The Bagobo-Tagabawas, a tribe in Santa Cruz, Davao del Sur, fear not only their displacement if an Aboitiz-owned power company succeeded in building a power plant in Tudaya. Ultimately, their leaders say, the children will pay the price. Text and photos by Davao Today?s Germelina A. Lacorte.
Related story: The Ritual at Tudaya Falls
Karapatan, the human-rights group, has reported that a member of the party-list group Suara Bangsamoro was shot and kidnapped by hooded armed men believed to be government agents at 2 in the morning today. According to Karapatan, this was the second time that Camili was abducted. In April 2003, he was taken by the Military Intelligence Group on suspicion of involvement in that year’s bombing of the Sasa Wharf. A Davao court dismissed the case against Camili for lack of evidence. He was again implicated in the 2004 Ecoland bombing but that, too, was dismissed by the court. Karapatan said Camili was falsely accused each time.
What possible good did the “disclosure” — that Congressman Prospero Nograles was being hunted by assassins — do to Davao City? If the authorities were convinced that they had suspects (they even had police sketches of them; in this country, apparently all one has to do to make a threat seem credible is to produce kuris-kuris of unrecognizable men), why are there no arrests? And why all the speculation that Leftists could be behind this plot?
Jerson Lastimoso, one of the four banana-plantation workers and union members from Compostela Valley province who were ambushed by unidentified men on Friday, died at 12:45 p.m. today, said Omar…
The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism has a collection of short audio features about Davao. Among the subjects of the podcasts are the durian, the Philippine eagle and other "achievements…