Guiuan flattened, needs quick help

Help is being concentrated on Leyte, principally on devastated Tacloban, but Guiuan on neighboring Eastern Samar is more devastated. Supertyphoon “Yolanda” made landfall on Guiuan, and the whole municipality and neighboring areas have been flattened. No structure remains standing. The casualty count is high. The people have no homes, no water, no food, no medical supplies, no means of communication to the outside world. And therefore no help. A man from Guiuan walked a whole day to bring the news outside and ask for help for Guiuan.

But the world seems to have forgotten it. And yet it would not be difficult to bring help to it. Guiuan has a first-class airport built by the Americans during World War II, when they used Guiuan as an air base and depot. It has twin runways better than those on Clark Air Base. The CAB runways were built for fighter planes. The Guiuan runways were built for heavy bombers and cargo planes. They can accommodate today’s jumbo jets. Therefore, they can accommodate C-130 cargo planes that can fly in help. But it seems to have been forgotten, even by the province’s representative in Congress. (Guiuan’s airport was reported opened yesterday—ED.)

The town’s former mayor, Annaliz Gonzalez-Kwan, is doing everything she can to help her townmates, but what can one woman out of government do? She and her townmates need immediate help now.

* * *

Also needing help is the city of Manila, the capital of the Philippines, which is deep in debt. Recently, Meralco sent Mayor Joseph Estrada a collection letter saying the city owes the power company P507,135,477 in unpaid electric bills. It is charging the city P106,562,034 in interest charges for the unpaid bills as of July 31, 2013. As of that date, Manila owed Meralco a total of P613,697,511.

Mayor Estrada claims that the debt was incurred by the previous administration and that Manila is really bankrupt. When he took the mayor’s seat, the former president said, Manila’s coffers had only a little more than P200 million, barely enough for the city payroll. By comparison, he said, former mayor Lito Atienza left more than P1 billion when he was succeeded by Mayor Alfredo Lim.

Erap and Meralco are not the only ones saying that Manila is deep in debt. The Commission on Audit says the city owed P3.5 billion as of July 2012, or more than three times its cash holdings of P1.006 billion.

The city also was not able to pay tax dues to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, employee contributions to the Government Service Insurance System, Home Development Mutual Fund (Pag-Ibig) and Philippine Health Insurance Corp.

The COA also says there were delays in the turnover of P511.391 million to the city’s 896 barangays, “thus hampering the delivery of basic services and the implementation of development projects of the city.”

“Don’t look at me,” Mayor Estrada says now. “That was incurred before my time. But I am the one left holding the empty bag and the one to pay those debts.”

That is why the City Council decided to authorize him to apologize to Hong Kong for the death of eight Hong Kong tourists in a bus hijacking and shoot-out with a rogue policeman at the Luneta in 2010, Erap said. The purpose is to assuage the hurt feelings of the Hong Kong people and make their tourists and businessmen go back to visiting Manila so the city will have increased revenues from them.

Erap says there are back-channel talks to arrange his trip to Hong Kong to extend the apology. Unlike somebody, I am not a proud person who thinks that apologizing would be a loss of dignity, he says, adding that being humble is not a loss of dignity. On the contrary, he says, it adds to one’s dignity.

The mayor also showed clippings from the Inquirer indicating that Manila had overtaken Quezon City as the “car theft capital” of the Philippines. Based on a report on Oct. 2, 2012, of the Highway Patrol Group (HPG), Manila had 19 vehicle theft cases in the month of August alone, compared to only nine in Quezon City.

“Manila now tops the list [of areas] where car theft cases are rampant,” Supt. Edwin Butacan of the HPG said in October 2012.

Queried on the reason for the rise in car theft cases in Manila and decline in Quezon City, Butacan said that since the latter was widely considered the “car theft capital,” the HPG augmented the anti-car theft efforts of the Quezon City police.

So shouldn’t the HPG also augment the anti-car theft efforts of the Manila police?

The other clipping, dated Sept. 19, 2012, stated that 12 policemen, called the “Dirty Dozen” and assigned to the Manila Police District, had been charged with kidnapping by a Fil-Canadian.

Belinda Rivera Placido complained that the 12 policemen arrested her on Sept. 12, 2012, in Zambales province and took her to the Sampaloc station where she was told by a policeman to pay P1 million so that the policeman who had accused her of masterminding the stabbing of his daughter would drop the case against her. Left with no choice, Placido said, she paid the amount. She was eventually released the next day.

It is not known what happened to her complaint and to the “Dirty Dozen.”