Resources

Stories of Human Rights Violations in the Time of COVID-19

3 December 2021

SWAN Philippines invites you to the launch of “Stories of Human Rights Violations in the Time of COVID-19”

SWAN-Philippines offers a compilation of 15 stories depicting the patterns of the Duterte Administration’s pandemic response. In many ways the pandemic response is like tokhang: unplanned, zero-sum, poorly-imagined, devoid of understanding, and always people-blaming. The full case stories can be accessed here on 04 December 2021.

STOP THE RED-TAGGING AND HARASSMENT OF COMMUNITY PANTRY ORGANIZERS

2 May 2021
In the bleakest of circumstances, we see Ana Patricia Non igniting hope in our capacity for collective goodwill. Community pantries help us realize that we can support one another even if we do not have millions of resources.
The pantry’s simple working principles was from a popular slogan, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, which Non’s sister aptly translated to Filipino, “mabigay ayon sa kakayahan, kumuha batay sa pangangailangan. Helping each other is an instinctive act, not an aberration by any human standard.
That we are on the same rough seas is true, but that we are on different boats is truer. Community pantries provide people in better boats opportunities to support those who are barely clinging to survive.
Community pantries show us that fear does not work, as long as there is hope. It is this same hope that the Government wants to destroy and we all must work against it.
Last Monday, April 19, 2021, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque was quoted saying that the community pantry “shows the best in us during the worst of times” with a qualifier that is not a condemnation of the government.” Yet this qualifier was precisely the trigger of the most recent anti-democratic measures of the security forces – the profiling of activities and harassment of uniformed personnel to volunteers manning the community pantries whose only wish is to provide a platform for people to help one another. These acts come from a deep-seated fear of the government. It wants to put a stop on community pantry becoming a spontaneous popular movement among the people in practically all parts of the country. The emerging mass character of the community pantry is a people’s growing collective indictment of the gross failure of this regime. The tactic of “nipping at the bud” has always been a part of the security forces arsenal to suppress the people.
Social Work Action Network (SWAN) – Philippines denounces these recent actions against the organizers and volunteers of the community pantry whose only objective is to help poor families bring food to their table. We believe that community pantries are good practices of mutual aid and empowerment, of people becoming the best of themselves to reach out and support others. We strongly demand from the government to respect the initiatives of the ordinary people. By such acts, these people uphold the fundamental right to life during this time of crisis. As Pasalo aptly puts it, “is sharing food to the hungry as grave as treason as giving away islands to China?”
We call on the

Philippine National Police

and the National Task Force to End the Local Communist Armed Conflict to stop profiling the organizers of these activities. You are violating people’s right to their privacy and incentivizing greed and apathy at a time when your very own systems are failing to provide support to the most vulnerable. This idea would not have been born if the Government has been more responsive and efficient in managing this pandemic in the first place. It is not the people’s fault if the incompetence of the government is highlighted by the actions of people with genuine intentions.

We urge:
– Fellow social workers to support the community pantry movement and uphold initiatives for mutual aid
– Local governments to welcome and support community pantries
– Filipinos to continue reaching out to those in need – looking out for each other
– The Government to focus its efforts in in addressing the needs of Filipinos for emergency subsidy and targeted COVID response rather than terrorizing citizen-led initiatives

DILG MEMORANDUM CIRCULAR 2021-012: HANDING POWER TO THE AFP AND THE PNP THREATENS OUR DEMOCRACY

2 May 2021
SWAN Philippines expresses deep concern over the passage of the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) Memorandum Circular (MC) 2021-012, indicating that civil society organizations (CSOs) need to acquire clearance from the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police to participate in local governance activities. We believe that this negates the essence of our democratic freedoms. If CSOs become beholden to those who hold the reins of power, who will provide the checks and balance? If CSOs will always have to look behind their back to check on their ranks, who will speak out to give the dissenting voice? With the blatant disregard to human rights, and with the red-tagging and killing of activists, this MC only gives the abuser the tool and defense to further abuse.
We, #SocialWorkers, believe in #empowerment as the means and end to what we do. Empowerment is not something that is given, it is something that is realized. We therefore cannot ask any agency or institution to bestow a right that is not theirs to give. As supported by Article XIII, Section 15 of our own Constitution, “The State shall respect the role of independent people’s organizations to enable the people to pursue and protect, within the democratic framework, their legitimate and collective interests and aspirations through peaceful and lawful means.” The right to pursue and protect our interest – within what’s lawful and peaceful is necessary to our empowerment. Let no armed personnel say it otherwise. Because when those who decide are also the ones who hold the gun, then we can only pray not to become targets.
Since a lot of Social Workers are employed and/or engaged with CSOs, we enjoin our fellow CSOs to hold the line and uphold our rights, as protected by the Constitution. Do not let this intimidate you. Let us push back and continue working for better accountability and transparency in our government. Social Work Action Network Philippines supports the CSOs’ call to revoke this DILG MC 2021-012 since the Philippine Constitution nullifies this in the first place.

A Pandemic of Killings

2 May 2021
Last Sunday, 7 March 2021, nine people were killed in separate police operations in CALABARZON. Of these nine, seven were members of progressive organizations. The crackdown took place two days after President Duterte told the military and police to make sure that they kill armed communist rebels when they encounter the latter (CNN Philippines, 2021). What of due process? When this government decides who gets killed, undermining the laws of the land, what will stop it from coming after you or your family?
The current government has practically reduced the country into “killing fields”. The deaths that occurred have victims practically from all ages, all professions, all sectors, organizations, and institutions, snatched from their loved ones, without an ounce of honor. As if it’s not enough that they kill you, they had to taint your memory with an unfounded accusations of drug peddling or drug use. The institutions, which are supposedly the duty bearers of human rights and the “protectors and defenders” of the people were reduced to being mercenaries of a President whose only solution to every problem is to kill.
The killings serve a very definite political purpose. It wants to instill fear among the people. This violence inflicted on persons or communities as punitive retribution for and/or to discourage political activity against a regime and the system (Scheid, 2015). In order words, the regime wants to discourage resistance.
#SocialWork believes in the inherent worth and dignity of every individual and we denounce the killings that is happening everywhere. Value for life is a sine qua non for all human rights (United Nations Human Rights, 1994). To quote further, “the worth of life, human and non-human existence, is the fountain-head for all other ideals and values that follow. This implies not only opposing the negation of life, but also positive and affirmative aspects. This is so that there can be fulfillment of human existence. Life is intrinsically connected and interdependent in all its parts and forms, human and non-human. Disruption of any of its aspects affects the social fabric or thread of life, thereby injuring humankind. Value of life implies that suffering and death are not just individual phenomena; they touch others just as joy, happiness and life do” (UN Centre for Human Rights, 1994).
We urge our colleagues to re-assert again the fundamentals of human rights (being at the heart our profession) amidst these most trying times. Our loci among service users and social work students afford us a vantage position to raise political consciousness of the former, so they can find their resolve, and gradually be part of the resistance.
Amidst repression under an authoritarian regime, there is no other option except to help build the resistance. This is one of the urgent tasks of our profession in the current period. Because if not now, then when? If not us, then who?

Celebrating Women: Speaking Truth to Power

2 May 2021
Edna (not her real name) walks to her children’s school every Monday and Friday to collect and submit learning modules. This is after she finishes preparing breakfast (if there is something to prepare) and attends to the needs of her three children, 7, 5 and 2. Her husband is away working as a construction worker. At the height of the pandemic, she was left without a husband and a source of income. His husband was displaced from work and got stranded in the construction site together with other workers. Thus, despite tight quarantine protocols, she tried her luck going to people’s homes, giving manicure and pedicure services, and a lot of times, she went to the nearby creek, gathering camote tops and malunggay leaves to supplement the relief packs she and her children would consume. Nobody knows when help would come, or whether they would come at all. From March until August, she received approximately three bags of rice and canned goods, but she was not included in the social amelioration program (SAP) of the government and did not receive any financial assistance. The barangay said her name was not in the list, even though she gave birth and raised all her kids in the same broken-down shanty for almost eight years.
Edna is only one of the millions of women who, before COVID-19 was barely getting by, but is now left with almost no source of livelihood and the multiple burden of overseeing her children’s education and attending to other domestic responsibilities. Unpaid care work is being disproportionately borne by women, who are expected to balance housework, child care and elderly care, and in many cases look for alternative means of livelihood when the husbands cannot provide.
#Women are also disproportionately affected by the economic loss brought by mobility restrictions in #COVID-19. As much as 6.6 million Filipino women are working in the informal sector – one of the hardest hit sectors of the pandemic. These women have little to no access to social protection measures and safety nets, and were the first to close down their enterprises or laid off from their jobs as a result of economic contraction.
A study published by UN Women in April 2020 showed that quarantine measures have trapped women and girls with abusive family members, at a time when reporting mechanisms and survivor services are scaled back. Massive economic loss has contributed to household stresses, a major risk factor in domestic and gender-based violence.
Internally-displaced women also face hygiene and security issues while in the evacuation centers and temporary shelters. The UN Women study also cited reports of sexual harassment in police and military checkpoints, compounding the condition of poverty, social exclusion and discrimination, being experienced by women in internally-displaced communities.
Women in the countryside continue to suffer from unpaid family labor,compounded by other forms of semi-feudal forms of exploitation. Women in farming and fisherfolk households continue to experience hunger, with one out of three fisherfolk, and a significant number of farming households living in extreme poverty (IBON Foundation, 2020).
Women frontline workers comprise 75 percent of the total workforce braving the pandemic, sans proper protective equipment, hazard pay and government support. Frontline workers, including social workers brave the risks of getting infected to provide essential, life-saving services to the most disadvantaged segments of the population.
This International Women’s Day, SWAN-Philippines call our fellow social workers to stay true to our tasks in “examining roles, equity and fairness not only in the profession but within society and with the women we serve each day” (National Association of Social Workers) because “almost every issue is a women’s issue that requires an intersectional gender lens” (Social Work Speaks).
We thank and celebrate all women who stand up everyday for their loved ones and families, for the society we live in – no matter how dysfunctional, for standing against misogyny and oppression. With you, we #ChooseToChallenge a society and culture of inequity and unaccountability. With you, we speak truth to power.

Social Care or Social Murder? (A 35th EDSA Anniversary Statement)

2 May 2021
The Shock Responsive Social Protection Systems Research (SRSPS) literature defines social care as “prevention services that are intended to develop the collective psychosocial resilience of communities and which are planned and delivered in advance of untoward events and basic humanitarian and welfare services that should be made available to everyone.”
Because of the pandemic, a comprehensive vaccination program is one of the most sought-after social care by everybody. As of February, 23, 2021, the country has already 564,865 cases and 12,107 deaths. Worse, “the percentage of confirmed COVID-19 cases that resulted in death was at its highest level in seven months (ABS-CBN News, 2021). That means COVID-19 deaths are growing faster than confirmed cases. It means the disease is killing Filipinos at a faster rate (ABS-CBN,2021). Covid-19 has also crippled the economy, with 7.2 million jobless Filipinos (The Straits Times, 2020), most of whom in the informal sector and lacking access to social protection measures.
Yet, the efforts of the government to put into place a comprehensive vaccination program is in dis-array, having no sense of urgency at all.
According to Rappler, “for nearly a year, President Duterte used speech after speech to claim that salvation from the pandemic would come from one thing only: vaccines.” Yet, The Philippine National Deployment and Vaccination Plan for COVID-19 Vaccines Interim Plan was only released by the Department of Health (Philippines) last January 2021, a year after the first case of COVID-19 in the country with a 38-year-old female Chinese national was registered.
Government’s hollowed assurance was issued when vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr “outlined the ambitious targets the government had for its vaccine program: secure at least 148 million vaccine does and inoculate 50 to 70 million within 2021.” He added that “the vaccines would arrive by mid-February.” Both the national and the local government units “have conducted vaccination rehearsals left and right, with much media coverage. Everything seems to be a picture perfect -save for the absent vaccines themselves.”
Rappler reported that “the government held talks with at least seven suppliers with corresponding number of possible vaccines from each, yet no definite supply agreements were signed. As early as June 2020, Pfizer had already reached out to the Philippine government but it was only in October, 2020 or about four months later that a key document (the confidentiality date agreement) was signed.”. According to yesterday’s Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI) copy, “the manufacturers require an indemnity law in the country to avoid lawsuits in case people suffer from adverse side effects after vaccination.” PDI added that “the need for an indemnity law has been known since the last quarter of 2020 yet it is only last month that the senators were told the country needed an indemnification law to get vaccine.” The politicization of vaccine did not only erode the public’s trust to measures that work; it also prevented us from getting the much-needed doses to protect our people and allow them some semblance of normalcy that some of our ASEAN neighbors are already enjoying.
While it is true “that wealthy nations representing just 13 percent of the world’s population have already cornered more than half (51 percent) of the promised doses of leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates and that the same companies simply do not have the capacity to make enough vaccines for everyone who needs one”, according to Oxfam International, the government does not have to go into trading our nurses for vaccines as if they are nothing more than an important commodity. With the limit of medical practitioners leaving the country to 5,000 a year, Alice Visperas, director of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) international affairs bureau, said that “the Philippines is open to lifting the cap in exchange for vaccines from Britain and Germany, which it would use to inoculate outbound workers and hundreds of thousands of Filipino repatriates.”
Finally, the country will reportedly have its first delivery of its first COVID-19 vaccines this weekend and consequently, will start its inoculation program by next week. But even this expected arrival of “Sino vaccines” put doctors “in a quandary on who should be prioritized” because of the restrictions imposed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Earlier, the FDA did not allow the vaccines to be used in the inoculation of health workers “who have high exposure to the virus”, according to the PDI’s today’s issue.
Engels had earlier defined social murder as “murder committed by the political and social elite where they knowingly permit conditions to exist where the poorest and most vulnerable in society are deprived of the necessities of life and are placed in a position in which they cannot reasonably be expected to live and will inevitably meet an early and unnatural death.”
The National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) chief recommended “to place the entire country under the lowest form of community quarantine starting March 1, as he cited the country’s need to recover from huge economic losses (Strait Times, 2021). But as Helicona Foundation puts it succinctly, “when a society regrets the economic loss more than the loss of life, it doesn’t need a virus, it is already sick.”
Social work shares with the fundamental belief that any attempt to save a life was, is and will always be urgent.

An Unnecessary and Untimely Death

2 May 2021

The Social Work Action Network-Philippines condemns, in the strongest terms, the murder of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) Social Welfare Officer II Justine Charles “JC” Accad.

According to the report published by the Manila Bulletin on February 20, 2021, JC was assigned at National Capital Region (NCR) and the DSWD Satellite Area. Last Friday, February 19, 2021, JC was presumed to deliver a huge amount of money to DSWD-San Juan City. According to a report, “the money will be used for the payout of hospitalization expenses and other relevant welfare needs of indigent residents in the City of San Juan.” Two days after, February 21, 2021 his dead body was found in a grassy area in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan.

His live-in partner narrated that JC normally brought along with him a minimum of 1 million for pay-out and cash assistance to the beneficiaries.

JC was a colleague, a friend, a partner, and a soon-to-be father. He should never have died. He should have witnessed the birth of his child. He deserved that.

But JC’s death seemed bound to happen. For years now, JC together with other DSWD staff have been doing the disbursement of cash assistance without any security escort. While the leadership of the DSWD (trained and experienced in security matters) are busy in putting into place the measures to gradually weaponize the social services, they forgot to ensure the security of the likes of JC who took risks of travelling alone with millions of cold cash to be distributed to the beneficiaries. With the widespread use of the Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), e-wallets, online banking, and other digital means of cash transfers that have sprouted during the pandemic, it is beyond comprehension why the DSWD allows this very precarious practice. Such an arrangement is an invitation to a disaster. JC was its first victim. If this is not addressed immediately, this arrangement will likely devour another victim, or more.

Nothing can justify this murder, as nothing can justify the killings of doctors, attorney-in-laws, and other social and development workers whose only aim is to reach out to the most disadvantaged segments of our communities. All these killings only hamper the effective mechanisms of rendering direct services to the poor and discourage individuals who are committed to serve the people.

We call on the DSWD to review its security measures and other safeguards for social workers and other staff who are risking their lives in providing support to the vulnerable. The current set-up is too compromising for a security breach. A new system is warranted if DSWD is serious in looking after the safety of its workforce. Because at this time and period, there are no too few casualties and no life should be collateral damage.

Children’s “Screaming Resistance” Demolish PNP’s Rescue Alibi

2 May 2021
Image from Bulatlat.com
Social work has always considered children as one of the vulnerable groups in society. Bagattini qualifies that “childhood is arguably the most vulnerable period of human life. Children are highly dependent on others to satisfy their basic needs, and this makes them particularly vulnerable.”
It is precisely this vulnerability that prompted the Archdiocese of Cebu to extend help to the Lumad children from Manobo and Mansaka tribes in Mindanao whose communities where subjected to intense militarization. Subsequently, it was the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) that accommodated the Lumad children in their retreat center inside the main academic campus of the University of San Carlos in Talamban, Cebu City. The Commission of Social Advocacies of the Archdiocese of Cebu considered the Bakwit school as a “celebration of dialogue and an act of solidarity to our Lumad brothers and sisters whose communities (and) schools were bombed and militarized.”
Religious institutions have always been regarded as sanctuaries for people who need a place to secure their minds, bodies, and spirits. Against any common sense, the police raided the retreat house on the pretext that the children were held against their own will. Worse, they claimed that the children were given “child warrior training.” This claim was rendered ridiculous. We salute Anne Suico, a Social Worker Officer of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), Cebu City attesting that in their interview with the children, the latter never mentioned about being indoctrinated and nothing about training to be child warriors. Sulat at basa lang ang tinuturo ng mga guardian nila.”
Being rescued gives you a feeling of relief or elation. It was not in the Lumad children’s case. As the February 15, 2021 editorial of Sunstar Cebu narrated: “This was not so in the police operation, as the videos showed. The minors, some of them clad in ethnic clothes, cowered in the corners of the room, screaming. A boy who took videos of the incident was accosted by the polices, brought outside and handcuffed. Another was constrained by four policemen and carried out of the room… It did not help that the social workers assured the children that they were being ‘rescued.’ Everyone scurried across the room in resistance; terrified calls for help rang out.”
A traumatic event is usually defined as a “scary, dangerous, or violent happening.” Childhood trauma is described as “an event experienced by a child that threatens their life or bodily integrity.” This system has long become barbaric against the children. The Lumad children have already suffered the psychological effects of trauma from aerial bombings and wide array of human rights violations in their respective communities by the soldiers and para-military forces. The police raid masquerading as a rescue operation inside a religious institution again triggered child traumatic stress. The Center for Child Trauma Assessment, Services, and Intervention in Chicago, United States, states that “child traumatic stress occurs when children and adolescents are exposed to traumatic events or traumatic or traumatic situations that overwhelm their ability to cope.” The SVD added that “no rescue need ever be conducted because the presence of the Lumads in the retreat house was for their welfare and well-being, and all throughout, they were nurtured, cared for, and treated with their best interest in mind.”
The Philippines has signed and ratified the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990. It is a legally binding international agreement setting out the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of every child, regardless of their race, religion or abilities.
The obsession to end the long running insurgency problem of the country has blinded the present government in its obligation to international human rights conventions and statutes. Worse, even the state’s social services are slowly being tailored to fit into the whole counter-insurgency program of the government through the DSWD. The government has gradually weaponized the social services against the perceived enemies of the state.
With the unbridled accolades and support of the president to “his soldiers and policemen,” the latter have been slowly transformed into institutions that also want to lord over the people, including the children. We call on our fellow social workers to promote, uphold, and defend the rights of the children especially during this most trying times.

Duterte’s Authoritarian Regime: A Theater of Wholesale Violation of Human Rights

2 May 2021
Human rights is at the heart of the social work profession (Ballantyne, 2019). By placing human rights at the core of the social work practice in the Philippines, our profession is expected to uphold, promote, and defend the rights and interests of the most vulnerable, marginalized, and poor Filipinos (Espenido, 2018).
The Philippines is one country in Asia whose history reflects “a catalogue of human rights violations.” Duterte’s regime is not different.
Recently, the Global civic society alliance CIVICUS has downgraded the Philippines’ civic space rating from “obstructed” to “repressed” amid attacks on human rights defenders and journalists and the passage of a “problematic” new anti-terrorism law. A “repressed” civic space rating means democratic freedoms like the freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and association, are “severely restricted,” CIVICUS said.
The arrest of at least 20 people at the Pride March in Mendiola last June 26, 2020, the red-tagging of perceived enemies of the state, the arrest and detention of activist nursing mothers, the killings of the leaders of progressive organizations and retired elderly activists, and the aerial bombings of tribes in the hinterlands (suspected to be mass base of the rebels) have validated how Duterte and his minions has thrown away human rights to the gutter.
One unsettling new phenomenon is the level of ferocity of the so-called duty bearers in the recent killings that is comparable to what our colonial master did to our predecessors.
This assessment does not include what happened to ordinary people affected by the pandemic’s lockdown that led to millions losing their jobs, students’ deprived of their right to education because of the problem of connectivity in the internet, and a neoliberal policy that pegged Php 10.00 per kilos of palay produced by the farmers.
Moreover, the initial results of our research at the national level confirm a continuing narrative of oppression as in the case of Meranao internally displaced persons (IDPs) or bakwit, where after being arbitrarily separated from their means of livelihood, are forced to live in temporary shelters measured only 22 square meters floor area per shelter. Since the Meranaw has extended families, some IDPs with larger family member take turns to get sleep or have an extension of makeshift room at spaces in between rows of houses. Some IDP’s have contracted the virus because of the cramped conditions of the temporary shelters. In Cebu City , workers in a known chain of malls in southern Philippines were terminated because they attempted to form a union. Vendors are evicted from their long established sites of vending along the streets. Fisherfolk in Bulacan are gradually being eased out to give way to the Php 735 billion (USD14 billion) New Manila International Airport project in their province. Coal-powered plant in Bataan continues to spew pollutants at the expense of the health of the local residents. Religious operated refuge center for the poor is being harassed, both the workers of the center and its beneficiaries.
These narratives undisputedly show the systematic violations that run roughshod on the political, civil, economic, and social rights of the poor, meaning the people’s rights in its totality.
Human rights violations innately happen in a society whose members are stratified into classes. When a minority (i.e. through the State) overrules the majority (i.e. the masses) the democratic rights of the majority tend to be violated with the State becoming the defender of the minority (Espenido, 2019). The State being a coercive instrument of the ruling class has a wide arsenal to institutionalize domination. From the laws (legitimizing anti-people and unsustainable development paradigms) and the penal systems to the military and police organizations which are all capable of suppressing dissent and resistance in the name of law and order (Espenido, 2019).
Peoples’ rights are not always granted voluntarily and gratuitously. Since elite democracy only formally guarantees the rights of the Filipino people through the laws, it becomes imperative for the social workers, service users, and social work students, together with the Filipino people to assert and fight for their democratic, civil, and political rights as well as economic, social, cultural and collective rights. The full realization of the people’s rights can only be the product, effect, and fruit of a collective and mass undertaking (Espenido, 2018).

Exacting Accountability

2 May 2021
The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) Climate Change Office describes vulnerability as “the capacity to be wounded”. Others defined it as “the potential for loss “and as “the characteristics of a person or group and their situation that influence their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard”.
Bankoff asserts that “vulnerable populations are those at risk, not simply because they are exposed to hazard, but as a result of marginality that make their life a ‘permanent emergency’.” Poverty is identified as “the primary contributor to social vulnerability, making the community less resilient to the hazard’s impact.”
In our archipelagic country, this “landscape of poverty and marginalization” rests on “one of the most hazardous landmasses to make disasters a frequent life experience.” It is accentuated when about twenty typhoons every year (equivalent to 25 percent of the total number of such events in the world), occur in the Philippines according to Wisner.
This phenomenon is once again seen through the flooding that hit Marikina City and other municipalities of Rizal and Quezon provinces. Deforestation in Sierra Madre remained unabated. For the environmentalists, “the 2004 mudslide in Infanta and Nakar, Quezon, was already a warning.”
Montalban is “the ground zero of quarry supplying aggregates to Metro Manila.”
On 14 November 2020, Ms. Mario Limos of Esquire Magazine narrated, “In September 2017, former Secretary Gina Lopez of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment (DENR) warned about how the Marikina Watershed needed immediate reforestation to protect Metro Manila from severe flooding.” She asserted that “it is important that we rehabilitate this watershed because it is the first line of defense of Marikina, Quezon City, Antipolo, Pasig, Cainta, San Mateo, etc., against rainwater surging from the uplands of Luzon.”
Through the years, this protected area shrunk in size because of land conversion. Land conversion is one of the neoliberal programs initiated by then Pres. Fidel V. Ramos and pursued until today. According to the DENR, “presidential fiats from 1904 to 1996 turned the Marikina Watershed lands into residential, commercial, and industrial areas, contrary to the to the intent of the EO 33 protect and preserve the area. The watershed has lost nearly a thousand hectares to land conversion, and parts of its are still vulnerable to illegal logging and quarrying.”
”The denuded Sierra Madre was not able to absorb the rainwaters of Typhoon Ulysses. Although Typhoon Ulysses was significantly weaker than Super Typhoon Rolly, the Sierra Madre was already saturated by rainwater before Ulysses came,” according to GMA News resident meteorologist Nathaniel Cruz.
Obviously, the culprit is the blind obedience of the past and current government to neoliberalism, making our natural resources as commodities for both foreign and local capital to exploit and trade.
The havoc brought by Typhoon Ulysses has again put the lives of the affected in greater danger. To-date, 67 people died, 21 are wounded, and 13 are still missing. Notwithstanding the extend of the damage, “the poor and marginalized have a low capacity to cope with a hazard and consequently, are highly vulnerable.” Our cities play host to urban poor families living in mobile carts (kariton), families occupying vacant tombs in cemeteries, living under bridges and clinging to dilapidated makeshift shanties along esteros.
Others have put forward developing resilience, meaning “the ability of individuals, communities, organizations and states to adapt to and recover from hazards, shocks or stresses without compromising long-term prospects for development.” There is a pending bill of creating the Department of Disaster Resilience (DDR). The government’s response to these devastating calamities are clearly directed to disaster management and resilience, but not a surgical approach to the structural roots causing such disasters. Such efforts become futile when the structural roots that cause man-made disasters are not confronted and altogether stopped.
The past and current regimes have been criminally negligent in safeguarding the lives of our people in crafting laws and executive orders that facilitate the wholesome destruction of our natural resources. Profits should not take precedence over the lives of the people. The past and current regimes should be held accountable together with the corporations and individuals responsible for exacerbating the effects of the natural disasters that hit the country.
Pres. Duterte has only trivialized the problem by simply saying that he wanted to swim with the victims, only he was not allowed.
Social workers are once more among the frontliners in the series of disaster management and rehabilitation work. We join the call for a critical review of policies, mechanisms, programs and services so that the roots of the issues are thoroughly addressed before the unprecedented loss and damage will be brought on by more disasters.
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