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Juana Change

January 17, 2009 By Isabel Esterman Leave a Comment

I’ve been a bit out of the Philippines loop this past month, so I just now heard about Juana Change’s Youtube channel, which is making a huge splash in the Philippines right now (thanks Noah) — the Youtube view counts may not be all that high, but the videos have been replayed on major news networks.

The videos, four so far, are in heavy Taglish, and probably make no sense without translation and explanation of specific cultural references. (Someone should get on this, and it is NOT gonna be me, I already have WAY too much on my plate as it is). But trust me, they’re hilarious.

The video below, for example, tackles Charter Change, known as Cha-Cha — attempts by politicians to change the current constitution (which was put into place following the popular uprising that overthrew the dictator Ferdinand Marcos). Among other things, Cha-Cha might make it possible to extend much-reviled current President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s term beyond 2010 (the current constitutional limit) and is widely viewed as a power grab by Arroyo and her political allies.

Juana Change takes on corruption, power grabs, brain drain, political assassinations and much more in just a few minutes, and calls on viewers to reengage with politics.

Even if you don’t get the language or the political context, I still think it’s a powerful example of how social media and satire can be used to send a political message to a wide audience.

Filed Under: california, multimedia, Philippines Tagged With: , , , , ,

UN Human Rights Committee finds the Arroyo government guilty of human rights violations

November 24, 2008 By Isabel Esterman

More than two years after the families of two murdered human rights activists filed a complaint against the Philippine government, the UN Human Rights Committee ruled the Arroyo government is guilty of violating the activists’ right to life, and was negligent in providing remedy after they were killed.

Eden Marcellana, photo courtesy Karapatan

On April 21, 2003, human rights workers Eden Marcellana and Eddie Gumanoy were salvaged* under the watch of Arroyo’s pet General Jovito Palparan, well known in the Philippines as “The Butcher of Mindoro” because of the appalling number of activists murdered in areas under his command.

Despite eyewitnesses testimony that the two activists were kidnapped by former rebels now working with the military, the Department of Justice dismissed a complaint filed by the activists’ families. More than 5 years later, the case in the Philippines has not progressed. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Human Rights, Philippines, politics Tagged With: , , , ,

Human bone found in Bataan Camp

October 15, 2008 By Isabel Esterman Leave a Comment

From the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

Human bone in Bataan camp
by Nikko Dizon
 LIMAY, BATAAN—Braving rains, a fact-finding team Tuesday dug up a yellow rubber slipper, a laced shirt and burned fragments of what they suspected was a human bone in an area where a former detainee said he saw people being tortured by soldiers. [more]

and more

and more

I don’t even know what to say. So I’ll quote UP Professor Roland Simbulan, from an interview I did in Summer 2007:

“There were human rights abuses before. Illegal arrests, torture, detention. But what is different now under Arroyo is the extent of killings of political activists. In fact, there’s an ugly joke going around that they don’t anymore have to feed them. Because during the Marcos time, and Ramos and other administrations, they would arrest an activist, or torture him at the most. But at least they were alive, they kept them in detention later to be released. But now, they’re not arresting them anymore. They just kill them. There’s not even a formal charge against them. They just abduct them, and perhaps they would try to extract as much information from them, and then they kill them. Some of their bodies or corpses are not even found. So that’s the difference, the gravity or the volume of people who are being killed. It’s very alarming.”

It’s not completely impossible this is some sort of elaborate hoax. Not completely.
And I’d very much like to think so, and that Karen Empeño and Manuel Merino are still safe and alive somewhere in the mountains.
But it doesn’t seem likely. By the most ridiculously conservative numbers, there have been at least 200 extrajudicial executions since Arroyo came to power. By the greatest estimate, over 1000. And I personally know multiple people who have been kidnapped by paramilitaries, taken to camps in isolated areas and subjected to brutal torture.
So there’s no real doubt in my mind that Manalo is telling the truth. I just hope that this time, this one time, some of the blood sticks on somebody’s hands.

Filed Under: Human Rights, Philippines Tagged With: , , ,

July 28, 2008 By Isabel Esterman Leave a Comment

So, as promised I put up more photos from the SONA counter-rally. But I’m feeling thin on thoughts, or at least coherent ones.

A full-text of Arroyo’s speech can be found here. There’s some debate about whether or not she actually believes the rosy statistics she quotes. I’ll leave that to the psychoanalysts.

I’d love to see an in-depth analysis of which subjects she chooses to speak about in Tagalog, and which in English. She seems to confine the folksiest parts, about her great concern for various types of poor people to Tagalog, while using English to talk about policy.

As far as the protests, it’s hard to know what to say. Clearly, people are angry. But not angry enough to stand together. The rally was actually composed of two parts: an RA section and an RJ section, with a fence and a police line between them.

(For those unfamiliar with the byzantine twists and turns of the history of the Philippine left, I’d reccomend Alecks Pabico’s article “The Great Left Divide” . But to make a long story short, RA ‘s are those who ReAffirm Marxist-Leninist(Stalinist)-Maoist principles as defined by the Communist Party of the Philippines — including protracted people’s war –and RJs are those who ReJected them in favor of a wide variety of political stances ranging from orthodox Leninism, Trotskyism, Social Democracy, etc. This debate split the left in 1992, and to put it mildly, the two factions don’t get along with each other.)

So far as I could tell, there was no conflict between the two groups yesterday, and it was possible to move from one section to another, but there were two competing speakers on two competing stages, talking about the same issues but each with their own constellation of supporters and party flags and banners around them.
It can be very hard to see any way forward.

Filed Under: Philippines, photography, politics Tagged With: , , ,

SONA

July 28, 2008 By Isabel Esterman Leave a Comment

While President Arroyo gave her annual State of the Nation Address, and estimated 13,000 protesters held a march and counter-rally, denouncing low wages, the risingcost of living, and denouncing Arroyo’s record on human rights and civil liberties.
Additional images here, and more photos and thoughts tomorrow.
Filed Under: Philippines, photography, politics Tagged With: , ,

Economic crisis keeping kids out of school

July 21, 2008 By Isabel Esterman 2 Comments

The Philippine government just released its report on school attendance for 2006-2007, revealing that 17% of primary-school-aged children — which is to say 2.2 million of them — are not in school.

In 1999-2000, before current President Arroyo, the corresponding number was 3%.

Numbers have plummeted under Arroyo, as has real per-capita spending on education, making the Philippines one of the lowest spenders in the world.

Unfortunately, the numbers are likely to be even worse for the current year, as the economic situation worsens. Public education is not free here — families are responsible for school fees, uniforms and school supplies — and registration season corresponded with the height of the rice crisis, forcing many families to choose between feeding their children or putting them in school.

Here,* school teachers in Carupay, Zamboanga del Norte, explain the situation in their own school, and the difficulties facing even children whose families manage to pay the fees.

President Arroyo, putting her Phd in economics to good use, recently conceded that the rising costs of food and energy may be keeping kids out of school.

Her solution? Asking schools not to require uniforms.

Read this great (as usual) PCIJ piece for links to the report and more information…

*some technical issues in the middle due to software problems. I’ll correct them if I can solve the original issue…

Filed Under: multimedia, Philippines, politics Tagged With: , , ,

Telling it like it is

June 8, 2008 By Isabel Esterman Leave a Comment

This is a quick-and-dirty little slideshow of Lorena Navarro, at Bankerohan Market in Davao City. She used to grow corn, but the price of fertilizer got too high, and her earnings were to low, so like many farmers, she had to leave the provinces and come to the city to look for work.

“It’s become too difficult to make a living, so many people stopped farming corn and rice,” she told me. “Now they just grow bananas and camote. But do you want to eat just bananas and camote? It that what you want? Look at the poor – fighting here, almost killing each other just to buy some cheap rice.”

When the government subsidized rice ran out at the market, she lost her temper, jumped up on a platform and started shouting against the government, accusing President Arroyo and other officials of failing to take care of the people, of corruption, of having bad policies about fertilizer and other agricultural products. “We’re sick of this,” she says. Sick of waiting in line, sick of hunger. As you can see, she found a pretty receptive audience.

Sorry for lack of subtitles, maybe in the future.

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The Arroyo Imbroglio

January 17, 2008 By Isabel Esterman Leave a Comment

I highly recommend “The Arroyo Imbroglio in the Philippines,” political scientist (and former teacher of mine) Paul Hutchcroft’s new article in The Journal of Democracy to anyone interested in a lucid summary of a century of Philippine political history. In an impressively concise article (13 pages), Hutchcroft manages to address most of the key issues facing the Philippine political system — corruption, fraud, violence, human rights abuses, impunity, insurgency and public disenchantment — in a manner accessible to a non-specialist.

Although the Philippines can boast the oldest democratic structures in Asia, they are currently weak and lacking in legitimacy. Battered by scandal after scandal, these structures need careful and well-considered reform if they are to survive. read more..

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Death Squads and International Norms

December 13, 2007 By Isabel Esterman Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about death squads today — mostly because of an interesting article by Greg Grandin I read this morning, but also partly because of correspondence with friends from Davao, partly because it’s a change from working on papers, and partly because I am clearly a somewhat disturbed person.


In the article I’ve linked to above, Grandin does a good job of explaining the role that death squads, which he defines as “[c]landestine paramilitary units, nominally independent from established security agencies yet able to draw on the intelligence and logistical capabilities of those agencies,” play in state terror campaigns to suppress dissidence.

I think, though, that he misses a key point about death squads: the role that international norms play in creating them. I’ve only ever come across one book that seriously engages this question, Bruce Campbell and Arthur Brennar’s Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability. With apologies for academic-ese, the book’s central argument can be summed up as follows:
Bruce Campbell poses one central question regarding the global phenomenon of death squads and vigilantism: following a Weberian conception, statehood is defined by the monopolization of the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory. Why then, have so many states compromised this monopoly on force, devolving coercive power to private, extra-state forces by offering formal or tacit support to death squads and vigilante groups?

Drawing on literature on state violence, Campbell attempts to situate this devolution of force within the bounds of rational, conventional state behavior, arguing that subcontracting violence may be a state’s best, or only, available means of dealing with an internal threat.

As Ted Robert Gurr suggests, state violence is a response to “the existence of a class, group, or party that the ruling elite sees as a threat to its continued rule.” However, most modern states are constrained by both international and domestic laws and organizations, rendering full-scale, overt state repression a political impossibility. Death squads and vigilante groups, then, fill this gap, allowing states to orchestrate the violent suppression of dissident groups while retaining plausible deniability nationally and globally.

(from a paper I wrote last Spring, which then challenges aspects of this theory, at least as it applies to the Philippines, by introducing the element of personalistic politics, but that’s more than I care to get into at the moment)
Essentially, death squads exist where external pressure makes overt state repression politically impracticable. In this sense, they represent one of the greatest failures of the “international community,” which has a history of making an enormous fuss about state sponsored violence, while quietly tolerating extra- or quasi- state violence.

A case in point would be the Philippines during the Marcos era. The early period of the Marcos dictatorship was marked by mass arrests of Marcos’ political opponents. These arrests were conducted overtly, generated paperwork, and were undeniably tied to the central state’s policies. Consequently, foreign governments who cooperated with Marcos were compelled to censure him for his excesses.

In response, Marcos made a tactical shift to quasi-state repression. Instead of having dissidents arrested by the police and put in prison, he had them kidnapped by death squads, and disappeared or salvaged [tortured to death and left for public display]. This was clearly not a move that improved the human rights situation in the country, but it allowed Marcos to deny responsibility for abuses, a contention those who wished to collaborate with him — including, let’s not forget, Jimmy “the Carter Doctrine” Carter — were happy to accept.

The Arroyo administration is, of course, another example. At the same time Arroyo is (to say the very least) tolerating hundreds of murders by death squads, she is being celebrated, in some quarters, for official policies she claims seek to curtail such violence.
By pressuring states to distance themselves from abuse while failing to combat the underlying political and social conditions that create it, the “international community” creates the conditions in which death squads thrive.

So fine, condemn death squads. Of course they should be condemned. Just… don’t get too comfortable about it.
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Arroyo receives human rights award. Seriously.

December 7, 2007 By Isabel Esterman 2 Comments

President Arroyo was just awarded the “Medalla de Oro” from Universidad de Alcala in Spain, in recognition of her work to improve the human rights situation in the Philippines.

This makes me, quite literally, feel sick.
Yes, she abolished the death penalty. But to me, that seems a little irrelevant when she has condoned hundreds of extrajudicial executions.
This is the woman who has presided over the worst resurgence of torture, illegal detainment and extrajudicial murder the Philippines has seen since the Marcos dictatorship. The woman who is so bad she almost makes you miss Estrada, who was disgusting and corrupt but at least not on a campaign to murder the entire left.  The woman who is currently facing censure from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the UN SR on extrajudicial executions for her absolutely appalling human rights record. The woman whose regime is so obviously complicit in human rights abuses that even the US Senate has felt the need to make (a little tiny portion of) aid contingent on her cleaning up her act. 
As for Arroyo’s claim that there are 100 cases involving extrajudicial killings being prosecuted, that is, to the best of my knowledge which is pretty damned good on this subject, a bald-faced lie.
And I can’t believe she had the nerve to take credit for constituting the Melo Comission and “following its recommendations” when she has absolutely failed to take responsibility for the fairly damning conclusions of the Commission’s initial report, and continues to block release of the final version.
I have yet to read anything that gives any clue as to what the people who chose to give Arroyo this award were thinking. It is either shockingly ignorant or shockingly sinister. I’m not sure which is worse.
This would make me absolutely livid on any day. The fact that it comes just as I’ve finished revisions on my paper on impunity in the post-Marcos Philippines — a process in which  I’ve been consumed with rereading my own work, interviews I conducted over the last 2 years, and countless reports like the ones I’ve provided links for above — is pushing me over the edge.
Did I mention that this makes me sick?
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