Saturday, August 28, 2010

Please Hear What I’m Not Saying –

“Don’t be fooled by me. Do not be fooled by the face I wear, for I wear a mask, I wear a thousand masks. Masks that I’m afraid to take off and none of them are me.

Pretending is an art that’s second nature with me, but don’t be fooled; for God’s sake don’t be fooled. I gave the impression that I’m secure, that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within, as well as without; that confidence is my name and coolness my game, that the waters are calm and I’m in command, and that I need no one.

But don’t believe me, please. My surface may seem smooth, but my surface is my mask, my ever0varying mask. Beneath lies no smugness, no complacence. Beneath dwells the real me in confusion, in fear, in aloneness. But I hid this; I don’t want anybody to know it.

I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear of being exposed. That’s why I frantically create a mask to hide behind, a nonchalant, sophisticated façade to help me pretend, to shield me from the glance that knows. But such a glance is simply my salvation. And I know it. That is if it is. If it’s followed by acceptance, if it is followed by love. It’s the only thing that can liberate me, from myself, from my own self-built prison walls, from the barriers that is painstakingly erect. It’s the only thing that will assure myself of what I can’t assure myself, that I’m really worth something.

But I don’t tell you this. I don’t dare. I’m afraid to; I’m sooo afraid your glance will not be followed by acceptance – love. I’m afraid you’ll think less of me; that you’ll laugh and you laugh will KILL me.

I’m afraid that deep down I’m nothing, that I’m just no good, and that you see this and REJECT me. So I play my game, my desperate pretending game, with a façade of assurance without, and a trembling child within. And so begins the parade of masks, and my life becomes a front. I idly chatter to you in the suave tones of surface talk. I tell you everything that’s really nothing, and nothing of what’s everything, of what’s crying within me. So, when I’m going through my routine, do not be fooled by what I’m saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear that “I’m not saying”, what I’d like to be able to say, what for survival, I need to say, but what I can’t say.

I dislike hiding. Honestly, I dislike the superficial game I’m playing, the superficial phony game. I’d really like to be genuine and spontaneous and ME, but you’ve got to help me.”

A Halloween story: Tuyor's special Adobo

"Even though I cooked it very well, there’s still a curious after taste when I ate it.”


HE had less than an hour to finish. His family—he thought—might start suspecting where he got the main ingredient for their supper so late in the evening.

Jovencio Tuyor crazily chopped the onions, garlic, hurriedly crushes the paminta seeds and crumpled the laurel leaves. Simultaneously, he broiled his prized meat he got that evening. “Maybe this would lessen the pungent smell of the meat,” he muttered.

After broiling the meat for 20 or so minutes, he marinated it with vinegar and soy sauce in a pot. He poured all the ingredients he chopped earlier, dashed it with some rock salt and monosodium glutamate and let the contents broil again for another 20 minutes.

Moments later, Jovencio hollered to his wife and kids. “Dinner is ready guys,” he said in vernacular.

It had been a long dry spell without eating meat and kids were famished, the Tuyors ate their repast that night with gusto.

Earlier that evening of September 30, this year, Jovencio, his eldest son Melchor, Rey Dadole, Arante Maravillas and brothers Johnny and Junmar Candar had been drinking in a village store. They were neighbors in Naawan—a sleepy coastal town 30 minutes away from Cagayan de Oro city.

After about 30 minutes into their drinking, the group decided to part ways and call it a night. Ten to 15 meters en route to their respective homes, Arante, Johnny and Junmar heard an eerie shriek. Realizing it was Rey’s voice frantically yelling “mama tabang”—they rushed to where the shouts came from.

When they trained their flashlight to where the voice came from they saw Rey, his back to the ground, while Jovencio was striding him plunging and hacking the boy with a scythe. With each lunges and hacks, they could hear the boy’s blood oozing to the grassy ground, where at one moment they even thought they heard it bubbling as Rey gargled his own blood.

Noticing the light, Jovencio looked up to his drinking buddies. “Dili baya mo magsaba bai ha,” in between heavy panting, he calmly said.

Scared out of their wits, they scrambled to their homes but Melchor remained with his father. Jovencio then scalped half of Rey’s face including one of his earlobes. Not contented, he lopped off the boy’s arm-muscles—both the triceps and bicep—up to his elbow. Father and son, then, hurriedly left for their home.

Estenely, Rey’s mother, having last seen him afternoon of September 30—worried sick—finally decided to file for a missing person at the Naawan Police on wee hours of October 2.

That same day, hours later, Naawan Police found Rey’s mutilated corpse lying on a grassy knoll not far from where the witnesses said they had a drinking spree. Half of his face was missing as well as almost half of his left arm, while 31 stabs and hack wounds were found in the different parts of his torso.

Rev. Sanny Limbag—a minister of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP) in Naawan for six years—said that blinding rage may have pushed Jovencio to commit the grisly acts.

Unknown to Rey’s mother and a couple of weeks before that fateful drinking spree, Melchor got mauled in one of the town’s dark alleys. He was pounded so hard he had to go to their village clinic. While recuperating, he identified Rey as his attacker to his father, Jovencio.

However, Jovencio had been known in their village to have committed other disturbing practices.

His neighbors said they once saw him eat a Carabao meat raw after rustling it from a neighboring sitio. Jovencio had also been known to include cat meat in his family’s meals (According to his wife, he was the cook of the family.).

Jovencio was arrested by SPO1 Arnold Sacabin, PO3 Cirilo Manco Sr, PO2 Jope Cagabcab and PO1 Senador Ostero of the Naawan Police Station hours after finding Rey’s body.

During his preliminary inquest last October 23, Jovencio showed no sign of remorse or regret as he stared blankly at the prosecutor who peppered him with questions.

Arante Maravillas and brothers Johnny and Junmar Candar—who stood as witnesses—denied having partaken of Rey’s flesh and subsequently release from the municipal jail where they were held after Jovencio’s arrest.

Melchor—and the rest of the Tuyors—have since left town, leaving Jovencio on his own in Misamis Oriental Provincial Jail, where he is currently being detained awaiting his formal trial.

There he confessed to local media he cooked and ate Rey’s flesh with his family.

“Even though I cooked it very well, there’s still a curious after taste when I ate it,” Jovencio had told media in the vernacular.

Back in Naawan, the people still talk about the incident albeit in hushed tones. Rural grapevine had since abuzz and the sleepy coastal town west of this city will never be the same again.

“After the Tuyor incident, the people here were never the same. I know this will forever be etched in the memories of the people here,” said Limbag.


(All anecdotal situations are based on real events, affidavits of witnesses, police reports and the accounts of the self-confessed cannibal, himself.)

Bitter tears flow over human rights abuses

BITTER TEARS FLOWED like the mighty Agusan Grande here when Lumad victims and witnesses of human-rights abuses took turns in recounting their appalling ordeals in Esperanza, Agusan del Sur.

In the International Peace and Human Rights Summit at St. Augustine Formation Center, this city on Thursday, some 150 peace advocates gathered to take part in the Mindanao Week of Peace and Human Rights that started on November 26 and will end on Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day.

In between sobs, Adelfa Belayong, wife of slain Lumad leader Datu Mampaagi Belayong, narrated the events surrounding her husband’s murder.

“I am very disappointed with this government. They punished my husband without due process. I am disappointed with the ruthlessness of this government,” said Belayong.

She denied allegations that her husband and their family are members of the Communist Party of the Philippines’s armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA). Belayong claimed that paramilitary forces killed her husband, who suspected the latter was a member of the NPA.

“In our years here, we never joined any armed group,” Belayong said.

Belayong, who said she was beside her husband in his final moment, said her husband’s final words for her was, “Don’t stop struggling for our ancestral.”

Samuel Hangadon, a Lumad leader of the Higaonon tribe, told summit participants that he witnessed the assassination of Datu Mampaagi Belayong.

“I ran to his side to see if he was still alive,” said Hangadon in Visayan. He said he rushed to Belayong’s slumped body after heard gunshots.

Hangadon said he went into hiding after his son overheard talks that his father would be next.

“Pa, you should go away because they’re saying you are,” Hangadon’s son supposedly told him.

“I can no longer return home,” Hangadon added.

His family is now in a dilemma and is having a hard time coping with what had happened in their community.

“Because I’m no longer in our area, they can spread the lie that I am an NPA member,” said Hangadon--who sought refuge with church people for a month now.

He said he could identify the members of the paramilitary group Task Force Gantangan because some of them, he said, were even his relatives.

“Some of them are my relatives, several are my nephews,” he said. “Up to now, they are harassing the civilians in our,” Hangadon said.

His family is currently starving, he said; his children have resorted to begging in the streets of neighboring Butuan City.

Senatorial hopeful Bayan Muna Rep. Satur Ocampo and Anakpawis Rep. Joel Maglungsod participated in the summit.

Maglungsod, himself a Mindanaoan, said he was aghast after hearing the victims’ testimonies. He added that first thing next week, he would file a House resolution condemning the ongoing militarization in Northern Mindanao and request for a full-blown legislative inquiry on the matter.

For the victims’ immediate needs, he said Anakpawis would request the Department of Health and Department of Social Welfare and Development for a medical and relief operations in the area.

“I will personally participate in the mission to make sure that help gets to those who need it,” Maglungsod said.

“I am a witness that the province of Bukidnon is now a military zone,” he added.

He recounted their ordeal when, together with International Peace and Human Rights Mission (IPHRM)-Bukidnon Team, were not allowed to enter the fact-finding mission area even with the go signal of Malaybalay Mayor Florencio Flores.

“After that, we sought the help of the office of Gov. Jose Maria Zubiri but we were still prevented from entering the area,” said Maglungsod.

In an interview, Ocampo said the testimonies of the victims only reinforce the consistency and pattern of the military’s implementation of Oplan Bantay Laya.

“They are militarizing the area by establishing civilian armed groups under the pretext of counter-insurgency when the motives are the profits they could gain by controlling these resource-rich areas,” Ocampo said.

GATT-WTO: Bane to third world nations’ patrimony

“This transnational phenomena—specifically the hegemonized market—affect the traditionally held state-centric concept of sovereignty as it no longer is the sole significant actor in the already complex interdependence of the global society.”


I.                    Introduction

Sovereignty as a social construct

IN ORDER to establish how trade hegemony of the “borderless market” has threatened the access and control of Third World Nations’ (TWNs) own resource-rich patrimony, we need to dissect first the central concept that binds these two variables—trade and environment—a conceptual analyses of sovereignty.

On one hand, when we discuss global trade relations, as a means of global division of labor and accrual of wealth, we delve on the nuances of the interdependence of states in the international arena.  Hence, we reiterate the

On the other hand, environment, as a source of raw material for the production of commodities which propagate global trade, is in fact also a discourse on a state’s sovereignty and patrimony.

Sovereignty is an inherently social construct that allows us to understand the relationships of nations, as well as the internal political dynamics within a state. It builds a social environment in which states can interact as an international society of states, where the mutual recognition of claims of sovereignty between states is a primal element to the construction of the states themselves.[1]

This becomes the political entity’s externally recognized right to exercise final authority over its affairs. The aspects then of sovereignty, territory, population, authority—recognition—are socially constructed, as is the modern state system. This is because the state is never the product of any solitary institution or discourse.

“The modern state system is not based on some timeless principle of sovereignty, but on the production of a normative conception that links authority, territory, population (society, nation), and recognition in a unique way and in a particular place (the state).[2]

With the initial statement of arguments above, Philippines—as a duly recognized state—should have final authority over its affairs. We could even go further as to assert the indigenous peoples’ rightful juridical and empirical dominion over its resource-rich ancestral domains, under the premise that they (tribal nations) too, are internationally recognized as quasi-states within a state (e.g. national minority) having their own cultural identity, territory, population, authority and recognition.

However, since sovereignty is a social construct it transforms as global relations to trade and production changes on whose behalf it is reconstructed. Their meanings arise out of interaction with other states and with the international society they form. It is never a finished product; it is always on the process of being constructed and reconstructed.

The emergence of other significant non-state actors has subsequently reconstructed the conceptual definition of sovereignty and its traditional character as a frequently invoked statute for states for protection and defense, when violated.

“During the early 1970s, a number of scholars began to challenge what they characterized as the state-centric bias prevailing in the international relations theory and to stress the need to incorporate important non-state actors like multinational corporations, transnational corporations and international organization into the analysis of international phenomena.[3]

This transnational phenomena—specifically the hegemonized market—affect the traditionally held state-centric concept of sovereignty as it no longer is the sole significant actor in the already complex interdependence of the global society.

This has eroded that state’s focal role in claiming sovereignty and authority over its patrimony.

(to be cont.,)


[1] Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (eds.)
State sovereignty as a social construct 1996
Cambridge Studies in International Relations: 46
[2] Ibid, p. 3
[3] Ibid, p. 6