Having been an activist (underground, I was told) Angeles City Mayor Edgar ‘EdPam’ Pamintuan — I’m certain — recognizes the virtue of paying a good attention not only to those who are supportive of him but to those who are positively critical of him, and be particularly wary of those who lavishly praise him and simply patronize him.
By that, Mayor EdPam was one of the countless youth of the ‘70s which heeded the national democratic movement’s call ‘… to seize the day .. and the hour …’ made themselves scarce from public eye, went against the Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos conjugal dictatorship and met the perils of martial rule head on.
He’s back to the society’s mainstream for years now, and as a leader with substance he can look back to his experience in the ‘underground’ as a treasured opportunity in concretely feeling the peoples’ pulse.
For starters, shortly after being sworn into office, he literally brought light back to the city hall after some days of dark and night of disquiet.
No martial law there. Just unlighted buildings, rooms and alleyways courtesy of the past city leadership’s “failure” to settle their electric service account in Angeles Electric Cooperative which run P18 million.
The eyepiece of the microscope by which EdPam will be viewed has been wiped clean by the arrest of Mark Dizon, aka Michael Mitchell Dizon who with his caliber 32 pistol claimed nine lives including war veterans — an American and a Briton — and an Australian with a Canadian passport.
His own call for transparency can be seen with his investigation of the immediate past City Mayor r Francis “Blueboy” Nepomuceno giving away the city government’s vehicles to village officials which is “patently illegal,” as they were Blueboy’s “payback” to those who supported him in the last polls.
Placed alongside this is the purchase of three big and grossly over-prized second hand motorbikes supposedly for better police mobility, but now parked and gathering dust and rust at the city hall’s motor pool.
Optimism to EdPam’s renewed mandate reduced the public cries for the speedy resolution of the city’s garbage disposal problem and the millions pesos of debt to the Kalangitan dumpsite again courtesy of the alleged corruption and mismanagement of the preceding city administration.
That cleaned up the plate to which EdPam’s first hundred days was laid as a political microscopic specimen.
But it is my sincere prayer that EdPam be not measured not only in the initial stages of his city watch but the rest of his term along the need to concretely address the issue of prostitution and the trafficking of women and children. It can’t be EdPam’s litmus test.
The problem’s dimension is not confined within the city’s boundaries. The strength of the law however willfully implemented can only drive both the victims and the culprits to the next city or town. Before the blinking of the red lights in the length of Ermita in Manila, there was Calumpang in Marikina and Bocaue in Bulacan.
In not too recent past the Gabriela Women’s organization released a statement stating that Angeles City has overtaken any district in Manila as far as the blinking of “entertainment red lights” is concerned. In a not too amusing incident in the thick of campaigns in the last elections, an incumbent local official running for reelection was asked in a local television program what he thought and planned to do concerning Gabriela’s findings. He said the information is outdated and there are no more prostitution houses operating in his area.
The following day Channel 7 news aired footages clandestinely shot featuring 30 or so women dancing in the nude by a poolside entertaining foreigners in a hotel operated in the local official’s area.
Hungry women and children and even men can will themselves to be trafficked. Empty stomachs see to that. Traffickers also for their poverty or greed or both particularly if they see greed in more monstrous proportions in the ranks of those who are supposed to wield the political will continue to prey on vulnerable women and children.
A heartless profitable trade as old as time itself, it flourished here since Fort Stotsenberg, later Clark US Air Force base and now Clark Freeport Zone came into being.
Angeles City is being shaped to compete for tourism among other economic thrusts, and only the naïve can believe that by doing so the City can rid itself of prostitution and trafficking in person. There will be demands both local and foreign, and there will be plenty who will cater, to make their pots boiling.
By that, Mayor EdPam was one of the countless youth of the ‘70s which heeded the national democratic movement’s call ‘… to seize the day .. and the hour …’ made themselves scarce from public eye, went against the Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos conjugal dictatorship and met the perils of martial rule head on.
He’s back to the society’s mainstream for years now, and as a leader with substance he can look back to his experience in the ‘underground’ as a treasured opportunity in concretely feeling the peoples’ pulse.
For starters, shortly after being sworn into office, he literally brought light back to the city hall after some days of dark and night of disquiet.
No martial law there. Just unlighted buildings, rooms and alleyways courtesy of the past city leadership’s “failure” to settle their electric service account in Angeles Electric Cooperative which run P18 million.
The eyepiece of the microscope by which EdPam will be viewed has been wiped clean by the arrest of Mark Dizon, aka Michael Mitchell Dizon who with his caliber 32 pistol claimed nine lives including war veterans — an American and a Briton — and an Australian with a Canadian passport.
His own call for transparency can be seen with his investigation of the immediate past City Mayor r Francis “Blueboy” Nepomuceno giving away the city government’s vehicles to village officials which is “patently illegal,” as they were Blueboy’s “payback” to those who supported him in the last polls.
Placed alongside this is the purchase of three big and grossly over-prized second hand motorbikes supposedly for better police mobility, but now parked and gathering dust and rust at the city hall’s motor pool.
Optimism to EdPam’s renewed mandate reduced the public cries for the speedy resolution of the city’s garbage disposal problem and the millions pesos of debt to the Kalangitan dumpsite again courtesy of the alleged corruption and mismanagement of the preceding city administration.
That cleaned up the plate to which EdPam’s first hundred days was laid as a political microscopic specimen.
But it is my sincere prayer that EdPam be not measured not only in the initial stages of his city watch but the rest of his term along the need to concretely address the issue of prostitution and the trafficking of women and children. It can’t be EdPam’s litmus test.
The problem’s dimension is not confined within the city’s boundaries. The strength of the law however willfully implemented can only drive both the victims and the culprits to the next city or town. Before the blinking of the red lights in the length of Ermita in Manila, there was Calumpang in Marikina and Bocaue in Bulacan.
In not too recent past the Gabriela Women’s organization released a statement stating that Angeles City has overtaken any district in Manila as far as the blinking of “entertainment red lights” is concerned. In a not too amusing incident in the thick of campaigns in the last elections, an incumbent local official running for reelection was asked in a local television program what he thought and planned to do concerning Gabriela’s findings. He said the information is outdated and there are no more prostitution houses operating in his area.
The following day Channel 7 news aired footages clandestinely shot featuring 30 or so women dancing in the nude by a poolside entertaining foreigners in a hotel operated in the local official’s area.
Hungry women and children and even men can will themselves to be trafficked. Empty stomachs see to that. Traffickers also for their poverty or greed or both particularly if they see greed in more monstrous proportions in the ranks of those who are supposed to wield the political will continue to prey on vulnerable women and children.
A heartless profitable trade as old as time itself, it flourished here since Fort Stotsenberg, later Clark US Air Force base and now Clark Freeport Zone came into being.
Angeles City is being shaped to compete for tourism among other economic thrusts, and only the naïve can believe that by doing so the City can rid itself of prostitution and trafficking in person. There will be demands both local and foreign, and there will be plenty who will cater, to make their pots boiling.
