LuisTeodoro.com

Whatever the Arroyo government calls it, the identification system Executive Order 420 would put in place is the same as the system Administrative Order 308 wanted to create.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo justifies the creation of a “unified” ID system as a means of “streamlining” existing government ID systems, not for counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency. But despite that intentionally innocuous justification, and the vague “safeguards” the Order contains, the system would create a central data base as AO 308 would have–and assign a number to every Filipino as AO 308 planned to. »

The military’s reckless tagging of legal groups as communist fronts, its probable role in the killing, abduction and harassment of political activists, and the continuing possibility of coup attempts not only recall the martial law period. These are also reminders that the military has not changed much, and is still driven by Cold War and authoritarian assumptions.

Nineteen years after EDSA 1986 and despite the repeal of the Anti-Subversion Law (RA 1700), the Armed Forces of the Philippines still describes materials seized from the alleged NPA guerillas it captures as “subversive documents,” and militant groups as “subversive organizations.” »

Despite martial law in the Philippines and the defeat of the United States and its favored regime in Vietnam in 1975, is the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) still missing the point?

AFP intelligence does seem to be familiar with events in Vietnam, where the communist-led National Liberation Front (or the “Viet Cong” as the United States referred to them) won power in 1975. But a media briefing by a Philippine Navy intelligence officer last week didn’t mention the country’s own martial law experience at all. »

Few would be surprised if a policeman appeared in the list of suspects in the Maundy Thursday killing of journalist Marlene Esperat. Policemen, after all, have their fingerprints all over the 2002 killing of Pagadian City journalist Edgar Damalerio.

The alleged triggerman was an active duty policeman when Damalerio was shot dead on a busy Pagadian street in May three years ago. The city police did all it could to mislead the media and the prosecutors of the case. At one point the police implicated the witnesses in the killing and named a local criminal, who was not in Pagadian at the time of the murder, as the killer. »

The Valentine’s Day bombings in Makati, General Santos and Davao, which killed 13 people and injured 150, were certainly terrorist acts, if terrorism is defined as the indiscriminate use of violence to instill fear in furtherance of a particular goal.

It doesn’t matter how noble or debased the goal is. Terrorism is a method independent of the validity or bankruptcy of the goals of those who use it. In every instance, the point is to frighten through the message that everyone can be a target, and to coerce governments into making concessions. In making that point, terrorism kills indiscriminately. »

The fighting in Sulu has so far claimed 70 casualties among the combatants, and displaced some 2,000 residents of the municipalities affected.

There are only two ways the fighting can go, given the tenacity of the MNLF guerillas and the determination of the AFP leadership to crush them. Either it escalates into another major conflict, or it results in the defeat of the guerillas. One thing is certain, however. Neither the immediate cause of the conflict nor the social and economic realities that have made parts of Mindanao so volatile are likely to end up being wisely addressed. »

The Undiscovered Country
Stories by Luis V. Teodoro

Year Published: 2004
Specifications: 6×9; PB/BP
No. of Pages: 148pp
ISBN: 971-542-405-8
Price: PhP 300.00

Writing in the sixties, “Luis Teodoro … stood apart from his generation in going back to the tradition represented by journalist-artists of the early twentieth century,” not to mention Rizal and the writers of the Propaganda Movement. Collected here for the first time, these stories fill the gap in most accounts of Philippine literature in English, a gap that must surely bother both avid reader and literary scholar. Didn’t the sixties produce powerful stories in the social realist tradition? What happened to them?

Here are some of the best, produced by a writer better known as journalist and academic. It is time to make the stories available to readers again, for, as Ramon Magsaysay awardee Bienvenido Lumbera says, “in our time, the need of our milieu is once again for creative writers who do not apologize when their fiction or poetry partakes of the concerns and functions of journalism. »

Speaking for the last time as Armed Forces Chief of Staff last October 29, Narciso Abaya had critical words for the media, the politicians and the civilian government. He was correct on all counts–but incorrect in making the AFP seem like the hapless victim of both in the making of the scandals that have rocked the military establishment.

The media do tend to sensationalize. They do publish unverified information and even to present speculation as fact. And in cases too numerous to mention, they do engage in trial by publicity. Conventional journalism wisdom declares these practices to be unethical and unprofessional. »

Add the possibility of a coup to the two most popular arguments currently being advanced by generals, former generals, certain congressmen, and the usual media hacks to stop the House hearings on military corruption.

The first argument, repeated so often its imbecility is beginning to sound like words of wisdom to the unthinking, is that General Carlos F. Garcia is being singled out for persecution. After all, says this argument, there is as much corruption in the rest of the government as there is in the military.

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Because Francisco Tatad fancies himself a writer–as he is indeed fancied by others who think that all anyone needs to be one is the capacity to put words on paper–one must assume that he chooses his metaphors carefully.

If Tatad was quoted accurately last week, we may thus assume that his description of the Arroyo government as “ripe for the picking” was the result of some thought. Surely he must have considered its appropriateness and nuances, and its capacity to make an otherwise unfamiliar concept familiar through an implied comparison with something known. »