Panelo’s sexual joke

Letters

IT is bad enough that chief presidential legal counsel Salvador Panelo should blame the unwilling recipients of his – to put it very, very kindly – utterly tasteless humor for failing to discern what, to him anyway, passes for wit.

But to actually accuse Swiss National Public Radio and Television’s Karin Wenger and Ana Santos of having interpreted what he insists was a joke “wrongly to suit your anti-administration sentiment” and of sweeping aside “the meat of the interview on the rationale of the issues raised against the Duterte presidency” to “highlight a joke you didn’t even understand to put me in a bad light, as well as the President” is, to our mind, as deluded as his appreciation of his comic talents.

Let us grant Mr. Panelo the benefit of the doubt and parse his joke.

Maybe he did, indeed, say, “I pack my clothes… because I travel a lot,” and, hypothetically, mispronounced, wittingly or otherwise, the “p” in pack as “f” in “f*ck” as not a few Filipinos are known to do.

How then can he explain this in the context of his being “better in bed”? Because he “packs like an 18-year old”? How does that even begin to make sense?

So, yes, Mr. Panelo, you are right in saying Ms. Wenger and Ms. Santos didn’t get the joke. Neither do we.

And we stand with our two colleagues in denouncing your crass display of lechery and misogyny.

But perhaps we really cannot expect all that much by way of the truth and decency from a lawyer who once accused the families of the 58 persons, including 32 of our colleagues, whose lives were brutally snatched in the Nov. 23, 2009, whose eighth anniversary we will be marking in less than a month with justice just as far today as it was on the day a madman and his minions carried out an orgy of murder that has few equals in our country’s sorry history with impunity. — Jo Clemente, acting chair, and Dabet Panelo, secretary general, National Union of Journalists of the Philippines

‘Free Otacan!’

WE condemn the arrest of RMP-NMR staff, lay worker Julito Otacan, and five other Banwaon human rights defenders in Balit, San Luis, Agusan del Sur.

Otacan is a field worker under the Protect and Promote Indigenous Human Rights in the Philippines, a project funded by the European Union and implemented by the RMP-NMR and Relief International. Otacan, in his work under the project, had been going around the Banwaon communities in Agusan del Sur, to organize and facilitate the training of community members in their capacity as Human Rights Defenders (HRDs). Under martial law, attacks against HRDs had been heightened, with community organizers and legitimate community meetings put under surveillance of state forces.

We are demanding their immediate release and for the government to ensure their protection while they are doing their legitimate work for indigenous peoples’ rights. -Maridel Fano, project manager, Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Human Rights in the Philippines Project, and program coordinator

Still No Jusice

NO justice has been served under Duterte, while the architects of enforced disappearance continue to reign in power. The Damilies of the Disappeared for Justice as they gather on Nov. 2, All Souls’ Day, in their annual commemoration of desaparecidos who were abducted and disappeared by state forces.

The gathering is an indignation of the acquittal of Maj. Harry Baliaga, accused in the abduction and disappearance of Jonas Burgos, and the continuing absence of justice to hundreds of victims of desaparecidos under previous regimes.

Meanwhile, Desaparecidos also calls to surface the four disappeared under Duterte, and demand to hold accountable the brains behind the policy of enforced disappearance who were recently appointed by Duterte to key positions in the government like Gen. Ano who is now DILG secretary. –Ma. Cristina Guevarra, Desaparecidos