Watch out! The train is coming!” yelled the crowd of urban poor clustered around the railroad tracks by the España station. It was Holy Week and seven cross-bearers were kneeling on the tracks to protest government policies threatening their already precarious existence. They scrambled to get out of the train’s…
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by Fr. Flaviano L. Villanueva, Fr. Joselito Sarabia, Fr. Roberto P. Reyes, and Sr. Teresita Alo To those old enough to remember the stolen election of 1986, the vote recount for the vice presidential race, currently underway, may seem at once like a repetition and an inversion of the past. In February…
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Even before coming to power, President Rodrigo Roa Duterte had been casting federalism as “our last hope” to set right the excesses of a central government controlled by “Imperial Manila,” the inequitable distribution of public resources, the uneven economic development among regions, and the massive poverty that has bred unrest…
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Hopes rose among the urban poor when President Duterte declared, during his first month in office, that his administration would not treat them like dogs by allowing the demolition of their houses. If relocation cannot be avoided, he said, he would be “very generous” and ensure the presence of job-creating…
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As the two chambers of Congress find themselves in an impasse over the convening of a constituent assembly to amend the Constitution, a fortunate digression has brought the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) back on the administration’s priority legislative agenda, where it should be. The Bangsamoro Transition Commission (BTC), which had…
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“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet!” writes Rudyard Kipling in “The Ballad of East and West.” That seems an apt description of the politics in the Philippines. On one side, we have the government and its “diehard” supporters, and on the other,…
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For a year and a half now, I have watched my country go insane. Thousands of the poor have been slaughtered in the antidrugs campaign, tens of thousands left grieving and destitute. Our leaders threaten to shut down democratic institutions and kill human rights defenders. Yet the latest Social Weather…
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The Duterte administration has not had many polite things to say about the Catholic Church. Its rudest assaults on the Church have been triggered by Catholic criticism of its antidrug campaign, in which thousands of mostly poor suspects have been killed. For those Catholics who consider the defense of human…
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JJCICSI gathered NGOs workers, academics, and community leaders on November 18, 2017 for a forum titled “Do We Need Duterte’s Federalism and RevGov?” at the Walter Hogan Conference Hall, Ateneo de Manila University. The speakers were Atty. Christian S. Monsod, former member of the 1987 Constitutional Commission, and Dr. Ronald U. Mendoza,…
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Doing resettlement differently
One of the infrastructure projects in the government’s “Build, build, build” program which is certain to bring great relief to commuters and travelers is the North-South Railway Project. The South line consists of a 68-kilometer commuter line that will run between Tutuban in Manila and Los Baños in Laguna and…