When Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was sworn in as president of the Philippines on June 30, he took his oath in front of the former legislative building where his father entered politics and swore on the same Bible used by the elder Mr. Marcos at his 1965 inauguration.
For victims of Mr. Marcos’s tyrannical reign, it was an insulting homage to the dead dictator. But it came as no surprise.
The younger Mr. Marcos rode to a landslide election win with a campaign that leaned heavily on the fiction of a triumphant golden age under his father. It was promoted by a well-oiled disinformation machine that brazenly ignored the thousands of people jailed, tortured or killed by the regime and the estimated $5 billion to $10 billion siphoned off by the Marcos family.… Seguir leyendo »
No hay extracto porque es una entrada protegida.
This weekend, crowds danced in the streets of U.S. cities to mark the end of the Trump era and the start of democratic restoration.
I’ve danced on the streets before, but I do so now with caution. I know from my home country, the Philippines, that the spell of authoritarianism is not so easily broken. The rite of voting does not suffice to exorcise its demons.
In 1986, the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos called an election, a cynical ploy to prove to his American patrons he still had popular support. He thought he could bribe and bully his way to victory at the polls as he had done in the past, but after 20 years of plunder and abuse, Filipinos could no longer be bought or cowed.… Seguir leyendo »
Flaviano Villanueva, 47, entered the priesthood in his 30s after leading a fast life fueled by drugs and alcohol. So late last year, when a small-time drug dealer approached him in his rectory in one of Manila’s oldest districts, the Roman Catholic priest, recalling his own checkered past, could not turn her away.
“She was a member of a notorious gang that sells shabu in this area,” the priest told me recently, using the local term for crystal meth. “They were a gang of six. Four had already been killed. She came to me crying, ‘Father, can you hide me?’ ” She feared she might soon join the thousands of Filipinos who have been gunned down since President Rodrigo Duterte sanctioned the wanton killing of drug suspects.… Seguir leyendo »
