Category: Frontiers

That quest pulled me out of the comfort of the church rectory into the farms and factories, onto the streets and into the harsh realities of poor people’s lives and to understand better the causes of poverty and led me to start Fair-Trade projects all over the Philippines. How could I be content to eat well everyday and enjoy food security when millions went hungry? It led me to look closely at the social teachings of the church and realize that faith in the God’s given dignity of the human person is only real when it leads to action for justice that will uplift the downtrodden and lead to a life of dignity for all. In the Philippines, about 200 families own or control 70% of the wealth. They control the Congress and the Army ensures their survival. Only a handful of rich families, politicians, and tycoons own or control most of the private arable land in the Philippines while the majority goes landless and hungry. For example, 7 out of 10 peasants still do not own land while less than 1/3 of landowners own more than 80% of agricultural land. The land reform project (CARP) failed: only a fraction (17%) of the 1.5 million hectares of private lands has been fairly redistributed to the tenants who worked the land. The previous government of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo negotiated a 25-year lease with South Korea for 94,000 hectares of prime arable land in Mindoro for food production for South Koreans while Filipinos went landless and hungry.  Since the rapid increase in commodity prices worldwide three years ago, rice has remained at an all-time high in the Philippines. Small farmers did not benefit, fertilizer and pesticide costs rose, millions of pesos designated to help subsidize the inputs were allegedly siphoned off to support the election of the Administration candidates. Besides the Government did not offer higher prices to farmers to grow more rice, instead they imported millions of tons of rice and allowed traders to manipulate the prices by hoarding. So as usual, the rich are getting richer on the hunger of the poor.  There are a billion hungry people in the world today, most of them in Asia at 642 million; in Sub-Saharan Africa, 265 million; Latin America and the Caribbean, 53 million; Near East and North Africa, 42 million; and developed countries, 15 million. Children suffer most from this global malnutrition. If they don’t get the basic food intake between one and three, they are brain damaged and, if they survive, will join millions of children who are unable to learn and remain uneducated and can never have a decent job and a life of dignity.  Undernourished children are sick 160 days of the year and this leads directly to the death of an estimated 5.4 million children every year. Another 5 million children die because of preventable diseases: diarrhea (61%), malaria (57%), pneumonia (52%), and measles (45%), which do their deadly damage because the children are so weak from undernourishment.

In the Philippines and many developing countries, the youth and children, abandoned street children, are arbitrarily arrested and held in medieval dungeon-like conditions without beds, toilets, showers, dining facilities, exercise, sunshine, entertainment, recreation or education for months on end. They endure hunger, undernutrition, lack of medical care, suffer diseases, scabies and some are brutalized and sexually abused by older inmates and guards. They may be guilty but have not been convicted and are too poor to pay bail. They are held for weeks, months and even years before their case is heard and finished. Then it is frequently dismissed for lack of evidence. The Philippines is 80% Catholic and these inhuman conditions continue despite laws forbidding it. That needs a national examination of conscience and repentance. Jesus Christ said: “When I was in jail you came to visit me” … “So long as you did it to one of these, the neediest of all, you did it to me.” But who really cares? They are God’s children whom Jesus called to Himself but society rejects them. Likewise, the general silence and failure of religious leaders and churchgoers to act and protest against the widespread rape, abuse and exploitation of children trafficked into the sex industry, the wide-scale abortion and incest it promotes, will surely bring God’s condemnation and great shame on all. Faith without action is dead, St. James says. We live with shame that stuns the world and that will continue until the sword of justice is raised and lady justice pulls off that blindfold to see the injustice and act to end the suffering of abused victims. Non-implementation of the law to save the victims of sex tourism and the dismissal by some prosecutors of trafficking and child abuse cases is shocking beyond belief. The endless courtroom delays, the sickening sympathy for the suspects of child rape and the legal manipulation that allows the rapists to go free is the most depressing and the worst corruption imaginable. The greatest challenge of the Aquino Administration and Secretary of Justice Leila De Lima is to end this culture of corruption and blatant bribery that is robbing the poor Filipinos of the respect and dignity that they truly deserve. While there are thousands of courageous Filipinos out in the streets, visiting jails and courtrooms fighting for the victims, there is little support for their heroic efforts. Their greatest enemy is apathy and indifference to the plight of the children in this nation. The cries of the victims for justice go mostly unheard and, all the while, children are raped by local and international sex tourists, and relatives. Many are made pregnant; children are having children – that is if the abortionists don’t get them first. In the PREDA homes for abused children, the teenage mothers get all the help and support they need to give birth in dignity and decency and bring up the child in a safe and in a healthy environment. Despite all the physical and psychological damage, they

Zhang Zuhua, among the signatories of Charter 08, has declared that: “The award honors the more than 10,000 Chinese citizens who courageously signed in support of the ideas expressed in the Charter 08 and of all prisoners of conscience.” For his part, the chairman of the Committee that awards the Nobel Prize, Thorbjoern Jagland, said that Liu “is the most prominent symbol of the broad struggle for human rights in China.” The courage of the Nobel Committee in indicating Liu Xiaobo as the winner of the prestigious prize is, however, surprising. Particularly given that it comes at a time when the international community seems to be prostrating itself before China; super-rich, super-powerful, the largest market in the world, etc.  The point is that Liu Xiaobo’s and Charter 08’s vision of their country is prophetic: without human rights, China may be able to “modernize” itself from the economic point of view, but this modernization will become “madness,” the harbinger of a disaster, the traces of which are already visible in China today. Charter 08 cites some examples of this; “government corruption, the lack of rule of law, human rights undermined, the corruption of public ethics, crass capitalism, the growing inequality between rich and poor, unbridled exploitation of the natural environment, both human and historical; the escalation of a long list of social conflicts, and … a clear animosity between officials and ordinary people.” By curbing human rights and democracy, the Communist Party of China becomes fully responsible for the human disaster towards which China is heading. An important element in giving the Nobel Prize to Liu lies in the fact that Charter 08 sees religious freedom as being at the heart of all true reform. It is increasingly clear that one cannot defend man (Chinese or of any other culture) without considering him an absolute value and, thus, in a religious view that sees man as belonging to God and not to the state. For this very reason – and perhaps for the first time in the history of Chinese dissidents – a document on human rights calls for religious freedom, the elimination of differences in “legal” and “illegal,” official and underground religious activities. This step – a religious foundation of human rights – is the result of the suffering and imprisonment of several dissidents, among them Liu, who came in contact with the best of Western civilization. The Nobel Prize and the religious emphasis of Charter 08 and Liu Xiaobo’s proposals are also a warning to the West. Europe and the United States must choose whether to continue to use China like a donkey to pull us out of economic crisis, without considering the rights of workers and the environment, taking advantage of cheap labor and nothing more, or whether to enhance not only commercial and economic relations, but also human and religious rights, essential to the development of all peoples. Liu’s warning and that of Charter 08 is that if this step towards respect for man and his religious