 It has been over a year since Ferdinand Marcos Jr. or Bongbong Marcos came to power in the Philippines with Sara Duterte as his vice president. Marcos Jr. follows the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte whose administration was marked by various human rights violations and excesses. Marcos Jr. became president with the support of Rodrigo Duterte but thus his administration followed the legacy of his predecessor. To talk more about this we are joined by Dr. Delin De La Paz and Albert Pascual from the Health Alliance for Democracy. Thank you for joining us Dr. Delin and Albert. If we talk about what the past year has been like for the Philippines of course the global media has often focused its coverage on you know the war on drugs or even US- Philippines relations but before we talk about that I want to talk about this fear that was there when the when Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte came into power that their presidency could see a further weakening of the institutions that had started during Rodrigo Duterte's presidency. So can you tell us about that how have institutions like the media been impacted in this past one year? Okay so when Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ran for presidency we were really quite anxious that he's doing it for the wrong reasons not for the country's benefit but for his family's benefit because there are many pending cases in the court against his family's wealth that were amassed during his father's presidency that were really illegal and it still be in question in court and there is also that huge amount of tax that they have not paid the estate tax on when his father passed away that they were supposed to pay but it's a huge amount that they haven't paid and so it's really to wipe out the bad debts that they have and the change so-called the history that the Marcos presidency and dictatorship was the golden era of the Philippines. So in his campaign he has been always talking about this so we in the people's organizations were very clear that they were changing the history that this is not what has happened during the Marcos Ferdinand Marcos senior dictatorship and there was a lot of human rights violations we exposed this to the people but unfortunately they rigged the elections and so he won as president and during the when he started as president we already presented our demands we had a people's summit where we presented the demands of the people that even if we have not even if we know that his presidency has been rigged that's why the elections has has been rigged that's why he became president we we knew that we it was like that but we still had to present the people's demands and one year after we had another people's summit where we assessed the areas that we looked into such as social services economic policies political policies and militarization economic policies that include foreign policy we looked at it and it we gave him a failure mark because he has not really supported the needs of the people instead there is worsening economic conditions of the people worsening poverty worsening malnutrition and the graft and corruption in government has actually ballooned and the the military is again in place and to top it all he has also collaborated more with the US such that there is increased US military presence in the Philippines which we are afraid will also attract possible conflicts from other countries yeah and we believe that because of different and systematic fake news that's the reason why he became the president so it's a deceptive campaign strategy by the Marcos and his social well he is now in power now after he after his inauguration speech he made a lot of promises number one he promised that he will improve the life of every Filipino but of course one year after we see that this is not true because if we look at the policy of the government regarding the economic policy so we noticed that there's no deterrent from the previous administration like he is still in focusing on the borrowings the importation and the intensive financial investment here in the Philippines if we talk further about the economic policies there is something called the Maharlika Investment Fund which has been very strongly opposed by social movements can you tell us about what this is and why it's being opposed yeah the Maharlika Investment Fund is supposed to be a reservoir of funds that the government can tap on but and they look at the experience of other countries but the experience of other countries is that these are excess funds of these countries and it's like a something that that you have us on hand like savings that you can tap on if you need resources but what the Maharlika Investment Fund wants to do is to get the funds of the people like the pension funds from the social security system the pension funds from the these are from the private groups that have paid their social security taxes the government service insurance system which is for government employees they're gonna tap on these funds and what will they use it for and as Albert was saying the direction of the economic policies of government is foreign investment they will be attracting foreign companies to invest here but at the same time also they will be using these funds for their own personal needs so the Maharlika Investment Funds also will tap on government agencies budgets and so it's it's something that we are afraid will deplete our economic coffers much more than it will help in terms of investment so the government will be investing these funds to all sorts of business ventures that we know from experience have actually just benefited the few of them like the president is current has not really appointed a secretary of agriculture he has appointed one very recently but it's not yet clear what the policies are and in the past year when the president was the secretary of agriculture concurrently president and secretary of agriculture we had a lot of problems with our agricultural conditions like many food even onions even vegetables were being imported and they cost so much at the expense of local development they're not helping local farmers but instead they are importing and who is the importer these are all relatives and cronies of the president so it's really them who are benefiting from this and they will use the Maharlika Investment Fund as their source of investment they will not be using their own personal money but where will the proceeds go it will go to them it will not even go to the Filipino people so a lot of people have really opposed the Maharlika Investment Fund but unfortunately because they control congress both the house of representatives and the senate they have this bill has been passed already and it just needs the signature of the president and if you talk about the sector you both belong to the health sector how is that fared under marcos junior what has been the impact on health workers yeah of course well the marcos administration at first a lot of promises to improve the health care system because number one he promised to hire more health workers more especially doctors in rural areas and build more hospitals to address the lack of health facilities here in the country but year after the marcos administration do nothing about his promises well in fact the benefits of the health workers the benefits of the health workers delayed in his wife so and the facility we don't see any moves by the government to improve the health care system here in Thailand yeah I'd like to also add that because hunger and malnutrition has a big impact on people's health the health conditions of people have really deteriorated because of the increasing number of people who are hungry hungry and malnourished this is because the wages have not really been increased they increase it to 40 pesos what's that it doesn't even it doesn't even allow you to buy a kilo of rice because a kilo of good rice is already 50 pesos they will only increase 40 pesos per day what kind of addition is that to the budget so many people are really going hungry and because of hunger many people are malnourished and because of malnutrition many people are getting ill even the ordinary infectious diseases which is viral it ends up into a bacterial infection that means antibiotics but the medicines continue to increase in price and marcos was saying that he will decrease the price of medicines but the studies have shown that the prices of medicines continue to increase also because we do not have our own drug industry we have been dependent on imported medicines for a long time so if the cost of medicines is expensive in importation then it will really adapt to the cost but why is it also like that it's because the drug industry is dominated by foreign multinational drug multinational drug companies and even the local drug companies they have also paid their medicines at an expensive rate and as albert was saying the president promised better facilities but it's not happening many of the hospitals especially in rural communities are there but they are not equipped with proper facilities nor do they have enough human resources many of the nurses are leaving the country because the pay outside of the country is much higher than what they get from here although the government is saying oh no because we have increased the salaries in the salary standardization law but if there are so many requirements for nurses to get into the government hospital so many of them would just rather go abroad and also because of the understaffing nurses are really overworked and many of them also get sick so they said rather than being overworked and underpaid in this country they might as well and that's a big problem we have a lack of nurses and a lack of doctors the first the hospital building is there but there are no personnel there are no equipment and so the poor people they're the ones suffering in the end when they're already seriously ill they go to private hospitals and private hospitals are also very expensive so contractualization among workers continue especially in the private hospitals they employ the nurses for only a certain period of time because they don't want to make them permanent because that would mean more benefits for them so every six months you have a change of nurses and even not just the nurses the nursing attendants the institutional workers they have been privatized to private contractual agencies so the hospitals are now being supported by workers who have not really been trained as hospital workers it's only now that we have a secretary of health that has been assigned but unfortunately we also do not see him addressing the public health system he comes although he comes from the government hospital but his trust has been very hospital-centric so public health community-based health care has really been neglected under the Marcos government and we're also witnessing this increasing presence of the US military in the Philippines so can you tell me about that you know we recently had saw the largest ever US Filipino military exercises and now US is also going to gain access to four new bases so what does this mean what implications is this going to have for our military it undermines the Philippine military because US military forces come in here actually we have a visiting forces agreement this has been signed several years back where we allow the US forces to go to any place in the Philippines where supposedly they're going to train our local military soldiers the basics of the new armaments but what is the hidden motive here is to sell arms to the Philippines so they will they will train our soldiers on the use of their armaments and they will sell this so again the US being a war dictated economy they're they're importing their exporting their war armaments to us and we are readily accepting them and now with the EDCA the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement Marcos has gone to the US has spoken to President Biden and they have strengthened the Defense Cooperation Agreement the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement and he has agreed to have nine sites of the Philippines as areas where the US soldiers can come and in the guise of training the Filipinos they're actually training themselves in our terrain because we have a terrain that's very similar to the terrain of the countries around Asia and they again want to re-establish themselves as the primary country that has influence in Asia and we are worried about this because of the Taiwan and Beijing disputes we can attract this dispute into our country because obviously the US is also siding with Taiwan against China so we can be drawn into this conflict because of this US presence in our country and this is something that we are very worried about and we are protesting the presence of the US in these sites we expel the US in 1991 there are no more bases here but the visiting forces agreement has actually worsened it because they can go anywhere and this EDCA has identified nine sites that can be attracting more of conflict rather than supporting the Filipino people okay I would like to add yeah well if you look at the background of the US bases in the Philippines as Mamdelen said in 1991 the Senate rejected extended the US bases in the Philippines since then they have no stock in finding ways to return their weapons troops here in the country so as a great background in 1999 under the framework of MP the government signed the RP visiting forces agreement and in 2022 the mutual district agreement just want to show the trend of the US government so that they can return here in the Philippines so in 2014 they signed the enhanced cooperation agreement or the EDCA then if we ask questions if the US return in the Philippines is to help the country or is the US want to support and defend our territory of course now after the US was defeated in in its war of aggression in the middle of the Obama administration began rebalancing the military forces in the Asia Pacific mainly cost in the pacific region as the most abundant natural resources so they ensured their military presence here in this place so particularly Japan, South Korea, Singapore and the Philippines so here in the Philippines like Mamdelen said under EDCA there is a nine education and five were designated in 2016 and in February 2023 another four designated location was approved so from April 18 to 28 it held the biggest exercises in history military exercises in history involving some 12,000 US troops so 5,000 and 5,000 military troops so I think this agreement disadvantage the Philippines first the state of the US forces in the agreed location is for free under article 3 of the EDCA agreement so second they do not have to pay taxes like fees for using water electricity and other public utilities this is only an executive agreement violating the constitution so the the Filipino people is rejecting this kind of policy of foreign policy of the Marcos administration absolutely and if we look at you know how things were under Rodrigo Duterte and how things are now it also becomes important to look at the war on drugs of course under the 30 thousands became victims of extradition killings under the guise of the war on drugs how are things now has how are things changed first the Marcos does not want to accept the international committee who wants to come here and investigate the the cases that the people have presented in the international court so that it can be investigated they do not want to accept the investigators from the international criminal court second it continues the Duterte policy of terrorizing the people and implementing the anti-terrorist law in the anti-terrorist law they will say that you are a terrorist if they have allegations on you even if it is not uh it's not uh confirmed what kind of how do they how did they label you as a terrorist people who are critical of the government have been red tagged we call them red tagged when they always say oh you're communist if you criticize the government you're immediately labeled as communists so we call that red tagging and many of our activists have been red tagged and it's so difficult to move around if you red tag because you're under surveillance and there is that threat of death that they can just kill you on the pretext that you are a terrorist and this is what has happened and it continues to happen many of the communities have experienced um strafing by military personnel we have families they wanted to kill the the father who they alleged to be working with the new people's army but they killed the entire family they strafed the whole house no questions asked so we have communities that have been affected by this where families even children have been killed because of this um militarization and abuse and we also have even among our health workers the Duterte administration has killed Zara Alvarez a nurse in Negros as well as Dr. Mary Rose Sanzalan also a doctor in Negros with no questions asked only the allegation that they were helping the new people's army and right now we also have several activists from the Cordillera region who have been tagged as terrorists because they were speaking against the continuous land grabbing by big business of the indigenous lands in their area their areas have a lot of indigenous communities and these are ancestral lands but government is allowing foreign investors to bring their industry here uh put up with uh their companies in these ancestral lands and these activists have been very vocal against it this is the Cordillera People's Alliance and now they have been tagged as terrorists what does it mean they can just pick you up anytime uh on the allegation that you because they will equate terrorism to communism and they can always say oh your communism you can be arrested but that's not fair because activism is not terrorism so um it's a continuous abuse by the Marcus government from what the Duterte government has started if we look at the uh the records of the Karapatan the human rights group and human rights defenders here in the Philippines i'd like to uh share uh in uh this report came out in 2022 to 2023 so one year of the Marcus administration so here the extra judicial killings the number of victims is 27 uh prostrated extra judicial killings 22 uh we have end post disappearance four uh there is uh 11 victims of torture or illegal arrest arrest without detention 187 so illegal arrest uh uh no illegal search and seizure 507 physical assault and on july 15 demolition 12 000 and a lot more so uh we bring this to the united nations in their uh article uh we bring these issues to the united nations and uh the united nations seeking for uh investigation that the Marcus administration uh do not want to happen so i think uh like mom Dylan said the human rights violation continues and it's very alarming because this is the state policy right so under these conditions how are social movements organizing how are they mobilizing and what are the kind of actions they are able to lead on the ground we continue with our education our mobilization and our organizing of communities because they have to understand that we could have to continue to uphold our rights especially our rights to help and we have basis for this we have the Philippines is a signatory to many of this covenants on human rights etc but the government does not follow it but we have to continue to speak up although of course the threat is there so we have some members who are afraid to join but we still have others especially the young the students are very much uh involved they understand what is happening they know what needs to be done and so we have very good organizing at the level of the nurses we have the Philippine nursing students association at the level of the medical students we have the Philippine medical students association and they're quite there in the forefront coming out with statements coming out with analysis and they continue to organize in the different schools that that we are in and in the communities also we continue to organize the community health workers in the hospitals we have the alliance of health workers that continue to organize the hospital workers and we are now preparing for what we call the sauna um resident bonbon marcos will give his state of the nation address son a on july 24 and this is something that we are also preparing for because we will give our state of the people's address we will have a rally we always have it every year because the conditions have not really changed and in fact it's worse me but we have to speak up so this is something that we are preparing for because we know people continue to suffer people continue to uh wallow in poverty and it's all because of the lack of concrete people centered political and economic policies right uh so thank you dr delin and albert for talking to us today and we hope to keep talking to you in the future on more developments in the region thank you for joining us that's all the time we have for today thank you for watching people's dispatch for more such stories visit our website people's dispatch dot org and follow our social media handles on facebook twitter and instagram