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News that our OFWs have again been maltreated by the Department of
Labor’s Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration (OWWA) gave me
a pain in the chest. After all I am a former OFW myself.
Another reason I was feeling sentimental about
the bad deal OFWs are getting, once more, from OWWA is that last
week, on May 4, was when the Aguinaldo government that ousted Andres
Bonifacio, our original hero of the revolution against Spain,
appointed a court martial to try him and his brother Procopio for
alleged treason. A week before, on April 27, Andres and
Procopio were arrested after a skirmish with Aguinaldo forces in
which another Bonifacio brother, Ciriaco, was killed. In
captivity, the Supremo was stabbed in the neck.
On May 5, the Aguinaldo government’s Council
of War, with General Mariano Noriel as its chairman, began studying
the case against the Bonifacio brothers. They heard the pleadings of
the defense counsel and the former Supremo of the Katipunan. The
next day, Noriel’s kangaroo court found Andres and Procopio
Bonifacio (in the words of the National Historical Institute)
“guilty of aiming to overthrow the Aguinaldo government, to kill
President Aguinaldo and to declare war against government forces.”
The council recommended the death penalty.
On May 8 President Aguinaldo commuted the death
sentences to life imprisonment. But, as Aguinaldo’s memoir tells
us, Noriel argued that sparing the Supremo would lead to instability
and undermine the revolutionary government. President Aguinaldo then
rescinded the commutation and told Noriel to go ahead and carry out
the Council of War’s sentence.
So on May 10, the founder of the Katpunan and
the initiator of the revolution, and his brother were shot to death
by a detail led by Lazaro Macapagal. This fellow turned out to be
quite a liar.
He feigned not knowing what he was supposed to
do with the Supremo and Procopio when he and his gang brought them
to Mount Tala. He said his orders, signed by Mariano Noriel, were
sealed. He only found out that he was to execute the
Bonifacios when he opened the sealed instructions. Then,
robbing glory from the Supremo, he testified at first that Bonifacio
had died a coward, begging for his life. Macapagal, who had in fact
been the secretary of Noriel’s Council of War, later moderated his
slander.
Apparently, the Aguinaldo camp had to make sure
Bonifacio was silenced. For they had begun to betray the revolution
by negotiating, with the help of friars, to end the revolution. But
the negotiators for the Spanish side eventually withdrew, sensing
that they were not authorized to grant the concessions the Aguinaldo
camp were asking for. Bonifacio’s people had apparently
found out that the Caviteños who had drummed him out of the
revolution’s leadership were seeking an accommodation with the
enemy.
Macapagal shot the wounded Bonifacio from
behind. Procopio had died minutes earlier. He had made a dash for
safety into the woods and was shot by pursuers. But other witnesses
have testified that the Bonifacios were not shot. They were hacked
to death.
Read the late Adrian Cristobal’s The Tragedy
of the Revolution and his play The Trial.
Similar betrayal
A similar but unbloody betrayal of the OFWs,
whom the Arroyo administration exalts as great heroes in words but
not in deeds, has been happening at every turn.
The strength of the peso against the US dollar,
a strength that OFW remittances help build, works against them. But
the government is doing nothing to help these heroes.
At a forum last April 14 organized jointly by
the Philippine Embassy in Washington, D.C. and the Migrant Policy
Institute, an independent think-tank based in America’s capital,
one of the things that came out was a World Bank study revealing a
tragedy about OFW remittances. These dollar remittances make up
about 13 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.
OFW dollar remittances have grown by about 50
percent—from $11.5 billion in 2004 to $17 billion in 2007.
In real terms, however, according to World Bank people Sanket
Mohapatra and Dilip Ratha (as reported by Rodney Jaleco of the ABS-CBN
North America News Bureau) that increase represents only a 3 percent
because the purchasing power of the OFW dollars has declined
immensely.
The OFWs have had to send in double the amount
they used to remit to their families otherwise the latter would not
be able to buy the same things and pay for the same debts.
Now, the OWWA and DOLE, like Lazaro Macapagal
slandering Andres Bonifacio, are maligning the OFWs who have
made pre-departure loans as dishonorable deadbeats!
Very commendably Senate President Manuel Villar
has scolded the OWWA for suspending the pre-departure loans to OFWs
and leaving them at the mercy of loan sharks. If OWWA is failing to
collect, he said, it should simply improve its collection system.
Left-of-center Migrante says DOLE’s loan
suspension move and the slander of the OFWs are just means to cover
up for the government’s mismanagement of the P9 billion to P10
billion it has amassed by collecting $25 per OFW.
rqb@manilatimes.net
rq_bas@yahoo.com
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