In this issue:

• Gloria’s inglorious record: Biggest debtor, least popular
• The economy
  Misplaced government spending worsens woes
• ‘Dubious’ oil price hikes hurt the poorest most
• Romulo L. Neri: Can golf, realpolitik work at SSS?
• Perspectives
  That bumpy ride called democracy
• First person: August 21, 1983
  A million came for Ninoy as reporters battled with censors
• On the 25th year of the Aquino assassination
  Noynoy, Nene, Joker remember Ninoy
• They all remember Ninoy, too
• Public Eye
  Amid the fighting, the clan rules in Maguindanao
• Young guns, young terror

IF THIS country were a family, it is unhealthy, lacking in education and employment opportunities, is deep in debt and spends its limited budget on the wrong things.

This is despite the fact that the head of this household called the Philippines is someone whose expertise is economics.

Top financial experts also say things are bound to get worse before they get better. They warn of a “perfect economic storm” in the horizon. Much like a house built on shaky ground, the country’s economy is bound to “collapse come a typhoon,” says University of the Philippines economics professor Ernesto Pernia.

For sure, the Arroyo administration has pointed to the global recession as a major reason for the country’s own economic slowdown. But Rosario Bella Guzman, executive editor of the non-profit group IBON Foundation Inc., notes, “The oil price hike, rice crisis, and power rates increase — these are not new. What is new is that these are happening all at the same time in the context of record joblessness, worsening poverty, and political killings.”

Pernia, meanwhile, comments, “To be objective, the global crisis is affecting everybody, but the adverse effects vary according to the strength of the economy of the country. Countries like Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam — because their economies have grown strong — are less adversely affected. They are able to cushion the impacts better. But the case is different in a country that has a weak economy such as that of the Philippines.”

Even former economic planning secretary Solita ‘Winnie’ Monsod, who is known to sometimes offer kind words about President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s economic policies, says, “If there’s anything I have against her (Arroyo), aside from her political moves, is that from 1997 to 2006, poverty went up, and she was president for six of those nine years.”

Indeed, the number of poor Filipinos has increased from 30 out of 100 in 2003, to 33 per 100 in 2006. This translates to 27.6 million poor Filipinos who have little or no resources to ride out the turbulence ahead. The real number may even be much higher, since the homeless — among them the pushcart-dwelling masses — are not counted in the government’s poverty mapping.

Other experts also say that while the coming economic storm has long been anticipated and not just arising from current conditions, it has been made more potent by the Arroyo government’s wrong priorities in the last seven years.

Arroyo spends less for social services

Mapping the spending habits of five administrations since that of Ferdinand Marcos, former budget secretary Benjamin Diokno reveals the Arroyo administration has been spending less for social services as a percentage of the gross national product (GDP) compared to its predecessors. Social services include education, health, land distribution, housing, and subsidy to local government units (LGUs), and other social services.

Recently, Diokno, who has gone back to teaching economics at UP, notes that while the share of social services against total government has been increasing, support for this sector as percentage of GDP spending has dropped to 5.3 percent under the Arroyo administration, from an all-time high of 6.4 percent during the Estrada presidency.

Under the Aquino government, says Diokno, education received a high of 65 percent share of social services. But he says the figure has shrunk, and points out, “In fact, under Arroyo’s watch, from 2001 to 2007, it slumped to a historic low of 53 percent.”

By contrast, the Arroyo government’s spending has seen an increase on debt payments, wages and salaries of its employees, and subsidies to local government units. This means the budget has become so lopsided that it no longer supports the development of the nation’s human capital, says Diokno.

Arroyo’s own economic adviser, Albay Gov. Jose Ma. Salceda, recently admitted in an interview with local cable channel ANC that the current budget is non-responsive to the fiscal problems that have emerged. “The budget is really behind,” he said, “and it will be tough to adjust.”

Monsod explains that in absolute number, the Arroyo administration has been increasing its budget for health and education and other social services. It’s just that when computed on a per capita or per person basis, the amount becomes too small to decently support the growing number of Filipinos.

“The population, that’s a big problem,” says Monsod. “It makes it more difficult for us because the number of people sharing the pie is getting larger and larger.” She laments that the government’s population policy has been mired in debate between the Roman Catholic Church and various groups.

Yet in her most recent State of the Nation Address, President Arroyo said that the population growth rate had slowed to 2.04 percent from 2.36 percent, which she credited to her promotion of family planning and “female education” referring to reproductive health.

She also assured the nation that rice production since 2000 has gone up 4.07 percent a year, “twice the population growth rate.”

This begs the question why the Philippines has degenerated into one of the world’s biggest net rice importers.

Number belie claim of growth

Six months ago, Arroyo also said that she had achieved the best Philippine economy in the last three decades. But the latest official figures show the opposite.

This year’s first-quarter statistics show that the industry sector suffered the most significant slowdown, dropping from 6.6 percent in 2007 to 3.9 percent in 2008, mainly due to less activity in construction and manufacturing. Construction, which hit a high of 21.7 percent in the first three months of 2007 — a pre-election period — sank to a low of 4.5 percent in the same period this year.

These two areas are labor-intensive and employ millions. Social Watch co-convenor Leonor Magtolis Briones estimates that this translates to a loss of 168,000 jobs since April last year.

“These claims are totally erased by the fact that unemployment now stands at eight percent and underemployment at double-digit levels,” says Briones, adding that the jobs created were “for street cleaners, canal diggers, flower trimmers and the like,” not long-term work.

In fact, the number of unemployed Filipinos could have been higher than eight percent had it not been for a revision of the formula, which now excludes those who do any work even for one hour during the reference period.

Meantime, Alvic Padilla of Social Watch Philippines for the Alternative Budget Initiative points out that inflation continued to accelerate after the first quarter, hitting a record 11.4 percent last month.

“Diminishing purchasing power of people’s money will inevitably lead to lower consumption, and may affect business profitability, defer expansion of business, and reduce overall production,” he says in a paper he authored.

Typhoon Frank, which pummeled a wide swath of the country a few weeks ago, also weakened the capacity of those in the lower quintile of the population to weather the economic storm.

Frank damaged crops, livestock, fisheries, irrigation, and other agricultural facilities worth P7.57 billion. An estimated P3.9 billion worth of roads and bridges were also damaged. This will obviously have an impact on the country’s food production and food price, says Padilla.

As it is, food prices had already been on a steep climb in the past few months, with President Arroyo blaming the global food crisis for the rice price hike in the local market and the ripple effects on all food commodities and grocery items.

But IBON’s Guzman argues that while it is true that global food costs have increased, global food production in 2007 would show that most of the food commodities registered growth in production (except for wheat) while ending stocks for important grains (in the case of wheat and corn) either declined or were maintained (in the case of rice).

“In other words,” she says, “global supply is simply tight but manageable and is therefore not the main cause for the phenomenal price movements.”

Rice Watch and Action Network (R1) lead convenor Jessica Reyes-Cantos also says that while global trends will always be a factor, the primary dilemma is with the Philippine government’s policy implementations.

Problematic agricultural sector

The way IBON sees it, the Philippines has long had an agricultural crisis that is characterized by backwardness, low productivity, landlord monopoly, tenancy, usury, foreign control and incursions, trading cartel and monopoly. These days, it says, the situation has been aggravated by globalization policies such as the liberalization of rice and food imports, as well as the privatization of public stockholding and marketing organs, such as the National Food Authority (NFA), and the deregulation of agriculture, such as substantially reducing the budget for it.

Reyes-Cantos rues what she calls the government’s “quick-fix” solutions. “If there is rice shortage, then import,” she huffs. “This is not sustainable. What’s necessary is to create long-term solutions, invest in production, and support farmers.”

But financial and economic experts point to other “band-aid” measures that they say only worsen problems. Monsod, for instance, describes the president’s recent scheme of giving P500 doleouts to selected members of the poor as “nakakasuka (sickening).”

“What is P500?” asks Monsod. “What is a one-shot deal that has no long-term effect?”

She adds that it is obvious that Arroyo was just “courting the Manila vote.”

The government has defended the scheme by saying it is merely giving back part of the people’s taxes, since the funds supposedly come from the value-added tax (VAT) imposed on oil.

Monsod acknowledges that the VAT “saved the country.” But she urges Arroyo to be more circumspect in the use of its proceeds. “The best you can say for it is that it (the subsidy) is aimed at the poor,” she says. “But even then you could have been more selective.”

Monsod is a member of the advisory council of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino, a subsidy program under the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). The program aims to implement a conditional cash transfer program to the poorest families in poorest towns identified in the 2006 Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES). Under the scheme, families who send their children to school will receive as much as P1,400 a month in health and education support.

Briones, for her part, suggests, “(Arroyo) should start reversing the government public expenditure patterns. Declining economic growth, soaring cost of living, and increasing unemployment do not bode well for the worsening poverty.”

Reputedly the highest paid Filipino in Saudi Arabia, Bolos decided to head home and put up his own business here in 2005. Never mind that he might never earn the same income he had as an accountant and chief financial officer; all he wanted was to invest the money he had earned for 25 years in his hometown of Guagua, Pampanga, a bustling town north of Manila.

Using the managerial techniques he had learned overseas, Bolos now runs a spa in Manila and the first and only mall in Guagua. But it was no easy task, he shares, since he had to learn how to save and invest his money well.

Another returnee, Roderico Cane, also shares how setting up his catsup factory in 1996 required a lot of hard work and discipline. A backyard business that he started in Butuan City in Mindanao, Joy Banana Catsup is now producing 1,000 gallons of catsup per day and has gross annual sales of P15 to P16 million. Cane proudly says that he has the best catsup there is and at the lowest prices — a 250-mg pack of Joy Catsup costs only P4, or about three pesos cheaper than what the multinationals offer.

Not everyone, however, is as lucky.

For one, both Bolos and Cane were already adept at handling finances and knew how to start a business. They are the few rare cases among the hundreds of OFWs who had already returned home. And the government’s inefficient implementation of a proper reintegration program, much less coming up with an effective one, is largely to blame.

In a 2005 policy paper of the International Labor Organization (ILO), it reported that the post-employment problems of OFWs were mainly due to lack of opportunities.

But a law passed in 1995, the Migrants Welfare Act, is supposed to protect them from such troubles. The law reads that the State “does not promote overseas employment as a means to sustain economic growth,” adding that it must “continue to create local employment opportunities.”

The ILO, however, said the government has no adequate employment program, and even the pre-departure orientation, which is supposed to prepare the OFW for his eventual return, is ineffective.

But while it reported that the Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration and the Department of Labor and Employment did have entrepreneurship and livelihood programs, observers say the programs had little success since barely a few knew they were being offered. Even Bolos and Cane weren’t aware that there was such a program.

As for those who had tried availing such programs, they said the procedures were complicated and the loaned amounts were just too small.

A failed promise

There are also those like Jimmy Avila, a former mechanical engineer in Jeddah, who says he didn’t get help from the government at all, at least not after he got the loan for his machine shop from a government bank.

Encouraged by the OWWA to come home in 1996, with a sweet promise that there were business opportunities for workers like him, Avila resigned from his job. Setting up the shop was pretty easy, he says. “The hard part came when I realized I couldn’t market my products. I didn’t know how to get clients.” (see the PCIJ’s 1999 report, “For Many Overseas Filipino Workers, Home is Where the Hurt Is.”)

Avila has since managed to survive and feed his family with the meager income he earns. He did try to seek help from the government, but he says it couldn’t offer any good options. He, however, remains optimistic. He has in fact sought the assistance of a nongovernmental organization, the Entrepinoy Chamber of Small and Medium Enterprises.

With the free business courses the group offers, Avila hopes that he will be able to market the organic fertilizer he will be producing, that is, once he has managed to build the bioreactor, a machine that turns waste into compost. “Hopefully, with funding I can finally come up with my own version of a bioreactor.”

OWWA, however, says that it continues to come up with ways to help the returnees. It has even recently created a National Reintegration Center for OFWs (NRCO) , a one-stop shop for all reintegration programs and services for the government. When asked what it has so far accomplished, the NCRO merely said it was still consolidating all OFW programs and couldn’t give any report yet.

And there is of course the issue of funding. The OWWA has accumulated P9 billion in its trust fund over the last 12 years, but a report says only P45 million had so far been spent.

“The interest alone should be more than enough to fund more reintegration projects,” says Jackson Gan, vice president of the Federated Association of Manpower Exporters, in a recent Philippine News Agency article. Most of the projects, he says, were small-scale stores, advocacy, and seminars.

At the moment, NGOs like Entrepinoy are doing a fine job helping OFWs like Avila, who may not be as business savvy as Bolos or Cane.

There are also organizations like Unlad Kabayan, which can pool in the money of five to 10 OFWs, do feasibility study to determine which business is suitable for a community, and train OFW families to manage the business, teaching them skills like bookkeeping. This type of set-up helps the OFWs cope way before they decide to return home.

“We are squandering a lot of opportunities. OFWs have a lot of money yet we’re not utilizing them properly,” laments Bolos. “But realistically speaking we can’t expect much from government.”

WHETHER it’s beer, stress, or too much sleep, there is a form of poison present in the lives of many of us.

We asked people to name their poisons, be it stress, negativity, or a set of squabbling parents. You’d be surprised at what they had to say.

In this issue

• Power and poisons
• In search of green alternatives
• Cleaning up the ‘King’
• Harnessing the wind
• Photo gallery: The windmills of Ilocos Norte
• Building the breathing spaces
• Photo gallery: The house on M. Viola Street
• First person: Starting a ‘clean’ revolution
• Short-circuited reforms in the power sector
• A commission of power
• Toxins ‘R’ Us
• Podcast: Name that toxin
• A puff of a test
• Video: Toxic city
• What’s swimming in your soup?
• Waste not, want not
• Hazards of healthcare waste
• There’s something about mercury

Public Eye

• No coming-out party for PLLO
• Has NEDA gone nada?
• From newshound to news target

VOTING wasn’t a problem for most of the first-time voters whom I spoke to. Aside from flyers that were given away in front of poll precincts, all of them said that the proper voting process was followed.

What did cause a problem was that some of the first-time voters were not familiar with many of the candidates, so they had a hard time deciding whom to vote for.

Topping their list of senatorial candidates was Representative Francis “Chiz” Escudero, as well as the other members of the Genuine Opposition. The first-time voters said that they were ready for change, and that these candidates’ platforms and programs were the most youth-friendly.

In this issue

• Eenie, minnie, minie, moe…
• Podcast: First-time voters speak up
• Ghosts of past polls haunt Comelec
• Piecemeal law implementation?
• The case for computerized elections
• Guardians of the ballot
• A watchdog loses some bite
• Missing the message (or why some big ad spenders lost)
• Hey, big spenders!
• An abnormal return to normality

Photos by Lilen Uy

LATE IN the evening of July 7, 2005, Cory Aquino together with four Roman Catholic bishops paid a call on President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo at Malacañang Palace. It was not a social visit. Far from it. The presidency was then in the throes of crisis. Arroyo’s legitimacy was under fire: barely a month had passed since the public release of wiretapped conversations where she was heard talking to an elections official, supposedly about padding the results of the 2004 presidential count. Many Filipinos found the whole affair scandalous and believed the president had no other option but to resign.

On that Thursday evening, Cory Aquino came to tell Gloria Arroyo precisely that. “I asked her to make the supreme sacrifice,” Aquino recalls. “I realized I was asking so much of her but I did tell her that I think all of us Filipinos have to make sacrifices and those of us who are in positions of authority or perhaps have greater blessings should make the greater sacrifice. The bishops spoke first and then I spoke last. She didn’t say anything.”

Perhaps only in the Philippines could this happen: a 72-year-old former president and four bishops trooping to the presidential palace to ask the head of state to step down. But that moment had 20 years of history behind it, 20 years during which two peaceful middle-class revolts toppled presidents. And in both those uprisings, the Catholic bishops and Cory Aquino played important roles as crowd gatherers and symbols of moral uprightness.

Twenty years since that February afternoon when she joined the crowds at Edsa that ousted a dictator, Cory Aquino believes Filipinos still expect her to make a stand, to speak out, and to help them chart the course of their damaged democracy.

When her six-year presidency drew to a close in 1992, Aquino opted for political retirement, saying that she looked forward to nothing more than being a grandmother. For the most part she kept out of the political limelight, yet she also made her presence felt. In 1992, she chose her defense secretary, Fidel Ramos, to succeed her. She campaigned for “Steady Eddie” and many of those in the Ramos campaign say that the “Cory factor” was decisive in his victory.

In 1998, she and Manila archbishop, the late Jaime Cardinal Sin, led protests against attempts to change the constitution to allow Ramos to stay on as head of state. The protests were loud enough to force President Ramos to back off. In 2000, she was back on the campus and church circuit, endorsing the impeachment of President Joseph Estrada, and when “People Power II” broke out on the evening of January 16, 2001, she was among the first few thousand people who gathered on Edsa. Three days later, Estrada was waving goodbye from a barge that took him and his family from the back door of the presidential palace, down the Pasig, and into ignominy.

For sure, Cory Aquino’s word still carries weight. When they considered resigning from the Arroyo Cabinet in July, she was among those that the “Hyatt 10″ group of senior executive officials ran to. When anti-Arroyo protesters wanted to make a show of force during the voting on the president’s impeachment in Congress last September, they made sure Cory was there. She came, if only “to show others that look, if I can still do it, maybe you can, too.”

Only this time, there was no explosion of people power. There was outrage, but it didn’t spill out to the streets. Had the Cory magic waned? Or had the people become too tired, too demoralized, and too bereft of hope to care?

TO THIS day, Cory Aquino remains a firm believer in people power, never mind that its currency has been much devalued by the dashed expectations of those who had taken part in popular revolts. People power, she says, “will bring change but not the ultimate or desired change that will continue.” This is why, she says, “we have to change first within ourselves and we have to continuously find out what it is that we can do to offer to our country.”

To this day, Aquino talks about politics in moral and religious terms. Her political vocabulary is firmly Catholic: she speaks of suffering, sacrifice, good and evil, right and wrong. Her analysis of contemporary problems is couched in religious parable. To Cory Aquino, life — and politics — is a morality play, and our lives are nothing but pale versions of the Passion of Jesus Christ.

“You know,” she says, “when Ninoy was in prison, I used to think all of us have a quota for suffering and when Ninoy was assassinated, I supposed I’d filled up my quota of suffering. But that isn’t so, and when we think of Jesus Christ who did not do anybody any wrong, He was goodness Himself, and yet He was prepared to make all of these sacrifices and His suffering did not end until he died. So I suppose, each of us, while we are in this world, while we are here in the Philippines, must think of what it is that we can still offer to make life better for our fellow Filipinos.”

More secular and sophisticated analysts are bound to scoff at such talk. Unlike them, Cory Aquino does not blame oppressive social structures or an oligarchic political system for the country’s woes. Her views are traditional, old-fashioned, pre-Vatican II Catholic.

But it also cannot be denied that her vocabulary of suffering and sacrifice has great resonance among ordinary Filipinos who supported her fight against Marcos precisely because it was couched, not in ideological or academic terms, but in a language that struck a chord in their hearts. During the 1986 election campaign, Cory Aquino was mythologized: she was both suffering Mater Dolorosa and avenging Joan of Arc.

She was a martyr’s grieving widow, purified by suffering, her agony mirroring that of the nation’s. How could any Filipino not be moved?

Propelled to iconic status in 1986, Cory Aquino became the projection screen for varied hopes and expectations. She could not possibly have fulfilled them all. Until now the jury is divided on the Aquino presidency. Many credit her for reestablishing democratic institutions and doing away with some of the most egregious legacies of the Marcos dictatorship. They blame rebel factions of the military, which staged several unsuccessful coups, for blocking democratic reforms and setting back economic recovery. They also say that only Cory, of all the presidents after Marcos, remains untainted by corruption, although they will not vouch for some members of her family.

But others are not as kind. They say Aquino’s was a presidency of missed opportunities and shattered hopes. They blame her for resurrecting the pre-martial law political system dominated by elite families and patronage-seeking politicians. They say she should have written off our foreign debt, implemented land reform, beginning with her family’s 6,000-hectare Hacienda Luisita, and shuttered the military where it belonged-the barracks. They mourn that Cory could not transcend the interests of her clan and class.

Aquino is unperturbed. “I don’t know how they will judge [my presidency],”she says, “but I just hope that they will realize that it was not an easy thing restoring democracy after a dictatorship. Also being the first woman president certainly had its problems and then we were dealing with a very strong military that were spoiled during the Marcos dictatorship.”

She says hers was a healing presidency that initiated talks with various rebel groups. Her government gave a lot of money to NGOs and she herself set the example for honesty and simple living, refusing to live in Malacañang (she chose to stay at the more modest Arlegui residence) and having the presidential car stop, just like other vehicles, at a red traffic light. And for sure, through all the most determined attempts to unseat her, she was equally “determined that I would never leave Malacañang in spite of all the coup attempts.”

THE IRONY is that it was Ninoy Aquino, rather than Cory, who believed he was destined to be president. Aquino recalls she was perfectly content to be his wife and mother to five children. She regrets now that she never read all the books that her husband had told her to. She would perhaps been better prepared to be president if she had. Other than that, she has few regrets.

Today Cory Aquino still lives in the modest, one-story Quezon City house she and Ninoy moved into in 1961. She spends her time painting (her living room is abloom with the flowers on her canvases), enjoying her grandchildren, and being involved with microfinance projects. She is a woman at peace with herself, content in semi-retirement, and happy that she is no longer in government.

She says she was never really cut out for public life, anyway. The presidency was thrust upon her by circumstances beyond her control. “I decided that I would accept the draft for the presidency because it was impressed upon me by Senator Tañada, Senator Salonga and all the others that, ‘You are the only one who can unite the opposition.’” The only way to defeat Marcos, she says, was for her to run. Otherwise, there would be more than one opposition candidate “and we might as well just hand over [the election] to him on a silver platter.”

“I believed,” she says, enumerating the Cory Aquino articles of faith, “that it was important for us to restore democracy. I believed it was important for us to oust the dictator in a peaceful manner.”

To this day, Aquino repeats this like a mantra. It was what she was destined to do, and it was what she did. Nothing more. Nothing less. Cory knew she was unprepared to be president, but having “restored democracy,” she is confident she had done her part.

After all, she is not a social reformer, much less a revolutionary. She is not even a hands-on executive. Maybe things would have been different if she were. But she is not. She is an icon who became president, a devout Catholic housewife swept, like the rest of her countrymen, by the tide of history.

Ultimately, all of us will judge Cory Aquino according to whether she has measured up to our hopes and expectations. But Cory herself does not worry much about what we think; neither does she fret about the judgment of history. She wants to be remembered only as “somebody who really tried to do her best and who believed in prayer and who believed that prayer would direct her to what God intended for her.”

How can anyone argue with that? – Sheila S. Coronel

Photos by Lilen Uy

IT WAS the night of February 22, the beginning of what would become Edsa 1. There, in the midst of a sea of protesters that would later swell to nearly a million people, was three-year-old Alfonso Tomas ‘Atom’ Araullo. He wasn’t alone, of course. The little boy was riding on his father’s shoulders, while his mother walked alongside, their young family enjoying what many remember to be a lovely evening, the air brisk and cool and a full moon washing the street with light.

Araullo himself has no memory of that night, but one of his father’s favorite stories is how he had been part of history 20 years ago. Today at 23, Araullo refers to the first people power uprising as “one of the shining moments of the Filipino people” and an event that has helped shape his life.

But he also says the country has not progressed since the 1986 revolt. “I realized that the same things people were fighting for in 1986 still exist today,” says Araullo, who calls himself a full-time activist. “There’s a need to continue the struggle until we achieve a true and fundamental change.”

A recent graduate of applied physics at the University of the Philippines, Araullo spends part of his time nowadays co-hosting Studio 23′s morning show “Breakfast” and the youth-oriented “Kabataan News Network” of the Probe Media Foundation.

But most of his day is usually taken up by his work in political activism, which is about to kick into higher gear. He remains a member of the League of Filipino Students (LFS), but now that his term as education research officer of UP’s Student Alliance for the Advancement of Democratic Rights (Stand UP) has ended, Araullo is looking forward to joining “broader alliances.”

In the current Starstruck and Pinoy Big Brother world of his generation, Araullo — whose matinee-idol looks could compete with those of television’s pretty boys — is quite the oddity. He admits himself that many in his age group do not know what Edsa 1 was all about, and what it stood for. It worries him that many youths have grown indifferent, preferring their own private corners to the world beyond. They have no interest in what Karl Marx once called their “political existence,” and Araullo thinks that is a shame. He says there is a need for the youth to “historicize,” to know and learn from the failures and victories of the past so they could offer solutions to current problems.

“The youth has a big role in this kind of social formation,” he stresses. “It really is true that we have the biggest stake in any change in society.”

Still, it’s not like Araullo himself realized this just by listening to his father’s story about their evening stroll at Edsa 20 years ago. Although he knew that Edsa was “important,” it was not until he entered UP that he came to understand what it was all about. And so, he says, “I decided to join different organizations that seek to uphold the same ideals that were present during those times, that up to now we are still fighting to achieve.”

THE SON of Carol Pagaduan Araullo, who heads the left-wing Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN, New Patriotic Alliance), Atom Araullo sees Edsa as a culmination of the struggles of the people during that period. It was a fight not only against the dictatorship, he says, but also against the things the strongman Ferdinand Marcos stood for and the policies he upheld — “his close ties with foreign powers, the United States, his style of governance. And political repression was rampant at that time.”

Filipinos throughout history have proven that they are willing to fight for their ideals, says Araullo. He thinks 1986 was the peak of that kind of struggle. For his part, he believes it is only through the militant struggle that society can progress, as it aims for a “genuine liberation and democracy.”

We are living in a false democracy, he says. As he sees it, “genuine democracy” is to have the rule of the majority, where equal rights and opportunities are afforded everyone. He points out that this isn’t the case in the country right now, since the larger section of the population is still not reaping the full benefits of its labor. He sounds almost embarrassed to admit that he is lucky to have had a good education and land a job that pays relatively well. To his mind, an ideal society would be one where any opportunity that comes would be based on merit and how much one contributes to society.

“Compared to what others do, which is more difficult, which contributes more to nation-building — factory workers, farmers — they really don’t have a ‘return of investment,’” he says. “And here I am, I don’t have to do much…but I have a lot of benefits.”

The young man doth sells himself short. For someone his age, he has already done a lot. At 15, he won his first triathlon competition, a sport that involves swimming, running, and cycling. Araullo is also trained in soccer, tennis, volleyball, taekwondo, and platform diving. Nowadays, he does mountaineering and underwater diving.

Araullo, who has had a stint in theatre, plays the flute, guitar, and an Australian folk instrument called digeridoo. He does computer graphics and travel and street photography. This year, he plans to learn filmmaking, painting, sculpting, cooking — even breadmaking. And all of those are just for fun.

When he was still head of Stand UP, he led the campaign against Senate Bill 2587, which proposes a new UP charter. He and his co-protesters argued that the change would result in the “commercialization” of UP education. They took their protest as far as the grounds of the Senate, and were rewarded with blows to the head and body by the stick-wielding guards. Fortunately, he did not suffer any serious injuries.

Araullo was also one of the convenors of UP SIGAO (UP Student Initiative for Gloria Arroyo’s Ouster) and TXTpower, a citizens’ group that saw the potential of text and the Internet for mobilizing people into action. Primarily concerned with shielding consumers from the abuses of telecommunications companies, TXTpower turned political at the height of Gloriagate last year, posting different versions of “Hello, Garci” ringtones (with downloads reaching 350,000), along with jokes, anti-Arroyo placards, and posters.

“My interests are very varied,” he allows. “I’d be the first to encourage my fellow activists to try out other things. It’s important for me to develop (one’s) personality in all aspects, to be a well-rounded person.”

NEARLY EVERYONE had expected Araullo to win in the bid for the student council chairmanship in 2004. But Stand UP suffered an overwhelming defeat, getting only one seat in the 14-person slate, and he wasn’t even that winner. It was a humbling experience from which he and his partymates learned some hard lessons. It was also one of his lowest points, “a rude awakening,” he calls it, but that which has equipped him with a deeper appreciation of things.

Araullo says he considers failures, even unwise decisions he may have made, as all part of the process. Obviously, he doesn’t shy away from challenges either, and he believes in hard work and discipline. These and his strongly held convictions, with a full sense of who he is and what he would one day want to become, are what set Araullo apart from many of his peers.

To be sure, his mastery of multitasking is something he shares with many other young people, although he may not be as interested in the latest gadget or the next killer app as the next twenty-something. His is a generation that is both producer and consumer, a maker and seeker of all sorts of stimuli. But it is also a generation that has been dismissed as “lost,” or at most spoiled by the freedom regained by its elders at Edsa 1, a generation said to be trapped in its own ambivalence and apathy.

Araullo says he understands why others see his generation this way. His opinion is that the youth, because of the sheer number of issues they are assaulted with, oftentimes choose to simply turn inward and worry only about what they can deal with directly: themselves. Especially now that many Filipinos — young and old alike — seem to be having mounting apprehensions about the future. “Everybody feels it, things are so bleak,” he laments.

The government has stolen from the young people their aspirations for a better future, Araullo says, offering them nothing but empty promises amid a foundering economy and brewing political crisis. For him, this is an example of a glaring contradiction that the youth must learn to recognize. He says they must question why, for example, this nation wallows in poverty despite its very rich marine biodiversity.

He adds that the youth should use their talents for the benefit of the people. They should strive to be experts in their respective fields, he says, but the crucial questions they should ask are: “What am I doing this for? Who will benefit from my efforts?”

Reminded that many of his peers seem to lack the kind of nationalism possessed by previous generations, Araullo argues that that the youth today face a different and more challenging task. Though the same kinds of problems exist, he says, they have a more “developed and prepared enemy” in the ruling elite.

He is not about to give up on his generation, insisting that youth and activism are always directly related. “Once young people start figuring things out, they have a tendency to shake things from the foundation, they’re not afraid to turn things upside down,” he says. That’s why it’s important for the youth to realize that their potential can only be maximized through militant struggle. At the very least, says Araullo, young people have to become more interested in issues beyond their own.

“If we will pin our hopes on one thing,” he says, “it must be in our capacity to shape the future, in the capacity of the youth to take an active role in changing the things they think are wrong.”

He also insists, “This so-called lost generation would still be able to redeem itself…just you wait, this generation will be able to prove itself as a generation that has something to contribute to overall change in society for the better.”

Everything may look bleak now, Araullo agrees, but he believes a different world is possible. He says this is not just based on some romantic illusion. “(It is) definitely achievable,” he says, even if he adds that it may not happen in his lifetime.

Or could it? — Avigail M. Olarte

Photos by Lilen Uy

SHE CROUCHED in the foxhole that she and loyal Berto had dug with their bare hands, breathing heavily as she tried to fit her eight-month pregnant body sideways into its shallow hold. Above the roar of gunfire, she could hear the invading soldiers shout out the name that had come to be identified with her.

At near sundown, Berto, a former soldier from Mindanao who had defected to the New People’s Army (NPA) and sort of acted as her security, crept up to her from his own foxhole. “We have to leave.” She nodded. She knew it was only a matter of time before the soldiers discovered them. Berto said, “I’ll cover you as you make your way up the hill.” He had just fired two shots when a barrage of mortar fire rained down on them. Before her eyes, she saw her trusted aide dissolve into a mass of blood.

It was over in a matter of seconds. As the jubilant soldiers led her down the hill, some CAFGU (Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Unit) members began grabbing at her long hair and snipping off some strands. They had captured the famed Kumander Liway and every lock was worthy of an amulet.

Today the long tresses are gone. Yet the memories remain, even if Ma. Cecilia Flores Oebanda, 46, has come a long way since that fateful day in September 1982, when the military overran her guerrilla camp in an eight-hour gunbattle in the mountainous interior of Hinobaan, part of the chain of six towns in Negros Occidental called CHICKS, where poverty and insurgency had long fed on each other.

At her air-conditioned office, a long shelf displays a collection of plaques and pictures that portray a new life. Occupying pride of place is a big frame that reads “Anti-Slavery Award, 2005.” Last November 29, Oebanda received the award from Anti-Slavery International in London for the pioneering work of the Visayan Forum among the Philippines’ modern-day slaves — the domestic helpers who are forced to work in Filipino households for little or no pay and are constantly at the mercy of their employers.

Oebanda is the president, executive director, and moving spirit behind the Visayan Forum. Set up in 1990 by former political prisoners and activists from the Visayas, the NGO evolved from discussing the plight of the four million Visayans in Metro Manila to focusing on internal migrants from the Visayan region and elsewhere, many of whom are female and employed as maids.

Instead of organizing poor peasants and indigenous tribes that once filled up her days, Oebanda now devotes her time and energy to making visible a sector whose lowly, scattered, and hidden plight has kept them from the public eye. She is especially proud of the formation in 1995 of Sumapi, the first domestic workers’ association in the Philippines.

The rise of NGOs, fuelled largely by activists who were in the anti-Marcos movement, is one of the major developments in the post-EDSA era. Like other activists formerly in the underground who have directed their energies to NGOs, Oebanda sees this route as a valid way of working for social reforms.

“I see my work as an instrument of social transformation,” she says. “I think protecting the domestic workers, teaching them their rights, providing them empowerment in terms of recognizing their worth in society through their economic contributions, somehow, it’s part of the social transformation we fight for today to achieve in our country, but at another level, another approach. What I’m fighting for today, I see as an extension of what I fought for before.”

OEBANDA’S OWN personal struggle began in the slums of Bacolod City, where her family lived. Her father was illiterate and her mother was sickly. The second and eldest girl of 12 children, she started working at the age of five.

“I helped sell fish and I was also a scavenger along with my siblings,” she says. “Until now when I talk of hardship, I can still feel the warm drippings down my face from the basket of fish that I carried on my head. I can still smell the stench of the garbage that clung to my clothes and my skin. That’s my history, that gives me all the reflection that no matter how hard you work, if you come from a very poor family, you have a very slim chance of getting out of that situation.”

But a combination of innate intelligence, diligent study, and swimming skills honed in the waters of the Bacolod wharf enabled the young girl to get out of the morass of poverty. “What I appreciated most with my parents, especially my mother, was that they valued education,” says Oebanda. “I remember that even if my slippers were of different colors, one red, the other yellow, she required us to go to school.” She made it to the Negros Occidental National Provincial High School, a top pilot school.

A swimming scholarship then got her to the Colegio de San Agustin in Bacolod, but she would be unable to finish her commerce course “because I was at a rally almost every day.” Her faith and spirituality, a legacy from her religious mother (who would die later while Oebanda was up in the mountains), had found a new dimension in the teachings of liberation theology. She became an organizer for basic Christian communities as well as other sectors. But a crackdown in Bacolod in 1976 forced her to flee to the mountainous far south of Negros where the then fledgling NPA, made up of young students and other idealists, had found a home among the poor in the CHICKS area.

It was in these hinterlands, in the midst of meetings and more mass organizing where she met her husband, who was into education work. It was here where she bore her first child and experienced the agony of leaving him in the care of relatives to protect him from her dangerous life. It was also here where stories about the young, beautiful, and gutsy “Kumander Liway,” one of three women leaders of the Negros underground movement, spread throughout the island. It was here as well where she was captured together with her husband that fateful day 23 years ago.

In the four years they would spend in jail at the regional constabulary headquarters in Iloilo City, she recalls, “Every time I went to sleep, I felt there were fireworks exploding in front of me, and the face of Berto would appear. I would struggle to breathe and I would wake up crying.”

It was the memory of Berto’s ultimate sacrifice as well as of the people who had made her life in the mountains possible, that kept her resolve. “What I can’t forget and appreciate to this day is, no matter how hard life was, the masses followed us wherever we went,” she says. “They would cook yams for us, or boil eggs. During the times when the military operations were particularly intense, but you had a chance to pass by their huts, they welcomed you. Even the seeds they were to plant, they would cook into food for you. Actually, this was my motivation. That if I owed loyalty to anyone, it was to the masses.”

The remarkable comradeship of those years also infused in her a positive outlook. “Life wasn’t easy in the movement,” says Oebanda. “But I did not see weariness in my comrades nor did I hear complaints. They were still happy, we were all happy. At the end of the day, you would sit down together. You talk, you laugh, you dream. Maybe that’s the very important thing-not only dreaming, but willing to give yourself to your country.”

ON FEBRUARY 26, 1986, Oebanda, along with other political prisoners across the country, was released from jail. But the stresses of prison life and her decision to personally attend to her growing brood and make them her topmost priority had put a strain on her marriage. She and her husband eventually parted ways.

With four children in tow, including two who had been born in jail, she struggled to make a new life in Manila. She was able to put her kids through school with the help of supportive brothers who had made it good. But the call of service was already in her blood and too strong to ignore. The Ormoc tragedy in 1991, which killed 8,000 people in huge flashfloods and landslides, sparked the first joint activity of the Visayan Forum, which was now drawing more of her time. Tapping a growing circle of contacts among Visayan professionals and students in Metro Manila, they were able to send three planeloads of relief goods and supplies to Ormoc, Leyte.

This was also the time when cases of abused housemaids began being brought to the Forum’s attention. Oebanda recounts cases of eight year olds whom they had rescued, their backs and thighs pressed with a hot iron by their employer. There were also cases of rape, those whose bodies were burned with cigarette butts, or sprayed with a fire extinguisher. She say, “I was like an umang, a crab, who had a backpack with me wherever I went, and planted myself wherever there was some vacant place in an office where I could make use of a computer to document these cases.”

Today the Visayan Forum now has its own national office in Manila — plus a network of over 70 staff workers, six regional offices, and seven project areas at strategic locations around the highways and ports. Its program provides crisis services to child domestics and exploited adult househelp, such as a telephone hotline, medical and legal assistance, and shelters.

“Our focus is child domestics because of their vulnerability, but our advocacy is for the whole sector,” says Oebanda. The Intenational Labor Organization estimates that locally, 2.5 million women work as domestic helpers in private households, constituting 14 percent of total wage earners in the private sector. More than 250,000 are hired overseas legally. The National Statistics Office reports around 300,000 children working as domestic help.

While her current work keeps her busy, Oebanda says she has no bitterness or regret over her years spent in the movement. She muses, “The stages of my life are written and carved in the names of my children — Eric, who is his father’s junior; Kip, which is short for “dakip” or capture; Malaya, which means freedom; and Ani, which means harvest because she was born just after Edsa 1.”

And through her work among the most silent and neglected by society, Oebanda has added more children to her brood, giving them a name and a face for everybody to see. — Fides Lim

Photos by Lilen Uy

HE IS a practicing lawyer, but Jose Luis Martin ‘Chito’ Gascon also wants it known that among his professions are as “democracy activist” and “social reform advocate.” After all, he has been no mere spectator in watershed events in contemporary Philippine politics.

During the first people power, Gascon, then chairman of the University of the Philippines Student Council, and other student activists were among the first to heed the call of Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin and opposition leader Agapito ‘Butz’ Aquino to go to Edsa. Gascon shuttled between Edsa and Diliman on those four days to, in his words, “refresh the troops.”

Gascon still distinctly remembers the roaring military choppers hovering above Camps Crame and Aguinaldo and the fear that swept the crowd that thought these would attack. “Instead of doing that, (the pilots) landed and said that they were joining the people. The fear changed to joy quite quickly,” he recalls.

Just as quickly, he confesses, “Not until the actual departure of Marcos did I understand what we were doing. We just knew that we had to be there as it was part of the political developments that were unfolding. I did not think that being at Edsa would, in fact, topple the dictator.”

And usher in much more changes. Now 41, Gascon will always be known as the youngest member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission that drafted the 1987 charter. He was named four years later to the Eighth Congress as youth sector representative, which gave him a direct hand in crafting the country’s laws.

At the time, he was one of the faces of the supposedly new politics. But then the system itself got old all too soon, or else reverted to the way things were.

Gascon himself says it was a matter of retaining the wrong things. “The mistake (of those in EDSA 1) was thinking it was sufficient to remove a dictator…and everything would fall into place,” he says. “We have seen that that does not happen. We removed the dictator, but we retained the political system.”

“Our failure is in the consolidation of that democracy,” he laments. “Twenty years hence, we see that our democracy continues to face major challenges.” Gascon’s frustrations mirror those of many in his generation, college students in the mid-1980s whose defining experience was Edsa 1. As they inch toward middle age, this generation is realizing that that the country is in a quagmire. Many have joined the system rather than fight it, and those who continue the struggle are beginning to realize that there is no easy way out of the bog.

Not that Filipinos haven’t tried mending the political system to harness the gains of People Power 1. The constitution Gascon helped craft provides for, among other bold initiatives, a multiparty system, term limits on elective officials, a representative Congress through the party-list system, an end to political dynasties, and electoral reforms.

But today a wiser Gascon acknowledges: “There’s a big difference between aspirations in a fundamental document and putting it in practice through systems and institutions. We have not really done enough in terms of our governance to make sure that those aspirations are made a reality.”

IN JULY 2005, at the height of the political crisis triggered by the disclosure of wiretapped conversations between elections commissioner Garcillano and President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Gascon resigned as undersecretary of education, sharing the belief of the “Hyatt 10″ that Arroyo had lost her capacity to govern. He does not conceal his disillusionment with Arroyo, who first came to power as a result of Edsa 2 where Gascon was also an active participant. Then the executive director of the political-think tank National Institute for Policy Studies, he had helped organize demonstrations against President Joseph Estrada.

Before he becoming undersecretary, Gascon served as a member of the Arroyo government’s peace panel that negotiated with the communist-led National Democratic Front. Now he says, “There were many promises of Edsa 2 that remained unfulfilled. None of the things she promised she actually pursued vigorously.”

He points out that proposals for electoral and political reforms made by a summit convened weeks after Arroyo’s ascension to power in 2001 have remained unacted upon. He adds, “Most of the appointments in the post-Aquino period to the Comelec (Commission on Elections) were made not on the basis of integrity and competence but on the basis of political considerations.”

For Gascon, the appointment of Garcillano to the Comelec, despite objections by members of Congress and civil society to his “dagdag-bawas” (vote-padding and shaving) reputation, is by far the worst example of a how president has undermined political institutions.

While he is not against constitutional reform, Gascon says the current move to amend the charter is spurred purely by personal political interests, especially by the leadership of the House of Representatives. “Imagine,” he says, “we have a president who faces major questions of credibility and legitimacy and then tells the entire nation that it’s not her fault and it’s the fault of the system. And you have the leader of the House just applauding it because it falls into his agenda.”

“I’ve always said that (charter change) should be at the proper time, using the proper process and for proper reasons,” he says. “And that’s not the case that we find ourselves in the present.”

IN GASCON’S book, Congress embodies the failure of political reform. He notes that those elected into Congress 1987 were the same people or clans that had been of the old system. “The system,” he says, “(just) adapted itself in the democratic context.” The consequence: a well-entrenched political elite holds sway, perpetuating itself in power through money and patronage, with the chief goal of protecting and preserving its political and business interests rather than pursuing much-needed social reforms.

Term limits did not break the stranglehold of traditional politics. As Gascon now sees it, the limits are an “artificial mechanism to bring about some form of regular transition of power from one political force to another.”

What has happened is that politicians stay in power by getting their relatives to warm their seats until they can run again. “In fact,” Gascon observes, “dynasties have consolidated. You have one congressman, another relative is the mayor or the senator, and they reinforce each other.” The legislators belonging to Gascon’s own generation are not exempt — many are part of political families and have inherited their seats from their older kin, who in turn have gone on occupy other posts in the clan’s bailiwick.

“People are not elected to positions primarily on the basis of their legislative or political agenda,” he says. “The reasons for their being elected to office are often defined by the strength of political clans in the different districts of the country.”

While clans are strong, parties are weak. Political parties, says the Liberal Party member, remain “alliances of conveniences.” The party-list system has not been successful in transforming the congressional landscape as shrewd politicians have also exploited this initiative to cling to power, Gascon notes.

“There are no real political parties (in Congress) that articulate the agenda of reforms. It is defined or determined by leaders whose political positions change based on convenience. That’s why there’s no sustainability of reforms,” he concludes.

Perpetually garbed in a polo barong, the bespectacled Basque mestizo looks more like an accountant than a determined political reformist. Yet not even marriage has weakened the ex-student leader’s political convictions, and it is clear he is now capable of something beyond shouting slogans. He worries, though, “There’s that old adage that for evil to triumph, it’s enough for good men and women to do nothing. And I think that’s what’s happening now.”

TO GASCON’S mind, the apathy that has Filipinos in a near-fatal grip can be traced to the lack of alternative leaders and the sheer difficulties of modern-day living. He also talks of a generational shift that has caused Filipinos to embrace the status quo–however ugly that may have become.

“Those of us who were politically active in the ’80s, which created the core for what happened in EDSA 1, were children or students of those who were politically active in the ’60s. So there was in a sense an appropriate passing of the baton and education for liberation,” Gascon says. “I think we became a little too complacent when democracy was established in the mid-’80s and forgot to continue the work of political education, civic education, voter education that will create a polity of citizens.”

In an attempt to fill the slack in civic education, Gascon became one of the convenors of the Black and White Movement and the Citizens for TRUTH (Transparency, Responsibility, Unity, Transformation, and Hope). Both seek to ferret out the truth behind the wiretapping controversy and are pushing a package of political, social, and economic reforms. He also heads INCITE Gov (International Center for Innovation, Transformation and Excellence in Governance), a new policy think tank established by the “Hyatt 10″ to advance governance reform.

Gascon is just as busy as executive director of Libertas (Lawyers’ League for Liberty), a voluntary network of lawyers pursuing reforms in the justice system. Gascon’s recent experience at the education department had made him realize how ordinary people like public school teachers need legal aid but have been unable to find it.

Ultimately, the trigger for political reforms is people empowerment. His goal, he says, is to help build what he describes as an “army of reforms and reformers.”

“Perhaps,” muses Gascon, “we presumed too much on the part of our leaders and didn’t do enough in terms of building the institutions of democracy, political accountability, and citizens’ participation. What we need to focus on now is building up a constituency for change that will demand accountability now and that constituency for change will pursue reforms in politics and economics in the period of transition that is ahead.”

Gascon is staying for the long haul. He says, “As my former boss in the Department of Education used to say, (the struggle for reforms) is not a hundred-meter dash, it’s a marathon. We have to pace ourselves. You don’t win a marathon unless you train for it, you prepare ahead of time.” — Yvonne T. Chua