Verily, the lowland Filipinos have only replaced the foreign colonizers in colonizing the racial and blood brothers and sisters—the Lumads in the countryside.
The Makabayan Coalition is one with the nation in expressing its deep sorrow and sense of loss at the death of Letty Jimenez Magsanoc, editor in chief of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and indefatigable defender of press freedom and democracy.
Earlier last week, while most of us are into the slapping fiasco between presidential candidates Mar Roxas and Rody Duterte, the peasants in Compostela Valley are fighting for their land, fighting for their lives.
Around a long-neck bottle of Emperador we gathered and happily exchanged holiday greetings and peered on each other’s radiant faces and exhibited our dirty-white teeth to one another and hummed or sang the jingle bells and silver bells the way we wanted our uneasy joy to manifest on this bright evening twodays before Christmas Day.
Not only students, but teachers also suffer from end of sem blues: wrapping up lessons, checking papers and exams, calculating grades, beating deadlines.
Reading Roland Simbulan’s book The World is a Classroom — and this time about Vietnam— I couldn’t help but breath a mute cry of deep, deep, deep admiration. My heart skipped and pumped into my eyes a teardrop.
A continuing discourse on Neoliberalism is needed in order to awaken all and sundry and address the perennial issue of poverty and underdevelopment that has plagued the Filipino nation for so long.
Three years ago, our dear province of Compostela Valley and the nearby province of Davao Oriental were devastated by Typhoon Pablo (International name Bopha), damaging billions of properties and claiming thousands of lives mostly of poor farmers in Compostela, New Bataan, Monkayo, Boston, Baganga and Cateel.
![[Part Two] Neoliberalism and Human Rights: AFP as “Sekyu”](https://davaotoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Neoliberalism-and-Human-Rights-2-850x443.jpg)
In Mindanao, especially in its southern regions, more than 29 battalions of the AFP’s forces are being deployed in the name of counter-insurgency, but ostensibly they serve as the “Sekyu” (security force) of the big foreign companies that are conducting large-scale mining activities operating in these mineral-rich areas.
Neoliberalism, as a capitalist doctrine, was formulated in order to provide a basis for the economic development of society.
