Wag iboto si Migz Zubiri, kaaway siya ng mga katutubo

Who is Congressman Migz Zubiri to the IPs?

NO TO MIGZ ZUBIRI FOR SENATOR: VIOLATOR OF IP'S FPIC RIGHTS

Ang mga Katutubong Mamamayan o Indigenous Peoples isa sa mga marginalized sector at hindi masyadong nabigyan-pansin nga ating pamahalaan ng Pilipinas. Ayon sa 1995 National Commission on Indigenous Peoples o NCIP Census, mayroong humigit kumulang 110 ethnolinguistic groups o tribu sa boong bansa na kung saan umaabot sa 12.8 milyon ang kanilang kabuung populasyon. Sila ang sector ng ating lipunan na madalas biktima ng development aggression sa loob ng kanilang mga Lupang Ninuno gaya ng MINING, LOGGING, COMMERCIAL PLANTATIONS, BIOPROSPECTING AT BIO-PIRACY sa usaping Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), Reservations, PROTECTED AREAS at marami pang iba. Dahil karamihan sa kanila ay hindi nakapag-aral sa mataas na antas kumpara sa ibang sector ng Lipunan, naaabusu din sila sa pamamagitan ng paggamit nga kanilang kultura sa pamamagitan ng ng mga programang Pangturismo ng Pamahalaan. Ang kanilang mga tradisyon, sining at makulay na kultura ay madalas na ginagamit at kinuko-commercialized sa pamamagitan ng mga Festivals at kung ano-anong mga celebrasyon. Ang kanilang pagka-inosenti o kakulangan ng kaalaman sa takbo makabagong panahon o modernisasyon ay madalas ring ginagamit at inaabusu ng mga malalaking Politiko lalo na sa panahon ng eleksiyon.

Ayon sa Art. XIV, Sec. 17 ng 1987 Saligang Batas ng Pilipinas, nakasaad doon na "the State shall recognize, respect and protect the rights of the indigenous cultural communities to preserve and develop their cultures, traditions, and institutions. It shall consider these rights in the formulation of NATIONAL PLANS AND POLICIES".

Ang probisyong ito ng ating Konstitusyon ay pinagtibay at ipinatupad sa pamamagitan ng Republic Act 8371 o ang tinatawag na Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997 o ang Batas na IPRA.

Ang Batas na IPRA (R.A.8371), sa pamamagitan ng National Commission on Indigenous Peoples o NCIP ay gumawa ng mga GUIDELINES kung paano mapoprotektahan ang karapatan ng mga katutubong mamamayan, isa na dito ang karapatan na "Free, Prior and Informed Consent o FPIC" na makukuha hindi sa pamamagitan ng ordinaryong mga konsultasyon o maging plebisito man.

Ang FPIC ayon sa batas na IPRA ay isa sa pinakamahalagang karapatan ng mga katutubo dahil ito ay binansagang "THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES' TOOL FOR EMPOWERMENT IN ANCESTRAL DOMAIN GOVERNANCE". Nakasaad sa batas na IPRA na walang sino man o ano mang ahensiya ng Gobyerno o Pribadong indibdiwal o grupo ang pwedeng magpatupad ng kahit anong gawain, programa, prohekto o polisiya sa loob ng katutubong teritoryo (ancestral domain territories) kung walang consensus na pagpayag ng lahat ng mga katutubong mamamayan.

Sa isyung ito, laking gulat ng mga kumakatawan ng "constitutionally at culturally aware" na mga Lider ng Katutubong Tribu sa Bukidnon noong marinig at makita sa balita na kinumpirma ni Congressman Juan Miguel Zubiri ang kanyang pagtakbo sa Senado. Siya pa nga ang pinaka-unang nag-file ng COC sa COMELEC.

Si Congressman Migz Zubiri may malaking nilabag na karapatan ng mga Katutubo sa Probinsiya ng Bukidnon sa pamamagitan ng kanyang pag-akda ng HB 3312 o "Bill Creating the Province of Bukidnon del Sur". Sa totoo lang po, ang Probinsiya ng Bukidnon kung saan ibinotong Congressman si Juan Miguel Zubiri sa pangatlong Distrito (3rd District) ay kinikilala sa kasaysayan ng Probinsiya bilang Ancestral na Teritoryo ng Pitong (7) Katutubong Tribu gaya ng Manobo, Talaandig, Higaonon, Bukidnon, Matigsalug, Umayamnon at Tigwahanon . Ito ang pinaka batayan kung bakit ang ginawang HB 3312 ni Congressman Miguel Zubiri na hatiin ang Probinsiya ng Bukidnon sa pamamagitan ng paggawa ng bagong "Bukidnon del Sur" ay kailangan ng Free, prior and Informed Consent o FPIC galing sa lahat ng mga Katutubong tribu sa Bukidnon at HINDI SA PAMAMAGITAN LANG NG ORDINARYONG MGA KONSULTASYON AT SA PAMAMAGITAN NG ISANG PLEBISITO. Pero ang probisyong ito ng Batas na IPRA o R.A. 8371 ay hindi kinikilala ni Congressman Migs Zubiri sa pamamagitan ng pagporsegi sa Senado na magkaroon na ng Plebisito sa Probinsiya ng Bukidnon na kung saan ay nasisiguro na niya at ng kanyang kampo na talagang "YES" ang mananalo sa pamamagitan "majority rule" dahil na rin sa maraming migrants o dayong naninirahan at hindi nabibilang sa mga katutubong tribu sa Bukidnon.

Ang HB na ito ni Congressman Zubiri ay pumasa na sa mababang kapulungan ng Kongreso at ngayon ay nakasalang na sa Senado. Ito rin ang isang dahilan kung bakit malaki ang pagnanais ni Congressman Zubiri na maging Senador upang sa mabilisang paraan ay maisulong na ang Plebisito sa paghahati ng Probinsiya ng Bukidnon.

Sa totoo lang, may iilang konsultasyon na ang ipinatawag tungkol dito. Una ay ang Hearing sa Senate Committee on Local Government sa pangunguna ni Senador Alfredo Lim, ang Chairman ng nasabing Komitiba. Ito ay idinaos mismo sa gusali ng Senado sa Maynila. Ang konsultasyong ito ay sinundan pa ng isang Senate Hearing Noong buwan ng Agosto 4, 2006 sa Cagayan de oro City sa pamamagitan din ni Senador Nene Pemintel. Nong panahong ito, umani ng negatibong na reaksiyon galing sa mga "Culturally at Constitutionally Aware" na mga leader ng ibat-ibang tribu mula sa ilang lungsud ng Bukidnon ang nasabing House Bill.

Pagkatapos noon, ibinalik ang naturang Bill sa Senado. Subalit dahil sa isyu ng mga katutubong karapatan, mula sa Senate Committee on Local Government ay inilipat ito sa Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples, sa pamumuno ni Senadora Jamby Madrigal. Malaking pasalamat namin dahil ang Komitiba ni Senadora Madrigal ay malalim ang pagkakaintindi sa karapatan ng mga katutubo, partikular sa isyu ng Free, Prior and Informed Consent o FPIC. Ang ginawa ng kanyang Komitiba ay pagpapatupad lamang nga Republic Act 8371 o Batas na IPRA.

Subalit, ang ginawang ito ni Senadora Madrigal pabor sa aming mga lumalaban na Katutubo ay umani naman ng violenting reaksiyon mula kampo ni Congressman Zubiri, sa kanyang mga taga suporta at sa kanyang ama na si Bukidnon Governor Jose Ma. R. Zubiri, Jr. Dahil dito, ang kampo ni Congressman Zubiri ay gumawa pa ng isang OPEN LETTER TO ALL SENATORS sa pamamagitan ng Philippine Daily Inquirer, December 13, 2006 issue kung saan kinu-question nila ang hindi daw patas na pagtanaw ni Senadora Jamby Madrigal sa naturang Bill. Ang nasabing OPEN LETTER ay pinipirmahan mga Local Government Officials at politikong ka-alyado ng mga Zubiri, mga sector, pati na rin ang iilang leader ng tribu sa Bukidnon na kung saan ang iilan ay "SCANNED SIGNATURES" lamang at hindi genuine signatures.

Kahit pa nga ang Indigenous Peoples' Provincial Consultative Body o PCB na kumakatawan sa pitong tribu ng Bukidnon na kung saan nakasaad sa batas na IPRA ay limitado lamang ang kanyang function bilang Advisory Body ng National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (Hindi advisory Body ng LGU at mga Politiko) ay ginagamit din ng Kampo ni Congressman Zubiri upang ma-justify na suportado na "RAW" ng mga katutubo ang kanyang Bill na hatiin ang Probinsiya ng Bukidnon sa dalawa. Higit sa lahat, ginagamit din Congressman Zubiri ang Cultural Identity at sagradong tradisyon ng mga katutubo ng Bukidnon sa pamamagitan ng kanyang pagpapa-adopt at pagpakakasal ayon sa customary law ng mga katutubong Bukidnon. Sa naturang seremonya at selebrasyon, ipinatawag at ginastohan niya ng libre upang gawing batayan na PUMAYAG NA TALAGA ang mga Katutubong mamamayan ng Bukidnon sa kanyang Bill na gagawa ng bagong probinsiya ng Bukidnon del Sur.

Sa totoo lang po at ayon na rin sa mandate ng Akta Republika 8371 o batas na IPRA, ang Free Prior and Informed Consent ay hindi pweding magmumula lamang sa iilang leader ng tribu kundi ito ay galing talaga sa CONSENSUS na proseso ng lahat ng mga apektadong membro nga mga katutubo. Kaya nga ipinasa ang batas na IPRA noong Oktobre 29, 1997 upang maituwid ang maraming pagkakamali sa kasaysayan (Historical Mistakes and Injustice) na nagawa ng maraming leader ng tribu sa lumipas na mga panahon sa pamamagitan ng kanilang MISREPRESENTATION sa usaping karapatan ng mga katutubo sa loob ng kani-kanilang mga pamayanan.

Bilang mga katutubong mamamayan ng Probinsiya ng Bukidnon mula sa tribong Manobo, Talaandig, Higaonon, Bukidnon, Matigsalug, Umayamnon at Tigwahanon na may sapat na kaalaman sa aming mga karapatan sa loob ng aming mga Lupang Ninuno o ancestral territories, kami ay taos pusong nananawagan ha HUWAG IBOTO ang mga Politikong hindi marunong kumikilala at lumalabag sa karapatang pantao ng mga Katutubo.

Kaya nga nananawagan kami sa buong bansa, sa lahat ng mga katutubong mamamayan, mga sector at mga suportang grupo ng mga katutubo na HUWAG IBOTO SI MIGZ ZUBIRI. Hindi na nga niya nagawang kumilala sa karapatan ng mga katutubo sa probinsiya ng Bukidnon ngayong Congressman pa lang siya, paano na kaya pag siya'y nasa mataas na posisyon na bilang Senador ng Bansang Pilipinas? Mangangahulugan ba itong ang 110 katutubong tribu sa boong Pilipinas na kumakatawan sa kabuuang populasyong na 12.8 milyon ay maging biktima rin balang araw sa paglabag ng karapatang pantao pag nagiging Senador na si Migz Zubiri?

KAYA HUWAG KALIMUTAN, HUWAG IBOTO si MIGZ ZUBIRI!

SANA PO AY SUPORTAHAN N'YO. MARAMING SALAMAT PO AT MABUHAY!!!!! !!!!

Sumasainyo,

The Council of Elders of:
Bukidnon Unified Tribal Development Council of Elders (BUTRIDCE)
Tulugan, Lumalambung, Sumpong, Malaybalay City

Contact Person:
Datu Umpongan Romando Sambile
President

Inday Grecil

Inday Grecil
Ni Frankie del Rosario

Saksi ang naulilang sapa
Noong lumisan ka.
Ang kanilang mga balak
Ang nagpaitim sa tubig
Kaya't doo'y di ka na nakapaglaro.

Tumakbo kang papalayo sa sapa
Pabalik sa niraratrat na dampa.

Nag-alala ka.

Di mo nabatid,
Wala na roon ang iyong ama't ina
Wala na rin doon ang iyong mga kapatid.
Di mo na sila naabot ng iyong yakap.
Di na rin nila nayugyog ang iyong
pag-aalala.

Sapagkat bumaon sa lupa
ang iyong mga yapak.
habang ang mga punglo
ay humagibis sa iyong siko
at ang isa'y dumurog
sa mura mong bungo.

Inday Grecil,
Noong bago ka tuluyang paslangin,
Walang nakarinig sa impit mong daing
Maliban sa kanila.

Sila na may maitim na balak,
Mga berdugong nag-piyesta sa iyong bangkay
Isang ripple ng M-16
na halos kasintaas mo
Ang sa iyo'y pilit pina-angkin
Upang ituro ka bilang salarin.

Inday Grecil,
sakali mang dumaing ka
Bago ang bungo mo'y pasabugin
Walang nakarinig sa impit mong daing
Maliban sa kanila.

Ngunit, ayaw nilang mabuhay ka.

Dahil saksi ka laban sa kanila
mga berdugong humihiklas ng hininga
at pumapaslang ng mga pangarap
Ng maraming Ama at Ina
At ng gaya mong bata.

Inilathala ng Bulatlat

Si Grecil Buya ay siyam na taong gulang noong siya ay paslangin ng mga militar ng 67th Infantry Battalion ng AFP sa Purok 5, Brgy. Kahayag New Bataan, Compostela Valleynoong ika 31 ng Marso, 2007. Ilang araw lang ito pagkatapos ng kanyang recognition sa Grade 2 sa Simsemin Elementary School kung saan siya kinilala bilang isa sa pinakamahusay na estudyante at Most Neat. Ngunit ayon sa militar, siya diumano ay isang batang mandirigma na kasapi ng New People's Army (NPA). Patunay nito, ayon sa militar, ang isang M16 na itinutok sa kanila ni Grecil kaya nila ito binaril.

Nabalaka mi kay karon ako na pod ang gihimo nilang NPA kuno---Grecil Galacio's father

26 April 2007

WITH GEN. HOLGANZA’S PRE-JUDGEMENT
GRECIL’S FAMILY FEARS JUSTICE WILL BE DENIED

Hopes for an honest and independent investigation regarding the killing of 9-year old Grecil Buya, were dashed by Army Brig. Gen. Carlos Holganza’s statement that virtually exonerated the government troops responsible for her death. Buya was branded as a “child soldier” by the members 28th IB and 67th IB who were accused of indiscriminately firing at the house, killing Grecil. Holganza said the military would not claim accountability for her death because she was allegedly killed in crossfire.

“The investigation we are demanding will establish the weight of the military’s accountability. Fact is, a 9-year old girl is dead and the bullet that ended her bright future came from the military’s side. If only for that, they should be held accountable,” said Alphonse Rivera, Spokesperson of the Salinlahi Alliance for Children’s Concerns.

The group is also calling for an autopsy to be done by an independent forensic expert. “With the recent turnaround of the military from its previous statement that brazenly, recklessly and falsely accused Grecil of being a “child soldier” to a more tongue in cheek statement that she was caught in the crossfire, the military has already proven that they are not inclined to know that truth at all. This is why an independent autopsy is needed,” Rivera added.

Rivera also said that the immediate statement released by the military that Grecil was a “child soldier” further established their guilt. “They are sending the message that it is okay to kill a 9-year old girl because she is a member of the New People’s Army without having proving so.”

Gregorio Galacio, Grecil’s father denied that he was not cooperating with the military investigation. “Sobra tulo ka oras ako ginakuwestiyon sa military bag-o ko nila gitugutan nga makuha ang lawas sa akong anak nga gibilad nila sa init sa araw atubangan sa PNP station didto sa amo-a. Mao ba ang wala nag-kooperar?” Galacio said. (For over three hours, I was questioned by the military before they even allowed me to claim the body of my daughter who was exposed to the heat of the sun in front of the PNP station in our place. Is this what they call non-cooperation?”)

He also dismissed Holganza’s statement that the family was forum-shopping. “The family is seeking justice for the death of their eldest child. This is a very good form of psychological coping for victims. And with the current atmosphere of intimidation Gen. Holganza’s statement has created, it is but appropriate that the family ensures that justice will be done.”

Gen. Holganza’s threat to file charges of rebellion and illegal possession of firearms to Gregorio should the family decide to file charges against the military, has made them fear for their lives and their children’s security. “Tablahon kuno nila ako kung magkaso mi. Nabalaka mi kay karon ako na pod ang gihimo nilang NPA kuno,” Galacio added. (They will get back at me should we decide to file charges. We are worried because now I they are accusing me of being an NPA.)

The CRC and Salinlahi, together with Karapatan Alliance for Human Rights are set to accompany the family tomorrow at the Ombudsman to file administrative charges against 2nd Lt. Francis John Gabawa, platoon commanding officer and other military personnel involved in the incident. “We will continue to help them in their quest for justice. We want to reiterate the message that killing children deserves punishment,” Rivera concluded. ###

"Child Soldiers" Label used by the Military to Escape Accountability over Cases of Children Victims of Human Rights Violations

SALINLAHI Foundation for Children's Concern
April 16, 2007

'Child Soldiers' Label Used by Military to Escape Accountability

"Child Soldiers" Label used by the Military to Escape Accountability over Cases of Children Victims of Human Rights Violations

Obedient, playful and fun-loving. These are characteristics typical of rural children like Grecil Buya Galacio, 9 years old. She had cherished the start of the summer vacation because this meant days of helping her mother in her house chores, playing with her younger siblings, and swimming in the nearby creek. But on that fateful day of March 31, 2007, Grecil's childhood had ended. Members of the 28th and 67th Infantry Brigade based in Compostella Valley had shot Grecil during an encounter with members of the New People's Army in Purok 6, Barangay Kahayag, New Bataan. With no remorse, the military immediately branded Grecil as a "child soldier" of the NPA as if labeling their victim as such could exenorate them from the accountability of such a gruesome act.

As an alliance of organizations concerned with the rights and welfare of children, Salinlahi issues the highest condemnation against this act by the government military troops especially since this is not the first time that they used the excuse of children being "child soldiers' in violating children's human rights.

In February last year, the military arrested 12 youths, 2 of them minors, who were bound to watch a rock concert in Baguio City. The youths were detained for months and were charged with rebellion.

* A 14 and 15 -year old High School students, Aileen and Marjorie were shot in their thighs and injured in Baggao, Cagayan by members of the 21st IB PA. They were also branded as "NPA amasona's" and charged with rebellion. They now fear that they could not continue their studies with a case filed against them.

* 3 youths, Jefferson, Kennedy and Joey, all 15 years old, were gathering coconuts when they were chanced upon by members of the 76th IB PA in Lopez, Quezon. They were tortured to force them to admit that they were members of the NPA. They were also charged with rebellion.

* 5 minors have been arrested and placed in the custody of the DSWD for being in a house where alleged NPA leaders were caught in Eastern Visayas

* 11 minors were arrested in Basilan while tending their farms. They were branded as Abu Sayyaf members and were detained at Camp Bagong Diwa in Bicutan for more than 3 years now.

These cases make up only part of the hundreds of cases of children victims of human rights violations since Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo came into power in 2001. There are 54 cases (49 of which are well-documented) of children killed by the military during operations. Till now, justice for these children has not been served.

We cannot help but conclude that these acts are intentional and systematic rather than isolated. These are acts consistent with the AFP's Malacanang-approved counterinsurgency plan known as Oplan Bantay Laya 2. The government chooses to hide behind the distorted concept of "child soldiers" against the children they have victimized. Instead of protecting children, this concept exposes children all the more to violence and makes them vulnerable targets of human rights violations.

For a government who is signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and boasts of laws and policies that promotes the best interest of the child, this is utter hypocrisy. Pres. Arroyo, a woman and a mother, continues to ignore the issue of blatant human rights violations and instead chose to heap praises on military officials who are accused as perpetrators.

We challenge the Arroyo government to show its sincerity in upholding children and human rights by dropping all rebellion charges against children and minors. We hold it accountable for the destruction of these children's lives and future.

We urge child rights advocates, including politicians running for office, to condemn this brutal act and join us in our actions on the case. We will support the family in their pursuit for justice as they file a case in a proper regional trial court. Likewise, we will also file a complaint at the Commission on Human Rights and the Joint Secretariat of the Joint Monitoring Committee of the CAHRIHL and present the case to the Geneva Committee on the Rights of the Child and to Mr. Philip Alston, the UN Rapporteur for Extra Judicial Killing.

We urge all decent and peace-loving Filipino family to support our call for JUSTICE FOR GRECIL and all other children and minors who are deceitfully branded as child soldiers. Let us not tolerate the rampant violation of children's rights, especially by the very institutions that vow to protect them. Let us instead be instruments in building a just and peaceful future for our children.

JUSTICE FOR GRECIL AND ALL CHILDREN VICTIMS OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS!

PUNISH ALL THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE WRONGFUL DEATHS AND ARRESTS OF SO-CALLED CHILD SOLDIERS! PROTECT CHILDREN'S LIVES AND UPHOLD THEIR HUMAN RIGHTS!

US News: Terrorist Posada Released on Bail! Extradite Posada -- Free the Cuban Five!

Terrorist Luis Posada Released on Bail!
Extradite Posada -- Free the Cuban Five!

The A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition condemns in the strongest terms, the release of terrorist Luis Posada Carriles from U.S. jail this past Thursday, April 19.

Posada, mastermind of the murders of dozens of people, while acting on behalf of the CIA for more than 40 years, was freed from a New Mexico jail and flown to Miami, despite worldwide protests. His freedom on bond is until May 11, when his trial on immigration-fraud charges begins. But a dangerous precedent is already in place, with Posada being allowed to fly into Miami to meet and strategize with other terrorists, those who have helped finance his bombing campaigns.


A powerful display in memory of Posada's victims in front of U.S. diplomatic mission, Havana

The move to free him is widely known to be the result of a blatant refusal by George W. Bush and administration officials to declare Posada a terrorist. Without such a declaration or prosecution for his terrorist crimes, federal judges have ruled that a detainee cannot be held indefinitely in immigration jail.

Right now U.S. authorities have only charged Posada with immigration fraud. But Posada is not simply an immigrant. He is an avowed terrorist who never renounced his crimes. Although convicted in the past for some of his crimes in other countries, he has always managed to escape and carry out more torture and killings.

In the meantime, other notorious anti-Cuba terrorists in Miami have been caught with massive arsenals of weapons but only received extremely light sentences for their crimes. One, Santiago Alvarez, actually brought Posada into the United States illegally, on boat, in March 2005. He was caught with weapons caches but was only sentenced to four years and promised an even lesser sentence if he reveals the whereabouts of all his weapons.

Posada’s release is a green light to U.S.-directed terrorism against Cuba.

---

Luis Posada Carriles's history

Posada, Cuban-born, was recruited into the CIA soon after the Cuban revolution in 1959. At Ft. Benning, GA, he was trained extensively in explosives and sabotage in order to try to debilitate—through the means of terrorism—the new socialist society that the Cuban people were building.

Posada’s terrorist history spans four decades. He is most notorious for the Oct. 6, 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner, which killed 73 people. The two mercenaries whom he paid to plant the bomb, Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo, confessed immediately afterwards that they were working with the CIA, and Posada was their boss. Posada’s favorite method is to pay mercenaries to do his dirty work. But he always procures the explosives and builds the bombs.

Not coincidentally, George Bush Sr. was head of the CIA in the 1970s when the plane bombing and many other terrorist attacks by Posada took place. In 1990, when Posada’s direct accomplice in the plane bombing, Orlando Bosch, was about to be deported from the United States, George Bush Sr. intervened to cancel his deportation, granting him permanent residence in the U.S.

Because the plane bombing was plotted by Posada and Bosch in Venezuela, the government of Hugo Chávez has demanded his extradition to Venezuela. But so far Washington has refused. U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has the authority and obligation to begin extradition proceedings, but he has remained silent and refused to act decisively against Posada during the two years that he has been detained in a El Paso, Texas jail.

This coddling of Posada and other Miami-based, anti-Cuba terrorists flies in the face of the hypocritical claim by Bush that he is fighting a war against terrorism.

The most outrageous example of the double standard is the U.S. government’s imprisonment of the five Cuban men who infiltrated the Miami terrorist groups for the sole purpose of monitoring those organizations and reporting on imminent terrorist attacks, in order to stop them.

But instead of arresting Bosch and many other Miami terrorists, the FBI went after the Cuban Five with a vengeance. They were charged with the completely unsupported allegation of espionage conspiracy, failure to register as foreign agents, and other charges.

The Five were tried in Miami and convicted and sentenced to four life sentences and 77 years collectively, in a politically-motivated trial that is part and parcel of U.S. hostility against Cuba.

Free the Cuban Five anti-terrorists from U.S. prisons! Extradite Posada to Venezuela!

A good provider is one who leaves, a NY Times article by a Filipino

Original article here

April 22, 2007
A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves
By JASON DePARLE

On June 25, 1980 (a date he would remember), a good-natured Filipino pool-maintenance man gathered his wife and five children for an upsetting ride to the Manila airport. At 36, Emmet Comodas had lived a hard life without growing hardened, which was a mixed blessing given the indignities of his poverty. Orphaned at 8, raised on the Manila streets where he hawked cigarettes, he had hustled a job at a government sports complex and held it for nearly two decades. On the spectrum of Filipino poverty, that alone marked him as a man of modest fortune. But a monthly salary of $50 did not keep his family fed.

Home was a one-room, scrap-wood shanty in a warren of alleys and stinking canals, hidden by the whitewashed walls of an Imelda Marcos beautification campaign. He had borrowed money at usurious rates to start a tiny store, which a thief had plundered. His greatest fears centered on his 11-year-old daughter, Rowena, who had a congenital heart defect that turned her lips blue and fingernails black and who needed care he could not afford. After years of worrying over her frail physique, Emmet dropped to his moldering floor and asked God for a decision: take her or let him have her.

God answered in a mysterious way. Not long after, Emmet’s boss offered him a pool-cleaning job in Saudi Arabia. Emmet would make 10 times as much as he made in Manila. He would also live 4,500 miles from his family in an Islamic autocracy where stories of abused laborers were rife. He accepted on the spot. His wife, Tita, was afraid of the slum where she soon would be raising children alone, and she knew that overseas workers often had affairs. She also knew their kids ate better because of the money the workers sent home. She spent her last few pesos for admission to an airport lounge where she could wave at the vanishing jet, then went home to cry and wait.

Two years later, on Aug. 2, 1982 (another date he would remember), Emmet walked off the returning flight with chocolate for the kids, earrings for Tita and a bag of duty-free cigarettes, his loneliness abroad having made him a chain smoker. His 2-year-old son, Boyet, considered him a stranger and cried at his touch, though as Emmet later said, “I was too happy to be sad.” He gave himself a party, replaced the shanty’s rotted walls and put on a new roof. Then after three months at home, he left for Saudi Arabia again. And again. And again and again: by the time Emmet ended the cycle and came home for good, he had been gone for nearly two decades. Boyet was grown.

Deprived of their father while sustained by his wages, the Comodas children spent their early lives studying Emmet’s example. Now they have copied it. All five of them, including Rowena, grew up to become overseas workers. Four are still working abroad. And the middle child, Rosalie — a nurse in Abu Dhabi — faces a parallel to her father’s life that she finds all too exact. She has an 18-month-old back in the Philippines who views her as a stranger and resists her touch. What started as Emmet’s act of desperation has become his children’s way of life: leaving in order to live.

About 200 million migrants from different countries are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is as big if not bigger. Were these half-billion or so people to constitute a state — migration nation — it would rank as the world’s third-largest. While some migrants go abroad with Ph.D.’s, most travel as Emmet did, with modest skills but fearsome motivation. The risks migrants face are widely known, including the risk of death, but the amounts they secure for their families have just recently come into view. Migrants worldwide sent home an estimated $300 billion last year — nearly three times the world’s foreign-aid budgets combined. These sums — “remittances” — bring Morocco more money than tourism does. They bring Sri Lanka more money than tea does.

The numbers, which have doubled in the past five years, have riveted the attention of development experts who once paid them little mind. One study after another has examined how private money, in the form of remittances, might serve the public good. A growing number of economists see migrants, and the money they send home, as a part of the solution to global poverty.

Yet competing with the literature of gain is a parallel literature of loss. About half the world’s migrants are women, many of whom care for children abroad while leaving their own children home. “Your loved ones across that ocean . . . ,” Nadine Sarreal, a Filipina poet in Singapore, warns:

Will sit at breakfast and try not to gaze

Where you would sit at the table.

Meals now divided by five

Instead of six, don’t feed an emptiness.

Earlier waves of globalization, the movement of money and goods, were shaped by mediating institutions and protocols. The International Monetary Fund regulates finance. The World Trade Organization regularizes trade. The movement of people — the most intimate form of globalization — is the one with the fewest rules. There is no “World Migration Organization” to monitor the migrants’ fate. A Kurd gaining asylum in Sweden can have his children taught school in their mother tongue, while a Filipino bringing a Bible into Riyadh risks being expelled.

The growth in migration has roiled the West, but demographic logic suggests it will only continue. Aging industrial economies need workers. People in poor countries need jobs. Transportation and communication have made moving easier. And the potential economic gains are at record highs. A Central American laborer who moves to the United States can expect to multiply his earnings about six times after adjusting for the higher cost of living. That is a pay raise about twice as large as the one that propelled the last great wave of immigration a century ago.

With about one Filipino worker in seven abroad at any given time, migration is to the Philippines what cars once were to Detroit: its civil religion. A million Overseas Filipino Workers — O.F.W.’s — left last year, enough to fill six 747s a day. Nearly half the country’s 10-to-12-year-olds say they have thought about whether to go. Television novellas plumb the migrants’ loneliness. Politicians court their votes. Real estate salesmen bury them in condominium brochures. Drive by the Central Bank during the holiday season, and you will find a high-rise graph of the year’s remittances strung up in Christmas lights.

Across the archipelago, stories of rags to riches compete with stories of rags to rags. New malls define the landscape; so do left-behind kids. Gain and loss are so thoroughly joined that the logo of the migrant welfare agency shows the sun doing battle with the rain. Local idiom stresses the uncertainty of the migrant’s lot. An O.F.W. does not say he is off to make his fortune. He says, “I am going to try my luck.”

A kilometer of crimson stretched across the Manila airport, awaiting a planeload of returning workers and the president who would greet them. The V.I.P. lounge hummed with marketing schemes aimed at migrants and their families. Globe Telecom had got its name on the security guards’ vests. A Microsoft rep had flown in from the States with a prototype of an Internet phone. An executive from Philam Insurance noted that overseas workers buy one of every five new policies. Sirens disrupted the finger food, and a motorcade delivered the diminutive head of state, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who once a year offers rice cakes and red carpet to those she calls “modern heroes.”

Bleary from the eight-hour flight, a few hundred workers from Abu Dhabi swapped puzzled looks for presidential handshakes on their way to baggage claim. Roderick de Guzman, a young car porter, took home the day’s grand prize, a “livelihood package” that included a jeepney, life insurance, $1,000 and a karaoke machine. Too dazed to smile, he held an oversize sweepstakes check while the prize’s sponsors and the president beamed at his side and a squad of news photographers fired away. When it comes to O.F.W.’s, politics and business speak with one voice. Message: We Care.

On the way to the photo op, I squeezed into an elevator beside Arroyo. A president and daughter of a president, she is a seasoned pol who attended Georgetown University (Bill Clinton was a classmate) and has a Ph.D. in economics. I asked why she called migrant workers “heroes” and gathered from her impatient look that it was all she could do to keep from saying “du-uh.”

“They send home more than a billion dollars a month,” she said.

“O.F.W.’s get V.I.P. Treatment, Treats,” reported the next day’s Philippine Daily Inquirer, which runs nearly 600 O.F.W. articles a year. Half have the fevered tone of a gold-rush ad. Half sound like human rights complaints.

“Deployment of O.F.W.’s Hits 1-M Mark.”

“Remittances Seen to Set New Record.”

“Happy Days Here Again for Real Estate Sector.”

“5 Dead O.F.W.’s in Saudi.”

“O.F.W. 18th Pinay Rape Victim in Kuwait.”

“We Slept With Dog, Ate Leftovers for $200/month.”

Nearly 10 percent of the country’s 89 million people live abroad. About 3.6 million are O.F.W.’s — contract workers. Another 3.2 million have migrated permanently, largely to the United States — and 1.3 million more are thought to be overseas illegally. (American visas, which are probably the hardest to get, are also the most coveted, both for the prosperity they promise and because the Philippines, a former colony, retains an unrequited fascination with the U.S.) There are a million O.F.W.’s in Saudi Arabia alone, followed by Japan, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan. Yet with workers in at least 170 countries, the O.F.W.’s are literally everywhere, including the high seas. About a quarter of the world’s seafarers come from the Philippines. The Greek word for maid is Filipineza. The “modern heroes” send home $15 billion a year, a seventh of the country’s gross domestic product. Addressing a Manila audience, Rick Warren, the evangelist, called Filipino guest workers the Josephs of their day — toiling in the homes of modern Pharaohs to liberate their people.

For the sheer visuals of the O.F.W. boom, consider Pulong Anahao, a village two hours south of Manila that has been sending Filipinezas to Italy for 30 years. Cement block is the regional style, but these streets boast — the only verb that will do — faux Italianate villas. For the social complexity, turn on “Dahil sa Iyong Paglisan” (“Because You Left”), a Tagalog telenovela. Each show explores a familiar type. “Dodgie,” a driver in Dubai, is livid at his wife’s profligacy. “Dennis” gets fleeced by crooked recruiters on his way to Singapore. “Carlos,” with a wife in Riyadh, is a hapless househusband; he cannot cook or wash, and his son is left out in the rain.

Manila Hospital was aflutter one morning with the taping of the episode about “Wally.” A seafarer home from Greece, he demanded to know where his money had gone, only to discover that his pregnant wife had spent it on antiviral medication. His port-of-call promiscuity had given her H.I.V.

“Qui-et!” the director bellowed, with Wally about to learn of his own infection. It took the actor five takes to summon a sufficiently chilling mix of fear and remorse. A giggly nursing student, fresh from a cameo, paused to chat. She was getting a degree to — what else? — “go abroad and try my luck.”

While the Philippines has exported labor for at least 100 years, the modern system took shape three decades ago under Ferdinand Marcos. Clinging to power through martial law, he faced soaring unemployment, a Communist insurgency and growing urban unrest. Exporting idle Filipinos promised a safety valve and a source of foreign exchange. With a 1974 decree (“to facilitate and regulate the movement of workers in conformity with the national interest”), Marcos sent technocrats circling the globe in search of labor contracts. Annual deployments rose more than tenfold in a decade, to 360,000.

The “People Power” revolution of 1986 replaced him with Corazon Aquino, who as the widow of his slain rival was a figure as un-Marcosian as they come. But the surge in labor migration continued. By the end of her six-year term, annual deployments had nearly doubled. There is no anti-migration camp in Filipino politics. The labor secretary, Arturo Brion, greeted me by saying that he, too, had been an O.F.W., having worked as a lawyer for seven years in Canada. When I asked how a nationalist candidate might fare with a vow to keep workers home, he looked confused. “Nobody would vote for him,” he said.

The political issue is not migration but migrant safety. The formative moment in O.F.W. history, its Alamo, was the 1995 hanging of Flor Contemplacion, a Filipina maid in Singapore. Though she confessed to killing another Filipina maid and a Singaporean child, she did so in an uncertain mental state with weak legal representation; an 11th-hour witness fingered someone else. President Fidel Ramos’s calls for mercy failed, and the martyred maid’s coffin received a hero’s welcome at home. Congressional elections followed, and the new Legislature passed what is variously called Republic Act 8042 and “the migrant workers’ Magna Carta.” It pushed the government’s responsibilities beyond migrant deployment to migrant protection.

Woe now to the Filipino pol who appears not to have migrant welfare in mind. After a Filipino truck driver was kidnapped in Iraq in 2004, Arroyo not only banned all contract work there but also withdrew from the American-led military coalition. Even state visits have the tenor of bail runs. The president triumphed in Saudi Arabia last spring when King Adbullah freed more than 400 workers who had been jailed for petty crimes. But the war in Lebanon last summer threw the Arroyo government into a crisis by displacing thousands of Filipina maids. They returned home with harrowing tales of prewar abuse, including beatings and rape, endured in pursuit of salaries that averaged $200 a month. Embarrassed (and seemingly surprised), the government proposed a “Supermaid” program, a short-term training regimen that would lift the maids’ skills and demand a doubling of their wage. Those not cringing at the name fretted that a pay raise would leave the maids displaced by Bangladeshis.

While every country’s migrants face risks, what makes the Philippines unique is a bureaucracy pledged to reduce them. There is no precise analog for the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration — O.W.W.A. — or its savvy director, Marianito Roque, who is one part international rescue worker and one part domestic fixer. A bureaucratic survivor who rose through the ranks, Roque understands the imperative of making the president look good. Christmas offered plenty of opportunity. With legions of workers coming home, Roque staged thank-you fiestas nationwide.

I pictured them as sedate affairs until I arrived at a mall in Cebu City. Five thousand people pressed against police barricades, aiming cellphone cameras at a fluttering pop star who urged them to buy her music and clothes. O.W.W.A. has its own chorale, which offered the workers “Lady Marmalade” — “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” — an odd choice in a country saturated with fears of overseas adultery. Roque raffled off a mountain of rice cookers and electric fans, and the crowd responded with game-show shrieks. He caught an early-morning flight the next day and stormed through two more fiestas.

When the last rice cooker had been claimed and the last voulez-vous belted out, I spotted a man grinning mischievously, as if he were in on his own private joke. An attractive woman hung on his arm with what I mistook as reunion bliss. The bliss, she happily explained, was in the pay. The man, Pepito Montero, boasted that he earned $8,000 a month on a Saudi oil rig, and a flicker of doubt must have crossed my face. His smile broadened at the chance to produce his retort — a mass of $100 bills the size of a tennis ball.

Emmet Comodas migrated to Manila before he migrated abroad. His parents, tenant farmers in the province of Leyte, died before he finished grade school, and he was handed off to an aunt in the capital, 600 miles away. She lived in a muddy squatters’ camp called Leveriza. The alleys were ruled by drunks and gangs, but Emmet wore his geniality as a shield and was quick to make friends. Drawn to commerce more than to school, which he left at 16, Emmet spent much of his youth dodging traffic to sell newspapers and cigarettes. When he grew weary of his aunt’s strictures, he slept on a city bridge.

Among his favorite vending sites was a nearby stadium, Rizal Memorial, though without a sales license he had to sneak in early and hide before events. The canteen manager, admiring his pluck, hired him as a cook. With a bounce in his step from his first real job, Emmet was walking home to Leveriza one day when he spotted a woman, beautiful but frail, in an alley ironing clothes. He was afraid to say hello.

Teresita Portagana came from a higher echelon of the Filipino poor. Her father was a farmhand in nearby Cavite province who managed to buy a few acres of coffee trees. Tita was raised on the farm, the oldest of 11 kids in a close-knit family who shared a single thatched hut. She left school after sixth grade to help her mother manage the growing clan, and when she turned 16 her father sent her to work in a Manila glove factory. She would live with an aunt and send home most of her pay.

Her excitement at the prospect of city living vanished when she saw her aunt’s neighborhood. Leveriza was not just crowded and dangerous; it stank. Stagnant estuaries, which doubled as sewage pits, were filled with discarded bundles of waste dubbed “flying saucers.” When her father learned that Tita was drawing looks from Leveriza boys, he hurried to Manila and moved her out. “One relative in Leveriza is enough,” he said. By then Emmet was pressing his case. Tita considered him plain-looking and “poor as a rat,” but his persistence carried the day. They married on the farm and moved back to Leveriza, where Emmet would be close to work. He was 23, and she had just turned 21.

Similar slums were spreading across the developing world, greeting provincial migrants with welcome mats of squalor. How people survived, and at what cost, was a mystery and a concern. As Tita and Emmet were settling in, F. Landa Jocano, an anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, moved nearby in search of answers, which eventually formed a noted book, “Slum as a Way of Life.” The setting of his Leveriza-like camp was predictably grim — “wet and muddy,” with a “nauseating smell” and “cardboard hovels” holding six to nine people to the room. But what really stood out were the social conflicts. Despite the Filipinos’ reputation for prizing social accord, husbands beat wives, gangs murdered gangs and tsismis — gossip — was a constant preoccupation. “Envy, jealousy, hatred and other forms of ridicule” coursed through the alleys, and it took a special deftness to thrive. Tita, lacking it, withdrew into herself. “I was talkless,” she said.

Tita and Emmet had three children in four years, and two more later. Their second child. Rowena, was born seven weeks early with a heart defect that went undiagnosed for years. All they knew was that she was constantly sick. The family lived in rented shanties until Emmet won $90 on a horse race and bought a shanty of his own. It was so bug-infested that he burned the walls and rebuilt with secondhand wood. He moved to a pool-cleaning job at the stadium and sold cigarettes on the side.

Still, the holes in the roof meant the children got wet on rainy nights. When she lacked money for vegetables or fish, Tita served the children rice, and when she lacked enough rice for three meals, she served two. A Sikh they called the “boom-bay” lent money at the standard interest rate, 20 percent per month. Emmet borrowed about $130 to open a tiny grocery store, which he planned to run as a sideline with Tita’s help. The thief who robbed it during Holy Week seemed to know that they were busy with a marathon reading of the “Pasyon,” a 24-hour life of Christ. A few months later, Tita became pregnant with their fifth child.

By then the Marcos labor decree was five years old, and the machinery was humming. Saudi Arabia was modernizing overnight. It needed roads, schools, apartments, hospitals and laborers to build them. Filipinos worked hard, spoke English and took orders. Tita and Emmet had seen the workers coming home with the Look — leather jackets, Ray-Bans and enough gold around their necks to turn their skin yellow with a case of Saudi “hepa.” But most of the jobs were controlled by recruiting agencies, which charged placement fees of a month’s salary or more. Only the privileged among the poor could leave.

In the spring of 1980, Tita’s brother Fortz took a loan from his father to try his luck in Riyadh. He had just landed when Emmet’s boss asked if he wanted to do the same pool-cleaning work in Dhahran. “Yes, yes, yes,” Emmet said. The firm that managed the stadium had a contract there, so there were no recruiters’ fees. Tita’s brother Fering came the following year, and soon after, her brother Servando. Of the 11 siblings in her generation, nine either became overseas workers or married one.

“First timers” have it rough. Emmet shared a comfortable company apartment and a cook with three other Filipinos, but the loneliness was worse than anything he had known. Outside of work, there was nothing to do. Alcohol and churches were banned. Looking the wrong way at a Saudi woman was an invitation to arrest. (That is one theory behind the Ray-Bans.) Emmet paced Dhahran malls and stared at Dhahran skies, fantasizing that the planes overhead had come to take him home.

Tita’s loneliness was costly, too, but she had Emmet’s earnings. With a monthly salary of $500, he made as much in two years in Dhahran as he did in two decades in Manila, and he sent two-thirds of it home. Tita bought better food, and she bought Rowena medicine. She bought each child a second school uniform, so she would not have to wash every night. She bought an electric fan and a television — her habit of watching through a neighbor’s window was a source of alleyway discord. Emmet, who talked to the family on cassette tapes, surprised Tita by sending one with a $100 bill inside.

When Emmet got home in 1982, he gave himself a party, patched the walls and replaced the leaky roof. Then he signed another two-year contract. After his second tour, he replaced the wooden walls with cement block and added an upstairs. After his third contract, he paid the government $2,000 and got title to the land. Though neither Tita nor Emmet finished high school, all five children started college; four got degrees. Emmet, overseas paying the bills, missed every graduation. It takes a lot to move him to anger, but even now he gets furious when someone says that overseas workers leave their children to grow up without love. “You cannot look at each other and say it’s love if your stomach is empty,” he said. “I sacrificed!”

I first met Tita and the kids in 1987, as Emmet was finishing his third contract. I had a fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation to study urban poverty; a Leveriza nun, Sister Christine Tan, introduced us, and Tita agreed to let me move in. With Cory Aquino finishing her first year, the country was in transition, and Tita was, too. She was no longer quite so talkless. I awoke in the mornings to the blare of Tagalog news radio and once found her studying an English newspaper with a dual-language dictionary. “What’s imperialism?” she asked. When Congress wanted a witness for a hearing on urban poverty, Sister Christine had Tita testify. Tita told me she had been asking God, “Why are so many Filipinos poor?” When I asked if God had answered, she laughed. “Not yet,” she said.

Much of the credit belonged to Sister Christine, who had organized a network of prayer groups and cooperative stores and groomed Tita as a lieutenant. Tita bought and distributed 2,000 eggs a week for the group’s co-op stores, placing them under a fluorescent light at night to keep the rats away. The unpaid work, undertaken in the spirit of community service, brought Tita new confidence. But so perhaps did the modest comforts made possible by Emmet’s wages. By now she had a toilet.

Her oldest two children spent less time mulling the meaning of life — Rowena, still poised between sickness and health, was addicted to celebrity gossip — and her two youngest were little boys. But Rosalie, the middle child, was on a quest. At 16, she was ambitious, sometimes brooding, beautiful and devout; while her sister squealed about movie stars, Rosalie wrote Tagalog plays about class conflict. One depicted Imelda Marcos conniving to raze Leveriza and put up a discothèque.

Emmet returned a few months into my off-and-on stay. He had missed half the life of his 11-year-old, Roldan, and nearly the whole life of the 7-year-old, Boyet. He wanted to stay. With jobs scarce, frustration rose all around. Emmet scolded Tita for running up the light bill with her stewardship of the eggs. Tita got angry when she heard Emmet urge their oldest child, Rolando, to join the U.S. Navy, and furious when she caught him encouraging Rosalie to go abroad. Emmet wanted her to be an O.F.W.; Tita wanted her to be a nun. Though Emmet found a temporary job, he was back in Riyadh within a year.

One day he opened the door to find his son Rolando on the steps. He had quit tech school to try his luck as a driver for a Saudi family. His luck proved mediocre. The salary was low, his hours were long and his secret courtship of a Filipina maid could have landed him in jail. He quit after his second contract. By then, Rosalie had finished nursing school in Manila, a milestone for the family. She had set her sights on a job in the United States, but narrowly failed the licensing exam. Four years after graduation, she still earned $100 a month. Saudi hospitals paid nearly four times as much. After borrowing the recruiters’ fee from an aunt, Rosalie was Jeddah bound.

No one fully understood that a baton was being passed. With the kids grown, Tita soon rented out the house in Leveriza and started building another on her share of the family farm. At 55, Emmet had given his prime years, nearly 20 of them, to a succession of Arabian pools. Rosalie, renewing her contract, insisted he go home. The responsibility of supporting the family was hers.

As an Islamic state that bans socializing between unmarried women and men, Saudi Arabia held out few hopes for marriage or kids. Rosalie approached her 30th birthday resigned to a dutiful life alone. She celebrated at a Jeddah restaurant with Filipino friends; one of them, knowing they had a private room, disregarded the gender rules by bringing along her nephew, a construction engineer. The nephew, Christopher Villanueva, took Rosalie for an after-dinner walk, trailing her by a few paces in case the religious police happened by. “I was trembling!” Rosalie said. With both of them living in guarded single-sex dorms, their 18-month courtship occurred largely by cellphone. When they flew home in 2002 to marry, they had never been alone.

In the Philippines the following year to deliver her first baby, Rosalie saw an ad seeking nurses in Abu Dhabi. At $1,100 a month, the job paid twice what she made in Jeddah, and Abu Dhabi had no religious police. She aced the test and caught another plane to the Middle East, this time as a mother. Christine — “Tin-Tin” — was 7 months old when Rosalie tore herself away. The baby stayed on the farm and soon called her Aunt Rowena “Mama.” When a second daughter, Precious Lara, followed, she considered Rowena her mama, too. The girls cried when Rosalie held them on visits, filling her with worry and regret.

Overseas prosperity is a gift and an obligation. “Everyone needs help, and you cannot say no,” said Rosalie, who seems not to mind. She paid to complete her parents’ new house and sends them $400 a month. She sent money for her cousins’ school supplies and helped her uncle buy a cow. She lent hundreds of dollars to godparents, knowing she would never be repaid. Migration operates like compound interest, building upon itself. Capitalizing on permissive visa laws, Rosalie has now brought a cousin and three siblings to Abu Dhabi. Rowena will soon start a secretarial job, and Roldan and Boyet are working with computers. Rosalie has also gotten Tin-Tin back, though not without some continuing distress: the girl, now 4, still treats Rowena like her real mom.

Already the family benefactor, Rosalie recently got a big promotion. As a charge nurse at the Al Rahba Hospital, she now earns $2,000 a month — 20 times what she earned a decade ago when she left the Philippines. Plus she has free health care and housing. Nonetheless, she is determined to stamp one more visa on the passport page. After a decade of trying, she has passed the American nursing exam and will soon retake the English test, which she narrowly failed. “The U.S. is the ultimate,” she said. “If you make it to the U.S., there is no place else to go.”

Once upon a time — say five years ago — remittances were considered small potatoes, and possibly rotten ones. Experts saw them as minor amounts, “wasted” on consumption, and to the extent they came from professionals, as reminders of brain drain. That began to change early this decade, when research by the Inter-American Development Bank (commissioned by a remittance enthusiast named Don Terry) showed the amounts in Latin America were three or four times higher than supposed. That work got people talking, but interest surged in 2003 when Dilip Ratha of the World Bank showed the eye-popping sums extended across the globe. Migration has been a prominent development topic ever since. Of the $300 billion that migrants sent home last year, about two-thirds came through formal channels like banks, while the rest is thought to have traveled informally, in pockets or cassette tapes. By contrast, the world spent $104 billion on foreign aid. While the doubling of formal remittances in the past five years partly reflects improved counting, Dilip Ratha argues that most of the gain is real. There are more migrants; their earnings are growing; and plunging transaction fees encourage them to send more money home.

The Philippines, which received $15 billion in formal remittances in 2006, ranked fourth among developing countries behind India ($25 billion), China ($24 billion) and Mexico ($24 billion) — all of which are much larger. In no other sizable country do remittances loom as large as a share of the economy. Remittances make up 3 percent of the G.D.P. in Mexico but 14 percent in the Philippines. In 22 countries, remittances exceed a tenth of the G.D.P., including Moldova (32 percent), Haiti (23 percent) and Lebanon (22 percent).

Despite fears that the money goes to waste, a growing literature shows positive effects. Remittances cut the poverty rate by 11 percent in Uganda and 6 percent in Bangladesh, according to studies cited by the World Bank, and raised education levels in El Salvador and the Philippines. Being private, the money is less susceptible to corruption than foreign aid; it is also better aimed at the needy and “countercyclical” — it rises in response to slumps and natural disasters. By increasing reserves of foreign exchange, remittances reduce government borrowing costs, saving the Philippines about half a billion dollars in interest each year. While 80 percent of the money sent to Latin America is spent on consumption, that leaves nearly $12 billion for investment. And consumption among the poor is hardly a bad thing.

The downside is the risk of dependency, among individuals waiting for a check or for rulers (like Marcos) who use the money to avoid economic reforms. The cash could have a stultifying effect, like the “curse” of too much oil. No country has escaped poverty with remittances alone. “Remittances can’t solve structural problems,” said Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington research group. “Remittances can’t compensate for corrupt governments, nepotism, incompetence or communal conflict. People have finally figured out that remittances are important, but they haven’t figured out what to do about it.”

Drawing boards are filled with schemes to leverage the money for development, in ways large and small. A small Manila nonprofit group, the Economic Resource Center for Overseas Filipinos, has a plan to get overseas workers to buy cows; a dairy farm in the Philippines would raise them, splitting the profits and creating jobs. More grandly, commercial banks in Turkey and Brazil have used the expected flow of future remittances as a form of collateral to issue billions in corporate bonds. This lowers the banks’ borrowing costs and increases the amounts they can lend, making it easier, in theory at least, for businesses to borrow and expand.

A goal atop everyone’s list is getting more families “banked.” Opening an account (as opposed to just wiring money) lets migrants establish credit histories for future mortgages or business loans. The deposits expand capital pools. And bank accounts boost savings rates. Some banks turn migrant deposits into tiny loans to village entrepreneurs, linking remittances to the popular realm of microfinance.

Migrants contribute to development in ways that go beyond remittances. Many countries tap their diasporas for philanthropy. Affluent migrants make investments back home. And the increasingly circular nature of migration means that some migrants return with knowledge and connections. This is a countertrend to brain drain — “brain gain” — with Taiwan the most obvious case. The Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park, a government-subsidized Silicon Valley, has lured home thousands of skilled Taiwanese with research and investment opportunities. The key is having something to lure them to; brain gain has not come to, say, Malawi.

Casting migration as the answer to global poverty has some people alarmed. It risks obscuring the personal price that migrants and their families pay. It could be used to gloss over, or even justify, the exploitation of workers. And it could offer rich countries an excuse for cutting foreign aid and other development efforts. “This is a new version of trickledown theory,” warned Stephen Castles of Oxford University at a recent conference in Mexico City. “It wants to make the poor pay for development.” Rodolfo GarcÃa Zamora, a professor at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico, warned the conference against remittance “fetishization.” Even in the remittance-happy Philippines, national law states that the government does not see migration as a development strategy — though it obviously does.

Certainly, soaring remittance tallies cannot measure social costs, to migrants or to those left behind. (So many Africans die at sea each year trying to reach European soil that the Straits of Gibraltar have been dubbed “the largest mass grave in Europe.”) I was with Emmet and his brother-in-law one day when they broke into a nostalgic version of “It’s So Painful, Big Brother Eddie,” a Tagalog classic from the 1980s that immortalizes every migrant’s fear:

My child wrote to me

I was shocked and I instantly cried.

“Father come home, make it fast

Mother has another man

She’s cheating on you, father. . . .”

But what’s painful, I’m wondering

Why our two children are now three?

Among the biggest worries, in the Philippines and beyond, are the “left behind” kids, who are alternately portrayed as dangerous hoodlums and consumerist brats. Some people fear that their gadgets and clothes, sent from guilty parents abroad, corrupt village values. A U.N. envoy, examining Filipino migration, had a different concern: “Reportedly children of O.F.W.’s are more likely to become involved in delinquency or early marriage.” (Note “reportedly.”) One episode of “Because You Left,” the television show, depicts an adolescent boy whose father is abroad, leaving no one to help him with his first crush. He bonds with the school bully, steals from his mother and tries to rob someone. In addition to the “left behind,” researchers speak of a more disadvantaged class — the “left out.” Lacking the money or connections to go abroad, they are marooned on the wrong shore of what is, among the poor themselves, a growing divide.

Fear about the children is inevitable (and laudable), but the modest social science that exists offers some reassurance. At least three studies have examined “left behind” families in the Philippines. All found the children of migrants doing as well as, or better than, children whose parents stayed home. The most recent, from the Scalabrini Migration Center in Manila, involved a national survey of 10-to-12-year-olds. The migrants’ kids did better in school, had better physical health, experienced less anxiety and were more likely to attend church. “For now, the children are fine,” it concluded. Joseph Chamie, editor of The International Migration Review, an academic journal, calls the finding typical. “There’s not much scientific evidence that children have developmental difficulties when a parent migrates,” he said.

One theory is that remittances compensate for the missing parent’s care. The study found migrants’ kids taller and heavier than their counterparts, suggesting higher caloric intake, and much more likely to attend private school. The extended family can also act as a compensating force. And so can modern technology in an age of cellphones and Webcams. There is no doubt that migration has costs. “We don’t have a focus group without people crying,” said the Scalabrini researcher, Maruja Asis. The point is that not migrating has costs, too — the cost of wrenching poverty.

The Philippines, more than most places, claims to be skilled in managing these costs. As the rare bureaucracy devoted to migrant care, the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration draws admirers from across the globe. Any agency pledged to tame a force as brutal as labor migration is bound to have its failures. O.W.W.A. has 300 employees to watch over 3.6 million workers. The general Filipino view is that the agency does a serviceable job during crises abroad (it evacuated 30,000 workers from Kuwait during the first gulf war), while playing politics at home — investing funds in cronies’ businesses and helping politicians get out the vote.

But there is an especially sordid chapter of migrant history that this forgiving account omits, the shipment of bar girls to Japan. Spotting a growth market a decade ago, Philippine recruiters marched armies of young Filipinas through short courses in song and dance, then sent them off to Japanese clubs, with the Philippine government certifying them as “overseas performing artists.” Club owners typically grabbed their passports and told them to do what it took to keep customers drinking; what it took was a mix of tableside affection, off-duty dating and outright prostitution. As both governments lent a hand, Filipinas in skimpy clothes became an export commodity. Their numbers rose from 17,000 in 1996 to more than 70,000 in 2004, as remittances from Japan hit more than $350 million.

Sex work is often a byproduct of extreme poverty. “A man is on top of me,” writes Corazon Amaya-Cañete, a Filipina poet in Hong Kong, in the voice of a woman who distracts herself by resurrecting a childhood habit of counting sheep.

In exchange for this is money for Mother’s

medicine

Building the house and

Buying food for my six siblings

Clothes, shoes, books and tuition for school . . .

Seventy-seven white sheep!

Seventy-seven white sheep!

The Tagalog wordplay emphasizes the cruelty of her fate: she starts life as a girl counting tupa and awakens to find herself a puta. “Oh! I am prostitute!” she screams. (The poem, “Seventy-Seven White Sheep,” was published in a Webzine of Filipino diaspora writings, Our Own Voice.)

It was not the Philippines but Japan that finally cleaned things up. It acted only after the U.S. State Department placed it on a 2004 watch list of countries lax toward human trafficking. The embarrassed Japanese now demand two years of performing experience for an entertainer’s visa, which has cut the flow of Filipina bodies by about 95 percent. Remarkably, it did so over the objection of the Philippine government, which sent a protest delegation to Tokyo.

Or perhaps it is less remarkable than it seems. A handful of advocates condemned the flesh trade, but most Filipinos see it as a consensual, if regrettable, economic exchange, and inevitable in a country where nearly half the population lives on less than $2 a day. Gina gawa ko dahil para sa familya ko goes the Tagalog saying. “I do this for the sake of my family.”

I asked Nito Roque, the country’s chief migrant protector, how to square the sex trade with the government’s pledge (in Act 8042) to protect workers’ “dignity and fundamental human rights.” His answer says something about the limits of migrant protection, in the Philippines and beyond. “The contract does not say anything about prostitution — that is a private matter between the employer and the employee,” he said. “Nobody forces anybody to go abroad. It’s the applicant who comes forward and applies for the job.

“Do they know what they’re getting into? I think so.”

About 30 miles south of Manila, just outside the town of Silang, a dirt road ends at a residential compound carved from a small coffee farm. For decades it held nothing but the thatched hut where Tita and her 10 siblings were raised. Now a dozen cement blockhouses are clustered in a U, some little more than shells and others, like Tita and Emmet’s pink cottage, boasting faux marble tile and lace curtains. One look at each home yields a fair guess of how long the owner worked abroad. Nine families in the compound sent workers overseas, and collectively those workers stayed for 131 years (and counting). A walk across the compound cuts through a century of rewards and regrets.

Tita’s brother Fering is thankful that he returned from Saudi Arabia in time to see his children’s first days of school. Another brother, Fortz, is one of two men in the family (by some counts, three) whose extramarital affairs overseas produced kids. He left for Saudi Arabia with a daughter named Sheryl and returned with another named Sheralyn. Conscripted as a stand-in mom, Tita raised the girl for 10 years — resentfully at first, because of the cost — and wept when her real mother took her away. “She is like having another child,” she said.

Tita’s sister Peachy learned that her husband had a girlfriend — and a son — when she received a package meant for them. The first time I asked her whether the time apart had strained their marriage, she politely lied. “No — we’re loving each other for ever and ever!” she said. The following day she sought me out with a more candid account. Peachy is a large, cheerful woman, who seems as if nothing could daunt her. “I almost died,” she said. “I couldn’t lose my husband to someone else. That was the saddest moment of my life.”

Peachy’s sister Patricia thought all was well until a stranger called two years ago and said her husband was having an affair with his wife. “Your husband and his mistress,” the man wrote on the photograph that followed. When Patricia called her husband in Saudi Arabia, he denied all and then stopped taking her calls. He sends little money, and she suspects he has a new child. Their son Jonvic, a dimpled 9-year-old, renders judgments of his father with innocent cheer. “What he did to us was worse than if he died, because he violated the Ten Commandments of God,” he said.

It was not infidelity that moved another relative to tears but fidelity at any cost. We were breezing through the family photo album when she pointed at a picture from Saudi Arabia that showed her husband at an evangelical church. Church? That is a ticket to deportation or worse. Alarmed that her slip might place him in greater dangers, she started to sob. “I can’t stop him — that’s where he found his happiness,” she said. When I reached him, he encouraged me to mention his preaching, saying it was his way of thanking God for the chance to work abroad. “I promised the Lord I’ll share the Gospel under any circumstance,” he said.

The nine families of overseas workers raised 35 kids, some of whom scarcely saw their fathers. Their combined stories could fill a whole season of “Because You Left.” One became pregnant at 17 and is now a single mother. Another became addicted to video games and dropped out of school. Yet another started drinking after his father disappeared. One of Tita’s sisters sold a house and a cow to place her son in a Taiwan factory. The son squandered his parents’ life savings within a few months, and his drinking and gambling got him expelled from the country.

By any measure, the price was high, yet there it stands — a semicircle of blockhouses where there once was a mere thatched hut. Bookshelves sag with encyclopedia sets. More diplomas appear each year on freshly plastered walls. There are bunk beds and Bugs Bunny sheets, cellphones, stereos and big televisions. Having nearly lost her marriage to labor migration, Peachy is scarcely heedless of its social costs. “A good provider is someone who leaves,” she said, without ambivalence.

One irritant of life in the compound has been the shared well, which dries up and causes contentious waits. Three of the families have drilled wells of their own, with electric pumps. One belongs to Peachy, a gift from her daughter, Ariane, who used her father’s overseas earnings to get a degree in hotel management and earns $1,000 a month as a maid on a cruise ship.

Another tank belongs to Tita and Emmet, whose cottage is the compound’s jewel. It has a patio, a beamed ceiling, a tiled sala floor, two kitchens and two toilets that flush. It was built by Rosalie and is a monument to the tenacious child who wrote plays about the rich exploiting the poor and willed her way into the nascent middle class. Although she is thousands of miles away in Abu Dhabi, she hovers over the compound; no household there is heedless of her example or generosity.

The house is nicer than any that Tita and Emmet have known but quieter too, with four of the couple’s five children a continent away. “I am sad,” Tita said, “because they’re in a far place.” She is often weak with ulcers, and Emmet’s hearing has started to fade. They had a chance to sell the fixed-up house in Leveriza for a princely sum, $16,000, but unwilling to part with the place where their children were raised, they rent it to relatives. Restless without work, Emmet is especially susceptible to nostalgia for the bad old days. “I was happier then because I was with my children,” he said.

Going abroad is difficult, but so is coming home. Since Emmet returned for good, the kids have noticed less tenderness between their parents and more quarreling. They each grew accustomed to being the boss. One reason Rosalie left her second daughter, Precious Lara, in the Philippines is that she thinks her parents need a child to love. Tita and Emmet sleep beneath a malaria net with the 18-month-old beside them, and Rosalie often calls home two or three times a day. She and her husband have an infant son, Dominique Edward, in Abu Dhabi, whom her parents have never seen. Armed with her first cellphone at 60, Tita has sent so many text messages that she has worn the numbers off the keys. Yawning one night, she laughed and said of herself, “Low batt!”

Off the sala is a guest bedroom with a large framed photograph of Rosalie, taken on her wedding day. The woman in that picture shows no trace of a birthright of poverty. She turns to the camera wearing an enormous gown and a confident face. Two generations of labor migration have given her more education, more money and more power and prestige than her mother could have dreamed of on her own wedding day. Precious Lara rarely plays in that room and hardly knows the face, much less the sacrifices her mother has made for the blessings of a migrant’s wage.

Jason DeParle, a senior writer for The Times, last wrote for the magazine about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Ang talunang Pacquiao

HOT NEWS: Gloria's OEA-SCG electoral fraud plan exposed! Hello Garci 2 in the making!

In a press con today Gabriela and other progressive partylists revealed the Oct 2006 memo signed by the Office of External Affairs (OEA) Assistant Secretary Marcelo T. Farinas II urging the formation of a Special Concerns Group (SCG) inside Malacanang's Office of External Affairs and requesting funding from Gloria's Intelligence Funds.

The Confidential Memo is addressed to the President through her close relative and Special Assistant Atty. Erlyn De Leon. Atty. De Leon is reportedly tasked with handling Arroyo's intelligence funds.

The OEA memorandum identified the pro-Arroyo partylists as follows: Babae Ka formed by OEA Director Nerissa Garcia, Lypad Partylist organized by Director Melvin Mitra, and Kalahi initiated by Director Poe Gratela. Others named in the document were the Alliance of Neo-Conservatives, Abono, Kasangga and Aging Pinoy.

There are actually more than 30 admin and military partylists that have been listed by the election watchdog Kontra-Daya.

Inside Links:
Palace plan to campaign vs anti-gov’t partylist groups bared
MIGRANTE exposes papers linking Gloria to electoral fraud
Kabataan hits plot to destroy partylist system

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Palace plan to campaign vs anti-gov’t partylist groups bared
Malacanang execs deny allegation
By Lira Dalangin-Fernandez, Tetch Torres
INQUIRER.net
Last updated 04:25pm (Mla time) 04/20/2007

MANILA, Philippines -- There is a plan by Malacañang to campaign against anti-government partylist groups in the midterm elections to ensure that an impeachment move against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will not prosper, a militant leader said, quoting from a copy of an alleged document from within the Palace.

One Assistant Secretary Marcelo Fariñas II, head of the Office of External Affairs Special Concerns Group, in a memorandum dated Oct. 16, 2006, said the plan would include installing 9-12 pro-administration partylist groups in Congress; forming a partylist block; and reducing the number of votes of progressive partylist organizations.

When sought for a reaction, Fariñas and Gabriel Claudio, presidential political adviser, denied that there was such a memo, with Fariñas adding that such an accusation was “libelous.”

"It is clear that this move is to help counter the “grand plan” objective of the opposition. Definitely, they want to make sure that the impeachment case against the President will not prosper," said Gabriela Representative Liza Maza.

During the 13th Congress, 13 of the 24 partylist representatives voted for the impeachment of the President, Maza said.

Maza said that Fariñas also requested for a P5.5 million budget for the creation of pro-Arroyo partylist groups like Babae Ka, Agbiag, League of Youth for Peace and Development, and Kalahi Advocate and to support two to five other similar groups.
"There is a separate fund for the campaign," Maza said.

Maza said Fariñas even suggested that the amount be taken from the intelligence fund of the Office of the President.

Earlier on Friday, Cristina Palabay, secretary general of Gabriela, said that they would file a disqualification case against these groups before the Supreme Court and criminal and administrative complaints before the Office of the Ombudsman against Fariñas and lawyer Erlyn de Leon, special assistant to the President.
Palabay alleged that De Leon served as a conduit between the Palace and these partylist groups.

But Fariñas said that “there was no such memo.”

“In the first place, I'm not the head of the OEA, I don't have the personality to ask for support from Malacanang," he told INQUIRER.net in a telephone interview Friday.
The OEA serves as Malacañang's conduit to non-government organizations and other groups "to address the objectives of the President towards participation of the constituents in the development and implementation of the administration's programs," according to the mandate of the office.

Fariñas also denied issuing or receiving instructions from the Palace to campaign against partylist groups perceived to be anti-government.
Fariñas is the secretary general of the partylist group Agbiyag. However, he refused to divulge if he was one of its nominees, citing the law by the Commission on Elections.

He said he had been on leave without pay from the OEA since March until May 31 so that he would not be accused of using government resources for his partylist group.
"I have not received a single centavo from Malacañang to support Agbiyag," he said.
"Because of this bad publicity, other people are thinking we have a lot of money coming from Malacañang that's why they do not contribute anymore to the party. But we don't even have a TV ad while Gabriela had one with Senator [Manuel] Villar before the campaign started," he said.

Fariñas said his group represented the advocacy of all Ilocanos in the country and abroad.

"We want to have a voice in Congress that's why we are running," he said.
Meanwhile, Claudio said that such a memo was "inappropriate" and vowed to look into it.

"The proposal or request for such a budget to support a partylist group if there was one was inappropriate. We will look into it," said Claudio who has oversight functions over the OEA.

"Government funds and resources cannot be used for partisan purposes, including supporting a partylist group," he said in a text message to INQUIRER.net.
If there was such a request, Claudio said he was certain it would not be acted upon.

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MIGRANTE INTERNATIONAL
News Release
April 20 , 2007

Hello Garci Part 2:
MIGRANTE EXPOSES PAPERS LINKING GLORIA TO ELECTORAL FRAUD

Migrante International today presented to media copies of a Confidential Memo and Partylist Campaign Proposal addressed to the President detailing how Malacanang will "bastardize" the Partylist system to massively cheat in the 2007 elections.

"This paper outlines underlines Gloria's direct hand in this despicable scheme. Our expose illustrates that even the darkest of fraudulent and fascist deeds will be thrust into the public spotlight. We denounce in the strongest terms this latest covert operation by the Arroyo regime to cheat in this year's elections," says Connie Bragas-Regalado, Migrante International Chairperson, noting the "Hello Garci" expose regarding fraud in the 2004 elections.

Bragas-Regalado said the papers she presented during a joint press conference this morning by Migrante, the Gabriela Women's Partylist, Kabataan Party and Suara Bangsamoro in Manila go beyond the reports of Partylist seats for sale.

The two page Memo is signed by Office of External Affairs (OEA) Assistant Secretary Marcelo T. Farinas II and is dated 16 October 2006. It outlines the formation of a Special Concerns Group (SCG) inside Malacanang's Office of External Affairs and requests funding from Gloria's Intelligence Funds.

The Confidential Memo is addressed to the President through her close relative and Special Assistant Atty. Erlyn De Leon. Atty. De Leon is reportedly tasked with handling Arroyo's intelligence funds.

"The OEA is Malacanang's dirty tricks department while the SCG is its Special `Covert and Cheating' Group. Both must be immediately exposed and investigated. They are using the people's funds for widespread electoral fraud and political persecution," added Bragas-Regalado, noting that the OEA is headed by Arroyo lackeys Usec. Eduardo Soliman Jr. and Asec. John Batara. She also questioned the role Special Assistant Secretary Atty. De Leon plays in this grandiose plan for electoral fraud and violence given that she allegedly controls Arroyo's intelligence funds.

For its part, the OEA-SCG is headed by Asec. Farinas, who is assisted by three Directors. It is tasked with creating government-funded partylists and supporting other pro-administration partylists to prevent Opposition solons from gaining a majority in the Lower House – to stop another impeachment complaint against Arroyo.

According to the papers, the four main partylist groups for Malacanang to support are Kalahi (OFWs), Babae Ka (women), LYPAD (youth), and Agbiag (Ilocano). The first three groups were formed by OEA-SCG Directors Poe Gratela, Nerissa Garcia and Melvin Mitra respectively while the fourth group, AGBIAG, was created by OEA-SCG head Asec. Farinas.

"These groups combined with the creation of other pro-admin partylists by the First Gentleman, the AFP and other wings of the regime must be immediately disqualified. They are part of a grand scheme for electoral fraud and violence that involves a range of fascist tactics, including urban militarization and political killings," said Bragas-Regalado, noting that the OEA Partylist Campaign paper targets progressive partylist groups Bayan Muna, Anakpawis, Gabriela, Kabataan Party, Suara Bangsamoro and Migrante.

Bragas-Regalado concluded by calling on all Filipinos to remain vigilant in monitoring, reporting, exposing and opposing all attempts by the Arroyo regime to commit electoral fraud and violence in this year's elections. #

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Kabataan Partylist
News Release
April 20, 2007

Kabataan hits plot to destroy partylist system

The country's leading youth partylist group today denounced the President's Office for External Affairs for planning to subvert the partylist elections by directly organizing and financing at least five fake partylists.

"Young Filipinos have wanted a partylist representative as early as 2004 but the Hello Garci operations favoring Mrs. Arroyo and pro-Arroyo partylist groups cheated us of victory. Now the OEA wants nine to 12 seats by hook or by crook -- the administration wants to have a repeat of Hello Garci to cheat genuine partylists and favor pro-Arroyo fakes," said Kabataan Partylist nominee Enrico Almonguerra.

In a memorandum dated Oct. 2006, the OEA's Asst. Sec. Marcelo T. Fariñas, head of the agency's Special Concerns Group, proposed to President Arroyo full administration support for "partylist groups ascertained to be pro-administration and ensure the winning of nine to 12 seats in the House." The amount of P5.5-million was requested to cover the period of Oct.-Dec. 2006 for five to eight pro-Arroyo partylists.

The OEA memorandum identified the pro-Arroyo partylists as follows: Babae Ka formed by OEA Director Nerissa Garcia, Lypad Partylist organized by Director Melvin Mitra, and Kalahi initiated by Director Poe Gratela. Others named in the document were the Alliance of Neo-Conservatives, Abono, Kasangga and Aging Pinoy.

"We call on all young voters to be vigilant, shun the fakes and support Kabataan Partylist," said Almonguerra. "These fakes will only represent GMA, not the youth who want good government and legislation for education, employment and empowerment."

"Lypad actually stands for Liars to the Youth, Paid Arroyo Defenders. We are sure the young voters will reject them," said Almonguerra who said that the first nominee of Lypad went to a son of Team Unity senatorial candidate Jamalul Kiram III.

Kabataan first ran for partylist representation in 2004 but fell short by 30,000 votes to obtain the two percent requirement for one seat. The Hello Garci telephone conversations included the padding of votes for pro-Arroyo partylists.

"While genuine partylists labor everyday to mount a credible nationwide campaign to get elected fair and square, President Arroyo's favored partylists are having a fun time wasting away public funds," said Almonguerra.

Almonguerra said President Arroyo may be impeached if her administration is proven to have meddled in the partylist system.

"Mrs. Arroyo has a reverse Midas touch. She has sabotaged many institutions like the presidency, the military and police, and the Lower House. Now, she wants to touch the partylist system and turn it into shit," said the youth leader. "We won't allow that to happen."

Two articles on the fallen Julia Campbell

‘Buhay Pa Tayo’ last entry on her blog
By Volt Contreras
Inquirer
Last updated 05:13am (Mla time) 04/20/2007

MANILA, Philippines -- The last time she shared her tales from the Philippines to folks back home, US Peace Corps volunteer and former New York Times journalist Julia Campbell wrote poignantly that life, after all its tragic episodes, must move on.

That message now seems addressed to those who are mourning her shocking death.

“Buhay Pa Tayo” (We’re Still Alive) was the title of the last blog entry dated Jan. 13, 2007, a piece recalling how she and the rest of the people of Legazpi City in Albay province survived the flash floods unleashed by “Supertyphoon Reming” in November last year that left 900 people dead or missing.

That she used the pronoun “We” -- not “They” -- could reflect how deeply immersed she had become in the Filipino community where she was assigned, where Filipino culture both shocked and amused her, and where she gathered fond memories with the poor.

“I don’t think I could ever forget them,” she said, reporting about her encounter with some of the Reming evacuees in a tent city in Padang. She herself thought “I’ll drown right here,” after she got caught in waist-deep waters inside her own apartment.

The blog site loosely chronicled her “adventure” in the country since she was sent here two years ago. She said the site was “for those of you who could not be convinced to follow me into the Peace Corps.”

With the first post made in April 2005, the text would run up to around 40 pages if printed out.

It followed her during her stays with different “host” families in Los Baños, Laguna; Donsol, Sorsogon, and finally in Legazpi, Albay. There were sidetrips to Manila, which she described as “a city of great potential but lacking in so much.”

Campbell proved she was not only a humanitarian worker but also a devoted writer (often apologizing to readers for the long gaps between posts) and a keen observer of people and local color.

Many firsts

Often writing about her many “firsts,” she charted her progress in learning Tagalog, recalled riding jeepneys with buckets of live fish and gossipy co-passengers, and wondered why champorado,” a soupy chocolate rice concoction,” was eaten with dried salted fish.

She was amused at how Filipino men “drink in circles” outdoors; how dogs in her neighborhood served as her alarm clock; how a Catholic priest “blessed even my bathroom” when she had her own hut built near her host family in Donsol.

She discovered how the Philippines had become known as the “texting capital” of the world.

By May 2006, her Tagalog had apparently improved to the point that she translated a stanza of Aiza Seguerra’s love song “Pagdating ng Panahon.” She recalled scoring a perfect “100” when she sang it on a videoke machine.

‘This is all worth it’

“There are moments when I feel this is all worth it,” she wrote in August 2005.

“To stumble across a charming fishing village in a foreign land and come out of it having made a new friend. It’s a simple life here, off the beaten paths, where I find the most solace.

“It’s the little things too that make me laugh when I’m feeling homesick -- like watching two men pull a goat behind a motorcycle. Or the thought that I’m regularly eating squid, eyeballs and all. Or when the house helper, Edna, starts belting out ‘Nobody’s Perfect’ by Madonna in a very imperfect English.”

But then, her constant encounters with rural poverty dominated her blog.

She found the “American Dream, Filipino-style,” in Jason, a high school graduate who wanted to become a nurse, thinking it would be his ”best chance of finding a job in America.”

“It’s a lot of pressure on a 17-year-old kid,” Campbell said. ”This somehow seems unfair.”

Time: Why Pinoys are left behind

Campbell saw what the notorious “Filipino time” meant when, she recalled, some local officials whom she tried to help acquire weighing scales for a nutrition program “missed the deadline” for requesting a budget from UNICEF.

The cause: They didn’t draft a project proposal despite being told of this requirement well ahead of time.

Of this she further observed: “Many Filipinos live on what they laughingly refer to as Filipino time. Unfortunately, I think this is the very reason why they are falling behind the rest of the world. They are living in a different time zone.”

Witnessing the state of the local education system, she recalled entering a school library where she could not find a book published after 1978, and “the kids here don’t get much in the way of literature. The teachers are used to teaching grammar, not reading.”

“There’s a bigger world outside Donsol, right?” she mused, recalling how local “adults” once asked her “if England is on the same continent as the United States.”

Upside down, inside out

“It is really amazing to be living in such a sheltered place at the end of the road, literally. It really turns your sense of self baliktad (upside-down, inside out)!”

Campbell herself got candid about her own personal discomforts. She wrote in February 2006: “It gets harder and harder sometimes to express in words the things I experience here.”

“But life becomes somewhat normal once you live in a place for a while. Even if you live in a hut, without running water, and your evenings are spent hauling your water by the bucket, gutting your fish and picking the bok-bok (rut) out of your bed.”

In October 2006, with seven more months to go in her tour of duty, Campbell wrote about missing her family and “my old life.” “It’s been a rough road and I am hoping to finish, but I would be lying if I did not say that every day is a struggle.”

“Time will hopefully fly quickly.”

Early this week, with the discovery of Campbell’s body in Banaue, time instead froze for everyone whose lives she had touched in two countries.

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Julia remembered as hard-charging journalist
Inquirer
Last updated 05:13am (Mla time) 04/20/2007

NEW YORK -- Julia Campbell was no stranger to adventurous exploits.

As a journalist in New York City, she was a tenacious reporter, at one point getting arrested covering the funeral procession of rapper Notorious B.I.G. She once cut short a date after coming across a crime scene so she could report on the story.

Her adventurous spirit later took her to the Philippines, where she served as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was there that her body was discovered Wednesday in a shallow grave, unearthed by a stray dog more than a week after she disappeared while hiking.

“She was a fearless reporter,” said David Kocieniewski, a New York Times reporter who was bureau chief when Campbell was a full-time freelancer for The Times at police headquarters. “She was intelligent, incredibly hardworking and had the capacity both to ask intellectually tough questions and to be sensitive to the people we were writing about.”

Journalists who worked with Campbell during the years she spent freelancing for The New York Times, Court TV and other news organizations remembered her generosity and courage.

Police in the Philippines at first thought the 40-year-old might have fallen off a cliff while hiking alone in Ifugao province. But after her body was found in the grave, they said they believed foul play was involved.

“I’m absolutely jolted,” said Bill Hoffmann, a columnist for the New York Post’s Page Six gossip section who briefly dated Campbell. “I remember her as not having a mean bone in her body. She was a real sweetheart, and yet she was deceptive -- she was very dogged and determined like a bulldog.”

Hoffmann said he and Campbell were on a date once when they happened upon a crime scene. A gunman was loose and police had blocked off a street. Campbell immediately called The Times newsroom and started working the story.

Michael Cooper, a Times reporter now based in Albany, New York, also described his former colleague as dogged.

“When doing street reporting, she was always sure to ring the 10th doorbell, not just leave after a few,” said Cooper, who worked with Campbell at police headquarters.

After The Times, Campbell worked for People magazine, Star magazine, Court TV and FoxNews.com.

“She loved being a reporter,” said Liz McNeil, East Coast news editor for People. “She was very dedicated and had a lot of compassion.”

Campbell made headlines in 1997 during her stint at The Times when she was arrested covering the funeral procession of Christopher Wallace, also known as Notorious B.I.G.

The procession turned unruly and Campbell got in a shouting match with police, who had her handcuffed and dragged away. According to the police report, Campbell called one officer “a bastard.”

The Times protested the arrest, though metro editor Michael Oreskes acknowledged that Campbell’s “use of harsh language was not appropriate.” Disorderly conduct charges were eventually dropped.

Campbell wrote in her blog that “At the age of 38, I decided to step out of the rat race of New York, join the Peace Corps and board a plane for Manila.” Associated Press

Philippine Daily Inquirer reporter adds to victims of political repression

Inquirer newsman shot
Reporter survives slay try, blames congressman
By Norman Bordadora, Marlon Ramos
Inquirer
Posted date: April 20, 2007

LUCENA CITY -- The wave of political killings caught up Thursday with a correspondent of Inquirer Southern Luzon bureau, and Delfin Mallari Jr. said he had the heavy tint on his car windows and the would-be assassin’s jammed pistol to thank for his survival.

But Mallari’s wife Perseveranda, or Persy, said his new lease on life was God’s answer to her usual prayer for his safety whenever he left home for work -- as well as a gift from on high for their 24th wedding anniversary Thursday. “I thank God for this gift of another chance to be with him,” she said.

Mallari and his colleague Johnny Glorioso were on their way to radio station dwKI for their 8 a.m. program “JS Files” when a man on a motorcycle driven by another man fired at them through the driver’s side of their vehicle at around 7:40 a.m. on a busy street in Barangay Ibabang Dupay.

Mallari, who was at the wheel of his car, was hit, the bullet lodging in the left side of his back a few centimeters from his spine. Glorioso was unhurt.

At press time, the .45-cal. slug was still in Mallari’s body. There was no injury to vital organs, according to his attending physician, Wilfredo Frondoza of the MMG Hospital on Maharlika Highway near the crime scene in Ibabang Dupay.

“He’s now safe,” Frondoza told the Philippine Daily Inquirer, parent company of INQUIRER.net. “Performing an operation to remove the slug would do him more harm.”

The Inquirer, through publisher Isagani Yambot, said: “We denounce the blatant display of harassment and violence against journalists. The shooting of our correspondent Delfin Mallari Jr. was probably intended to stop him from making further exposés.

“Resorting to ambush is the greatest display of cowardice and guilt. We expect the authorities to do their best in bringing to justice the people responsible for this despicable deed.”

Malacañang, through Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye, deplored the “despicable” attack, saying “it has no place in a democracy that upholds press freedom.”

Bunye said President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had ordered the law enforcement agencies in Lucena City to “carry out a swift and thorough investigation” of the ambush.

Hit men

On his hospital bed, Mallari said the attack was the handiwork of hit men of a Quezon politician who wanted to “silence” him.

He initially refused to name the politician, but later disclosed that on March 9, Quezon Rep. Rafael Nantes met with him and Glorioso and told him to stop his critical commentary over his radio program.

Nantes is now seeking the governorship of Quezon province.

“He was discouraging us from continuing our commentary and wanted us to help him in his campaign. But we couldn’t do that because if we did so, people would think we were on the take,” Mallari said, adding:

“We have [a local newspaper] Ang Diyaryo Natin, and we have our radio program “JS Files” on two stations and on local cable TV. He had been a subject of some of our recent commentaries.

“I told him many issues would surface because it’s the election period. All he had to do was answer the issues.”

Mallari said Nantes threatened him, saying in Filipino: “If I lose in the election, blood will flow. I don’t know what my men will do.”

He said that at one point he was asked to leave the meeting place -- a McDonald’s restaurant in Tiaong town -- while Nantes tried to talk Glorioso into convincing Mallari to stop his criticisms on the radio.

Nantes supposedly told Glorioso to tell Mallari to name his price, and he would get the money “immediately -- the following day.”

Mallari said he didn’t bite.

Sought for comment, Nantes denied offering Mallari any money.

“I would not dare offer him money because I know he’s a principled journalist,” Nantes said.

He said all he had told Mallari and Glorioso was that he was willing to finance their radio program.

Range of issues

As a Lucena-based correspondent of the Inquirer, Mallari has reported on a range of issues involving the local elections, counterinsurgency, crime, environmental protection, illegal logging, “jueteng” and drug smuggling.

He has managed to cultivate a variety of sources including military and police officials, communist insurgents, leaders and members of nongovernment organizations, environment protection advocates, Church authorities and representatives of marginalized sectors like fisherfolk, indigenous peoples and farmers.

“I don’t think the military or the [communist New People’s Army] is behind this [attack],” Mallari said. “I have covered the insurgency, including writing about Communist Party of the Philippines founding chair Jose Maria Sison and CPP spokesperson Gregorio Rosal, and I have been able to get the respect of both sides. I don’t think the military is behind this. I sometimes have breakfast in Camp Nakar.”

Glorioso said both he and Mallari had an idea as to who might have ordered the attack.

He declined to name names for the moment but said: “This is definitely work-related and politically motivated.”

Mallari and Glorioso’s “JS files” is also aired over dzLT and local cable STV-6 at 5-6 p.m. on weekdays. The TV program is taped while the dzLT program is aired live.

Mallari’s account

Mallari talked in whispers as he recounted the attack:

“It was a good thing I had the car windows tinted. Johnny (Glorioso) told me to do it for my security, and I did so. If I didn’t, I could have been hit in the head.

“The gun also jammed. If it didn’t, I would have been surely hit because the gunman was trying to continue firing.”

Per Mallari’s account, he did not immediately know he was shot:

“I thought somebody just threw a stone at the car (a 1990s Honda Civic). It was when I saw the gunman still shooting at me that I realized I was being shot at.

“I also didn’t feel that I was shot because I didn’t feel any pain. I only realized I was shot when I saw the bullet hole in my window. I also then saw in front of me the two gunmen on a motorcycle with a ‘No plate available’ sign.

“I didn’t panic. I was still able to pull over to the side of the road. Johnny went down from the right side and volunteered to drive me to the hospital.

“He asked me to transfer to the right side. I did so on my own because I was not feeling any pain. But then he couldn’t open the [driver’s side] door because it was jammed. Apparently, the bullet that hit the door caused it to jam.

“Johnny broke the glass but still couldn’t open the door. When I moved to the right side of the car, I went out and there were already tricycles and barangay tanod (guards). A barangay tanod went with me to the hospital in a tricycle.

“Johnny was about to ride with me in the tricycle to the hospital but I told him I had important things in the car, like my laptop. I asked him to stay and look after my things.”

Glorioso’s account

Glorioso said he had asked Mallari to collect him at a gasoline station on Maharlika Highway several kilometers from the radio station because he had to have his own car checked.

Recalled Glorioso:

“We were talking in the car. Delfin must have lost his concentration. He usually checks his side and rear view mirrors for possible tails.

“He didn’t see the motorcycle following us. Two shots rang out -- pak, pak, one immediately after the other as if the one who fired really knew how to shoot.

“When I saw the gunman, he was still pointing his gun and was pulling the trigger. The gun jammed. After a while, he placed his gun on his holster.”

Mallari said he and Glorioso had received reports that Nantes was involved in illegal drugs and illegal logging.

Nantes told the Inquirer that he had no quarrel with Mallari.

He admitted having met with Mallari and Glorioso and appealed to the two to stop their critical commentary because it was the election season.

“I condemn this incident because it generates fear in my compatriots,” Nantes said in Filipino. “I am not doing Mallari any harm. All I asked was for them to stop attacking me on radio.”

Nantes also said that if the intention was to have Mallari killed, he would have been shot in the head.

“Let us allow the investigation to proceed,” he said.

Relief of police chief

In Bangued town in Abra, Philippine National Police Director General Oscar Calderon said he had ordered the administrative relief of the police chief of Lucena.

Calderon said he had ordered Supt. Nelson Luquin’s relief because the attack on Mallari and Glorioso happened in the Poblacion (town center) area.

Incidents such as an ambush are not supposed to happen especially in public places, Calderon said, adding:

“There’s no way to justify this.”

Luquin has been replaced by Supt. Marcos Abadilla Jr. With reports from Nikko Dizon in Bangued Abra; Juliet Labog-Javellana in Manila