being done.

As in the killing of journalists and other citizens, exemption from punishment has become so common citizens are no longer shocked when the perpetrators literally get away with murder. No human rights violator—neither rapist nor torturer, murderer or abductor—has ever been punished for his crimes against this country, its people, and humanity. A particularly foul specimen of this kind of criminal, for example, is even now continuing to elude arrest under the protection of his fellow brutes.

And yet only the dismantling of the culture of impunity by punishing the police and military thugs who killed and tortured then, and their present-day successors who today are the leading violators of human rights, can begin the process of finally putting a stop to the atrocities of the martial law period that continue to this day.

It is all very well to compensate the victims of martial law abuses. But what would really mean something is putting a stop to the violations of human rights that have become, in many communities and even in the heart of Metro Manila itself (Jonas Burgos was abducted in Quezon City), so common in this land of tears.

Luis V. Teodoro is a former political prisoner and is among the 10,000 complainants in the class suit against the Marcoses.

(BusinessWorld)

Although the House Public Information Committee chaired by Samar Representative Ben Evardone had seen the bill through, getting it into the plenary for discussion had so far been as problematic as the search for the Holy Grail.

None of the reasons were sublime. They ranged from the ridiculous to the fictitious. Evardone, whose committee had failed to hold only one meeting on the bill for about a year, said at one point that there was no room in the huge Batasan complex in which to discuss it again. When he did call a second Committee meeting and the bill was approved before Congress adjourned for the holidays last November, instead of forwarding it for plenary discussion, he called another meeting of the Committee so the members, 17 of whom had approved it, could sign the Committee report.

On January 21, the first session day after the holiday break, the bill, despite an assurance from House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte, Jr. that it was one of that body’s priorities, was not scheduled for discussion in the plenary. On January 22, the bill was again shunted aside when the House plenary discussed a protest over the creation of the province of Davao Occidental rather than the FOI bill. Last Thursday, January 23, lack of quorum prevented its discussion.

President Benigno Aquino III, who during the 2010 campaign said he would support an FOI bill, has never included it among his legislative priorities. Neither did he certify it as urgent as the end of the 15th Congress approached, despite Malacanang’s inputs in the consolidated bill.

But even if by some minor miracle the bill is finally discussed by the House plenary, the fear is that some congressmen are ready with additions to the list of government-held information exempted from public disclosure that’s already in the bill, and that others will press for the inclusion of a “right of reply” rider, their focus being on restrictions on the right to information rather than its enhancement, supposedly to prevent abuse of the right.

In both cases, the focus has been on the media–on the fear that an FOI would arm the press, allegedly regarded as “too powerful” by, among other administration big shots, Mr. Aquino himself, would reveal information damaging to government officials. Malacanang, on the other hand, has its own fears, among them that a deluge of requests for information would immobilize the government, and that information it considers classified would be disclosed.

And yet an FOI act is primarily meant to provide the public access to government-held information vital to its concerns. Information is a democratic right in furtherance of transparency and accountability, which is why United Nations standards mandate that any list of information exempted from public disclosure be limited.

On the other hand, the Malacanang fear that government will be overwhelmed by demands for information is unfounded, as the experience of countries such as Thailand, which has had its Official Information Act since 1997, shows. Fears that national security information would be compromised are on the other hand addressed by Malacanang’s inclusion of a provision (Section 7a) giving the President both the power to declare which information may not be released for national security reasons, as well as when to lift the prohibition.

This provision is already a compromise, being in lieu of a “sunshine provision” that would have specified when a ban on the release of information critical to national security–say after 20 years–would be lifted and the information declassified. Indeed, the FOI bill cobbled together by the Technical Working Group out of various FOI bill versions contains other compromises with international standards, among them the provision exempting from public access inputs into policy discussions. Because of the broad definition of “national security” in the bill, and, even more critically, the continuing use of “national security” to suppress human rights, the inclusion of information pertaining to national security in the list of exemptions from disclosure has been, since 2011, resisted by many groups in the FOI coalition. Despite that problematic provision, the coalition agreed to support the bill, with reservations.

Some 15 years ago, when journalists and media advocacy groups began discussing the possibility of having an FOI law passed, some of those present during a round table discussion on the subject expressed an even graver reservation.

They feared that any attempt to put public access to information into law, given the composition of Congress, would lead to restricting rather than enhancing access. This fear was in the context of the sense that at least for the media, getting information on public issues was not a problem, as was in fact validated by a Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) study that found government-held information most accessible in the Philippines compared to other Southeast Asian Countries.

This perception changed during the problematic Arroyo presidency, when such information became difficult, in some cases even impossible, to obtain, and when a law assuring access to information became a compelling necessity.

As things have turned out, however, not only has an FOI law been difficult to get through the legislative mill, there are clear indications that, as feared then, if it were up to them–and it is–the alleged people’s representatives in Congress would pass an FOI law only if it would restrict rather than enhance public and media access to information out of fear of public exposure and demands for accountability.

The bottom line is that given a political environment in which access to information has become increasingly difficult, this country–its people most of all–need a Freedom of Information Act. But it doesn’t mean accepting any Act that certain congressmen who have something to hide, should the honorable members of Congress finally decide to discuss and pass one, wants. The country needs an authentic FOI Act, not just one that will serve congressmen and other officials, rather than the people, best.

(BusinessWorld)

It’s certainly not so the citizenry can elect new leaders–or even remotely better ones, that possibility being nil with the dominance of a handful of dynasties over the political system. Neither is it so the political system can demonstrate how peaceably power is won, and the validity of Philippine democracy re-affirmed. As occasions for violence and for ringing in the same old leaders and the same old policies, elections demonstrate how damaged democracy is in this country.

The 2013 election season was practically inaugurated by incidents of violence shocking even for these murderous isles. As if to underline how much a condition of existence blood and gore and plain stupidity have become, the new year was ushered in by the usual reports of people maimed by firecrackers and killed by stray bullets, among the incidents of which was the death of a child in a Caloocan City neighborhood where, apparently, idiots had either been allowed legal access to guns, or had managed to get their hands on them through the many ways the mindless of all classes, sexes and sizes manage to indulge their fantasies.

The trigger-happy and corrupt among the police and the military have no such fantasies: their legal monopoly over the violence their guns represent is quite simply part of their reality, as was amply demonstrated in that police-versus-police ambush in Atimonan, Quezon, when to describe what hit two SUVs and killed 13 people as a hail of bullets would be an understatement.

If police and military people can pack pistols and be photographed with Presidents firing them, among the poor and powerless, owning even the semblance of one is pure fantasy, the power guns represent in this archipelago of violence being what eludes them most. (Practically part of the furniture in every gun store in this country is a group of men who can’t afford any of the weapons displayed, but who spend entire afternoons in the vicinity, drooling over guns as both symbol of, and means to, that most absolute of all powers, the power of life or death.)

That of course is what the near-universal obsession with guns in this damaged society and that other gun-obsessed country, the United States, is all about: about power and about the lack of it. The obsession with guns and the consequent epidemic of shooting deaths in the US is qualitatively different from the Philippine obsession in that the former’s a power over others, while the latter is one of those over whom it has power. In the former it’s an expression of the dominance over the rest of the world 55 million gun-owning Americans see as their peculiar mandate. In this country it’s an expression of the wish for and the reality of power over others: over one’s neighbor at least, or for the politicians, over the entire country.

The powerful wield guns legally in this country, while the powerless don’t. In the gun-possession as in most other issues in these isles, class divisions rule, and common folk are covered by so-called gun bans which have never prevented killings during election seasons, while their rulers, from the President and Vice President to members of the Cabinet to senators and congressmen, aren’t.

Warlord and tyrant guns rather than public will decide elections most at the local level. But at every level of Philippine society, they also decide which factions, whether among politicians, the police or the military, will prevail at any given time in the division of the spoils of corruption and crime.
Most of all do guns keep the poor and powerless at bay, and the already wealthy and powerful wealthier and in power. Guns are thus absolute necessities in preventing any change in the ruling system, most specially by preventing the marginalized, the voiceless, the poor and the powerless from ever taking power. Guns are also the chosen means of resolving disputes among politicos from families that not only eventually reconcile, they’re even related to each other.

The violence among individual politicians and political families does demonstrate differences, if only of the superficial, though often deadly, kind. These are not differences in ideology or policy, but over who’s going to be in power or not–which question decides who will have the better and the more lucrative access to public funds.

This is the context in which Philippine elections have been held since 1947 and in which elections 2013 will take place. It is a culture of violence the politicians and their police and military accomplices have encouraged through example, and for which they are also directly responsible.

At some point limited as a way of life mostly to the political class and its armies of goons, the culture of violence has metastasized throughout Philippine society and has become the ruling condition of existence in it. Violence is the inevitable means of resolving the littlest dispute, and the first resort in addressing large ones in both city and countryside.

The result is a crime rate that annually falls only in the imagination of the police and other so-called “law enforcement agencies.” Even among these creatures, shootings with government-issued firearms when that’s convenient and with loose firearms when necessary to resolve disputes over territory, or the division of the spoils from the drug trade or “jueteng,” occur so frequently they have become the new normal.

A gun ban is in place for the 2013 elections, and a total gun ban has been proposed to halt the country’s slide into violence. The first has never prevented election-related killings, the ban on the carrying of firearms being usually observed by those who have the licenses and permits for them, and the politicians’ goons usually having the political clout to keep on carrying them. On the other hand, the criminals–whether from the police and military or the civilian population–have the means to acquire and conceal them as well as the audacity to use them.

The hundreds of thousands of loose firearms in this country–the consequence of equally loose enforcement of the gun-possession laws–constitute an arsenal that will continue to be the source of gun-related violence unless the police undertake a sustained, nationwide and no-exception effort beyond the issuance of glowing press releases. It is the primary condition that can make a total gun ban successful, but it is also the one thing they cannot and will not do, among other reasons because the politicians’ goon squads–which often include the police and the military–need those guns, and need them most during election season.

(BusinessWorld)

The Department of Interior and Local Government suspended Garcia last December for allegedly misusing government funds. Garcia claimed her suspension was part of the Liberal Party attempt to control the province in preparation for the May elections. She refused to vacate her office at the Cebu provincial capitol, triggering a crisis in that province that has affected government agencies like the police and a provincial government-controlled TV channel, and the local media, among others.

It’s happening in the context of Cebu’s reputation as an alleged center of press freedom and model of responsible media practice. The Cebu media community hosts an annual celebration that’s been held up as an indicator of a deep commitment to press freedom. The province is also the site of a regional press council that’s generally considered as the most successful in the country in enforcing ethical and professional standards among media organizations and journalists.

Part of the fallout of the Garcia-Malacanang crisis is the suspension of the operations of Sugbo TV, a provincial government- run TV channel, and the removal from the Sun Star Cebu daily newspaper of columnist Bobby Nalzaro, who says that he was asked to stop writing for the newspaper by the management in deference to the wishes of Garcia family “elders.” Sun Star editor Isolde Amante has confirmed Nalzaro’s “suspension” from her paper.

Although its being government-run has cast doubts on its independence, and therefore its legitimacy as part of the Cebu press, the suspension of the operations of Sugbo TV by Acting Governor Agnes Magpale has been criticized as politically-motivated–and it certainly is. Magpale, a member of the Liberal Party, suspended the operations of Sugbo TV, a project of Garcia allegedly intended to promote Cebu as a tourist destination, which she said Garcia was using to call for public support. But if Garcia wasn’t using Sugbo TV to provide the public unbiased information, neither was Magpale’s suspension of it more nobly motivated.

Garcia’s critics agree with Magpale, however: they say Garcia had been using Sugbo TV even before her suspension to further her political agenda. Her partisans claim, on the other hand, that its suspension is a press freedom issue. But because Sugbo TV is operated by the provincial governor’s office, like other government-run media organizations, there are serious doubts as to whether it can even be considered part of the press.

Not that a government-run or public media organization can’t be part of the press. It can be–if what it does is provide public information. If it reports government-related information without bias, informs the public about what both the administration in power and the opposition are saying and doing, and does so regardless of which administration is in power, then it qualifies as a member of the press. But Sugbo TV has not been known to air reports critical of Garcia or her administration. And neither has it aired the views of the opposition.

Its having been founded by Garcia helps explain why what it was essentially doing was public relations rather than public information. Sugbo TV’s being in the control of Garcia and her allies also makes its independence doubtful. And yet independence is among the necessary attributes of authentic journalists, an attribute that in turn has a bearing on their capacity for fairness–which in practice is most commonly expressed through reporting all sides of an issue or controversy.

Independence not having been, in the first place, one of its distinctions, the suspension of Sugbo TV’s operations isn’t a press freedom issue, merely an administrative matter.

On the other hand, Sun Star columnist Bobby Nalzaro’s dismissal from the Sun Star does involve press freedom. Nalzaro said he “understood” the Garcias and that it was management’s prerogative to remove his column. Columnists do serve at the pleasure of owners and editors, and can be dismissed for various reasons, whether for lack of skill, violations of ethical principles, or incompetence. In all these cases, however, no direct editor or owner interest, whether personal, corporate or political, are involved, only the integrity of the editorial and opinion pages.

The timing of Nalzaro’s dismissal–it came on the heels of his columns critical of Garcia’s refusal to vacate her office–suggests that personal and political interests were involved, the owners of Sun Star being Garcia’s relatives. In this context, the dismissal of Nalzaro looks suspiciously like subsequent punishment, or censorship, for his holding opinions contrary to owner interests.

One can argue until one’s hoarse and blue in the face that free expression is everyone’s, and certainly a columnist’s right. But the reality is that because of the dominant pattern of media ownership in this country–in which the owners of media organizations have interests other than publishing, or maintaining radio and TV stations as well as online news sites solely in behalf of keeping the public informed, those interests usually being business and political ones–journalists are routinely dismissed, suspended, or at least asked to “tone down” whenever they seem to be endangering those interests through their opinions.

It’s usually an exaggerated fear, and not necessarily because of the private ownership of media alone, but also because of the rarity of owners who’re simply into the media. One can name only a very few such media owners, among them the late Chino Roces of the old Manila Times, and the late Raul Locsin of BusinessWorld, who were publishers, period. As for the rest, they’re also Congressmen, Senators, or CEOs, linked in some way with this or that political party, or with a political family like the Garcias . Some even like being called “Don,” as if to emphasize that their interest in a media organization is only one among many other businesses, whether telecommunications, hotels, shipping, real estate, junk food manufacturing, or food franchises, the operations of which always have political dimensions.

Inevitable that sooner or later that these political and business interests will have a bearing on how the news is presented, and on whether columnists will continue to have the space in which to air their opinions, or be deprived of it.

(BusinessWorld)