“See you in the trenches,” the human rights lawyer and law professor Ted Te said at the tail end of a brief online post addressed to the passers of the 2022 bar examination, whose names were released by the Supreme Court last April 14. Te’s message evoked in the attentive observer, not the glamorous, de...
Author: Rosario A. Garcellano (Rosario A. Garcellano)
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Hail and farewell: Luis V. Teodoro
The public intellectual Luis V. Teodoro was not known to be ailing, which was why his many friends and admirers could not immediately come to grips with word that he had passed, felled by a heart attack. How could that bodily treachery occur in someone who watched his health as carefully as he watched the...
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Merrymaking gone south, or a portent of things to come
Almost a month into 2023 and the rain still won’t stop in certain parts of the country, as though portending a bad time ahead despite the lunar new year’s promise of “a year of recovery.” The “shear line,” or the point where the cold northeast monsoon meets the warm easterlies from the Pacific—a relatively new...
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When the wheels of justice grind
When she is released from prison, whether by virtue of bail, dismissal of her remaining two drug cases, or acquittal, Leila de Lima is clear on what she will do. “I will make every second of my life as a free woman count. I will waste no time,” the former senator said last November in...
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Books at the fair: reading as resistance
Time has become a privilege one carves out from these days of want and fear: time to muse, to make sense of what’s going on, to read. Reading is crucial: an act of will, of resistance. Slogging through the tremendous crowd on the last day of the Manila Book Fair last September, one gaped at...
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Martial law and the urgency of remembering
In the morning of Sept. 23, 1972 (Philippines), Edel shook me awake, his face looming above mine and his voice murmuring my name while I got my bearings. The radio’s dead, he said finally. I lurched out of bed, confirming in his eyes what we sensed the night before, when a colleague abruptly left a...
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Agrava reports didn’t answer question of why Ninoy Aquino was killed
Editor’s note: Former senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. was shot dead on Aug. 21, 1983, upon arriving from exile in the United States at the airport now named after him. Fourteen months later, a fact-finding board assigned by President Ferdinand Marcos to look into the assassination submitted two reports—one by its chair and the other...
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Among the garbage in raging waters
Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry/And I will sing a lullaby… — “Golden Slumbers” by the Beatles Two girls were killed in the flash floods on July 15-16, according to the initial reports. Like many an afternoon in the metro in this warm season, dark sky and distant thunder heralded the rain that steadily became...
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The ‘battle for memory’
Reports of protesting Sri Lankans storming the presidential palace and forcing President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to run away and eventually announce that he would step down are triggering recollections of Ferdinand Marcos’ own flight from Malacañang in February 1986 as protesting Filipinos approached the gates. Written accounts of the ailing dictator’s last hours in the Palace—for...
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Cat and mouse at Ayungin Shoal (or China’s ‘very aggressive’ presence in the West Philippine Sea)
China’s Coast Guard is guarding Ayungin Shoal, on the map a tiny rectangle to the left of Palawan in the West Philippine Sea, likely to evade the eye if one weren’t particularly looking for it. Not many Filipinos are aware of the “low-tide elevation” well within their country’s exclusive economic zone, with a war-vintage ship,...