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Featured Stories

PHILIPPINE DEMOCRACY
People Power and the Perils of Democracy Lite
by Herbert Docena
Beneath the coup plots, shadow plays, and shifting alliances is the old protracted struggle for power in the Philippines.

DISASTER
Preparing for Disaster
by Vinia M. Datinguinoo
For a disaster-prone country, the Philippines is notoriously unprepared to deal with calamity.

WOWOWEE
Wowowee and the Women of 200 P. dela Cruz St.
by Sheila S. Coronel
TV networks benefit from the poverty and despair of their audience. But until the “Wowowee” tragedy, TV executives were oblivious to the perils of peddling dreams.

NEWSCAST
Through the Tube, Darkly
by Sheila S. Coronel
Primetime newscasts are fixated on crime stories, but then that is what their audiences want.

MARTIAL LAW
The Way We Were
On Sept. 22, 1972, the military closed down newspapers and broadcast stations and hauled to jail journalists and publishers.

FOCUS
Unusual Journeys
Most travel pieces by Filipinos involve shopping, but there is more to traveling than searching through the bargain bin. Unusual journeys inspire the traveler to see the world in a new light.

Romancing the Camera
by Howie G. Severino
Filipinos love the camera and the camera loves us.

A Basketball Diary
by Steven Pollit
A Canadian traveler discovers the Pinoy passion for basketball in Visayan villages way off the tourist track.

The Lost Boys of Sagada
by Danilova Molintas
The young men who grew up in the midst of Sagada’s tourist rush have fallen to the temptations of easy money, easy women, and what seemed for many years an easy life.

A Sta. Ana Story
by Grace Loreno
The time-warped district of Sta. Ana in the old Manila is changing fast, the remnants of its storied past now being overrun by fast-food joints and urban blight.

On the Trail of Lost Films
by Nick Deocampo
The pieces of our celluloid heritage are scattered throughout the world.

TV networks benefit from the poverty and despair of their audience. But until the "Wowowee" tragedy, TV executives were oblivious to the perils of peddling dreams.

by SHEILA S. CORONEL

HER NEIGHBORS on 200 P. de la Cruz Street remember the 49-year-old Lolita Bergado as a fair, petite, and pretty housewife who loved to watch television. She lived in a one-bedroom house with her husband and their four sons, the oldest 30 and the youngest, 14. They also have a daughter, 19-year-old Marjorie-lue or Joy, who was born with Down's syndrome. Two daughters-in-law and two grandchildren stay with them as well. Lolita cooked meals and kept house for them all — 11 members of an extended family that somehow managed to cram themselves into a dark and airless concrete shell barely 40 square meters in size.

	ANATOMY OF TRAGEDY. Zenaida del Perio was wounded during the “Wowowee” stampede. She went to Ultra, encouraged by the winnings in the game show of her neighbor, Julieta Ferrer (standing, right, in the left photo). [photos courtesy of Malaya]

200 P. de la Cruz Street is the common postal address of an eskinita with a row of about a dozen wood and concrete houses in Barangay San Bartolome, Novaliches, in the northern fringe of Quezon City. The houses were built cheek by jowl, imposing on neighbors a forced intimacy. There are few secrets here, but plenty of neighborly sharing and concern, and the occasional neighborly envy and bickering. The households of 200 P. de la Cruz have one other thing in common: they are all hooked on Channel 2, the TV station run by network giant ABS-CBN. "Lahat dito kapamilya (All of us here are part of the ABS-CBN family)," they all say.

They are such big fans that 200 P. de la Cruz is perhaps the only eskinita in the entire country that can boast of having two winners in ABS's popular noontime game show, "Wowowee." Sixty-two-year-old Rosario Alorar or Aling Chi, who runs the sari-sari store right next to the Bergado home, won P20,000 in a "Pera o Bayong" contest last May, while Julieta Ferrer, 57, who lives across the alley, won a whopping P80,000 only last December.

Her neighbors' good fortune was a constant source of wonderment for Lolita. They talked about it frequently in Aling Chi's sari-sari store, where the women of the neighborhood would gather in the afternoon. Lolita was addicted to "Wowowee." She never missed a show; when her household's electricity connection was cut because they couldn't pay their bills, she went over to her neighbors to watch it. "She watched TV every day," says Zenaida del Perio of her friend Lolita. "She watched from morning till night. The TV was hardly ever turned off and it was always on Channel 2."

Zenaida, 65, is a manicurist who is also yaya to the children of the couple who lives two houses from the Bergados. She is a big "Wowowee" fan herself. She happily said yes when Lolita asked her if she wanted to watch the show live at Ultra (also known as the Philsports Arena) in Pasig. Instead of its usual studio venue, "Wowowee" was going to have its first anniversary celebration there on Feb. 4, a Saturday. On the early morning of Friday, Feb. 3, Lolita and Zenaida left their eskinita for Ultra.

By Saturday night, some networks would report that about 74 people had died in a stampede earlier that morning outside the Ultra. The official Mar. 8 report of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), however, says there were 71 fatalities, and that they died mainly from severe head, chest, and abdominal injuries. People had literally been crushed and trampled to death. Of the dead, 68 were women, one of them pregnant. The youngest victim was only four years old; the oldest was 81. Over 800 others were injured.

The tragedy threw ABS-CBN into the maelstrom of controversy. On television, "Wowowee" host Willie Revillame shed tears. Both he and the network's executives said they meant well, that they merely wanted to brighten the lives of the poor. Yet the death toll on that tragic Saturday also showed that they failed to fathom the depths of people's despair. They didn't realize that many of "Wowowee's" viewers lead such brutish lives that they would cling — stubbornly, impervious to the well-being of others — to the most tenuous of hopes offered by games of chance. The network and the show benefited from their poverty and despair, as these meant a viewership that bolstered ratings and attracted advertising. They were apparently oblivious to the perils of peddling dreams.

PROMISES OF PRIZES
Days before the first-anniversary show was scheduled, Revillame had already been announcing the prizes and inviting viewers to join what he promised would be a grand celebration. ABS-CBN itself hyped the show, airing ads that featured the prizes and made viewers feel that everyone and his mother-in-law were raring to go to Ultra. It even ran a video showing an aerial view of the crowd that had massed up at the stadium days before. ABS also had TV plugs that even some within the network are now uncomfortable about. One plug promised that the show would provide for day-to-day needs like food on the table. "For us it was a good sound bite," says Menchie Silvestre, a social worker who was then with the outreach program of the network's news and current affairs division. "But it was also a message that people can count on the show for their everyday needs."

	MISSING LOLITA. With his wife gone, Mang Peryo now has to take care of Joy (top photo). At night, he says, he talks to Lolita’s photograph (below), asking why, of all people, she had to die. [photos by Sheila S. Coronel]

"We wanted to show the audience gathering, how big it was, how many they were," she adds. "But that sent a different message to the viewers who interpreted this as the entire neighborhood is there already, the ones from the provinces were there already, so what were we still doing here? The production people just wanted to entertain. But what did the audience want? They wanted a chance to better their lives. You ask them and they will say, we were hoping to win, not to be entertained."

There was a mismatch between what the producers had intended and what the audience understood and wanted. Certainly that was the case with the women of 200 P. de la Cruz. Two other women from the eskinita, including sari-sari storeowner Aling Chi, had already joined the queue at the stadium as early as Thursday, Lolita told her husband Porfirio that Friday morning. There was the promise that early-comers would get P20,000 each as a prize, she said. She asked for P50 for bus fare from her husband, a big chunk of the P200 or so a day he makes as a tricycle driver. Mang Peryo gave her the money, knowing Lolita would be disappointed if she couldn't go. He felt happy he could indulge his wife and nurture her hopes.

"Times are really hard and she wanted to help out," he says, recalling how desperately Lolita wanted to win in a "Wowowee" contest. "We had not had electricity for five months. We owed P9,000 in taxes for the house, which we hadn't paid in 10 years. I was also paying P1,000 a month for the loan for my tricycle. Our house needed repair — our roof leaks, the ceiling is falling apart. She thought that with 'Wowowee,' our luck would change."