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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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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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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