Mark was arrested when he picked up a piece of rusted junk metal, practically worthless, and put it in his wobbly pushcart. Someone claimed it was private property and, the small slim, 15-year-old boy was charged and jailed. There, he suffered brutality and deprivation, hunger and endured the denial of his most basic human rights as a minor in detention. Innocent until proven guilty, he was forgotten and only rescued when the PREDA jail rescue team found him and took legal action to have him release to the PREDA boys home pending the resolution of his case. As usual, that was a long slow process. As many as 20 minors see the inside of a jail cell any given year more or less.
They rescued Mark and over a hundred other jailed children last year, by court order, which the legal team procured from a compassionate judge that is implementing the Juvenile Justice Law.
He was months in an overcrowded jail with adult criminals. Most of the minors are there because they steal food, slippers, a T-shirt and some with more serious crimes. Others have no crime at all, they are framed up by police eager to show results for unsolved crimes, appease angry victims, or to meet an arrest quota to get a promotion.
Living in that clapboard shanty with almost zero education, no job and no hope for any kind of a future, 15-year-old Mark and the other younger children had little chance to break out of the vicious circle of poverty. Poverty breeds poverty and the everlasting circle of hunger, ignorance and death. The livelihood projects are giving hope and real action for many of these families. They will break that cycle of poverty with a small interest-free loan. Mark and his parents will get a small bicycle with a big box attached to double their collection range and, in half the time, double their collection and sales of junk and increase their income in weeks. Life would be poor but livable. Mark will have a chance to go to school and break out of poverty.
In the distance over the rusty iron sheets of the slum town roofs I could see the towering skyscrapers and high rise office block and condos of the rich. The people that rule the Philippines compose only a small fraction, of the population, say 200 vastly wealthy families but they account for ownership of 70% of its wealth, power and government. The elite have it all and live in opulent luxury protected by police and army.
Even though the People’s Power movement ousted the Marcos dictatorship in 1986 in the EDSA bloodless revolution, the elite have held onto power. Fundamentally, the same system operates, the same inequality dominates. Hopefully, the people’s street revolutions in the Middle East, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya will bring real democracy and equality to those countries.
The sad reality is that shameless scandal after scandal leaps from the newspapers almost daily as the Senate investigators probe the corruption being uncovered by the Aquino Administration.
Millions of dollars allegedly disappeared into the private bank accounts of corrupt officials, military officers and policemen. One General committed suicide on his mother’s grave a few weeks ago when he was openly accused of corruption.
Most of the suspects in these crimes of the wealthy and corrupt go free and are unaccountable; they apparently have impunity. Even a new honest Secretary of Justice can’t bring them to account. All this while, Mark and thousands like him, suffer hunger and abuse in filthy prison cells without court hearings or evidence against them. They are forgotten as soon as the iron gate slams shut. Parents and relatives are afraid or unable to help them. The rich go free. It’s up to us; until the corrupt system is changed, we need another people’s power revolution for justice and freedom for the children.
