Rebel without a clue
Caught
By Patricia Evangelista
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:19:00 09/14/2008
Filed Under: Crime, Judiciary (system of justice), Politics
MANILA, Philippines—It rained Tuesday. It was the sort of day that had vendors standing underneath the pink-and-blue overpasses, selling thin P100-apiece umbrellas to soaking pedestrians. On that day, Court of Appeals Justice Vicente Roxas was found “dishonest and untruthful” and was removed from his post because of his “undue interest” in the Meralco case against the Government Service Insurance System. On that day, Sept. 9, two congressmen were convicted of corruption, 21 were killed in a landslide in Compostela Valley, four Caloocan houses were ravaged by flood, and the website Star-mo-meter chose Angel Locsin as the most beautiful Filipina over her dimpled, hip-slinging rival in GMA7.
On that same Tuesday, a 9-year-old boy playing on a Tondo street held the string of his white kite as a bullet ripped into his skull. News reports say the boy “caught” the bullet, and there is an image suddenly of a 9-year-old boy swinging his head to intercept the bullet, ball to waiting glove. It happened then: the cramped street, the bullet bursting from the gun of PO2 Bernardo Cruz, the turning head, the crack of impact, the slow silence as the small body crumpled to the ground. They say that Cruz, of Manila Police District Station 1, was shooting at his “enemy,” Archie Bernardo, the man whose mother beat Cruz’s father as barangay chairman.
I do not know if it was an enterprising cameraman who posed the kite and started rolling his tape, I suppose to illustrate the irony of innocence and violence, or if it was by some accident of fate or physics that the kite landed to lean oh-so-bravely on a rock as its young master was rushed to Tondo General Hospital. What I do know is this: I could not help watching as the reporter in her clean white blouse and coiffed hair began talking about the child and the incident; could not help looking at the white kite she held so casually in her hand as a prop for her story; could not, even as I bent forward in my seat to watch closer, help the feeling of both outrage and interest—the interest of the writer in the story, and the outrage that I imagine a rape victim would have if her panties were fingered on national media as proof of the violation. That boy, after all, could have been anyone’s 9-year-old nephew, could have been named Robbie or Mark or Boy, and maybe that explains the interest these stories hold for so many: the madding crowd that figures in every execution story, clamoring for more, grateful that the more does not include “me.” And then there was the story of Janeth Ponce.
Janeth Ponce was the 32-year-old wife of a construction worker, who, one hour after midnight on that same Tuesday, forced her three children—4-year-old Marjorie, 3-year-old Margareth, and 2-year-old MJ—to drink Bright blue toilet cleaner from a plastic bottle at their home in Barangay Salasad in Magdalena, Laguna. Police reports say Janeth later drank the cleaning fluid herself. Her suicide note, written in cramped cursive on a sheet torn from a child’s notebook, asked neighbors to care for her other child, at that time staying with her mother-in-law. The three children were already dead when they were brought to the Magdalena General Hospital. Janeth followed soon after.
Senior Insp. Raul Sandoval, Magdalena police chief, said the suicide note made them believe that the mother killed her children and herself because of poverty. The same refrain that is being picked up by the media—how poverty’s brutality has forced another innocent’s death, the same way 12-year-old Mariannet Amper’s suicide became a circus of suspicion and blame, the story evolving to include unproven suspicions of alcohol abuse and rape, making the girl who died by her own hand an instant celebrity. By her death, she was crowned poverty’s hero. Then, as now, there are howls of protestation over the inability of government to provide for the people, the same tap-dancing by politicians who demand for “answers” and deluge the inboxes of journalists with their statements of outrage. Sen. Loren Legarda says the tragedy “should be a warning to government” and that “In all likelihood, the pressures and anxieties of poverty played a major role in this tragedy.”
“What could be more telling,” says Senate Majority Floor Leader Francis Pangilinan, “about the direness of the common Filipino’s situation than when a mother chooses immediate death for her young children over the slow anguish of starvation?”
And yet there is something terribly wrong with the way these stories immediately capture the national consciousness. Perhaps it is the result of the stories that have been told and retold, the increasingly grim narrative painted of the Philippine condition. It is as if it’s a reason for a mother to kill her three children, as if it is a natural result of poverty to resort to suicide. It ignores the low suicide rate in spite of the outrageous poverty, ignores the lack of any attempt on the part of Janeth to ask help from neighbors.
It is as if there is nothing ridiculously contrary to the Filipino temperament than for a mother to kill her children—the same notoriously protective Filipino mother who will suffer all, including alienation in a strange country, for the sake of that child. Following the logic of police and media and politicians, it is then strange that the streets of Manila are not littered with the dead bodies of toddlers.
By treating Janeth as a woman forced by circumstance to no other recourse than murder is to justify murder. By glorifying suicide, we take the risk of more babies being murdered by mothers, more suicides by those who see Janeth and see her as a hero, the same way Mariannet’s death became the precursor of a spree of other child suicides.
There has never been any doubt that poverty exists, or that violence occurs. Turn the pages of this newspaper, and you’ll see the stories. Neither is the government any less responsible for the wellbeing of its people—consistently, consciously, and not only at the instance of these stories.
Janeth is the easiest, most sensational image that can be used of a Third World country caught in a cycle of violence and poverty, but it is hardly the most accurate.
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Send comments to pat.evangelista@gmail.com
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