EDITOR’S NOTE: These remarks were delivered as a message from the family at the close of the 5th Edel Garcellano Conference with the theme “Resistance, Contradiction and Critique: Committed Writing Now,” held at the Ateneo de Manila University last Nov. 29. It’s extraordinary that the conference honoring Edel Garcellano and his work is now on...
Author: Rosario A. Garcellano (Rosario A. Garcellano)
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Let’s hear it from the President’s mouth
In a surprising turn, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. personally announced the Sandiganbayan’s issuance of warrants for the arrest of ex-Ako Bicol Rep. Zaldy Co and 17 others in connection with an anomalous flood control project in Naujan, Oriental Mindoro. It was an obvious effort to demonstrate control of the raging corruption scandal. But in the...
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Lost lives, lost homes, lost livelihoods
One day in the 1990s after rivers of lahar streamed from the slopes of Mount Pinatubo and buried many homes in Pampanga, I was peering through a second-floor window below my eye level. The ground was warm beneath my sneakers as I stooped to look into a bedroom with a double bed and its tousled...
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Evidence deemed insufficient after all these years: Enrile et al. cleared in ₱10B pork barrel scam
Distressing is the news that Juan Ponce Enrile and 34 others had been cleared of graft charges in connection with the ₱10-billion pork barrel scam exposed by the Inquirer in 2013. It aggravates Filipinos’ growing impatience with ongoing official inquiries into the raging trillion-peso corruption scandal involving flood control and other infra projects. It seems...
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Pablo Tariman kept the music playing
At Gallery MiraNila in Quezon City on Oct. 1, the hardbound volume “Encounters in the Arts” was available for sale at the registration corner for “Cecile Licad Up Close.” But the man behind both the book of reportage and the piano concert was elsewhere—quite out of character, being hands-on if not OC at each endeavor...
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To demand the facts and make correct sense of the corruption scandal
So much stuff to process, so little time before the next explosive detail erupts. Filipinos are called upon to make correct sense of the corruption scandal now approaching crisis proportions. That means educating themselves in how the plunder of taxpayer money was pulled off in flood control and other infra projects, and by whom, and...
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Return the money, jail the crooks: Vigorous protests again animate the motherland
The sun blazed all morning Sunday and rain poured intermittently starting in the early afternoon in Metro Manila. Still, attendance was vigorous at the twin protest rallies—dubbed “Baha sa Luneta” at Rizal Park and “Trillion Peso March” at the People Power Monument on Edsa—condemning the brazen corruption in flood control projects and demanding accountability. Attendance...
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Once more unto the breach with the scandal du jour, even with thinning reserves of hope
What does the current spasm in the body politic over the latest manifestations of corruption indicate but that the more things change, the more they remain the same? It wasn’t too long ago when such types as “Pogi,” “Sexy” and “Tanda” were hogging the news, having been accused of receiving ₱224.5 million, ₱183.8 million, and...
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Sara’s impeachment trial, Baste’s boxing bout, and the (worsening) floods of our lives
Vice President Sara Duterte and her younger brother, Acting Mayor Sebastian “Baste” Duterte of Davao City, have managed to evade confrontations of their making. The Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the verified impeachment complaint transmitted by the House of Representatives to the Senate in February is unconstitutional, providing the Vice President a reprieve from...
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When ‘dinosaurs’ peopled the Inquirer, they made it No. 1
A tempest in a teacup has been stirred by someone who attributed to “dinosaurs” the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s purported bumbling journey to digital. He appeared to be singing a dirge for it in a chest-thumping report that was run on June 30, timed for the next-day management transition of the No. 1 newspaper from its corporate...