Gracia ni Maria
There are crying ladies and an old man is weeping in silence – a loved one’s body lies lifeless in a white casket. There’s a flamboyant boy in a black skimpy two-piece with Christmas lights wrapped around his body, dancing the night away; a mother and son are trying to get a good night’s rest. The shanties are dripping wet because of the downpour and the sound of pots and pans banging endlessly is echoing above the hodgepodge of makeshift homes. There’s soot, grime, and dirt all over. A riot has erupted and people are killing each other. There’s bedlam and silence all at the same time—bullets, explosions, incessant wailings, anger.
This labyrinthine shantytown is a hellhole; you’ll get lost in the wink of an eye. This is Barangay Gracia ni Maria, a netherworld in Erik Matti’s BuyBust. It’s not real but it’s a cartographic reality; it’s just a setting of a movie, but fiction it is not — the desperation of the people here is as real as it can get.
The movie is about a buy bust operation by anti-drug authorities that goes terribly wrong. In the tradition of Matti films “On the Job” and “Honor Thy Father,” BuyBust is thrilling, well written and visually engaging although some elements of the story are not necessarily realistic.
But more than the story, it left me a question on the country’s slums.
Why, I wondered, do Filipinos continue to live in slums, year after year, one administration after another?
Slums are widespread in Metro Manila, along riverbanks, by mountains of garbage, or under condemned bridges.
There are roughly five million people living in Metro Manila’s slums, according to government statistics. The number is projected to rise to 6.3 million in 2020 and to 8.9 million in 2050, according to the Family Income and Expenditure Survey. Between 2000 and 2006, the slum population grew at an annual rate of 3.4 percent in urban areas. Work has brought me to many slum communities through the years. I once visited Barangay Corazon de Jesus in San Juan to cover an eviction. In a place they call “looban,” in Tandang Sora, I trailed a gambler for days. I also went to a slum near Mayon in Quezon City to do a piece on prepaid electricity. The size of the dwellings are so small, just about five square meters – or just enough for a bed and some stuff. People here are cramped like sardines. Every squatter colony in the Philippines has its own story
to tell, but their tales are woven out of the same fabric of extreme poverty. Some are netherworlds with high concentrations of gangsters and thieves, while others are home to vendors and laborers. What is common is the daily struggle to survive.
Conditions in these places are barely livable – no clean water, no proper electricity connection, and with all the trash and dirt, these places are the most unsanitary dwellings.
Authorities demolish squatter colonies when big developers want to build on the land where these slums exist, but fail to implement a relocation program acceptable to the settlers.
The National Housing Authority (NHA), mandated to provide for the housing needs of the urban poor, insists that the government provides proper relocation.
In a relocation site in Montalban, Rizal, a geohazard area prone to flooding and earthquakes, the NHA has already moved more than 100,000 settlers.
The site is located 30 kilometers away from the capital, at the end of a winding road lined on both sides with garbage dumpsites and junkyards. It stands on a barren rice field, directly under the scorching heat of the sun.
The nearest public hospital is 25 kilometers away and the nearby school is cramped with a hundred students per class.
People call it a God-forsaken place. Years ago, on Aug. 7, 2012, monsoon rains brought so much water, leaving some homes submerged all the way to the roof.
The government must have better relocation programs including proper employment. The government must increase the budget for the NHA and not cut it for this to happen. It slashed the agency’s budget to at least P2 billion for 2018 from P6 billion last year. Cash transfers will not address slum poverty. It’s only a palliative but not a long-term solution.
Our politicians must muster enough political will and selflessness to help address the problem. Sadly, our local politicians keep the slums where they are because the dwellers provide the votes they need come election time.
At the end of BuyBust, Gracia ni Maria descends into an insanely twisted pandemonium.
The morning after, there are throngs and throngs of bloodied bodies strewn grotesquely in mud, dirty water and filth. It’s the same maze-like slum where the four horsemen of the apocalypse galloped the night before, twisting and turning into the muck.
In real life, in the many Gracia ni Marias all over the country, the desperately poor aren’t dead. They go on eking out a living doing odd jobs, day after day, night after night. After a day’s hustle and when darkness comes, they go back to their shanties, the only home they have.
Iris Gonzales’ e-mail address is eyesgonzales@gmail.com