Adventures of Isabel

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]