DAY 2: Labour Rights are Human Rights

With human rights organization Karapatan

Tuesday, January 5

Stuart Ryan, CUPE 4600:

It has been quite a couple of days.

Today we met the families of those killed and disappeared in the government campaign to eliminate the Communist insurgency by the time that Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) ends her term this June. The campaign targets leaders of legal organizations who criticize the government policies as Communists; and that their organizations are front groups and therefore legitimate targets for eliminations, either by extrajudicial killings, disappearances, or charging them in courts with trumped-up-charges.

Lorena Santos, from the group Desaparecidos, described the ordeal of having both her parents abducted. While her mother, Elizabeth Principe, has surfaced alive and has just recently been released from jail on trumped-up charges of rebellion as a Communist sympathizer, she has not heard a word about her father, Leo Valasco. She has gone public about her case, and still holds out hope that he is still alive.

We met one torture victim, Raymond Manalo, who managed to escape after 18 months of various forms of mental and physical torture. He implicated a key general, General Jovito S. Palparan known as the butcher, as the key person orchestrating the government campaign. The retired general is now a congressman. A Filipino court case against the General was dismissed on a technicality, but his  testimony of the victim to the UN has led briefly to a reduction of extrajudicial killings and a new anti-torture law.

The human rights group Karapatan asked us to find people to come as International Observers for the May Presidential elections, as they are afraid that more killings will occur during the buildup to the election. It wants the end of impunity for the military

We then visited the dumpsite where some 180,00 poor people live in the largest slum in Manila. We visited a monument to hundreds of victims who died in July, 2000 when a landslide of garbage buried homes during a period of torrential rain.

We met and witnessed people scraping out a living sorting through the garbage and cleaning plastic bags for sale to factories who turn the plastic bags into shoes. The women sorted through the garbage while men cleaned the plastic and piled them into piles for shipment to the factories.

At Plastikan, where community members recover, wash and sell plastic for recycling.

While we were guests of organizers in the ghetto, we were quite a spectacle, and gathered a crowd wherever we went. It is not often they get white, well-off Canadians visiting them.

As everywhere else in the Philippines, the big sport is basketball. We saw two pickup games. Two members of our delegation joined one game.

Our hosts were representatives of KADAMAY, a national organization of the urban poor. They fight with the people in a campaign for living wages for their work, jobs and social services for  the poor, including housing.

A touching moment was the invitation of a single mother into her house where she brings up her 3 children. One is going to high school nearby. All the students, even here, wear uniforms, while most of the children we saw wore shorts and T-shirts.

Tomorrow we meet teachers, members of ACT, while they are in  the classroom and then two of our delegation make a report on the issues facing workers and students in the post-secondary education sector in Canada to a forum at the University of the Philippines.

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