Former chief executive Rodrigo Duterte has already concluded his bloody rule, but the killings have not stopped. During the first 29 days of Ferdinand Marcos Jr in Malacañang, more than 30 killings have already happened. The latest murder was that of Rolando Yumol, the father of physician Chao Tiao Yumol, himself a cold-blooded murderer of three people in Ateneo de Manila University one day before his first…

Writing this blog while the country’s novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) cases shoots up to over 800,000, to remember how things were almost five years ago is a note of pain. Remember May 9, 2016? It offered a great measure of hope, of something so alternatingly new, a fresh air from…

“Pandemic fatigue” is not an unseen folly. It’s the natural consequence of the miasma that is Rodrigo Duterte’s failure to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s like a ticking bomb waiting to explode, a booby trap that we have stepped on when the country cruised into the lockdown’s first year. We…

The road to 1986 beckoned with an entanglement. But so is the road to 2022. How poetic, if not ironic, is it to witness history unfold itself once more, although under different sets of conditions and circumstances, in an eerily similar manner and dispensation? To allow people to reflect and…

Institutions are an important cog in the wheel of democracy, the integral cog that allows it to keep moving. — Wrote the historian Timothy Snyder, in his slim volume about dictatorships: “… institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were.” Institutions are an important cog in the wheel of democracy, the integral cog that allows it to keep moving. Without the shining…

“It takes little effort to stop a tyrant. I have no doubt in the ultimate victory of right over wrong, of good over evil, in the awakening of the Filipino.” — Benigno “Ninoy” S. Aquino Jr. ‘Marcial Bonifacio’ could have chosen a different path. But he did not. On the tenth year anniversary of his murder, Teodoro Benigno wrote this of Ninoy: “What made [the fight] majestic was that Ninoy, even when almost everybody deserved him and his cause, held the conviction that the Filipino was…

The dictator was right about history. But so are we — we are not off his hook yet. — History’s shadowboxing with Ferdinand E. Marcos did not cease on February 25, 1986. One could posit an initial claim that with the late dictator being dead for three decades already, his death because of lupus erythematosus had swept any issues and matters that he might have still had with history…

(This is part of my submission series for our Creative Non-Fiction class.) Way back in 2018, 72-year-old peasant activist Randall “Ka Randy” Echanis was one of the 600 individuals designated by the Department of Justice as “terrorists.” Two years after, he was killed — right inside his home. How gruesome…

Hacienda Luisita is a symbol. — From the era of Spanish-backed encomendia and hacienda systems — which allowed rich families of mestizo descent and members of the principalia to accumulate large tracts of land — to that precise moment when state forces opened fire on striking farmers and farmworkers of Luisita after ten days of barricades…