Food for Sica detainees ‘inferior’

This refers to the article “Three meals, P50. The Joy of Cooking: Priceless” (Sunday Inquirer Magazine, 11/3/13).

I am generally assuming truth in what Jodee Agoncillo wrote about the food being given to the inmates at the Quezon City Jail Female Dormitory at Camp Karingal, Quezon City.

I wonder, however, why she mentioned that the daily food budget per detainee there is only P50, when all city governments in Metro Manila and many other city governments outside of Metro Manila, add another P20 or even more to the daily food budget of jails per detainee in their territory.

As a result of their struggle for better food rations, the Danao City Jail detainees were able to win a P30-addition to their P50 daily food budget per detainee, plus the right to review the accounting of the food budget and expenses for their food rations. (However, fellow National Democratic Front peace consultant

Ramon Patriarca, who led the detainees’ struggle there, was very soon afterwards surreptitiously transferred to military detention and isolation in Camp Lapu-lapu, in fierce reprisal for his having led the detainees’ struggle at the Danao City Jail.)

The Special Intensive Care Area (Sica) is the only Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) jail in Metro Manila outside the jurisdiction of a city government and thus is the only one that is not given at least P20/day in additional food budget per detainee.

Granting that only P50/detainee/day is received and spent for the food budget at the Quezon City Jail Female Dormitory and assuming the quality and variety of the menu and food rations there are as described in Agoncillo’s story, our food situation here at the Sica is very, very much different and inferior.

The jail authorities and the kitchen supervisors here at the Sica have been provided with the same menu designed by the BJMP-National Capital Region’s National Food Service Council. But the menu is only posted at the office bulletin board of the jail authorities here, and 80-90 percent of those specified in the menu has never been implemented here.

Detainees here have not ever once been given most of those listed in the menu, such as chopsuey guisado with chicken, fried longganisa with boiled egg, fried daing or fried tilapia with kamatis, fish paksiw with talong, monggo guisado with tinapa and ampalaya leaves. Not even once have we ever been given food rations with fiber-rich leafy vegetables.

Detainees are threatened against complaining about the poor food rations being given to them. If they complain, they would receive the fiercest reprisals from jail authorities.

—ALAN JAZMINES,
NDF peace consultant,
detained at BJMP-SICA,
Camp Bagong Diwa, Taguig City