Carnage
This is a story about death in a place they call the Promised Land, where the heat punches with a sweaty fist, and a crescent moon rises with the Christian sun.
It happened on a lonely hill in a quiet town, where every bridge is a checkpoint manned by young men in fatigues. Esmael Mangudadatu, Buluan vice mayor, threatened with violence, sending his wife Genalyn, his sister, his nieces and his lawyers to file his certificate of candidacy because he believed women would be safe. Esmael Mangudadatu, inviting a pack of journalists to cover the event, because he believed his family would be safe where the media were. Esmael Mangudadatu, answering the last phone call from a wife who told him they had been stopped by Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr.’s private army.
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March to mayhem
It is November in Manila, days before the deadline for filing candidacies. On Monday, Senate President Pro Tempore Jinggoy Estrada with 11 other senators signed Resolution 1472 absolving Sen. Manuel Villar Jr. of ethical charges in connection with the C-5 Road extension project, long before a committee report was officially released by the Senate.
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So sayeth the Comelec
Nicodemo T. Ferrer is a pillar of the community. Man of faith, Knight of Columbus, former dean of the Virgen Milagrosa University Foundation, Extraordinary Eucharistic Minister for Our Lady of the Purification Parish, a man whose 2006 appointment into the Commission on Elections came with his pledge to “restore and improve” the public image of the Commission on Elections—the same man of God whose bigoted morality has brought Manila back to the medieval.
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Jesus in Yellow
The grass is yellow outside the gates of Hacienda Luisita. Jesus walked here once.
His father watched him die, almost five years to this day. Nov. 16 was when close to 15,000 tenants gathered to protest their treatment under the Cojuanco-owned Hacienda Luisita. Dispersal units charged with a thousand soldiers in full battle gear. The Northern Command numbered over five hundred. Stones and shouts, water cannons, tanks that barreled into gates. It was three in the afternoon. The sun burned yellow. The father heard it first: rifle cracks, a barrage of bullets punching through bodies. Jesus died that day, one of seven reported union deaths. They tell me there are more whose names were never reported.
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Chiz Escudero 2010
The popularity of Francis Joseph Guevara Escudero, now senator of the republic and possible presidential aspirant for 2010, has been attributed to many things. Some claim it is his eloquence. Many have marveled at his ability to stretch a single thought into a 20-minute social commentary, dripping with synonyms and similes, delivered with the same deadpan efficiency of a call center agent explaining to the 38th caller just why their electricity went off in the storm. Others claim it is his looks, this tall lean man in shirtsleeves surrounded by colleagues carting potbellies in embroidered pineapple silk shirts. According to his personal website, his “rise into the nation’s consciousness” is nothing less than “meteoric.” He is described as “consistently leading surveys as the most trusted official of the land,” and his various distinctions—including the recent “Most Admired TV Personality” in 2008—proves “he has not gone unnoticed.”
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Yellow river red balloon
It is a story that begins with the storm, as everyone’s stories begin now, here in a small watery barangay set on the knife-edge of Pasig City. This is the stomping ground of Mayor Bobby Eusebio, a fact difficult to forget, as his face flashes red and blue from an electronic billboard. Water laps at the mouth of the main road, licking at the legs of a rough wooden walkway. Pinagbuhatan is less than half an hour from the Shaw Boulevard MRT station, but it might have been in another country altogether. Under the teetering green arch, the water slaps back against thighs, leaving behind a layer of reeking damp. Bare-chested men make their way here, pushing trollies of empty Coke bottles. There are no more little girls paddling under the yellow river, as there were in the days after the floods came, no more little boys diving from roofs. It has been three weeks since the storm swallowed the barangay, and now the stench of dead cat claws its way down dry throats.
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Many waters
In my head, I call it the storm. I see the letters from, whenever someone says it, whenever I do. I don’t give it a name, naming gives a thing power, and the Storm has too much.
I’ll tell you where I was when it happened, because everyone does – I was in the office, I was in school, I was in the john when I heard – saying it, again and again, because saying it means you’re alive. I was in my apartment, and there was water swallowing cars in murky brown muck. I’ll say I was a writer first, and because I was I was out the door with a camera before I understood that flood meant I was being flooded, and the water rising in the hallways was water rising in my hallways. The water whipped sideways. Everything outside was a blur, like photos shot through foggy lenses. The maintenance man was banging at doors – get ready, get ready, it could still get worse.
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Being Mikey Arroyo
There are many reasons why Pampanga Representative and one-time movie actor Juan Miguel Arroyo has suddenly become the poster boy for the iniquities of the Arroyo administration. That he has failed to disclose his United States property in his Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth along with campaign contributions is not a particularly stunning revelation, at least not in a country where billion-peso corruption allegations are daily fare. It is not even the fact that a congressman who happens to be the President’s son has been caught with millions more than he makes through his monthly government paycheck. It may be easiest to say the current national disgust for him—as compared with the usual indifferent acceptance of his family’s various shenanigans—is largely due to his self-satisfied grin as he gleefully perjured himself on national television.
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Alexis
On Sept. 1, 2009, 27-year-old film critic Alexis Tioseco and his film journalist girlfriend Nika Bohinc were brutally murdered by three men in their home along Times Street. A maid who had been hired the previous month had let the men in. Tioseco and Bohinc had just come in from dinner when they were shot. Nika was leaving for Slovenia the following day.
I met him by accident, in a bar. There was music playing. The walls were green. It was dark, and loud, and crowded. There were laughing writers in long orange skirts and ponytailed old men sneaking sips from silver flasks of whiskey they snuck out of their pockets.
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The Aquino son
WE ARE told to wear yellow for Benigno Aquino III. Tie a yellow ribbon, wear a yellow shirt, remember the woman in glasses, remember the man in the bloodied white suit. Show him that you are behind him, he says, and he will stand for you.
He is aware that some have raised issues of his inexperience. “Some said I’m not yet ripe for the picking.”
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