In the wake of the death of the teenage student Kian Delos Santos, not only has it come to light that two other teenage students were shot and killed, one of them, Carl Angelo Arnaiz, was allegedly killed in an exchange of fire with police after robbing a taxi driver last month. A government forensic expert, however, said Arnaiz appeared to have been handcuffed, tortured and shot five times.
Now the entire 1,200 strong police force in the city of Caloocan has been fired and the justice department has started an investigation based on a murder and torture allegation against four Caloocan police officers allegedly linked to the killing of delos Santos. As a result of a public outcry, that killing has come under renewed scrutiny. Police described the teenager as a drug dealer who fired at officers during a raid, but his family and witnesses said the student was shot as he pleaded for his life.
Oliver wrote:Presumably not the ones who live in the slums.
An inaccurate assumption, sadly.
The gleaming skyscrapers of Manila’s Makati Malate district can be seen from the slums of Tondo, but there is nothing shiny about the alleyways where children play in piles of rubbish and filthy shacks are packed by the river.
Container lorries carrying cargo from the harbour rattle past as a man sets fire to a pile of rubbish, watched by a group of children. This is the slum area known as “Happyland”, which comes not from any sense of joy, but as a translation of the Bisaya word for “dump”.
The irony continues in the “Aroma” slum, which true to its name has a strong odour of compacted waste rising off the rubbish which is everywhere, as scavengers and stevedores work desperately to make a living.
The Philippine capital is home to an estimated four million urban poor, many packed into places like Smokey Mountain, a landfill that officially closed in the 1990s but is still busy. There are 80,000 people per square kilometre, most of them without access to running water, education, healthcare and employment.
There is no waste disposal system, and the river where the children play is clogged with filth and a serious health risk.
Here are plenty of posters for the country’s new president Rodrigo Duterte. He came here immediately after his inauguration and held a solidarity dinner with the poor, a gesture that only adds to his enormous popularity in a district where he won by more than 115,000 votes.
He promised the poor of the district they could sleep in the Malacanang presidential palace and pledged to use earnings from the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation to pay for healthcare for the residents.
“He’s a very good president. He will fight drugs and corruption, and say no to criminals and rapists – that’s number one,” said mother-of-six Marietta Tacoralde, who lives in a shanty house off the main road in Tondo . . .
Duterte’s crackdown on illegal drugs is popular as many of Tondo’s residents are hooked on shabu, or methamphetamines, and the violence linked to the drug trade is one of the reasons why the murder rate is so high in this district
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It always staggers me that the Philippines are often blind when it comes to electing their President. In recent times Marcos, Estrada and Macapagal were all proven crooks, although Marcos was an evil, thieving and murdering bastard as well, propped up by the CIA until even it realised people power had won and it then forced him into exile.