We asked here last month. With local politics taking a morbid turn, to wit:
a) Some white casket stencilled with “Alay ni Mayor TJ Rodriguez” in red elevated the reelecting alcalde to the Facebook wall of shame; and
b) Civil Case No. 971-4-12 filed on April 17, 2012 with the RTC Branch 66 was exhumed versus Rodriguez’s rival, the comebackdreaming Rey Catacutan for his “stubborn” refusal to vacate the morgue at the O’Donnell Resettlement site which he reportedly converted into his own rest house.
The caskets – however epal-ized – benefitted the Capas constituency more. That the town’s barangay chairs rose as one to petition the mayor against stopping his alay is indubitable proof of this.
The morgue-turned-private-rest-house disadvantaged everyone else in the community.
Catacutan’s pleading it was actually meant to be a pharmacy, readily dismissed as (un)justifying afterthought (im)material to his defense in the aforementioned case.
Of course, I am just being an amplifier here of trending opinions gathered in the town famous for being the terminus of the infamous Death March. Come to think of it, this may have some bearing on the politics of death at play here.
Aye, since writing that piece “Of caskets as assets, morgue as liability” (Punto! June 18-20, 2015), I have become some sort of sounding board for Capas politics.
The saga of morbidity, so I have been infofed, continues: funeral wreaths and bottled water branded with Catacutan’s name and signature color yellow are omnipresent in wakes where Rodriguez’s caskets – now minus his stencilled name – still make the centrepiece.
Only in Capas? Not by a long shot, this past few days proved.
Necropolitics is taken to the next – not necessarily higher – level in Angeles City.
“Will the dead among the poor be ever at peace in knowing that they now forever will be in a P110-million memorial ‘haven’?” Asked Vice Mayor Vicky Vega-Cabigting in her opposition to the plus-P287-million loan the city council ratified by a vote of 10-1 to fund the public cemetery, a fountain at the heritage district (P16 million), barangay halls (P28 million), the Pampang public market (P50) million, and a command center (P50 million).
Iterated Vega-Cabigting: “I believe that there should be a decent place for indigent individuals who have passed on. But a P110- million cemetery is not the answer.”
Riposted Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan: “The vice mayor will regret and feel sorry someday for opposing the memorial park designed to assist the poor.”
Retorted Vega-Cabigting: “I never regret good things I do. On the contrary, Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan might regret his action…I am not against the public cemetery project of the city government. What I am up against is the exorbitant amount they will use for it. P110 million is too much! They are buying a new land when there is already an existing donated land in Sapa Libutad which was given to the city for the purpose of making it into a public memorial park.”
Pamintuan dismissive: “Cabigting is misinformed and she did not study well before commenting.” The land referred to by the vice mayor, he said, is not the lot donated by the Ayson family for a public cemetery but the site of a materials recovery facility.
Admitting though that the donated lot for the cemetery “is too small and had been eroded” and thus required P30 million for “engineering interventions” alone to make it suitable for its purpose.
Quipped Vega-Cabigting: “I was told by experts that P25 million for the project is enough. They even told me that the design presented is not even ‘world class’.” Who these “experts” are, she did not say though.
“An old-style and small memorial park.” As cheap as one can ever get, Pamintuan said, in effect, of Vega-Cabigting’s P25-million price tag for a public cemetery.
Nowhere near the “Rolls Royce of memorial parks” envisioned by the mayor as befitting the nobility and dignity of every Angeleno, to wit: a columbarium and crematorium, as well as four chapels and other amenities at a low of P3,000 for service cost per head, er, per dead.
No need for a Rolls Royce of a memorial park, Vega-Cabigting insisted, but a “decent” burial ground for indigent constituents, minus the “indecent” amount it would cost.
Already dismissive, Pamintuan even conclusive: “The vice-mayor doesn’t have perspective. She keeps talking without making the necessary research and study. Cabigting is politicking too early.”
Expect now the public cemetery of Angeles City one issue that will be finally buried – along with the loser – only after the avalanche of votes in May 2016.
Caskets. Morgue. Wreaths. Cemetery. Ah, to what deathly lows has local politics sunk?
