Tricks of the light

Never Again

“No one should experience what the PC-INP (Philippine Constabulary-Integrated National Police) did to us while in detention at the PC Barracks in San Pedro Street, (Davao City).”

By Cong B. Corrales¹

IT WAS A SATURDAY, he recalled going to campus that fateful day wearing the prescribed army greens for their scheduled Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) formation.

“My classmates greeted me at the gates frantically to tell me that some of my friends were arrested earlier and that some have gone into hiding,” he said smiling—somehow amused at the turn of events.

Alfredo “Ka Paris” Mapano was barely an adult at 18 years old when strongman Ferdinand Edralin Marcos placed the entire country in a state of martial law through Proclamation No. 1082. However, he was already a member of the Samahang Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK)—a left-leaning student organization.

Marcos made the live television broadcast of the proclamation two days later—September 23, 1972.

He said the members of the now-defunct Philippine Constabulary-Integrated National Police (PC-INP), who patrolled their campus that Saturday, failed to notice him because Mapano—like the other students—was wearing fatigue.

“I went underground for three years,” Mapano said. He was captured in 1975 in his hometown in Davao Province.

“No one should experience what the PC-INP did to us while in detention at the PC Barracks in San Pedro Street, (Davao City). If the government is punishing us for fighting for what we believed in the why were the military who committed all those atrocities during martial law never held accountable,” lamented Mapano.

Currently detained at the Misamis Oriental Provincial Jail in Cagayan de Oro City, Mapano—now 58 years old—hopes President Benigno Simeon Aquino, III could understand people like him being a son of a political detainee.

President Aquino's father—the late Senator Benigno S. Aquino, Jr—was also jailed under criminal cases like illegal possession of firearms, murder and conspiracy to commit sedition, among other trumped up charges.

“Now that the son of probably the most famous victim of martial law (President Aquino) is in power, he should be in the best position to empathize with the detained political prisoners all over the country,” he said.

THIS PARTICULAR SATURDAY—August 1, 2009—Mapano was not as lucky as he was in Davao some 40 years ago.

The combined personnel of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, National Intelligence Coordination Administration and the 4^th Infantry Division of the Philippine Army arrested Mapano while the latter was “on family integration leave” at a local apartelle in Barangay Carmen, Cagayan de Oro City.

Four years after his arrest and facing multiple criminal charges in various municipalities, Mapano hopes President Aquino would grant political detainees like him “general, unconditional, and omnibus amnesty.”

“I am old and I would like to spend my twilight years with my children if I'll be granted amnesty,” he said.

Alfredo “Ka Paris” Mapano—together with 10 other political detainees—is still detained. There are 385 political detainees currently languishing in jails across the country.

1This narrative is adapted from an interview inside the Misamis Oriental Provincial Jail on September 17, 2012 when Mapano led 10 other political detainees in an eight-day fasting to commemorate the martyrs of martial law and to drum up support for a general, unconditional, and omnibus amnesty. Excerpts of the narrative first appeared on TV5's online news portal—Interaksyon.com—on September 17, 2012.

Sights & Sounds: One Million People March

AUGUST 26 was memorable because it was the day when hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, many of them “unorganized,” spilled out into the streets to express their derision over the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), otherwise known as the pork barrel.

The activity was sparked in part by reports that some P10 billion in pork barrel funds had been channeled into the pockets of middlemen and legislators through the use of ghost nongovernment organizations.

With the very high-profile surrender of Janet Lim-Napoles to President Benigno S. Aquino III himself, the issues appear to have changed, and the mood appears to have shifted. Now, social media is a-buzz with how government would or should prosecute those guilty of squirreling away public funds to very private pockets. And so the question: Regardless of who is hauled off to court, will the pork remain?

Lest the public forgets, the issue may not just be how the pork barrel is misused; rather, it is, more importantly, about the continuing politics of patronage, and how those whose main function should be legislation have also taken on the task of appropriation. It is the politics of give-and-take, the politics of wheeling and dealing, and a system of perpetuated dependence.

When the President announced he was abolishing the pork barrel, what he really meant was that he was merely reworking the mechanism of pork. And so, despite the anger at the Luneta, the Presidential ‘abolition,’ and that high-profile ‘surrender,’ pork still remains as pork, allowing the smartest and the craftiest among us to bring home the bacon while the rest are grateful to have been left with the scraps.