Crack

 

THE POLICE should have killed Reina Mae “Ina” Nasino when they arrested her and fellow workers in a raid at dawn on Nov. 5, 2019. It would have saved the State at least the additional expenses it always claims it can ill afford.

Instead, Ina, obscured in personal protective equipment (PPE), dominated online feeds during the furlough of six hours that the court granted so the 23-year-old urban poor organizer of the nongovernment organization, Kadamay, formerly working in Smokey Mountain, Tondo, can leave the Manila City Jail to visit her daughter.

The other body rivaling Ina’s viral image belongs to the truly dead, baby River. Like her PPE-hidden mother, River cannot be seen, only imagined in the small white coffin her mother, handcuffed, touched with difficulty. 

Mother and daughter are in white. Color of surrender, contagion, innocence, death. 

Along with Ina, 61 other activists were arrested in Bicol and Manila on the strength of warrants signed by only one Quezon City judge, reported Lian Buan of Rappler. Had Ina been shot while “resisting arrest,” a dominant narrative explaining this country’s history of inconvenient bodies conveniently silenced, who would remember her now?

Ina and River “benefit” from the punitive justice that reduces bodies into “bodiless reality,” instruments to demonstrate that far better for extracting obedience to the State is not torture or death but “punishment… (that) strike(s) the soul rather than the body,” as  Foucault, quoting Mably, states in “Discipline & Punish.” 

In the ensuing war of opinions spouting over two bodies we barely see, the news photos of Ina and River illustrate the difficulty of seeing,  past the long arms and uniformed escorts bristling around Ina’s white-coated figure during the wake and the burial, what the State and its instruments have effaced: underneath the PPE shroud are the breasts a mother was prevented by law and order from giving to her baby, born underweight after she carried her while jailed in a cell designed for 40 prisoners but holding 80.

No one dropped River into the cracks. Not the jails that don’t have facilities for breastfeeding inmates. Not the courts which ruled against her nursing while on hospital arrest and separated the infant from her mother a month after birth. Not the police, which used national security and the pandemic to keep mother and child apart even unto death.

Specially not us, so quick to condemn activists, dissidents, and political prisoners jailed for their beliefs.

This “bodiless reality”—who next after the Nasinos?—is superior to extrajudicial killing.

Thanks to the State in the time of Rodrigo Roa Duterte, we have a baby album like no other.

Source of photo: AP/sunstar.com.ph

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 18, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

No impunity

NEW normal for protests.

Last June 12, a “lightning rally” composed of 10 persons and lasting for “only half a minute” was held along Gorordo Ave. to protest the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020.

As reported by a SunStar Cebu team on June 12, professor Regletto Aldrich Imbong, president of the All UP Academic Employees’ Union at the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu, said the “lightning rally” responds to the present intolerance of the police for mass assemblies beyond 10 persons.

Convenors of the Movement Against Tyranny (MAT) Cebu and the Youth Act Now Against Tyranny (Yanat) Cebu, which organized the June 12 lightning rally, protested police discrimination in allowing supporters of the same bill to disperse “at least eight minutes” after their assembly in downtown Cebu. No riot police present.

Why should dissenters of the bill be singled out for violent dispersal and arrest?

Based on grammar and praxis, there is no distinction between “riot police” or “anti-riot police” because, as seen from the June 5 dispersal and arrest of dissenters, the formation outside UP Cebu of the Civil Disturbance Management Unit (CDMU) of the Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) turned a group of 30 or so persons into a riot requiring “hot pursuit” of unarmed rallyists by heavily armed officers.

During the Marcos years, activists covered their faces with “tubao” (woven indigenous scarves) because agents in civilian attire, mingling with rallyists and spectators, were filming and photographing street protesters for the dossiers compiled by the police and the military.

Smart phone videos of the June 5 incident uploaded by UP students and faculty confirmed that operatives in civilian clothes emerged from the crowd and chased the rallyists when the order to disperse came from police higher-ups. They breached the low walls of the academe, with some snatching at and wrestling with rallyists helping companions being manhandled by these operatives.

Police presence in UP Cebu, as well as allegations of campus guards cooperating with the police in the June 5 dispersal and arrests, must be acted upon by the UP Cebu administration.

Such acts violate UP autonomy from military and police interventions, as sealed by the 1982 accord signed by student leader Sonia Soto and then defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile; the 1989 agreement signed between UP president Jose Nemenzo and then secretary of the national defense Fidel Ramos; and the 1992 agreement covering the Philippine National Police (PNP), signed by UP president Jose Abueva and then Interior Secretary Rafael Alunan III.

Police impunity should not be part of the new normal.




Mouthwash? Tom and Jerry image sourced from bbc.com



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 14, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”