Did President Duterte lie to the people of Tondo?

pro-poor. Accompanying Duterte was the future foreign affairs secretary, Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano. He the Duterte election campaign, an amount three times higher than his declared net worth. He had stayed with his investment every step of the way. Fresh from the resounding campaign triumph, Cayetano looked as if he didn’t at all mind sitting for an hour or so in the depths of urban hell.

And there was also the militantly left- wing feminist Judy Taguiwalo, the nominated social welfare secretary. She told the assembled crowd that night that Duterte put the interests of the poor at the heart of everything he did. A few months later, she went back to being a professor at the University of the Philippines after the Commission on Appointments rejected her nomination.

It’s absurd to try and look for traces of Chief Lakan Dula’s proud and illustrious pre-hispanic trading port that was Tondo in the sixteenth century. Eighty thousand people per square kilometer now live in the maze of Tondo’s shanties and along the banks of the Pasig River. It is some time ago since can tell you about the acidic smell, and the shacks, cobbled from bits and pieces, clumped in alleyways and under crumbling bridges, and giant cement pipes inhabited by whole families. There was no clean water and sanitation to speak of, but plenty of fetid puddles and stinking slurry that were happy breeding grounds for malaria and dengue and parasitical worms.

For Duterte’s visit, the residents of Isla Puting Bato were treated to white tablecloths on plastic tables, free bottled water, and styrofoam who listened to him included children, small, thin, and wide-eyed with hope? It’s possible.

The nominated health secretary Paulyn Ubial vowed to pursue the dream of universal health care. In August 2016, she was sent to Cuba to learn how the Cubans managed it. She said she’ll spend to the max on front line services.

By mid-2017, Duterte’s health agenda was being seen as a sham. In her withering report to Rappler, Eleanor A. Jara, director of the Council for Health and Development, found the Duterte administration responsible for devastating budget cuts on direct health services and aggressively pushing to privatize and corporatize public hospitals. Thirty-three out of seventy-two public hospitals, includ for maternal and child health care, Nothing was being done about the high maternal mortality rate, and frontline services as immunization and basic check-up programs promised to 20 million Filipinos, never materialized. Neither was there an increase in the salaries of health personnel, and there was no funding for additional barangay health stations in rural areas. For reasons other than these failures, Ubial’s nomination was not con

Hopes were also raised, then dashed, within education. The bill for free tuition for state universities and colleges was passed by Congress allocation was missing in the 2018 budget. His education secretary nominee, Leonor Briones, however, managed to keep her job.

brief stint as Secretary of Agrarian Reform ended with the rejection of his nomination in September his entire career working to promote the rights of peasant farmers and their struggle for land, was considered far too radical for the post. Citing his alleged links to the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed guerrilla wing, the New Peoples’ Army, the Commission on Appointments put a brutal end to his mainstream political ambitions. Duterte, evidently, likes to toy with leftists.

And he doesn’t have any patience or sympathy for the struggles of the poor. In October 2017 he was determined to ram through his public utility modernization program, which forces jeepney drivers and operators to take out punitive loans from the government to replace or older. Jeepney drivers cried foul. They threatened, and then went ahead, with strikes. An enraged President wanted to charge them Duterte fumed at the transport unions. “P***** ina, magtiis kayo sa hirap at gutom. Wala akong whore. You can suffer hardship and hunger. I couldn’t care less.)

It’s doubtful Tondo’s residents will hold President Duterte accountable for his un-kept prom and certainly will not be the last. Besides, he proved to be true to his word on one pledge.

Less than a week after Duterte’s visit to Tondo, dead bodies started turning up in conspicuous areas of Santa Cruz, in front of the Intramuros - ropolitan Theater. The bodies were mutilated. The heads of the victims were wrapped tightly with packing tape, and a piece of card was left on their chests: Huwag tularan. Pusher ako. The date was July 10, 2016.