This NPA is a Library
By Rodel Rodis, INQUIRER.net
Posted date: August 07, 2007
SEATTLE - To Filipinos in the Philippines, the initials NPA refer to the rebel New People’s Army. To the more than 600,000 Filipino “overstaying tourists” in the US, NPA describes their nomadic status – No Permanent Address. But to Filipino Americans, these initials belong to the National Pinoy Archives of the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS).
I visited the FANHS national office in Seattle and chatted with the NPA's founding archivist, Fred Cordova. Now 76, Fred established the National Pinoy Archives in 1987 to create a repository of “textual, graphic and electronic historical records” to document the Filipino American experience.
“I was a pack rat back then,” Fred said. “I would regularly clip out news articles about various Filipinos and put them in boxes all over the place,” a practice he said, that dated back to his years as a newspaperman with the Seattle Post Intelligencer, as Director of Public Information at Seattle University (SU) and as Manager of the University of Washington News Services.
“So about 20 years ago, I decided to be more organized about this process and to set up files about the individuals and organizations that I had news clippings on,” he said.
What few files he set up in 1987 has now mushroomed to 17,000 separate file folders on Filipino individuals and 3,000 files on Filipino community organizations in the US. It is by far the largest, most comprehensive archive of Filipino individuals, groups, organizations, institutions and facilities in the US.
The NPA is a priority project of the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) founded on November 26, 1982 and now has 27 active chapters throughout the US. Fred and his wife and life partner, Dorothy, founded FANHS and Fred served as its first national president while Dorothy serves as its Executive Director.
On any given day, Fred and some FANHS members can be seen scouring through newspapers and magazines from all over the US, snipping out articles by and about Filipinos in the US and placing them in folders found in dozens of file cabinets in one room and in the “catacombs” section of the basement.
When I last visited Seattle a year ago, I spent a morning at the NPA doing research on the life of Larry Itliong, the Filipino American labor organizer who initiated the Delano Strike of 1965 and who, together with Cesar Chavez, founded the United Farm Workers Union. I found primary source information in the archives that I could not find anywhere else. It was the source of my articles about Itliong which appeared in community newspapers.
When I visited Fred then, the friend who dropped me off at the NPA inquired if there was a file on him. Fred checked for “Rick Q. Beltran” and found a 3-inch thick file which contained an original copy of the souvenir program of the Council of Filipino-American Organizations of the Pacific Northwest (CFAOPN) when Rick was inducted as its president many years ago. The news articles in his file brought back a flood of memories for Rick, who never had a clue that there was a file on him that would live on long after he has passed away.
Fred was born in the little town of Selma, in Fresno County, California in 1931, the offspring of itinerant farmworkers. His father, Geraldo Umali, came to the US in 1919 from Batangas while his mother, Margarita Pilar, immigrated to Hawaii from the Ilocos region in 1912 as one of the first women sacadas.
After he was born, Fred was adopted by another Filipino farm worker couple, Leoncio and Lucia Cordova.
Fred studied in more schools than he can remember as his parents followed the crops and lived in work camps while enrolling him in the local schools where they worked the fields. After graduating from a high school in Stockton, California in 1948, Fred moved up to Seattle to study at Seattle University
(SU). To pay for his college education, Fred he worked as an “Alaskero” in the fish canneries of Alaska along with thousands of other Filipinos.
While at SU in 1948, Fred met Dorothy Laigo and, five years later, they married and engaged in a life-long partnership that has produced eight children, 16 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Dorothy was born in 1932 in Seattle, the daughter of Valeriano Laigo, who came to the US in 1919 as an 18-year old traveler - his mission was to “find work and send money back home”-and Bibiana Montante, who came in 1928 to go to school. In 1929 Dorothy’s parents met, got married, and gave Dorothy eight brothers and sisters.
And in 1957, Fred and Dorothy established the Filipino Youth Activities (FYA), a social service agency catering to the needs of Filipino American youth of Seattle. Two years later, Fred founded the FYA Khordobah, a drill team which has performed in half-time shows at NFL games in Seattle and in parades all over the United States for nearly 50 years.
In 1983, Fred wrote Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans, a collection of photographs and essays about the Filipino experience in North America, which
Dorothy edited. It is the foremost resource book about Filipinos in America, the one most often used in Filipino American Studies courses throughout the US.
As though Fred’s plate weren’t full enough, he was ordained a Deacon (“by the grace of God”) in 2003;, he regularly gives the homilies at Catholic churches in the Seattle area and officiates at baptisms, confirmations, marriages and funerals. In these Filipino gatherings, the question most asked of him is: “How can you be a Filipino and not speak the language?” Fred would patiently explain that he was born in the US in 1931 and wasn’t taught Tagalog by his Visayan parents. He speaks a little self-taught Tagalog now, though.
Fred’s passion and enduring legacy may very well be the NPA but he worries that this valuable community resource may not survive him. “Who will take over after I’m gone?” he asks. That is the challenge for FANHS and the Filipino American community.
If you want the National Pinoy Archives to continue, expand and grow, please send your tax-deductible donation made out to “FANHS” and send it to the Filipino American National Historical Society at 810 18th Avenue, Room 100, Seattle, Washington 98122, or call (206) 322-0203. If you would like the NPA to open a file on you (or on someone you hold in high regard) and would like the world to remember you, him or her, please send the information (news clippings, souvenir programs, obituary notices) to the NPA at the address above.
I would especially like to request Filipino community newspapers and magazines throughout the US to send complimentary subscriptions to the NPA so that FANHS volunteers can cut out news clippings from your publications and open new files.
This is a special anniversary year for Fred and Dorothy – the 50th anniversary of FYA, the 25th anniversary of FANHS and the 20th anniversary of the NPA.
Happy Anniversaries! Mabuhay Fred and Dorothy!
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com
Monday, October 29, 2007
What Price Remittances?
What Price Remittances?
By Rodel Rodis, INQUIRER.net
Last updated 01:15pm (Mla time) 08/14/2007
While balikbayan visitors from the US may complain that they’re buying less with their dollar than they used to because the peso has improved from 53 to 1 to 45 to 1, it’s an accomplishment of the current Philippine government that the strong peso requires it to expend less to pay off its foreign debt, leaving more for infrastructure improvements.
By all accounts, this improvement in the economy is owed chiefly to the $15-B in annual remittances that more than two million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) send back to their families in the Philippines. But what is the price that they have to pay for these Philippine economy-saving remittances?
While many of them have found great jobs as nurses or engineers, others are not so fortunate. Two reports about these OFWs, which appeared the past week in the mainstream media in the US, provide us with a glimpse of their lives and the human costs of their remittances.
The first report originally appeared on July 26 on Youtube - www.youtube.com - increasingly the source of news by CNN and other mainstream media. The video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evRPwwyno_c was of a US House hearing where an eyewitness testified about the brutal conditions that 51 Filipino workers were subjected to in Baghdad while working on the $600-M US Embassy construction there.
The witness, an American medical technician, Roy Mayberry, was hired by the First Kuwaiti Company to work as an emergency medic for its contract in Baghdad. On the first day he reported to the company in Kawait, he was brought to a room with 51 Filipinos who told him they were bound for Dubai to work in hotels there. They showed their plane tickets to him which showed Dubai as their destination.
After they boarded the plane and the pilot announced that the next stop was Baghdad, “all you know what broke loose on the plane”, Mayberry reported, as the Pinoys screamed and demanded to be flown to Dubai. They returned to their seats only after security officials pointed their MP-5 submachine guns at the men and ordered them to do so.
"I believe these men were kidnapped by the First Kuwaiti Company to work on the US Embassy in Baghdad," Mayberry told the congressional committee. These men could do nothing, he said, but accept their fate. Their passports had been taken away from them in Kuwait. Their fate was to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, with only short breaks in between. They could complain only on pain of being verbally and physically abused, or fined with huge wage deductions.
“They had no IDs, no passports, and were being smuggled past US security forces,” Maybery said. He also testified that while he had his own trailer at the construction site, the Filipinos were packed 20 to 30 people in one trailer.
“Everyday, they went out to work without proper safety equipment. I went to the construction site to watch. There were a lot of injuries out there because of conditions these men were forced to work in,” he said. They were working “without shoes, without gloves, no safety harnesses.”
He said he often saw the Filipino workers with their toes wrapped around scaffoldings “like a bunch of birds…One guy was up there intoxicated with pain killers and I had to yell and scream for 10 minutes until they got him down,” he said.
This wholesale kidnapping of Filipinos occurred a year ago but was only revealed to the world during the July 26 US congressional hearing. When confronted about this disclosure, a First Kuwaiti Company spokesman denied that it had any Filipino employees.
The second report on Filipinos came on August 8 when Dateline NBC devoted a full hour on prime time to the dramatic rescue of Lannie Ejercito, a 22-year old Filipina “sex slave” in Malaysia http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20185681. NBC Dateline host Ann Curry reported that the girl, “just one among hundreds of thousands of girls who are poor, helpless and naïve, preyed on by human traffickers” had one thing going for her. She had an aunt, Ravina, who is married to “Troop” Edmonds, a retired former US Marine officer living in Oregon.
On October 5, 2006, they receive a panicked call from overseas. “Get me out of here” was her anguished plea. The call came from Ravina’s niece, Lannie, whom they had financed her through nursing school. When she failed the national nursing exam, Lannie pursued a career as a hotel singer and was eventually contracted to sing in Malaysia.
But when she arrived in Malaysia, she learned that singing was not on the mind of her employer, who confiscated her passport and forced her to sign an 8-year contract that required her to work until she paid back the $80,000 which her employer said he had paid for her. It would be work not as a singer but as a prostitute.
Ravina told her husband to go to Malaysia to rescue Lannie and not come back without her. With that assignment, Troop recruited Jerry Howe, a buddy who was a retired FBI agent and they, together with a Dateline NBC film crew flew to Lannie’s hometown of Cebu to obtain clues on Lannie’s whereabouts.
After interviewing a Pinay who had recruited Lannie, the Americans and the TV crew went to Kuala Lumpur. With clever sleuthing and the reluctant aid of the local police, they managed to safely rescue Lannie.
There were 15 other Filipino “sex slaves” similarly living in “debt bondage” with her in an apartment, Lannie told them, but the Americans decided that it would be too risky to stay in Malaysia and attempt to rescue them as well. They quickly departed Malaysia and safely returned Lannie to her parents in Cebu.
Dateline NBC reporter Chris Hanson also reported on the side story of “Ann,” a Filipina who was a virgin when she was sold into “debt bondage” in Malaysia. Her virginity was sold for $80, she said, and she was forced to work as a prostitute until she managed to contact the Philippine Embassy which rescued her. By then, she said, she had contracted AIDS and was of no use to her employer.
At the end of the Dateline NBC program, my tears flowed freely just as they did when I watched Mayberry’s report about the Filipinos in Baghdad. Is the price of huge remittances from overseas Filipino workers worth all the pain and suffering many have to endure?
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
By Rodel Rodis, INQUIRER.net
Last updated 01:15pm (Mla time) 08/14/2007
While balikbayan visitors from the US may complain that they’re buying less with their dollar than they used to because the peso has improved from 53 to 1 to 45 to 1, it’s an accomplishment of the current Philippine government that the strong peso requires it to expend less to pay off its foreign debt, leaving more for infrastructure improvements.
By all accounts, this improvement in the economy is owed chiefly to the $15-B in annual remittances that more than two million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) send back to their families in the Philippines. But what is the price that they have to pay for these Philippine economy-saving remittances?
While many of them have found great jobs as nurses or engineers, others are not so fortunate. Two reports about these OFWs, which appeared the past week in the mainstream media in the US, provide us with a glimpse of their lives and the human costs of their remittances.
The first report originally appeared on July 26 on Youtube - www.youtube.com - increasingly the source of news by CNN and other mainstream media. The video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evRPwwyno_c was of a US House hearing where an eyewitness testified about the brutal conditions that 51 Filipino workers were subjected to in Baghdad while working on the $600-M US Embassy construction there.
The witness, an American medical technician, Roy Mayberry, was hired by the First Kuwaiti Company to work as an emergency medic for its contract in Baghdad. On the first day he reported to the company in Kawait, he was brought to a room with 51 Filipinos who told him they were bound for Dubai to work in hotels there. They showed their plane tickets to him which showed Dubai as their destination.
After they boarded the plane and the pilot announced that the next stop was Baghdad, “all you know what broke loose on the plane”, Mayberry reported, as the Pinoys screamed and demanded to be flown to Dubai. They returned to their seats only after security officials pointed their MP-5 submachine guns at the men and ordered them to do so.
"I believe these men were kidnapped by the First Kuwaiti Company to work on the US Embassy in Baghdad," Mayberry told the congressional committee. These men could do nothing, he said, but accept their fate. Their passports had been taken away from them in Kuwait. Their fate was to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, with only short breaks in between. They could complain only on pain of being verbally and physically abused, or fined with huge wage deductions.
“They had no IDs, no passports, and were being smuggled past US security forces,” Maybery said. He also testified that while he had his own trailer at the construction site, the Filipinos were packed 20 to 30 people in one trailer.
“Everyday, they went out to work without proper safety equipment. I went to the construction site to watch. There were a lot of injuries out there because of conditions these men were forced to work in,” he said. They were working “without shoes, without gloves, no safety harnesses.”
He said he often saw the Filipino workers with their toes wrapped around scaffoldings “like a bunch of birds…One guy was up there intoxicated with pain killers and I had to yell and scream for 10 minutes until they got him down,” he said.
This wholesale kidnapping of Filipinos occurred a year ago but was only revealed to the world during the July 26 US congressional hearing. When confronted about this disclosure, a First Kuwaiti Company spokesman denied that it had any Filipino employees.
The second report on Filipinos came on August 8 when Dateline NBC devoted a full hour on prime time to the dramatic rescue of Lannie Ejercito, a 22-year old Filipina “sex slave” in Malaysia http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20185681. NBC Dateline host Ann Curry reported that the girl, “just one among hundreds of thousands of girls who are poor, helpless and naïve, preyed on by human traffickers” had one thing going for her. She had an aunt, Ravina, who is married to “Troop” Edmonds, a retired former US Marine officer living in Oregon.
On October 5, 2006, they receive a panicked call from overseas. “Get me out of here” was her anguished plea. The call came from Ravina’s niece, Lannie, whom they had financed her through nursing school. When she failed the national nursing exam, Lannie pursued a career as a hotel singer and was eventually contracted to sing in Malaysia.
But when she arrived in Malaysia, she learned that singing was not on the mind of her employer, who confiscated her passport and forced her to sign an 8-year contract that required her to work until she paid back the $80,000 which her employer said he had paid for her. It would be work not as a singer but as a prostitute.
Ravina told her husband to go to Malaysia to rescue Lannie and not come back without her. With that assignment, Troop recruited Jerry Howe, a buddy who was a retired FBI agent and they, together with a Dateline NBC film crew flew to Lannie’s hometown of Cebu to obtain clues on Lannie’s whereabouts.
After interviewing a Pinay who had recruited Lannie, the Americans and the TV crew went to Kuala Lumpur. With clever sleuthing and the reluctant aid of the local police, they managed to safely rescue Lannie.
There were 15 other Filipino “sex slaves” similarly living in “debt bondage” with her in an apartment, Lannie told them, but the Americans decided that it would be too risky to stay in Malaysia and attempt to rescue them as well. They quickly departed Malaysia and safely returned Lannie to her parents in Cebu.
Dateline NBC reporter Chris Hanson also reported on the side story of “Ann,” a Filipina who was a virgin when she was sold into “debt bondage” in Malaysia. Her virginity was sold for $80, she said, and she was forced to work as a prostitute until she managed to contact the Philippine Embassy which rescued her. By then, she said, she had contracted AIDS and was of no use to her employer.
At the end of the Dateline NBC program, my tears flowed freely just as they did when I watched Mayberry’s report about the Filipinos in Baghdad. Is the price of huge remittances from overseas Filipino workers worth all the pain and suffering many have to endure?
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
Ramil's Ordeal
Ramil's Ordeal
Rodel Rodis, INQUIRER.net January 09, 2007
In a press conference in Manila on August 4, Vice President Noli De Castro announced that there were only 11 Filipinos who worked at the US Embassy in Baghdad, not 51 as reported by John Owens and Roy J. Mayberry, two former employees of the Kuwaiti firm, in sworn testimonies at a US congressional committee last July 26.
Vice President De Castro, the chief presidential adviser on overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), apparently learned this from reading the full-page ads that First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Company ran in five leading newspapers. The ads staunchly denied the allegations of Owens and Mayberry that First Kuwaiti had kidnapped 51 Filipino workers and forced them to work under inhumane working conditions on their $592-M US Embassy project in Baghdad. First Kuwaiti claimed that the Filipino workers “willingly agreed to work in Iraq before their departure and before they arrived at the site of the embassy.”
Perhaps the Vice President should be forgiven his gullibility because his previous job in the private sector, as a TV anchorman ("Magandang Gabi, Bayan"), consisted of reading the nightly news on the teleprompter, not investigating the truth behind the news reports he read on air.
Perhaps he should have spoken with Ricardo Endaya, Philippine Ambassador to Kuwait, who had recommended to the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs as early as March 2006 that First Kuwaiti be put on a watch list for violations of the government ban on the deployment of Filipinos to Iraq. “Way back in 2004 when I was Charge d’Affaires in Baghdad, I investigated complaints of OFWs against First Kuwaiti for violation of employment contracts involving salary, overtime pay and accommodations,” Endaya said.
But the Vice President need not have even gone all the way to the Middle East; he could have just watched the new documentary "Someone Else's War" currently circulating in the Philippines and at US film festivals. The film features the true story of Ramil Autencio, a Filipino who worked for First Kuwaiti in Iraq.
Ramil’s ordeal was relayed to me by David Phinney, a journalist and broadcaster based in Washington, DC, whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and on ABC and PBS. Phinney read my column last week (“What Price of Remittances?”) and contacted me to inform me about Ramil, whom he had interviewed for a story he wrote in October, 2005.
"The promise to build a better life in the Philippines for himself and his young family took Ramil Autencio to Kuwait. He never suspected that a month after leaving home in December 2003, he would be living a wartime nightmare in northern Iraq, pushing boulders 11 hours a day, seven days a week for a contractor fortifying a US military camp in Tikrit,” Phinney wrote.
"Showers to wash off the day’s sweat were an uncertainty, and in the chilly January and February nights of 2004, he and seven other Filipinos would live in an empty truck with no windows, sleep on cardboard boxes for a bed, and eat leftovers and meals-ready-to-eat from soldiers. It was the only way to have enough food. He says crackling gunfire and crashing incoming mortar would wake him at all hours of the night and the unfortified trailer would tremble and shake from nearby rocket blasts.”
This was not what he had bargained for, Ramil told Phinney. An air conditioning repairman and technician, he had signed a two-year contract to work at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Kuwait for $450 a month. But when he arrived at the Kuwait airport, Ramil was quickly hustled over to a rundown apartment building managed by First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting, a Kuwaiti firm doing a booming multimillion-dollar business with the US military and the Pentagon’s primary support contractor, Halliburton.
To date, Phinney reports, First Kuwaiti has already billed the US government $2 billion for its work in Iraq, including the $592-million US Embassy in Baghdad now nearing completion.
Ramil was informed that there were no more jobs at the hotel in Kuwait and because his recruiter had processed only a one-month travel visa for him, he could not work in Kuwait. He had three options: pay a $1,000 penalty and work in Kuwait for free for six months, be arrested and jailed, or work in Iraq. As he pondered these choices, Ramil lived in an apartment building in Kuwait, without mattresses or blankets, with 800 other Filipinos. They would eat only chicken and rice under the building’s crumbling ceilings. One Filipino worker lost his mind and died in the building, Ramil recalled.
“A jail would be better,” Ramil told Phinney. “The building was so crowded, you could barely breathe.” Finally, one day, a supervisor presented him with some papers for him to sign. “I don’t read Arabic or English, but it was that, or jail,” Ramil signed and, together with other Filipinos, were then brought to a bus bound for Tikrit in Iraq.
Upon arrival in Tikrit, Ramil and the other Filipinos were forced to work 11 hour days, 7 days a week but were not paid as they were told the money would be waiting for them in Kuwait. As months passed and the conditions became increasingly unbearable for him and the Filipinos working with him, Ramil decided to find some way to escape from Tikrit.
He passed out a crumpled yellow piece of paper to his fellow Filipinos, asking them to join his escape back to Kuwait. About 40 Filipinos signed up. He then got a sympathetic Filipino soldier in the US Army to convince the driver of a flatbed truck headed south towards the Kuwaiti border to give them a ride. For three nights they rode in darkness, packed tight in an empty transport container with very little food or water. “We were nearly starved,” Ramil told Phinney.
Phinney reported: When they arrived at the border, the sheer number of desperate Filipinos arriving without papers stunned the Kuwaiti police. “We were even angrier then because one of us had died so there was nothing they could do to stop us,” Ramil recounted. “We pushed them away when they asked for our papers.... We outnumbered them.”
The group somehow made their way to the Philippine Embassy, where the ambassador provided them with shelter until their return home could be arranged.
Ramil received only $300 for his entire three-month ordeal. He now lives in a shanty in Manila about a mile from the place where Vice President De Castro held his press conference. The Veep doesn't need to walk a mile on a camel to talk to Ramil himself.
Send responses to: Rodel50@aol.com
Rodel Rodis, INQUIRER.net January 09, 2007
In a press conference in Manila on August 4, Vice President Noli De Castro announced that there were only 11 Filipinos who worked at the US Embassy in Baghdad, not 51 as reported by John Owens and Roy J. Mayberry, two former employees of the Kuwaiti firm, in sworn testimonies at a US congressional committee last July 26.
Vice President De Castro, the chief presidential adviser on overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), apparently learned this from reading the full-page ads that First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Company ran in five leading newspapers. The ads staunchly denied the allegations of Owens and Mayberry that First Kuwaiti had kidnapped 51 Filipino workers and forced them to work under inhumane working conditions on their $592-M US Embassy project in Baghdad. First Kuwaiti claimed that the Filipino workers “willingly agreed to work in Iraq before their departure and before they arrived at the site of the embassy.”
Perhaps the Vice President should be forgiven his gullibility because his previous job in the private sector, as a TV anchorman ("Magandang Gabi, Bayan"), consisted of reading the nightly news on the teleprompter, not investigating the truth behind the news reports he read on air.
Perhaps he should have spoken with Ricardo Endaya, Philippine Ambassador to Kuwait, who had recommended to the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs as early as March 2006 that First Kuwaiti be put on a watch list for violations of the government ban on the deployment of Filipinos to Iraq. “Way back in 2004 when I was Charge d’Affaires in Baghdad, I investigated complaints of OFWs against First Kuwaiti for violation of employment contracts involving salary, overtime pay and accommodations,” Endaya said.
But the Vice President need not have even gone all the way to the Middle East; he could have just watched the new documentary "Someone Else's War" currently circulating in the Philippines and at US film festivals. The film features the true story of Ramil Autencio, a Filipino who worked for First Kuwaiti in Iraq.
Ramil’s ordeal was relayed to me by David Phinney, a journalist and broadcaster based in Washington, DC, whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and on ABC and PBS. Phinney read my column last week (“What Price of Remittances?”) and contacted me to inform me about Ramil, whom he had interviewed for a story he wrote in October, 2005.
"The promise to build a better life in the Philippines for himself and his young family took Ramil Autencio to Kuwait. He never suspected that a month after leaving home in December 2003, he would be living a wartime nightmare in northern Iraq, pushing boulders 11 hours a day, seven days a week for a contractor fortifying a US military camp in Tikrit,” Phinney wrote.
"Showers to wash off the day’s sweat were an uncertainty, and in the chilly January and February nights of 2004, he and seven other Filipinos would live in an empty truck with no windows, sleep on cardboard boxes for a bed, and eat leftovers and meals-ready-to-eat from soldiers. It was the only way to have enough food. He says crackling gunfire and crashing incoming mortar would wake him at all hours of the night and the unfortified trailer would tremble and shake from nearby rocket blasts.”
This was not what he had bargained for, Ramil told Phinney. An air conditioning repairman and technician, he had signed a two-year contract to work at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Kuwait for $450 a month. But when he arrived at the Kuwait airport, Ramil was quickly hustled over to a rundown apartment building managed by First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting, a Kuwaiti firm doing a booming multimillion-dollar business with the US military and the Pentagon’s primary support contractor, Halliburton.
To date, Phinney reports, First Kuwaiti has already billed the US government $2 billion for its work in Iraq, including the $592-million US Embassy in Baghdad now nearing completion.
Ramil was informed that there were no more jobs at the hotel in Kuwait and because his recruiter had processed only a one-month travel visa for him, he could not work in Kuwait. He had three options: pay a $1,000 penalty and work in Kuwait for free for six months, be arrested and jailed, or work in Iraq. As he pondered these choices, Ramil lived in an apartment building in Kuwait, without mattresses or blankets, with 800 other Filipinos. They would eat only chicken and rice under the building’s crumbling ceilings. One Filipino worker lost his mind and died in the building, Ramil recalled.
“A jail would be better,” Ramil told Phinney. “The building was so crowded, you could barely breathe.” Finally, one day, a supervisor presented him with some papers for him to sign. “I don’t read Arabic or English, but it was that, or jail,” Ramil signed and, together with other Filipinos, were then brought to a bus bound for Tikrit in Iraq.
Upon arrival in Tikrit, Ramil and the other Filipinos were forced to work 11 hour days, 7 days a week but were not paid as they were told the money would be waiting for them in Kuwait. As months passed and the conditions became increasingly unbearable for him and the Filipinos working with him, Ramil decided to find some way to escape from Tikrit.
He passed out a crumpled yellow piece of paper to his fellow Filipinos, asking them to join his escape back to Kuwait. About 40 Filipinos signed up. He then got a sympathetic Filipino soldier in the US Army to convince the driver of a flatbed truck headed south towards the Kuwaiti border to give them a ride. For three nights they rode in darkness, packed tight in an empty transport container with very little food or water. “We were nearly starved,” Ramil told Phinney.
Phinney reported: When they arrived at the border, the sheer number of desperate Filipinos arriving without papers stunned the Kuwaiti police. “We were even angrier then because one of us had died so there was nothing they could do to stop us,” Ramil recounted. “We pushed them away when they asked for our papers.... We outnumbered them.”
The group somehow made their way to the Philippine Embassy, where the ambassador provided them with shelter until their return home could be arranged.
Ramil received only $300 for his entire three-month ordeal. He now lives in a shanty in Manila about a mile from the place where Vice President De Castro held his press conference. The Veep doesn't need to walk a mile on a camel to talk to Ramil himself.
Send responses to: Rodel50@aol.com
The Most Hated Pinay
The Most Hated Pinay
By Rodel Rodis, INQUIRER.net
Posted date: August 27, 2007
At least as far as millions of overseas Filipino workers and their families are concerned, the "Most Hated Pinay" Award goes not to Imelda Marcos or Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo but to Manila society columnist Malu Fernandez.
This dubious honor was attained by Ms. Fernandez with just one article which appeared in her regular Manila Daily Standard (“Fierce and Fabulous”) column which dealt mainly with the hedonistic lifestyles of the Philippine rich and famous. In that piece, “From Boracay to Greece,” which was also featured in the June 2007 issue of People Asia magazine, Fernandez wrote of her travel to Boracay and of her spur of the moment decision while there to spend her Holy Week vacation in Greece.
Fernandez is apparently accustomed to riding in first class or business class but on her flight to Greece, however, she decided to “bravely” fly in economy class. This is how she recounts her trip: “To save on my ticket, I bravely took an economy class seat on Emirates as recommended by my travel agent……However I forgot that the hub was in Dubai and the majority of the OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) were stationed there. The duty-fee shop was overrun with Filipino workers selling cell phones and perfume.
“Meanwhile, I wanted to slash my wrist at the thought of being trapped in a plane with all of them. While I was on the plane (where the seats were so small I had bruises on my legs), my only consolation was the entertainment on the small flat screen in front of me. But it was busted, so I heaved a sigh, popped my sleeping pills and dozed off to the sounds of gum chewing and endless yelling of “HOY! Kumusta ka na? At taga saan ka? Domestic helper ka rin ba?” (“Hey there! How are you? Where are you from? Are you also a domestic helper?) I thought I had died and God had sent me to my very own private hell.”
After a nine-hour flight, Fernandez landed in Greece and quickly “washed the plane off” her as the “Louis Vuittons” under her eyes, she wrote, were “enormous.” Despite the cold, she “bravely went about in a lightweight sweater and a throw.” ("Bravely" is apparently her favorite description of how she does things.)
“On my way back, I had to bravely take the economy flight once more. This time I had already resigned myself to being trapped like a sardine in a sardine can with all these OFWs smelling of AXE and Charlie cologne while Jo Malone evaporated into thin air.”
From Meryl Streep, we learned that the Devil wears Prada. From Malu Fernandez, we know she also wears Jo Malone perfume, which sells for $100 per 100 ml bottle (approximately 5000 pesos), unlike the cheaper Axe and Charlie colognes some OFWs prefer.
As soon as Fernandez’ article was published, word about her condescending depiction of OFWs quickly spread through the Internet to the blogosphere of OFW communities throughout the world, especially to the 1.5 million Filipinos in the Middle East. Through various OFW blogs, hundreds of Filipinos expressed their personal anger at the person they called the “mahaderang matapobre” (a meddlesome person who contemptuously looks down on the poor). [Google the words.]
Francis Sangalang wrote from Dubai: “We are already having a hard time here working under the hot climate then we get a strong below the belt blow by our own kabayan who has totally no idea on being an OFW.” Ingrid Holm, from England, chimed in: “You wrote that you wanted to slit your wrists because you were stuck in coach with all the OFWs. I am moved every time I am on a flight with OFWs. I am reminded of their resilience. Of how hard they work, and how they keep the Philippines going. The economy relies on their bravery. You should have slit your wrists, hon. And you are going to hell if you don’t change the way you think. Think of sitting in coach, imagining your personal hell as a personal foreshadowing.”
The vitriol fueled by her article, which she personally thought was a product of her “acerbic wit”, did not cause Malu Fernandez to back down one bit. Instead she responded by throwing gasoline to the fire: “The bottom line was just that I had offended the reader’s socioeconomic background. If any of these people actually read anything thicker then a magazine they would find it very funny. Most people don’t get the fact that they need bitches like me to shake up their world; otherwise their lives would be boring and mediocre. I obviously write for a certain target audience and if what I write offends you, just stop reading.”
So the lower class OFWs can’t read anything thicker than a magazine, huh? And they should be grateful for self-proclaimed “bitches” like her for making their “boring and mediocre” lives exciting? If there were hundreds of Filipinos denouncing the “mahaderang matapobre” in various blogs and print publications before, her rejoinder caused thousands more to vent their spleen at her utter contempt for the poor. In his blog, Loi Reyes Landicho compiled a list of things for OFWs to tell Malu Fernandez when they see her. On the top of the list was this: “In case you die, we’d like to attend your funeral. However, we’ll probably just go to work that day. You know… business before pleasure.”
The “deeply personal insults” and “death threats” she received eventually caused her to resign from the Manila Daily Standard and People Asia. In her statement which she released in her website, Fernandez wrote: “To say that this article was not meant to malign, hurt or express prejudice against the OFWs now sounds hollow after reading through all the blogs from Filipinos all over the world. I am deeply apologetic for my insensitivity and the offensive manner in which this article was written, I hear you all and I am properly rebuked. It was truly not my intention to malign, hurt or express prejudice against OFWs.”
Even as she "bravely" travels around the world regularly, what Malu Fernandez failed to realize is how much the world she travels in has changed. Twenty years ago she could have written about the “que horror!” of being surrounded by OFWs and gotten away with it. Not anymore. The Internet and the blogosphere it produced, coupled with the economic power of their remittances, have empowered the OFWs and leveled the playing field. It’s not safe to be a “matapobre” now.
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
By Rodel Rodis, INQUIRER.net
Posted date: August 27, 2007
At least as far as millions of overseas Filipino workers and their families are concerned, the "Most Hated Pinay" Award goes not to Imelda Marcos or Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo but to Manila society columnist Malu Fernandez.
This dubious honor was attained by Ms. Fernandez with just one article which appeared in her regular Manila Daily Standard (“Fierce and Fabulous”) column which dealt mainly with the hedonistic lifestyles of the Philippine rich and famous. In that piece, “From Boracay to Greece,” which was also featured in the June 2007 issue of People Asia magazine, Fernandez wrote of her travel to Boracay and of her spur of the moment decision while there to spend her Holy Week vacation in Greece.
Fernandez is apparently accustomed to riding in first class or business class but on her flight to Greece, however, she decided to “bravely” fly in economy class. This is how she recounts her trip: “To save on my ticket, I bravely took an economy class seat on Emirates as recommended by my travel agent……However I forgot that the hub was in Dubai and the majority of the OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) were stationed there. The duty-fee shop was overrun with Filipino workers selling cell phones and perfume.
“Meanwhile, I wanted to slash my wrist at the thought of being trapped in a plane with all of them. While I was on the plane (where the seats were so small I had bruises on my legs), my only consolation was the entertainment on the small flat screen in front of me. But it was busted, so I heaved a sigh, popped my sleeping pills and dozed off to the sounds of gum chewing and endless yelling of “HOY! Kumusta ka na? At taga saan ka? Domestic helper ka rin ba?” (“Hey there! How are you? Where are you from? Are you also a domestic helper?) I thought I had died and God had sent me to my very own private hell.”
After a nine-hour flight, Fernandez landed in Greece and quickly “washed the plane off” her as the “Louis Vuittons” under her eyes, she wrote, were “enormous.” Despite the cold, she “bravely went about in a lightweight sweater and a throw.” ("Bravely" is apparently her favorite description of how she does things.)
“On my way back, I had to bravely take the economy flight once more. This time I had already resigned myself to being trapped like a sardine in a sardine can with all these OFWs smelling of AXE and Charlie cologne while Jo Malone evaporated into thin air.”
From Meryl Streep, we learned that the Devil wears Prada. From Malu Fernandez, we know she also wears Jo Malone perfume, which sells for $100 per 100 ml bottle (approximately 5000 pesos), unlike the cheaper Axe and Charlie colognes some OFWs prefer.
As soon as Fernandez’ article was published, word about her condescending depiction of OFWs quickly spread through the Internet to the blogosphere of OFW communities throughout the world, especially to the 1.5 million Filipinos in the Middle East. Through various OFW blogs, hundreds of Filipinos expressed their personal anger at the person they called the “mahaderang matapobre” (a meddlesome person who contemptuously looks down on the poor). [Google the words.]
Francis Sangalang wrote from Dubai: “We are already having a hard time here working under the hot climate then we get a strong below the belt blow by our own kabayan who has totally no idea on being an OFW.” Ingrid Holm, from England, chimed in: “You wrote that you wanted to slit your wrists because you were stuck in coach with all the OFWs. I am moved every time I am on a flight with OFWs. I am reminded of their resilience. Of how hard they work, and how they keep the Philippines going. The economy relies on their bravery. You should have slit your wrists, hon. And you are going to hell if you don’t change the way you think. Think of sitting in coach, imagining your personal hell as a personal foreshadowing.”
The vitriol fueled by her article, which she personally thought was a product of her “acerbic wit”, did not cause Malu Fernandez to back down one bit. Instead she responded by throwing gasoline to the fire: “The bottom line was just that I had offended the reader’s socioeconomic background. If any of these people actually read anything thicker then a magazine they would find it very funny. Most people don’t get the fact that they need bitches like me to shake up their world; otherwise their lives would be boring and mediocre. I obviously write for a certain target audience and if what I write offends you, just stop reading.”
So the lower class OFWs can’t read anything thicker than a magazine, huh? And they should be grateful for self-proclaimed “bitches” like her for making their “boring and mediocre” lives exciting? If there were hundreds of Filipinos denouncing the “mahaderang matapobre” in various blogs and print publications before, her rejoinder caused thousands more to vent their spleen at her utter contempt for the poor. In his blog, Loi Reyes Landicho compiled a list of things for OFWs to tell Malu Fernandez when they see her. On the top of the list was this: “In case you die, we’d like to attend your funeral. However, we’ll probably just go to work that day. You know… business before pleasure.”
The “deeply personal insults” and “death threats” she received eventually caused her to resign from the Manila Daily Standard and People Asia. In her statement which she released in her website, Fernandez wrote: “To say that this article was not meant to malign, hurt or express prejudice against the OFWs now sounds hollow after reading through all the blogs from Filipinos all over the world. I am deeply apologetic for my insensitivity and the offensive manner in which this article was written, I hear you all and I am properly rebuked. It was truly not my intention to malign, hurt or express prejudice against OFWs.”
Even as she "bravely" travels around the world regularly, what Malu Fernandez failed to realize is how much the world she travels in has changed. Twenty years ago she could have written about the “que horror!” of being surrounded by OFWs and gotten away with it. Not anymore. The Internet and the blogosphere it produced, coupled with the economic power of their remittances, have empowered the OFWs and leveled the playing field. It’s not safe to be a “matapobre” now.
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
Behind My Walgreens Arrest
GLOBAL NETWORKING
Behind My Walgreens Arrest
By Rodel Rodis
There has hardly been a week in the past 4 1/2 years when I have not been asked about the time I was arrested by San Francisco police officers for passing what they thought was a counterfeit $100 bill at a Walgreens pharmacy near my home.
News of my arrest was widely reported in the local TV news and appeared on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle Metro section, with a photo of me holding the $100 bill. That 2003 Chronicle photo was used again last week on August 29 to accompany the San Francisco Chronicle news report, "Man Arrested in '03 Bogus Cash Case Can Sue Police."
The article referred to the “for publication” decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on August 28, 2007, rejecting the San Francisco police officers’ defense of qualified immunity because, according to the 2-1 decision, they had no “probable cause” to arrest me.
Among the factors the Court cited as having “significantly decreased” the probability that I would knowingly use a fake bill was the fact that Police Sergeant Jeff Barry, the first officer to arrive at the scene, had known me for several years: “He knew Rodis was a member of the Community College Board, and he had interacted with Rodis personally, encountering him at activities associated with the elementary school that both Barry’s and Rodis’s children attended.”
Because Sgt. Barry knew me, the Court reasoned, I should not have been arrested. In truth, it was precisely because he knew me that I was arrested.
The story behind the story began in 1995 when my oldest son Carlo was selected to be a member of the St. Stephen’s Elementary School basketball team. He practiced basketball everyday to improve his ball-handling and shooting skills as he eagerly awaited the intramural tournament. But Carlo never got a chance to play because his coach played only the best 5 or 6 players on the team and Carlo wasn’t one of them.
After several games watching Carlo suffer in frustration on the bench, I went to see the principal, Sister Paulina, to complain. “This isn’t the NBA and the coach isn’t Don Nelson,” I said. The principal was sympathetic to my concerns and directed me to speak to the volunteer in charge of the boys’ athletic program, Police Sergeant Jeff Barry. I knew Sgt. Barry because his wife was a teacher at the school and their son, Sean, was my son’s classmate.
Sgt. Barry listened quietly about my concerns; I told him about how my son’s self-confidence and self-esteem had eroded because of his coach’s actions. Instead of responding to my concerns, however, he questioned me about a policy of the San Francisco Community College Board where he knew I was a
member. His brother-in -law is a member of the SF Community College police force, he said. “Why won’t you guys allow your police force to carry guns on campus?” he demanded to know.
I told him that the issue was decided before I came on the board and hadn’t been brought up since then. Sgt. Barry became quite agitated as he accused me endangering his brother-in-law’s life with our no-guns policy. He made it crystal clear to me that he would never vote for me until the policy was changed. I told him that I was sorry he felt that way.
When the school year ended, my wife and I pulled our boys out of that Catholic school and enrolled them in a public elementary school near our home.
On February 12, 2003, I went to the Walgreens pharmacy near my office to purchase items totaling about $42.62. When I handed the young cashier my $100 bill, she applied a counterfeit detector pen which showed that it was genuine.
Unconvinced, she called the manager, who examined the bill and applied the detector pen again. When it showed the same result, he left with my bill. I followed him to his office and waited for him. When he came out, he said it was counterfeit.
As we discussed his suspicion, I noticed that police officers had entered the store. A female police officer named Michelle Liddicoet approached me and inquired if I was the one who had used the counterfeit bill. I asked her how she was sure it was counterfeit. She said it was obvious from how it looked. She then asked me for my driver's license and I told her I was an attorney, with my law office a block away, and that I was an elected official of the city, facts to impress upon her that I would not be the kind to knowingly use a counterfeit bill.
"I know who you are. You should be ashamed of yourself," she said. The next words to come from her mouth were: "Put your hands behind your back." After Officer Liddicoet handcuffed me and placed me in the back of the police car, she sat in the front seat, directly in front of me. Before her partner could start the car, however, another officer went over to Officer Liddicoet and said, “Under the circumstances, I would appreciate it if you didn’t include my name in the police report.” Officer Liddicoet said "Yes, Sarge".
I did not recognize him so I wondered who he was and what circumstances he was talking about. I was then transported to the Taraval police station for further investigation. The handcuffs behind my back were removed but I was placed in a holding area with my left wrist handcuffed to a rail. I asked to call my wife but this request was disallowed. I could do it later after I was booked downtown, an officer told me.
After a US Secret Service officer had determined that my bill was genuine, I was released, I obtained a copy of the police report. Because it was not written by Liddicoet, it included the name of the "Sarge" who spoke with her: Sgt. Jeff Barry.
My arrest was the most humiliating and degrading experience of my life. Because an injustice was committed against me, I hired my friend, Larry Fasano, to file suit against Walgreens, the City, the SFPD and police officers Barry and Liddicoet.
Walgreens subsequently fired the white manager who called the police and replaced him with a Filipino, the first time in a San Francisco Walgreens store.
Although my suit against the City and the SFPD was dismissed, the SFPD did formally adopt a policy that officers will no longer arrest anyone for merely possessing or using a counterfeit bill unless there was some evidence that the suspect had knowledge that the bill was fake.
One month before my suit against Barry and Liddicoet could proceed to trial in April of 2004, however, they appealed the court’s denial of their motion to dismiss based on their “qualified immunity” defense. In its ruling last week, the Ninth Circuit declared: “Given all of the circumstances surrounding Rodis’s arrest, no prudent person could have concluded reasonably that there was a fair probability Rodis had committed a crime. Consequently, Defendants are not entitled to qualified immunity.”
Police officers do not have the power to strip anyone of their individual constitutional rights without probable cause and for personal reasons.
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
Behind My Walgreens Arrest
By Rodel Rodis
There has hardly been a week in the past 4 1/2 years when I have not been asked about the time I was arrested by San Francisco police officers for passing what they thought was a counterfeit $100 bill at a Walgreens pharmacy near my home.
News of my arrest was widely reported in the local TV news and appeared on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle Metro section, with a photo of me holding the $100 bill. That 2003 Chronicle photo was used again last week on August 29 to accompany the San Francisco Chronicle news report, "Man Arrested in '03 Bogus Cash Case Can Sue Police."
The article referred to the “for publication” decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on August 28, 2007, rejecting the San Francisco police officers’ defense of qualified immunity because, according to the 2-1 decision, they had no “probable cause” to arrest me.
Among the factors the Court cited as having “significantly decreased” the probability that I would knowingly use a fake bill was the fact that Police Sergeant Jeff Barry, the first officer to arrive at the scene, had known me for several years: “He knew Rodis was a member of the Community College Board, and he had interacted with Rodis personally, encountering him at activities associated with the elementary school that both Barry’s and Rodis’s children attended.”
Because Sgt. Barry knew me, the Court reasoned, I should not have been arrested. In truth, it was precisely because he knew me that I was arrested.
The story behind the story began in 1995 when my oldest son Carlo was selected to be a member of the St. Stephen’s Elementary School basketball team. He practiced basketball everyday to improve his ball-handling and shooting skills as he eagerly awaited the intramural tournament. But Carlo never got a chance to play because his coach played only the best 5 or 6 players on the team and Carlo wasn’t one of them.
After several games watching Carlo suffer in frustration on the bench, I went to see the principal, Sister Paulina, to complain. “This isn’t the NBA and the coach isn’t Don Nelson,” I said. The principal was sympathetic to my concerns and directed me to speak to the volunteer in charge of the boys’ athletic program, Police Sergeant Jeff Barry. I knew Sgt. Barry because his wife was a teacher at the school and their son, Sean, was my son’s classmate.
Sgt. Barry listened quietly about my concerns; I told him about how my son’s self-confidence and self-esteem had eroded because of his coach’s actions. Instead of responding to my concerns, however, he questioned me about a policy of the San Francisco Community College Board where he knew I was a
member. His brother-in -law is a member of the SF Community College police force, he said. “Why won’t you guys allow your police force to carry guns on campus?” he demanded to know.
I told him that the issue was decided before I came on the board and hadn’t been brought up since then. Sgt. Barry became quite agitated as he accused me endangering his brother-in-law’s life with our no-guns policy. He made it crystal clear to me that he would never vote for me until the policy was changed. I told him that I was sorry he felt that way.
When the school year ended, my wife and I pulled our boys out of that Catholic school and enrolled them in a public elementary school near our home.
On February 12, 2003, I went to the Walgreens pharmacy near my office to purchase items totaling about $42.62. When I handed the young cashier my $100 bill, she applied a counterfeit detector pen which showed that it was genuine.
Unconvinced, she called the manager, who examined the bill and applied the detector pen again. When it showed the same result, he left with my bill. I followed him to his office and waited for him. When he came out, he said it was counterfeit.
As we discussed his suspicion, I noticed that police officers had entered the store. A female police officer named Michelle Liddicoet approached me and inquired if I was the one who had used the counterfeit bill. I asked her how she was sure it was counterfeit. She said it was obvious from how it looked. She then asked me for my driver's license and I told her I was an attorney, with my law office a block away, and that I was an elected official of the city, facts to impress upon her that I would not be the kind to knowingly use a counterfeit bill.
"I know who you are. You should be ashamed of yourself," she said. The next words to come from her mouth were: "Put your hands behind your back." After Officer Liddicoet handcuffed me and placed me in the back of the police car, she sat in the front seat, directly in front of me. Before her partner could start the car, however, another officer went over to Officer Liddicoet and said, “Under the circumstances, I would appreciate it if you didn’t include my name in the police report.” Officer Liddicoet said "Yes, Sarge".
I did not recognize him so I wondered who he was and what circumstances he was talking about. I was then transported to the Taraval police station for further investigation. The handcuffs behind my back were removed but I was placed in a holding area with my left wrist handcuffed to a rail. I asked to call my wife but this request was disallowed. I could do it later after I was booked downtown, an officer told me.
After a US Secret Service officer had determined that my bill was genuine, I was released, I obtained a copy of the police report. Because it was not written by Liddicoet, it included the name of the "Sarge" who spoke with her: Sgt. Jeff Barry.
My arrest was the most humiliating and degrading experience of my life. Because an injustice was committed against me, I hired my friend, Larry Fasano, to file suit against Walgreens, the City, the SFPD and police officers Barry and Liddicoet.
Walgreens subsequently fired the white manager who called the police and replaced him with a Filipino, the first time in a San Francisco Walgreens store.
Although my suit against the City and the SFPD was dismissed, the SFPD did formally adopt a policy that officers will no longer arrest anyone for merely possessing or using a counterfeit bill unless there was some evidence that the suspect had knowledge that the bill was fake.
One month before my suit against Barry and Liddicoet could proceed to trial in April of 2004, however, they appealed the court’s denial of their motion to dismiss based on their “qualified immunity” defense. In its ruling last week, the Ninth Circuit declared: “Given all of the circumstances surrounding Rodis’s arrest, no prudent person could have concluded reasonably that there was a fair probability Rodis had committed a crime. Consequently, Defendants are not entitled to qualified immunity.”
Police officers do not have the power to strip anyone of their individual constitutional rights without probable cause and for personal reasons.
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
Tears for Estrada?
GLOBAL NETWORKING
Tears for Estrada?
By Rodel Rodis
On the day the Estrada verdict was announced last week, a client who needed help in his claim for social security benefits in the Philippines professed sympathy for the former president, expressing his hope that he would be shown mercy because he had “suffered enough.”
Like most people, my client had not read the 212 page decision of the Philippine Anti-Graft Court (Sandigan Bayan) finding former president Joseph “Erap” Estrada guilty of plunder. If he had read the complete decision, he would have discovered the connection between his problems with the SSS and the plunder verdict. (For the transcripts, log on to http://www.manilamail.com).
It took six years for the Sandigan court to try the Estrada case, most of it due to delays caused by Estrada himself. At one point, he fired all his attorneys so that a mistrial could occur. But after the court provided him with new attorneys, whom he rejected, Estrada retained new counsel and proceeded with the case. His strategy then was to delay it until his closest personal friend, Fernando Poe, Jr. (FPJ), whom he personally coaxed into running, could win the presidency in the May 2004 elections and dismiss all the charges against him.
But when FPJ lost, Estrada had no choice but to proceed with the trial, with a strategy directed towards destroying the credibility of the court and depicting the trial as "politically motivated" to justify his removal from office. Very little was done by his lawyers to debunk the voluminous evidence presented in court.
Dozens of witnesses described how Estrada collected billions of Philippine pesos in "jueteng" protection money which, witnesses testified, they regularly delivered in cash to his Polk Street mansion in San Juan in Metro Manila. It was like a mob scene from "The Sopranos." Credible witnesses also testified that when Estrada was president, he directed his appointees in the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) and the Social Security System (SSS) to purchase a combined total of 681,733,000 shares of stock of the Belle Corporation worth P1,847,578,057.50 ($40-M).
Carlos Arellano testified that he was a childhood friend of Estrada who appointed him chairman and president of the SSS in 1998. On October 6, 1999, he received a call from Pres. Estrada instructing him to buy Belle Corporation stock. He said he hesitated to do so because the SSS had an investment committee which selected the stocks to invest in for the millions of Filipinos who had contributed to it. However, after further prodding from Estrada, Arellano purchased P900-M (pesos) in Belle stocks on October 21, 1999, just 15 days after he was directed to do so.
Federico Pascual testified that he was the president of the GSIS in 1999, appointed by Estrada, when he was instructed to purchase Belle shares. He hesitated to do the president’s bidding, he said, because the Belle Corporation was involved in jai-alai and gambling and had a “speculative flavor”. But after receiving another call from Estrada on October 9, 1999, he went ahead and authorized the purchase by GSIS of P1.1-B (pesos) in Belle stock.
A close crony of Estrada, Jaime Dichaves, facilitated the transaction. Belle Corporation executives testified that they issued a cashier’s check to Dichaves in the amount of P189-M (International Exchange Bank Check No. 6000159271 dated November 5, 1999) as his 10% commission for securing the purchase by SSS and GSIS of close to P2-B (pesos) in Belle stocks.
Bank executives then testified that Dichaves deposited the check into his account and issued a check in the same amount, which he then deposited in to the Equitable Bank account of “Jose Velarde.” Dichaves deposited an additional amount of P74-M (pesos) into the same account.
Clarissa Ocampo, an Equitable Bank manager, testified that she personally witnessed Estrada sign his name as “Jose Velarde” in withdrawing funds from the Equitable Bank, an allegation that was openly admitted by Estrada himself. Bank executives testified that other bank accounts in the same bank were in the names of Jose Velarde and Loi Ejercito (Estrada’s legal wife).
Bank executives also testified that it was from this same Jose Velarde account that Estrada purchased the “Boracay Mansion” near Wack-Wack Golf Club for the use of his favored mistress, Laarni Enriquez. The man who facilitated the purchase of this mansion was Jose Luis Yulo who, because of this “housing”
experience was then appointed Estrada’s Secretary of Housing, replacing the very competent Karina Constantino-David.
The evidence was just too overwhelming and too blatant for the Sandiganbayan justices to ignore. Estrada was guilty of plunder, beyond a reasonable doubt. Estrada had so much hubris (yabang) that he did not believe he would ever have to account for his actions so he did not care who knew what he was doing.
Unfortunately for him, stupidity is not a legal defense.
When GSIS and SSS bought Belle stocks in 1999, they were priced at P3.14 a share. One year later, on December 29, 2000, their value had sunk dramatically to 60 centavos a share. Two years later, they had gone down to 40 centavos a share. Now they are virtually worthless.
My client and millions of other Filipinos who deposited hard-earned money into the SSS and GSIS may never receive the funds they are entitled to because Estrada squandered their money, for a 10% commission to buy a pricey mansion for his mistress.
While I congratulate the Sandiganbayan judges for their courage in convicting Estrada, my only regret is that Estrada was never charged for his possible role in the abduction and murders of Bubby Dacer, Emmanuel Corbito and Edgar Bentain.
According to members of his family, Bubby Dacer was last seen in Malacañang where he was summoned by Estrada to explain why he was working with his political opponents to discredit him. Shortly after that confrontation where Estrada screamed at him, Dacer and his driver, Corbito, were abducted by members of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force (PAOCTF) headed by Gen. Panfilo Lacson, tortured and executed. The PAOCTF soldiers who admitted killing Dacer and Corbito pointed to Col. Glenn Dumlao as their commanding officer.
Before he fled to the US, Col. Dumlao pointed to Col. Cezar Mancao and Col. Michael Ray Aquino as the officers who gave him the orders. Before they could point their fingers as to who directed them, Mancao and Aquino fled to the US upon instructions of Lacson. If Lacson had been fingered by Mancao and Aquino, would he have pointed the finger at Estrada?
Edgar Bentain was a casino worker at the Casino Filipino (located at the former Silahis Hotel in Manila) when he secretly released to the press the videotape of Estrada playing high-stakes poker with his crony, Atong Ang. The embarrassing videotape was then shown on TV. Shortly after his identity was
revealed, Bentain was picked up by uniformed men in front of the casino and was tortured and killed. Who gave the orders to kill Bentain?
Still feel sorry for Estrada?
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
Tears for Estrada?
By Rodel Rodis
On the day the Estrada verdict was announced last week, a client who needed help in his claim for social security benefits in the Philippines professed sympathy for the former president, expressing his hope that he would be shown mercy because he had “suffered enough.”
Like most people, my client had not read the 212 page decision of the Philippine Anti-Graft Court (Sandigan Bayan) finding former president Joseph “Erap” Estrada guilty of plunder. If he had read the complete decision, he would have discovered the connection between his problems with the SSS and the plunder verdict. (For the transcripts, log on to http://www.manilamail.com).
It took six years for the Sandigan court to try the Estrada case, most of it due to delays caused by Estrada himself. At one point, he fired all his attorneys so that a mistrial could occur. But after the court provided him with new attorneys, whom he rejected, Estrada retained new counsel and proceeded with the case. His strategy then was to delay it until his closest personal friend, Fernando Poe, Jr. (FPJ), whom he personally coaxed into running, could win the presidency in the May 2004 elections and dismiss all the charges against him.
But when FPJ lost, Estrada had no choice but to proceed with the trial, with a strategy directed towards destroying the credibility of the court and depicting the trial as "politically motivated" to justify his removal from office. Very little was done by his lawyers to debunk the voluminous evidence presented in court.
Dozens of witnesses described how Estrada collected billions of Philippine pesos in "jueteng" protection money which, witnesses testified, they regularly delivered in cash to his Polk Street mansion in San Juan in Metro Manila. It was like a mob scene from "The Sopranos." Credible witnesses also testified that when Estrada was president, he directed his appointees in the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) and the Social Security System (SSS) to purchase a combined total of 681,733,000 shares of stock of the Belle Corporation worth P1,847,578,057.50 ($40-M).
Carlos Arellano testified that he was a childhood friend of Estrada who appointed him chairman and president of the SSS in 1998. On October 6, 1999, he received a call from Pres. Estrada instructing him to buy Belle Corporation stock. He said he hesitated to do so because the SSS had an investment committee which selected the stocks to invest in for the millions of Filipinos who had contributed to it. However, after further prodding from Estrada, Arellano purchased P900-M (pesos) in Belle stocks on October 21, 1999, just 15 days after he was directed to do so.
Federico Pascual testified that he was the president of the GSIS in 1999, appointed by Estrada, when he was instructed to purchase Belle shares. He hesitated to do the president’s bidding, he said, because the Belle Corporation was involved in jai-alai and gambling and had a “speculative flavor”. But after receiving another call from Estrada on October 9, 1999, he went ahead and authorized the purchase by GSIS of P1.1-B (pesos) in Belle stock.
A close crony of Estrada, Jaime Dichaves, facilitated the transaction. Belle Corporation executives testified that they issued a cashier’s check to Dichaves in the amount of P189-M (International Exchange Bank Check No. 6000159271 dated November 5, 1999) as his 10% commission for securing the purchase by SSS and GSIS of close to P2-B (pesos) in Belle stocks.
Bank executives then testified that Dichaves deposited the check into his account and issued a check in the same amount, which he then deposited in to the Equitable Bank account of “Jose Velarde.” Dichaves deposited an additional amount of P74-M (pesos) into the same account.
Clarissa Ocampo, an Equitable Bank manager, testified that she personally witnessed Estrada sign his name as “Jose Velarde” in withdrawing funds from the Equitable Bank, an allegation that was openly admitted by Estrada himself. Bank executives testified that other bank accounts in the same bank were in the names of Jose Velarde and Loi Ejercito (Estrada’s legal wife).
Bank executives also testified that it was from this same Jose Velarde account that Estrada purchased the “Boracay Mansion” near Wack-Wack Golf Club for the use of his favored mistress, Laarni Enriquez. The man who facilitated the purchase of this mansion was Jose Luis Yulo who, because of this “housing”
experience was then appointed Estrada’s Secretary of Housing, replacing the very competent Karina Constantino-David.
The evidence was just too overwhelming and too blatant for the Sandiganbayan justices to ignore. Estrada was guilty of plunder, beyond a reasonable doubt. Estrada had so much hubris (yabang) that he did not believe he would ever have to account for his actions so he did not care who knew what he was doing.
Unfortunately for him, stupidity is not a legal defense.
When GSIS and SSS bought Belle stocks in 1999, they were priced at P3.14 a share. One year later, on December 29, 2000, their value had sunk dramatically to 60 centavos a share. Two years later, they had gone down to 40 centavos a share. Now they are virtually worthless.
My client and millions of other Filipinos who deposited hard-earned money into the SSS and GSIS may never receive the funds they are entitled to because Estrada squandered their money, for a 10% commission to buy a pricey mansion for his mistress.
While I congratulate the Sandiganbayan judges for their courage in convicting Estrada, my only regret is that Estrada was never charged for his possible role in the abduction and murders of Bubby Dacer, Emmanuel Corbito and Edgar Bentain.
According to members of his family, Bubby Dacer was last seen in Malacañang where he was summoned by Estrada to explain why he was working with his political opponents to discredit him. Shortly after that confrontation where Estrada screamed at him, Dacer and his driver, Corbito, were abducted by members of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force (PAOCTF) headed by Gen. Panfilo Lacson, tortured and executed. The PAOCTF soldiers who admitted killing Dacer and Corbito pointed to Col. Glenn Dumlao as their commanding officer.
Before he fled to the US, Col. Dumlao pointed to Col. Cezar Mancao and Col. Michael Ray Aquino as the officers who gave him the orders. Before they could point their fingers as to who directed them, Mancao and Aquino fled to the US upon instructions of Lacson. If Lacson had been fingered by Mancao and Aquino, would he have pointed the finger at Estrada?
Edgar Bentain was a casino worker at the Casino Filipino (located at the former Silahis Hotel in Manila) when he secretly released to the press the videotape of Estrada playing high-stakes poker with his crony, Atong Ang. The embarrassing videotape was then shown on TV. Shortly after his identity was
revealed, Bentain was picked up by uniformed men in front of the casino and was tortured and killed. Who gave the orders to kill Bentain?
Still feel sorry for Estrada?
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
A Sacramento tragedy
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A Sacramento tragedy
By Rodel Rodis
As a community activist dealing with the Filipino American youth for more than 30 years, Ben Menor has attended the funerals of many young Filipino Americans who died from suicide, homicide, disease or accidents. But no funeral in the past could match the emotionally-charged sight he witnessed on Wednesday, September 19, in Sacramento, California: a single coffin holding a 21-year old father and his 8-month old infant son.
It was only a few days before, on September 14, that young athletic Sean Paul Aquitania, Sr. buckled his son, Sean Jr., in a car seat and drove to visit a friend in southeast Sacramento county. When he got to the house, Sean Paul parked his car in front and left his son in the car as he would be away for only a few seconds. He walked to the door and pressed the doorbell. When the door was opened by two men, two other men quickly ran up the house and forced their way inside in what police believe was a drug-related home invasion robbery.
A scuffle occurred and Sean Paul was shot and killed by the intruders. As the killers fled the house, they saw Sean Paul’s parked car with the baby in the car seat. One of the men opened the car door and shot Sean Jr. in the head, killing him instantly with the same gun that had been used to kill his father.
Police authorities who arrived at the scene interviewed the two residents of the house who witnessed the murder of Sean Paul. They were not cooperative, the police said, as they did not provide the police with information about the gunmen other than their description as two young males, one African American wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and the other a Latino wearing a green shirt and a green Oakland A’s cap.
Before that fateful day, Sean Paul had been working at the local Cash & Carry store, but wanted a better life for his son and his fiancée, his son’s mother, 19-year old Monique De La Cruz. He was studying for his GED (a high school equivalent diploma) so that he could go to college and become a correctional officer.
Friends recalled the time when Sean Paul was 14 and his mother enrolled him in a boxing class offered by the Shotgun Boxing Crew in his Elk Grove neighborhood. According to his friend and trainer, Daniel Palpalatoc, Sean showed an early talent for boxing. When he turned 17, Sean had become proficient enough to participate in a Junior Olympic boxing tournament and win a bronze medal. “He was somebody,” Boxing Crew owner Benito Garcia said.
At a Sacramento press conference held on September 18, the mothers of Sean Sr. and Sean Jr. held back their tears as they spoke of Sean Paul’s love for and total devotion to Sean Jr. Sarah Aquitania, mother of Sean Paul, pleaded for anyone with information about the identity of the killers to call the police with the information. "Come forward. I beg you," she said. Please call the Sheriff's Department at (916) 874-5115 or Crime Alert at (916) 443-HELP. Callers can remain anonymous and may be eligible for a reward.
Monique Dela Cruz spoke of her child with tears streaking down her face. "The smile on my baby's face was so precious. To think that someone could ..." She was overwhelmed with emotion that she could not finish her sentence.
At the Wednesday night funeral service, about 300 relatives, friends and leaders of the Filipino community came to pay their respects. They could only see the face of Sean Paul Sr. who was dressed in a burgundy red shirt. They could not view the face of Sean Jr. which was covered with a baseball cap.
Friends and relatives spoke at the funeral service about the deep love between Monique and Sean Paul. Monique’s aunt, Louise De La Cruz, shared her knowledge of their close relationship:
"They were the happiest couple I know. These two never fought, never squabbled and never disrespected each other. What they did do was laugh an awful lot. They -- maturely in their young years -- had an unwavering devotion to one another and somehow knew the key to life: 'As long as we have each other, we can be happy.' And they were."
The following morning, more than 700 people attended the funeral Mass at St. Rose Catholic Church, with hundreds joining the procession to St. Mary's Cemetery for the burial. After the funeral Thursday, family members thanked everyone for their outpouring of support and repeated their plea for people to provide information that would lead to the arrest of the killers.
In the meantime, family members have set up a Sean Aquitania Jr. Memorial Fund, c/o Bank of America, 940 Florin Road, Sacramento, CA 95831. Please contribute to support this devastated family.
Members of the Northern California Regional Chapter of the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA) plan to discuss the Aquitania tragedy and the senseless deaths of young Fil-Ams at the NaFFAA Region 8 Conference set for November 10 at the Bayanihan Community Center on Mission Street in San Francisco. For more information about attending this conference, please email: naffaanorcal@gmail.com.
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
A Sacramento tragedy
By Rodel Rodis
As a community activist dealing with the Filipino American youth for more than 30 years, Ben Menor has attended the funerals of many young Filipino Americans who died from suicide, homicide, disease or accidents. But no funeral in the past could match the emotionally-charged sight he witnessed on Wednesday, September 19, in Sacramento, California: a single coffin holding a 21-year old father and his 8-month old infant son.
It was only a few days before, on September 14, that young athletic Sean Paul Aquitania, Sr. buckled his son, Sean Jr., in a car seat and drove to visit a friend in southeast Sacramento county. When he got to the house, Sean Paul parked his car in front and left his son in the car as he would be away for only a few seconds. He walked to the door and pressed the doorbell. When the door was opened by two men, two other men quickly ran up the house and forced their way inside in what police believe was a drug-related home invasion robbery.
A scuffle occurred and Sean Paul was shot and killed by the intruders. As the killers fled the house, they saw Sean Paul’s parked car with the baby in the car seat. One of the men opened the car door and shot Sean Jr. in the head, killing him instantly with the same gun that had been used to kill his father.
Police authorities who arrived at the scene interviewed the two residents of the house who witnessed the murder of Sean Paul. They were not cooperative, the police said, as they did not provide the police with information about the gunmen other than their description as two young males, one African American wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and the other a Latino wearing a green shirt and a green Oakland A’s cap.
Before that fateful day, Sean Paul had been working at the local Cash & Carry store, but wanted a better life for his son and his fiancée, his son’s mother, 19-year old Monique De La Cruz. He was studying for his GED (a high school equivalent diploma) so that he could go to college and become a correctional officer.
Friends recalled the time when Sean Paul was 14 and his mother enrolled him in a boxing class offered by the Shotgun Boxing Crew in his Elk Grove neighborhood. According to his friend and trainer, Daniel Palpalatoc, Sean showed an early talent for boxing. When he turned 17, Sean had become proficient enough to participate in a Junior Olympic boxing tournament and win a bronze medal. “He was somebody,” Boxing Crew owner Benito Garcia said.
At a Sacramento press conference held on September 18, the mothers of Sean Sr. and Sean Jr. held back their tears as they spoke of Sean Paul’s love for and total devotion to Sean Jr. Sarah Aquitania, mother of Sean Paul, pleaded for anyone with information about the identity of the killers to call the police with the information. "Come forward. I beg you," she said. Please call the Sheriff's Department at (916) 874-5115 or Crime Alert at (916) 443-HELP. Callers can remain anonymous and may be eligible for a reward.
Monique Dela Cruz spoke of her child with tears streaking down her face. "The smile on my baby's face was so precious. To think that someone could ..." She was overwhelmed with emotion that she could not finish her sentence.
At the Wednesday night funeral service, about 300 relatives, friends and leaders of the Filipino community came to pay their respects. They could only see the face of Sean Paul Sr. who was dressed in a burgundy red shirt. They could not view the face of Sean Jr. which was covered with a baseball cap.
Friends and relatives spoke at the funeral service about the deep love between Monique and Sean Paul. Monique’s aunt, Louise De La Cruz, shared her knowledge of their close relationship:
"They were the happiest couple I know. These two never fought, never squabbled and never disrespected each other. What they did do was laugh an awful lot. They -- maturely in their young years -- had an unwavering devotion to one another and somehow knew the key to life: 'As long as we have each other, we can be happy.' And they were."
The following morning, more than 700 people attended the funeral Mass at St. Rose Catholic Church, with hundreds joining the procession to St. Mary's Cemetery for the burial. After the funeral Thursday, family members thanked everyone for their outpouring of support and repeated their plea for people to provide information that would lead to the arrest of the killers.
In the meantime, family members have set up a Sean Aquitania Jr. Memorial Fund, c/o Bank of America, 940 Florin Road, Sacramento, CA 95831. Please contribute to support this devastated family.
Members of the Northern California Regional Chapter of the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA) plan to discuss the Aquitania tragedy and the senseless deaths of young Fil-Ams at the NaFFAA Region 8 Conference set for November 10 at the Bayanihan Community Center on Mission Street in San Francisco. For more information about attending this conference, please email: naffaanorcal@gmail.com.
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
Joyce Tempongco Remembered
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Joyce Tempongco Remembered
By Rodel Rodis
On October 22, 2000, seven years ago, Claire Joyce Tempongco was having dinner with a friend when her ex-boy friend, Tari Ramirez, called her on her cell phone. As he had done in numerous calls before, Tari begged for another chance to get back together again. If she didn’t say yes, he would kill her, he promised. Joyce said no, no more please, as she had pleaded with him many times before.
Later in the evening, when Joyce returned with her two children to her 22nd Avenue home in San Francisco’s Richmond District, she saw Tari was waiting for her inside the apartment he had broken into. She quickly ran for the phone to call the police but Tari ripped the phone off her hands and smashed it. Then, in front of Joyce’s children, Tari stabbed her in the breast with a kitchen knife.
Joyce may still be alive today if the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) had done its job. Joyce had called 911 at least six times to report Tari’s numerous acts of violence against her but her pleas for help seemingly fell on deaf ears.
The first time she called the police, in April of 1999, she had reported that Tari broke a window to get back into the apartment, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to the hallway where he beat her up savagely before leaving the scene. When the police officers arrived, Joyce narrated a long history of abuse that reached a point the week before, when she broke off with him and asked him to leave her apartment. She told the police that Tari's violence was escalating and that she seriously feared for her life and for her children.
Later that evening, Tari was picked up by the police for unrelated drunk driving and hit and run charges. While in the police car, however, he told the police that he got drunk after beating up Joyce. San Francisco police officers were clearly aware from their first encounter with him that Tari Ramirez was a very violent man. But District Attorney Terrence Hallinan chose to file only drunk driving charges against him, not domestic violence, not breaking and entering, not making terrorist threats.
The police knew that Ramirez had injured Joyce Tempongco and terrified her and her children, and yet no domestic violence charges were brought against him. The police did not even bother to obtain a restraining order to protect Joyce.
After his release on the drunk-driving charge, Tari Ramirez continued to harass and abuse Joyce. When the police was called a second time, the police reported it as dog barking incident because the officers were too lazy to write a full police report. Finally, on the third 911 call after another savage beating two months later, the police arrested Ramirez and charged him with five felony counts of spousal abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, terrorist threats, false imprisonment and kidnapping.
Unfortunately, the District Attorney’s office plea bargained the five charges into just one count of domestic violence for which Tari was sentenced to probation and counseling. He did not even have to spend time in jail for beating up Joyce. After that conviction, whenever Joyce called the police to report that Tari had abused her again, he was simply charged with violating his probation and his probation term was routinely extended.
On September 1, 2000, when police officers responded to Joyce’s sixth 911 call they found her lying in bed with her kids, shaking and terrified with fright. There was blood on her mouth and red marks around her neck and face. Tari had strangled her until she momentarily lost consciousness when he finally let go of her neck. “I opened my eyes and I was still alive,” she later told her brother, Leo.
Tari should have been arrested and charged with attempted murder. Instead, when the case went to Sgt. Al Lum, the chief investigator of the domestic violence unit of the SFPD, he decided to process it, once again, as a simple probation violation and to send it over to the probation department. Tari was again charged with probation violation.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Sgt. Lum explained that he decided not to file new charges against Tari because Joyce had been drinking, had not been hospitalized and had not called the police to inquire about the progress of the case. “It’s up to her to call or come in for a follow-up,” Sgt. Lum explained, “She didn’t call, so we couldn’t do a work-up.”
Joyce’s mother, Clara, believes that perhaps it was because they are Filipino, the police did not take Joyce seriously before she was killed. Even after her murder, the police did not seem to care too much about capturing Tari.
The family had suggested to police officers that because Tari stole Joyce’s cell phone, they could track the calls made from the cell phone and interview the people he spoke with, to determine his whereabouts. The police ignored this suggestion. Joyce’s family members knew Tari’s hangouts, where his relatives live, but the police didn’t care to find out. It took months for them to produce a wanted poster for Tari Ramirez and though it had his photo, it misidentified his race as “W” and even omitted mention of an identifying tattoo.
It also took four months for the police to visit the school of Joyce’s children to counsel them about what they should do if Tari showed up, especially since they were witnesses to their mother’s murder. In a press conference on the Tempongco murder, District Attorney Hallinan lamented Joyce Tempongco’s failure to follow up on the prosecution of Tari and opined that this was “an example of the ideology of the disease.”
Hallinan was blaming the victim and calling domestic violence a disease, not a crime, and a disease of the victim, and not of the murderer. When Hallinan ran for reelection in 2003, he was soundly defeated by his chief opponent, Kamala Harris, who made Joyce Tempongco’s murder a crusade and a campaign issue.
In January of this year, Tari Ramirez was captured in Cancun, Mexico and extradited to San Francisco where he was charged with first degree murder. At his arraignment on April 18, 2007, District Attorney Kamala Harris said that the Tempongco tragedy provided a necessary “wake-up call” that helped San Francisco become more responsive to victims of domestic violence.
According to the statistics compiled by the Community Overcoming Relationship Abuse (CORA), every nine seconds in the US, a woman is abused. Anywhere from 3 -10 million children witness domestic violence every year. Each year, upwards of 1-M incidents of domestic violence occur. A third of all Americans know a woman whose husband or boy friend has physically abused her in the past year.
Most shocking statistic of all: more than three women are murdered by their former or current husbands or boy friends daily. Claire Joyce Tempongco was one of them.
Send comments to (Rodel50@aol.com)
Joyce Tempongco Remembered
By Rodel Rodis
On October 22, 2000, seven years ago, Claire Joyce Tempongco was having dinner with a friend when her ex-boy friend, Tari Ramirez, called her on her cell phone. As he had done in numerous calls before, Tari begged for another chance to get back together again. If she didn’t say yes, he would kill her, he promised. Joyce said no, no more please, as she had pleaded with him many times before.
Later in the evening, when Joyce returned with her two children to her 22nd Avenue home in San Francisco’s Richmond District, she saw Tari was waiting for her inside the apartment he had broken into. She quickly ran for the phone to call the police but Tari ripped the phone off her hands and smashed it. Then, in front of Joyce’s children, Tari stabbed her in the breast with a kitchen knife.
Joyce may still be alive today if the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) had done its job. Joyce had called 911 at least six times to report Tari’s numerous acts of violence against her but her pleas for help seemingly fell on deaf ears.
The first time she called the police, in April of 1999, she had reported that Tari broke a window to get back into the apartment, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to the hallway where he beat her up savagely before leaving the scene. When the police officers arrived, Joyce narrated a long history of abuse that reached a point the week before, when she broke off with him and asked him to leave her apartment. She told the police that Tari's violence was escalating and that she seriously feared for her life and for her children.
Later that evening, Tari was picked up by the police for unrelated drunk driving and hit and run charges. While in the police car, however, he told the police that he got drunk after beating up Joyce. San Francisco police officers were clearly aware from their first encounter with him that Tari Ramirez was a very violent man. But District Attorney Terrence Hallinan chose to file only drunk driving charges against him, not domestic violence, not breaking and entering, not making terrorist threats.
The police knew that Ramirez had injured Joyce Tempongco and terrified her and her children, and yet no domestic violence charges were brought against him. The police did not even bother to obtain a restraining order to protect Joyce.
After his release on the drunk-driving charge, Tari Ramirez continued to harass and abuse Joyce. When the police was called a second time, the police reported it as dog barking incident because the officers were too lazy to write a full police report. Finally, on the third 911 call after another savage beating two months later, the police arrested Ramirez and charged him with five felony counts of spousal abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, terrorist threats, false imprisonment and kidnapping.
Unfortunately, the District Attorney’s office plea bargained the five charges into just one count of domestic violence for which Tari was sentenced to probation and counseling. He did not even have to spend time in jail for beating up Joyce. After that conviction, whenever Joyce called the police to report that Tari had abused her again, he was simply charged with violating his probation and his probation term was routinely extended.
On September 1, 2000, when police officers responded to Joyce’s sixth 911 call they found her lying in bed with her kids, shaking and terrified with fright. There was blood on her mouth and red marks around her neck and face. Tari had strangled her until she momentarily lost consciousness when he finally let go of her neck. “I opened my eyes and I was still alive,” she later told her brother, Leo.
Tari should have been arrested and charged with attempted murder. Instead, when the case went to Sgt. Al Lum, the chief investigator of the domestic violence unit of the SFPD, he decided to process it, once again, as a simple probation violation and to send it over to the probation department. Tari was again charged with probation violation.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Sgt. Lum explained that he decided not to file new charges against Tari because Joyce had been drinking, had not been hospitalized and had not called the police to inquire about the progress of the case. “It’s up to her to call or come in for a follow-up,” Sgt. Lum explained, “She didn’t call, so we couldn’t do a work-up.”
Joyce’s mother, Clara, believes that perhaps it was because they are Filipino, the police did not take Joyce seriously before she was killed. Even after her murder, the police did not seem to care too much about capturing Tari.
The family had suggested to police officers that because Tari stole Joyce’s cell phone, they could track the calls made from the cell phone and interview the people he spoke with, to determine his whereabouts. The police ignored this suggestion. Joyce’s family members knew Tari’s hangouts, where his relatives live, but the police didn’t care to find out. It took months for them to produce a wanted poster for Tari Ramirez and though it had his photo, it misidentified his race as “W” and even omitted mention of an identifying tattoo.
It also took four months for the police to visit the school of Joyce’s children to counsel them about what they should do if Tari showed up, especially since they were witnesses to their mother’s murder. In a press conference on the Tempongco murder, District Attorney Hallinan lamented Joyce Tempongco’s failure to follow up on the prosecution of Tari and opined that this was “an example of the ideology of the disease.”
Hallinan was blaming the victim and calling domestic violence a disease, not a crime, and a disease of the victim, and not of the murderer. When Hallinan ran for reelection in 2003, he was soundly defeated by his chief opponent, Kamala Harris, who made Joyce Tempongco’s murder a crusade and a campaign issue.
In January of this year, Tari Ramirez was captured in Cancun, Mexico and extradited to San Francisco where he was charged with first degree murder. At his arraignment on April 18, 2007, District Attorney Kamala Harris said that the Tempongco tragedy provided a necessary “wake-up call” that helped San Francisco become more responsive to victims of domestic violence.
According to the statistics compiled by the Community Overcoming Relationship Abuse (CORA), every nine seconds in the US, a woman is abused. Anywhere from 3 -10 million children witness domestic violence every year. Each year, upwards of 1-M incidents of domestic violence occur. A third of all Americans know a woman whose husband or boy friend has physically abused her in the past year.
Most shocking statistic of all: more than three women are murdered by their former or current husbands or boy friends daily. Claire Joyce Tempongco was one of them.
Send comments to (Rodel50@aol.com)
Desperate Apologies
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Desperate Apologies
By Rodel Rodis
WHEN Terri Hatcher’s character in “Desperate Housewives” flippantly inferred in the September 30 episode of the hit TV show that all physicians who receive their diplomas from “some med school in the Philippines” are quacks, it exposed not just the anti-Filipino bigotry of the producers, scriptwriters and cast of that ABC show but the total absence of the Filipino community’s clout in Hollywood.
Certain groups in Hollywood have clout. If the “Desperate” writer had used Israel instead of the Philippines, he would have been immediately denounced as anti-Semitic and his offending script dumped in the garbage along with him. If the script attacked the integrity of African-Americans, the writer would have received the Don Imus “nappy-headed hos” award and would disappear in a New York minute.
If the script had denigrated someone’s sexual orientation, the writer would get the Isaiah Washington treatment named for the actor who used the “F” word in a confrontation with fellow actor T.R. Knight in “Grey’s Anatomy”. The producers of the ABC hit show compelled Washington to publicly apologize for the homophobic slur and to take anger management classes. After complying with all that was asked of him, Washington was fired from the show by ABC.
The offending "med school" script of “Desperate Housewives” was probably written about 10 months ago after which it went through a vetting process with the writers, producers and the director of the show, as well as the cast, working on the final script before shooting of the episode was completed around April or May. After editing, it was then shown to the ABC executives who approved it and readied it for showing on September 30.
Throughout this whole 10-month process, not one person in the ABC chain said “Wait a minute, folks, this isn’t right. We’re maligning every Philippine-educated physician in the US. What are we saying here? That they’re all quacks who can’t be trusted to make a proper medical diagnosis about menopause?”
Not one of them even sought to show the script to Alec Mapa, a Filipino-American actor who has a recurring role in the series, to get his reaction. If they did, he would have said, as he did after it aired: "It's unfortunate that the Philippines was used as a punch line. My family is filled with doctors and medical professionals. I know first hand from them, that the medical schools in the Philippines are top notch.”
After the offending episode was shown, ABC was besieged with angry phone calls, e-mails and letters from Filipino-American viewers throughout the US. An online petition drafted by Kevin Nadal drew 30,000 signatures in 48 hours (130,000 in five days). Philippine government elected and appointed officials went ballistic in expressing outrage.
In response, ABC's publicity department issued a boilerplate apology: "The producers of `Desperate Housewives' and ABC Studios offer our sincere apologies for any offense caused by the brief reference in the season premiere. There was no intent to disparage the integrity of any aspect of the medical community in the Philippines," the ABC statement said.
The PR person’s apology showed incredible ignorance of the issue. It wasn't the integrity of the “medical community in the Philippines” that was disparaged (Filipino patients don't care that their physicians were educated there), it was the Filipino “medical community in the US” that was defamed by the “brief reference” to their quack credentials.
Manila-based columnist Conrado de Quiros explained the significance of the offense: “It doesn’t just cast aspersion on—or worse doubts, which affect employment opportunities of—Filipino doctors, it does so on Filipino professionals generally. What applies to the diplomas of Filipino doctors applies as well to the diplomas of Filipino engineers, accountants and lawyers. Left unprotested, a single line like that in a hugely popular TV series can do more harm by the incalculable power of suggestion than whole reams or airtime of diatribe in a newspaper or talk show.”
What kind of harm can this show that is watched by more than 125 million viewers in more than 75 countries do?
One US-based physician, Dr. Arsenio Martin, a pulmonary and critical care specialist who has a diploma from “some med school in the Philippines”, wrote to say that he regularly sees terminal patients and knows that family members try to get the best specialist they could find to treat his patients.
“If that patient dies because of his or her terminal illness, the family members will either accept it or second guess themselves… If you try to inject negative things in their minds, like what Terry Hatcher did, then they will forever torture themselves wishing they had called another physician or, worst case scenario, they will file suit against that Filipino doctor.”
When ABC’s anemic apology failed to mollify the Filipino community, ABC dispatched Robert Mendez, its Senior Vice President for Diversity, to “reach out” to the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA). According to NaFFAA’s Jon Melegrito, Mendez wanted “to assure the Filipino American community that ABC takes our concerns seriously and is taking the necessary steps to make amends.”
After just one telephone conversation with Mendez, Melegrito was ready to assure the Filipino community that “ABC is making a good faith effort to seriously make amends, and that Mr. Mendez is sincere in wanting to open a dialogue with us.”
But others were not so quick to accept ABC’s "good faith effort" as they recalled a similar promise made by ABC in the past over an episode of Frasier where Filipino women were referred to as “mail order brides from the Philippines.” Filipino community protests resulted in a similar public apology by ABC and a similar promise to remove the offending dialogue from the episode. ABC reneged on the promise and the offensive episode has remained intact in the DVDs and in the syndicated reruns of Frasier.
Over the past week, pickets by Filipino-American groups in Burbank, California and in New York and Washington DC caused Mendez to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Filipino community leaders in New York on October 5. In that meeting, Rico Foz, a spokesperson for the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (Nafcon), asked ABC to broadcast its public apology during the show’s next episode. “It will be tough,” Mendez said (“In your dreams” is what he meant).
Foz also demanded that Mendez arrange a meeting with Marc Cherry, the producer of “Desperate Housewives”, to discuss their concerns and to obtain an explanation on how the bigoted remarks in the episode got past everyone. He wanted ABC to initiate cultural sensitivity training for its network writers and producers and for ABC to produce shows that depict Filipinos and other minority groups as "prominent, positive role models." Mendez promised to discuss these demands with the network management.
To ensure that ABC follows through on its promises, continuous pressure by the Filipino community must be applied. Pickets of ABC offices and a boycott of Disney products will ensure that ABC will live up to its promises. We will not be naively fooled again.
Please send letters of protest to Mr.. Mark Pedowitz, President; ABC Television Network; 500 S. Buena Vista Street Burbank, CA 91521-4551; email: abc7@abc.com) or sign the online petition (http://www.petitiononline.com/FilABC/). Attend the Filipino community meeting at the Philippine Consulate Social Hall in San Francisco on Tuesday, October 9, at 6 PM.
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
Desperate Apologies
By Rodel Rodis
WHEN Terri Hatcher’s character in “Desperate Housewives” flippantly inferred in the September 30 episode of the hit TV show that all physicians who receive their diplomas from “some med school in the Philippines” are quacks, it exposed not just the anti-Filipino bigotry of the producers, scriptwriters and cast of that ABC show but the total absence of the Filipino community’s clout in Hollywood.
Certain groups in Hollywood have clout. If the “Desperate” writer had used Israel instead of the Philippines, he would have been immediately denounced as anti-Semitic and his offending script dumped in the garbage along with him. If the script attacked the integrity of African-Americans, the writer would have received the Don Imus “nappy-headed hos” award and would disappear in a New York minute.
If the script had denigrated someone’s sexual orientation, the writer would get the Isaiah Washington treatment named for the actor who used the “F” word in a confrontation with fellow actor T.R. Knight in “Grey’s Anatomy”. The producers of the ABC hit show compelled Washington to publicly apologize for the homophobic slur and to take anger management classes. After complying with all that was asked of him, Washington was fired from the show by ABC.
The offending "med school" script of “Desperate Housewives” was probably written about 10 months ago after which it went through a vetting process with the writers, producers and the director of the show, as well as the cast, working on the final script before shooting of the episode was completed around April or May. After editing, it was then shown to the ABC executives who approved it and readied it for showing on September 30.
Throughout this whole 10-month process, not one person in the ABC chain said “Wait a minute, folks, this isn’t right. We’re maligning every Philippine-educated physician in the US. What are we saying here? That they’re all quacks who can’t be trusted to make a proper medical diagnosis about menopause?”
Not one of them even sought to show the script to Alec Mapa, a Filipino-American actor who has a recurring role in the series, to get his reaction. If they did, he would have said, as he did after it aired: "It's unfortunate that the Philippines was used as a punch line. My family is filled with doctors and medical professionals. I know first hand from them, that the medical schools in the Philippines are top notch.”
After the offending episode was shown, ABC was besieged with angry phone calls, e-mails and letters from Filipino-American viewers throughout the US. An online petition drafted by Kevin Nadal drew 30,000 signatures in 48 hours (130,000 in five days). Philippine government elected and appointed officials went ballistic in expressing outrage.
In response, ABC's publicity department issued a boilerplate apology: "The producers of `Desperate Housewives' and ABC Studios offer our sincere apologies for any offense caused by the brief reference in the season premiere. There was no intent to disparage the integrity of any aspect of the medical community in the Philippines," the ABC statement said.
The PR person’s apology showed incredible ignorance of the issue. It wasn't the integrity of the “medical community in the Philippines” that was disparaged (Filipino patients don't care that their physicians were educated there), it was the Filipino “medical community in the US” that was defamed by the “brief reference” to their quack credentials.
Manila-based columnist Conrado de Quiros explained the significance of the offense: “It doesn’t just cast aspersion on—or worse doubts, which affect employment opportunities of—Filipino doctors, it does so on Filipino professionals generally. What applies to the diplomas of Filipino doctors applies as well to the diplomas of Filipino engineers, accountants and lawyers. Left unprotested, a single line like that in a hugely popular TV series can do more harm by the incalculable power of suggestion than whole reams or airtime of diatribe in a newspaper or talk show.”
What kind of harm can this show that is watched by more than 125 million viewers in more than 75 countries do?
One US-based physician, Dr. Arsenio Martin, a pulmonary and critical care specialist who has a diploma from “some med school in the Philippines”, wrote to say that he regularly sees terminal patients and knows that family members try to get the best specialist they could find to treat his patients.
“If that patient dies because of his or her terminal illness, the family members will either accept it or second guess themselves… If you try to inject negative things in their minds, like what Terry Hatcher did, then they will forever torture themselves wishing they had called another physician or, worst case scenario, they will file suit against that Filipino doctor.”
When ABC’s anemic apology failed to mollify the Filipino community, ABC dispatched Robert Mendez, its Senior Vice President for Diversity, to “reach out” to the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA). According to NaFFAA’s Jon Melegrito, Mendez wanted “to assure the Filipino American community that ABC takes our concerns seriously and is taking the necessary steps to make amends.”
After just one telephone conversation with Mendez, Melegrito was ready to assure the Filipino community that “ABC is making a good faith effort to seriously make amends, and that Mr. Mendez is sincere in wanting to open a dialogue with us.”
But others were not so quick to accept ABC’s "good faith effort" as they recalled a similar promise made by ABC in the past over an episode of Frasier where Filipino women were referred to as “mail order brides from the Philippines.” Filipino community protests resulted in a similar public apology by ABC and a similar promise to remove the offending dialogue from the episode. ABC reneged on the promise and the offensive episode has remained intact in the DVDs and in the syndicated reruns of Frasier.
Over the past week, pickets by Filipino-American groups in Burbank, California and in New York and Washington DC caused Mendez to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Filipino community leaders in New York on October 5. In that meeting, Rico Foz, a spokesperson for the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (Nafcon), asked ABC to broadcast its public apology during the show’s next episode. “It will be tough,” Mendez said (“In your dreams” is what he meant).
Foz also demanded that Mendez arrange a meeting with Marc Cherry, the producer of “Desperate Housewives”, to discuss their concerns and to obtain an explanation on how the bigoted remarks in the episode got past everyone. He wanted ABC to initiate cultural sensitivity training for its network writers and producers and for ABC to produce shows that depict Filipinos and other minority groups as "prominent, positive role models." Mendez promised to discuss these demands with the network management.
To ensure that ABC follows through on its promises, continuous pressure by the Filipino community must be applied. Pickets of ABC offices and a boycott of Disney products will ensure that ABC will live up to its promises. We will not be naively fooled again.
Please send letters of protest to Mr.. Mark Pedowitz, President; ABC Television Network; 500 S. Buena Vista Street Burbank, CA 91521-4551; email: abc7@abc.com) or sign the online petition (http://www.petitiononline.com/FilABC/). Attend the Filipino community meeting at the Philippine Consulate Social Hall in San Francisco on Tuesday, October 9, at 6 PM.
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
Breaking our stereotype
GLOBAL NETWORKING
Breaking our stereotype
By Rodel Rodis
NEWS STORIES in the mainstream press about the negative reaction of Filipinos to the “Desperate Housewives” denigration of physicians with diplomas from “med schools in the Philippines” caused AOL to conduct a nationwide poll and ask its Internet users whether there was “good reason for some to be offended by this joke” (AOL already presumed it was just a "joke").
Surprisingly, notwithstanding the bias of the question, 27% of those polled agreed with the view that “it has racial implications.” This percentage is the same statistic as the number of Americans who still support President Bush’s handling of the Iraq War, according to recent surveys.
The AOL poll also asked what ABC and “Desperate Housewives” should do about the outrage that Filipinos have expressed towards the episode. They “should not worry about it” garnered 69% while “apologize” received 31% of the vote.
If any TV show receives 31% of the total TV viewing audience on any given night, it would top the Nielsen ratings for that week. It is an incredibly significant percentage considering that the 3 million Filipinos in the US constitute only 1% of the total US population.
While the AOL poll was encouraging, the report of Asianweek columnist Emil Guillermo about the inaction of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) on this issue was downright dismaying.
MANAA’s mission is to educate the public and the media about “what persons of Asian Pacific descent find racially offensive, stereotypical, and/or inaccurate and why it is harmful.” Towards this end, in 2003, MANAA organized a nationwide protest action against a FOX TV show called “Banzai” which depicted Asians in a negative manner. MANAA successfully persuaded advertisers to pull their ads from the show which was soon removed from the network.
MANAA regularly monitors TV shows and movies to make sure that anti-Asian racial slurs like "chink," "Chinaman," "Jap," "Nip," "gook," "slope," "slant-eye," and "wog" are removed from TV/movie scripts or, if retained, that they are properly “contextualized as negative and insulting.”
But racial slurs and epithets have generally lost their power to hurt. Their use now reflects more on the hateful bigotry of the user than any shame or pain it may inflict on the subject of the verbal attack.
If Terri Hatcher’s character had merely referred to Filipinos as “dumb Flips”, the anti-Filipino pejorative commonly used in the 1930s, it would not have been nearly as pernicious and damaging as the bigoted inference that doctors from the Philippines have sub-standard and inferior education, subliminally suggesting to American patients to avoid them or be wary of them.
Surely this anti-Filipino insult would have drawn MANAA’s attention. You think?
Emil Guillermo e-mailed Guy Aoki, the head of MANAA, to inquire as to what action his group took on the “Desperate” slur. Aoki e-mailed back: "You'll probably hate me for saying this, but we didn't think it was a big deal. If they mention any foreign country, people descended from that country are going to be upset. We have no idea about the caliber of doctors from the Philippines, only that there are a lot of Filipino nurses. Besides, we don't usually get involved when foreign countries are involved."
What? The insult to the 22,000 Filipino doctors practicing in the US did not meet MANAA’s standards for what is “racially offensive, stereotypical, or inaccurate”? As Guillermo observed, “To many, Filipinos still don't rate on the "offend-o-meter."
MANAA’s ignorance of how the “Desperate” remark severely wounded our integrity as a people and our pride in the quality of the medical education in the Philippines was shocking but understandable.
When Dianne Feinstein was mayor of San Francisco, she told her close friends that the Filipino community was her favorite. While other ethnic groups would demand that she appoint their people to various major commissions and funding for their community programs, Filipinos were content to simply having their photos taken with her. The other ethnic groups got what they demanded and were empowered. The Filipinos got the photo-ops but received appointments only to minor commissions and virtually no funding for our community programs.
The fury of the Filipino community’s reaction to the "Desperate" slur caused ABC to dispatch Robert Mendez, their "Vice President for Diversity" to take care of the problem. After all, that's what they created his job title for. Anytime ABC has problems with any minority group, it's Mendez Time.
So when a Filipino community leader suggested to Mendez that ABC "agree to explore a program that might help increase opportunities for Filipinos at ABC", Mendez quickly accepted the proposal. After all, what would it cost ABC to simply "explore a program"? The proposal wouldn't even require that it actually result in increased opportunities for Filipinos at ABC, it was enough that it "might help increase" it.
But creating a larger “talent pool” of Filipinos for ABC is totally useless if ABC doesn’t even care to use the Filipino talent pool it already has. Sumi Sevilla Haru, a veteran Filipino-American actress, received an audition call for the “Desperate Housewives” episode with the hateful “med schools” remark
“On Monday, July 30, I was to have an audition for the episode in question at Universal Studios,” Sumi wrote. “The part was for an older Asian woman with her daughter. In the scene in the waiting room, I was to assure Hatcher that the doctor was competent. At 10:30 a.m. just as I was to drive into the gate, I received a call from my agent that the part was written out. I suspect it was a last minute change, possibly to save paying two actors, or possibly to write in the joke about the doctor's credentials.”
Despite requests from certain leaders to tone down the rhetoric and activism, the Filipino community in the US is finally waking up to the realization that if you ask for little, you get exactly what you ask for, little.
Because of the community's agitation, ABC caved in to the community's demand that it remove the offending scene from the episode so that the show will not continue to inflict its pain on future viewers. That was a good start. But what about dealing with the 25 million viewers who watched the September 30 episode and whose minds were subliminally poisoned by it?
More needs to be done and will be done if the Filipino community continues to advocate for them. A public service announcement (PSA) on the show itself honoring Filipino physicians (like former White House physician Dr. Connie Mariano) as part of Filipino American History Month is one proposal that will show ABC's good faith.
But more leverage is needed. The threat of a class action defamation lawsuit against ABC and the call for a nationwide boycott of ABC and Disney may push ABC to grant further concessions.
These calls do carry the risk that if we succeed, we may no longer be considered for the top spot in the show “ABC’s Favorite Ethnic Community.”
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
Breaking our stereotype
By Rodel Rodis
NEWS STORIES in the mainstream press about the negative reaction of Filipinos to the “Desperate Housewives” denigration of physicians with diplomas from “med schools in the Philippines” caused AOL to conduct a nationwide poll and ask its Internet users whether there was “good reason for some to be offended by this joke” (AOL already presumed it was just a "joke").
Surprisingly, notwithstanding the bias of the question, 27% of those polled agreed with the view that “it has racial implications.” This percentage is the same statistic as the number of Americans who still support President Bush’s handling of the Iraq War, according to recent surveys.
The AOL poll also asked what ABC and “Desperate Housewives” should do about the outrage that Filipinos have expressed towards the episode. They “should not worry about it” garnered 69% while “apologize” received 31% of the vote.
If any TV show receives 31% of the total TV viewing audience on any given night, it would top the Nielsen ratings for that week. It is an incredibly significant percentage considering that the 3 million Filipinos in the US constitute only 1% of the total US population.
While the AOL poll was encouraging, the report of Asianweek columnist Emil Guillermo about the inaction of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) on this issue was downright dismaying.
MANAA’s mission is to educate the public and the media about “what persons of Asian Pacific descent find racially offensive, stereotypical, and/or inaccurate and why it is harmful.” Towards this end, in 2003, MANAA organized a nationwide protest action against a FOX TV show called “Banzai” which depicted Asians in a negative manner. MANAA successfully persuaded advertisers to pull their ads from the show which was soon removed from the network.
MANAA regularly monitors TV shows and movies to make sure that anti-Asian racial slurs like "chink," "Chinaman," "Jap," "Nip," "gook," "slope," "slant-eye," and "wog" are removed from TV/movie scripts or, if retained, that they are properly “contextualized as negative and insulting.”
But racial slurs and epithets have generally lost their power to hurt. Their use now reflects more on the hateful bigotry of the user than any shame or pain it may inflict on the subject of the verbal attack.
If Terri Hatcher’s character had merely referred to Filipinos as “dumb Flips”, the anti-Filipino pejorative commonly used in the 1930s, it would not have been nearly as pernicious and damaging as the bigoted inference that doctors from the Philippines have sub-standard and inferior education, subliminally suggesting to American patients to avoid them or be wary of them.
Surely this anti-Filipino insult would have drawn MANAA’s attention. You think?
Emil Guillermo e-mailed Guy Aoki, the head of MANAA, to inquire as to what action his group took on the “Desperate” slur. Aoki e-mailed back: "You'll probably hate me for saying this, but we didn't think it was a big deal. If they mention any foreign country, people descended from that country are going to be upset. We have no idea about the caliber of doctors from the Philippines, only that there are a lot of Filipino nurses. Besides, we don't usually get involved when foreign countries are involved."
What? The insult to the 22,000 Filipino doctors practicing in the US did not meet MANAA’s standards for what is “racially offensive, stereotypical, or inaccurate”? As Guillermo observed, “To many, Filipinos still don't rate on the "offend-o-meter."
MANAA’s ignorance of how the “Desperate” remark severely wounded our integrity as a people and our pride in the quality of the medical education in the Philippines was shocking but understandable.
When Dianne Feinstein was mayor of San Francisco, she told her close friends that the Filipino community was her favorite. While other ethnic groups would demand that she appoint their people to various major commissions and funding for their community programs, Filipinos were content to simply having their photos taken with her. The other ethnic groups got what they demanded and were empowered. The Filipinos got the photo-ops but received appointments only to minor commissions and virtually no funding for our community programs.
The fury of the Filipino community’s reaction to the "Desperate" slur caused ABC to dispatch Robert Mendez, their "Vice President for Diversity" to take care of the problem. After all, that's what they created his job title for. Anytime ABC has problems with any minority group, it's Mendez Time.
So when a Filipino community leader suggested to Mendez that ABC "agree to explore a program that might help increase opportunities for Filipinos at ABC", Mendez quickly accepted the proposal. After all, what would it cost ABC to simply "explore a program"? The proposal wouldn't even require that it actually result in increased opportunities for Filipinos at ABC, it was enough that it "might help increase" it.
But creating a larger “talent pool” of Filipinos for ABC is totally useless if ABC doesn’t even care to use the Filipino talent pool it already has. Sumi Sevilla Haru, a veteran Filipino-American actress, received an audition call for the “Desperate Housewives” episode with the hateful “med schools” remark
“On Monday, July 30, I was to have an audition for the episode in question at Universal Studios,” Sumi wrote. “The part was for an older Asian woman with her daughter. In the scene in the waiting room, I was to assure Hatcher that the doctor was competent. At 10:30 a.m. just as I was to drive into the gate, I received a call from my agent that the part was written out. I suspect it was a last minute change, possibly to save paying two actors, or possibly to write in the joke about the doctor's credentials.”
Despite requests from certain leaders to tone down the rhetoric and activism, the Filipino community in the US is finally waking up to the realization that if you ask for little, you get exactly what you ask for, little.
Because of the community's agitation, ABC caved in to the community's demand that it remove the offending scene from the episode so that the show will not continue to inflict its pain on future viewers. That was a good start. But what about dealing with the 25 million viewers who watched the September 30 episode and whose minds were subliminally poisoned by it?
More needs to be done and will be done if the Filipino community continues to advocate for them. A public service announcement (PSA) on the show itself honoring Filipino physicians (like former White House physician Dr. Connie Mariano) as part of Filipino American History Month is one proposal that will show ABC's good faith.
But more leverage is needed. The threat of a class action defamation lawsuit against ABC and the call for a nationwide boycott of ABC and Disney may push ABC to grant further concessions.
These calls do carry the risk that if we succeed, we may no longer be considered for the top spot in the show “ABC’s Favorite Ethnic Community.”
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
The Disconnect
GLOBAL NETWORKING
The Disconnect
By Rodel Rodis
If the question posed by AOL to its Internet users - whether there was “good reason for some to be offended by this (Desperate Housewives) joke”- had been asked of Filipino American and Philippine commentators, their answers would have been markedly different.
Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Conrado deQuiros wrote that his first reaction was “to laugh out loud (lol). Hatcher’s remark is funny, though the kind that hurts only when you laugh. It’s so because like the truly most laughable things on earth, it has much truth in it.”
Philippine Star columnist William C. Esposo wrote, “in typical Filipino fashion, we've over-reacted once again over what can be considered as nothing more than one issue in long line of misinformed racial slurs that are commonplace on US television.”
Another Philippine Star columnist, Barbara C. Gonzales, believed that “we have lost our sense of humor…That was just meant to be funny. Now we are outraged, protesting, demanding an apology.”
Their “get over it” attitude contrasts with that of Telltale Signs reader Purita Guinto who wrote a response typical of the views of many in the US: “I felt those who dismissed it did not feel the sting of that crude ABC joke, in contrast to those or us from the Fil-Am community who raged against it the instant we knew about it. Remember the thousands among us who signed that petition within a few days after it appeared on the Internet?”
At a hearing of the San Francisco Immigrant Rights Commission on October 16, where a resolution condemning the “Desperate” slur was discussed, I was asked by an Israeli-born commissioner why Filipinos were taking this matter too seriously. “There are anti-Semitic remarks in the Al-Jazeera cable channel all the time and we don’t complain about it,” he said.
There is a huge gap in the differing portrayals of Jews and Filipinos in the media, I replied. On any given night, you can view scores of Jewish Americans on network television as lead actors and actresses in TV sitcoms (“Seinfeld,” for example). “But how many Filipinos do you see on TV every night?” I asked him.
Except for Cheryl Burke (Dancing with the Stars), whom most Americans wouldn’t know is a Filipina, you don’t see Filipinos even as doctors or nurses in medical TV shows (Gray’s Anatomy, ER, House, etc).
When someone utters an anti-Semitic joke, people would generally regard it as a bigoted rant and dismiss it in the same way that Michael Richards’ racist rants against African Americans were disregarded. A ‘dumb blonde” joke would have no effect when prominent blondes like Dianne Sawyer, Barbara Walters or Hillary Clinton appear regularly on TV, belying the stereotype.
It was context that made the “Desperate” slur sting. Because of the absence of any counterweighing positive reference on network TV, any negative Filipino reference is therefore magnified. In this vacuum, any remark that questions the quality and competence of doctors with diplomas from “some med school in the Philippines” acquires instant credibility in the absence of TV evidence suggesting otherwise.
In contrast, Philippine commentators get to watch Filipinos on TV every night, in various roles both positive and negative. So when they hear a negative reference to Filipino doctors, they don’t see what the “big deal” is as they see Philippine doctors in a positive light regularly, in reel and real life.
Many of them, like Esposo, also asked: “Doesn’t the recent Nursing Exams Leak Scandal logically create the likely impression that we produce sub-standard medical professionals? Doesn’t the reputation of the Philippines as a diploma mill justify that impression too?”
But the unfortunate reality is that Filipinos are so far removed from the radar screens of Hollywood producers and screen writers that it would give them too much credit to assume that they have any interest in knowing anything at all about the Philippine educational system. They couldn't care a whit about
us.
The other reality that escapes “the truth hurts” proponents is that Filipino doctors have to pass three medical exams before they can practice in the US: the Philippine medical exams, the Educational Council for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) exams, and the Medical License Examinations (MLE), the only exam that holders of US diplomas have to take. It's not as easy as buying up a diploma from a sidewalk vendor.
But there is also another context that informs the attitudes of Philippine commentators. Philippine television is generally not subject to the same “fairness” standards that American TV networks are subject to.
When I was in Manila last year, I was shocked to watch a Philippine game show called “Game ka na ba?” (Are you game already?), hosted by presidential daughter Kris Aquino, where the contestants were all “little people” (derisively referred to as ‘dwarfs”). The TV audience laughed at them the entire show. That kind of mockery of people with disabilities would never appear on American game shows like Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune.
In the Philippines, it seems every disability is fair game for abuse in politics and on network TV where there are no limits to what or who you can mock. When opposition politicians like Sen. Panfilo Lacson can refer to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as “Dwendita” (little dwarf) because of her vertically challenged height, one can only imagine what people can say about anyone else.
Because the Philippine media culture has numbed them to feeling any sense of outrage at the utterance of degrading insults, many of these commentators just can’t understand why we’re making such a “big deal” about a "four second joke.”
The disconnect between Filipino American and Philippine commentators is evident in historian Ambeth Ocampo’s observation of the “Division” (the title of his recent column in the Inquirer) among Filipinos in America. “I’m not a sociologist, so I don’t know the answer to the question,” he asks. “What is it in our nature that makes expatriate Filipinos divide rather than unite? The answer will come in handy not just abroad but back home where every day is an exercise in forming a nation.”
From our vantage point, “expatriate” Filipinos have united on this “Desperate” issue more than any other issue in recent memory. It’s a unity that our community can build on to address other pressing issues (like the FilVets issue which needs our doctors' support). While not quite an exercise in forming a nation, it is boldly empowering a community.
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
The Disconnect
By Rodel Rodis
If the question posed by AOL to its Internet users - whether there was “good reason for some to be offended by this (Desperate Housewives) joke”- had been asked of Filipino American and Philippine commentators, their answers would have been markedly different.
Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Conrado deQuiros wrote that his first reaction was “to laugh out loud (lol). Hatcher’s remark is funny, though the kind that hurts only when you laugh. It’s so because like the truly most laughable things on earth, it has much truth in it.”
Philippine Star columnist William C. Esposo wrote, “in typical Filipino fashion, we've over-reacted once again over what can be considered as nothing more than one issue in long line of misinformed racial slurs that are commonplace on US television.”
Another Philippine Star columnist, Barbara C. Gonzales, believed that “we have lost our sense of humor…That was just meant to be funny. Now we are outraged, protesting, demanding an apology.”
Their “get over it” attitude contrasts with that of Telltale Signs reader Purita Guinto who wrote a response typical of the views of many in the US: “I felt those who dismissed it did not feel the sting of that crude ABC joke, in contrast to those or us from the Fil-Am community who raged against it the instant we knew about it. Remember the thousands among us who signed that petition within a few days after it appeared on the Internet?”
At a hearing of the San Francisco Immigrant Rights Commission on October 16, where a resolution condemning the “Desperate” slur was discussed, I was asked by an Israeli-born commissioner why Filipinos were taking this matter too seriously. “There are anti-Semitic remarks in the Al-Jazeera cable channel all the time and we don’t complain about it,” he said.
There is a huge gap in the differing portrayals of Jews and Filipinos in the media, I replied. On any given night, you can view scores of Jewish Americans on network television as lead actors and actresses in TV sitcoms (“Seinfeld,” for example). “But how many Filipinos do you see on TV every night?” I asked him.
Except for Cheryl Burke (Dancing with the Stars), whom most Americans wouldn’t know is a Filipina, you don’t see Filipinos even as doctors or nurses in medical TV shows (Gray’s Anatomy, ER, House, etc).
When someone utters an anti-Semitic joke, people would generally regard it as a bigoted rant and dismiss it in the same way that Michael Richards’ racist rants against African Americans were disregarded. A ‘dumb blonde” joke would have no effect when prominent blondes like Dianne Sawyer, Barbara Walters or Hillary Clinton appear regularly on TV, belying the stereotype.
It was context that made the “Desperate” slur sting. Because of the absence of any counterweighing positive reference on network TV, any negative Filipino reference is therefore magnified. In this vacuum, any remark that questions the quality and competence of doctors with diplomas from “some med school in the Philippines” acquires instant credibility in the absence of TV evidence suggesting otherwise.
In contrast, Philippine commentators get to watch Filipinos on TV every night, in various roles both positive and negative. So when they hear a negative reference to Filipino doctors, they don’t see what the “big deal” is as they see Philippine doctors in a positive light regularly, in reel and real life.
Many of them, like Esposo, also asked: “Doesn’t the recent Nursing Exams Leak Scandal logically create the likely impression that we produce sub-standard medical professionals? Doesn’t the reputation of the Philippines as a diploma mill justify that impression too?”
But the unfortunate reality is that Filipinos are so far removed from the radar screens of Hollywood producers and screen writers that it would give them too much credit to assume that they have any interest in knowing anything at all about the Philippine educational system. They couldn't care a whit about
us.
The other reality that escapes “the truth hurts” proponents is that Filipino doctors have to pass three medical exams before they can practice in the US: the Philippine medical exams, the Educational Council for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) exams, and the Medical License Examinations (MLE), the only exam that holders of US diplomas have to take. It's not as easy as buying up a diploma from a sidewalk vendor.
But there is also another context that informs the attitudes of Philippine commentators. Philippine television is generally not subject to the same “fairness” standards that American TV networks are subject to.
When I was in Manila last year, I was shocked to watch a Philippine game show called “Game ka na ba?” (Are you game already?), hosted by presidential daughter Kris Aquino, where the contestants were all “little people” (derisively referred to as ‘dwarfs”). The TV audience laughed at them the entire show. That kind of mockery of people with disabilities would never appear on American game shows like Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune.
In the Philippines, it seems every disability is fair game for abuse in politics and on network TV where there are no limits to what or who you can mock. When opposition politicians like Sen. Panfilo Lacson can refer to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as “Dwendita” (little dwarf) because of her vertically challenged height, one can only imagine what people can say about anyone else.
Because the Philippine media culture has numbed them to feeling any sense of outrage at the utterance of degrading insults, many of these commentators just can’t understand why we’re making such a “big deal” about a "four second joke.”
The disconnect between Filipino American and Philippine commentators is evident in historian Ambeth Ocampo’s observation of the “Division” (the title of his recent column in the Inquirer) among Filipinos in America. “I’m not a sociologist, so I don’t know the answer to the question,” he asks. “What is it in our nature that makes expatriate Filipinos divide rather than unite? The answer will come in handy not just abroad but back home where every day is an exercise in forming a nation.”
From our vantage point, “expatriate” Filipinos have united on this “Desperate” issue more than any other issue in recent memory. It’s a unity that our community can build on to address other pressing issues (like the FilVets issue which needs our doctors' support). While not quite an exercise in forming a nation, it is boldly empowering a community.
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.
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