Last week’s killing, wounding and illegal arrest of drought-stricken farmers who barricaded the Davao-Cotabato highway to dramatize their demands has brought to national attention the harsh realities in the country’s rural areas. It highlighted the desperate straits of the majority of rural folk especially the peasantry. Poor farmers including indigenous people eke out a living…
The violent dispersal by the police of the 6000-strong protest by farmers and lumad (indigenous people of Mindanao) in Kidapawan, North Cotobato last April 1 could be dismissed as just another incident in the long list of clashes between state security forces and citizens airing their grievances against government. But this is different. This has…
Dear Grandson, I thought I would write to you and try to explain what EDSA I was all about. The idea came up with all the recent talk about how your parents’ generation does not understand, much less appreciate, what happened thirty years ago, at the “people power” uprising that brought down the brutal and…
Worse, a significant number of young people have been hoodwinked into believing that the US-backed Marcos dictatorship was a kind of benevolent strongman rule that the present crisis-ridden Philippine society sorely needs to set things aright. It has been said that Marcos’ imposition of martial law signified the inability of the ruling elite to rule…
By Carol Pagaduan-Araullo Streetwise | BusinessWorld “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana From Feb. 22 to 25, the nation will be marking the thirtieth year of the people’s uprising that toppled the US-backed Marcos dictatorship dubbed EDSA “People Power.” Ironically, this event will take place even as…
By Carol Pagaduan-Araullo Streetwise | BusinessWorld Speaker Feliciano R. Belmonte, Jr. justified the abrupt adjournment of Congress last Wednesday by saying he didn’t want to embarrass President Benigno S. C. Aquino III with the prospect of a move to override the presidential veto on the SSS pension hike. Not that Rep. Neri J. Colmenares, who…
By Carol Pagaduan-Araullo Streetwise | BusinessWorld\ I waited to hear the views of a friend, a former SSS top executive who sought a meeting with Rep. Neri Colmenares, original sponsor of the bill that seeks to raise the Social Security System (SSS) monthly pension for more than 2 million retirees by P2000. I wanted to…
By Carol Pagaduan-Araullo Streetwise | BusinessWorld Ask a Filipino nowadays what he or she knows about Colombia and chances are the reply will be about how the reigning Miss Universe, the Philippines’ Pia Alonzo Wurztbach, almost lost her crown to Miss Colombia, Ariadna Gutiérrez, after the emcee mistakenly announced the Colombian beauty to be the…
By Carol Pagaduan-Araullo Streetwise | BusinessWorld Two hours before the New Year is ushered in, this accidental columnist struggles to write the last essay for the year. It isn’t easy. Writing has never been easy for someone who doesn’t write in pursuit of a muse or a career. I write because, fortuitously, I have been…
By Carol Pagaduan-Araullo Streetwise | BusinessWorld Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City is not called the “killer highway” for nothing. It is notorious for vehicular accidents involving all manner of wheeled conveyances: speeding buses and jeepneys whose brakes invariably “fail”; tricycles that aren’t even supposed to be plying this major thoroughfare; sleek late-model sedans and SUVs…
By Carol Pagaduan-Araullo Streetwise | BusinessWorld Lumad extrajudicial killings and forced evacuations due to military and paramilitary forces rampaging across the indigenous people’s ancestral domain in the remaining frontiers of Mindanao have finally made its mark on the national public consciousness. The arrival of the Manilakbayan 2015, a contingent of more than 700 people who…