We beg to differ.
The on-going war on drugs in the Philippines is a hot topic nowadays. Supporters of the country’s new President (Rodrigo Duterte) have hailed the energized efforts of the government to put a stop to this drug menace plaguing the country while detractors of the President have cried foul over the bloodbath that has resulted and…
What to make of what’s happening in the Philippines today. Reports of “drug lords”, drug dealers, kidnappers, carjackers, and the like being killed in police operations fill the news. It could be a shortfall in reporting resources deployed by Philippine corporate news organisations that makes facts surrounding these incidents spotty but there seems to be…
Read More “5 cops named and shamed, but early days of Duterte’s war on drugs draws mixed reviews” »
The return of former Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte to the Philippines’ 2016 presidential election race says a lot about how little of a foothold real “democracy” has made in Philippine society. Democracy is not just about “freedom” and “elections”. It is also about justice and discipline. Duterte’s main value proposition to Filipino voters addresses…
Read More “Rodrigo Duterte’s promise to Filipinos in his bid for the presidency” »
It baffles me the way the furor over the execution of the three convicted Filipino drug mules in China reached the crescendo that we are seeing today. It’s as if this thing had not been hanging over Filipinos’ heads for the last several months. It first captured the broader public awareness when the Philippine Government…
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) Country Fact Sheet for the Philippines published in 2006, 16,000 Filipinos died violently in 2002. This means that in the five hours it took for a Philippine Government delegate to travel from Manila to Beijing to plead for the life of three Filipino drug mules sentenced to death…
Read More “Case studies of irrelevance: Drug mules and Ombudsman Merci Gutierrez” »
During former President Gloria Arroyo’s (GMA) term, we referred to Overseas Foreign Workers (OFW) as our “Bagong Bayani” or “Our new heroes.” Earlier in the year, some economists gave OFWs credit for boosting growth in the economy due to their “higher remittances” the country received from the millions of Filipinos working abroad. The question is,…