“If the masterminds and their accomplices are ever charged in court, why, they just pay up, because in this country, only the poor pay”
Due to persistent rains in the mountain areas of Cebu City, the garbage landfill operated by a private contractor collapsed, and buried scores of people under tons of society’s refuse.
The barangay where the landslide of garbage occurred is called Binaliw.
The landfill is operated by Prime Integrated Waste Solutions, Inc. which is part of Prime Infrastructure of the Razon multi-billion business empire, which began with port operations, then gambling casinos, later electric power and water services, and now garbage.
We are writing this article when more than 20 people have been found dead, and a dozen more workers are being unearthed from a mountain of garbage which cascaded into the Binaliw landfill site.
Only the poor engage in the “dirty” work of garbage collection, sorting and other activities in refuse management. In Binaliw, it is the poor who paid with their lives.
I was a member of Pres. Estrada’s Cabinet as presidential adviser on political affairs and general manager of the Philippine Tourism Authority when in July 2000, what happened in Binaliw also occurred in Payatas, the garbage dump used by most Metro Manila cities.
Payatas is just a few kilometers off the Batasang Pambansa where our legislators craft laws that are supposed to protect the people.
200 perished in that garbage slide in Payatas, including women and children who eked a livelihood out of scavenging, like that young basurero from Tondo, Isko Moreno, who at a very young age, scoured through garbage to earn a few bucks to support himself and his mother.
A year before the Payatas incident, Congress passed RA 8749, also called the Clean Air Act which, in trying to protect us from toxicity in the air, forbade waste incineration.
I wondered then, with the quantum leaps in technology and the worldwide demand for a clean environment, what if years after RA 8749, state-of-the-art waste incineration facilities were developed?
I asked the president why we should outlaw incineration when technology might develop a clean alternative in the future, yet he signed the bill into law anyway.
After the Philippine Tourism Authority was done with supplying Boracay with clean water piped under the sea from mainland Aklan, we next worked on the wastewater treatment facility for the island.
I went to Japan to look at technologies for solid waste management.
I visited two incineration facilities that generated electric power out of solid waste, without toxic smoke being spewed from its plants.
But that required segregating household waste, which is supposed to be made obligatory by our LGUs. If I recall right, only Marikina mayors Bayani and Marides Fernando implemented a successful waste segregation program for their city.
And so, we have landfill after landfill — in Montalban and elsewhere in the country, to include Binaliw upon Cebu City.
Incidents like Payatas and Binaliw will be replicated in other parts of the country, and all government does after is to give “ayuda” to the bereaved families of the victims but do nothing thereafter.
They are poor, anyway. And the poor always pay, for the callousness of officials with unlimited greed, as in ghost and sub-standard flood control that contributed more to flooding.
The rich and the scandalized upper middle class threw out Joseph Estrada for accepting money from jueteng operators, but that was not about government funds.
No one died while betting on jueteng, whether operated by Atong Ang or rival Bong Pineda, or chief collector Chavit Singson during Erap’s time.
Jueteng, a “victimless” crime, caused Erap’s downfall. But flood control now, with deadly consequences, has yet to get a big fish hooked.
Always, it is the poor who pay — losing their long-saved for appliances and furniture, while suffering unbearable living conditions due to floods.
But over and above the loss of possessions, many lives were lost, never to be regained.
A few hundreds in the greater Manila area to include neighboring provinces like Bulacan, almost two hundred in Cebu and Negros when Typhoon Tino struck, others elsewhere in the benighted land — dead.
The greedy “proponents” buy Rolls Royce wheels and private planes, or houses in Forbes Park, hotels and resorts even, designer bags and atrociously expensive, but tastelessly crafted Richard Mille’s, otherwise called Reloj ng Magnanakaw.
And if the masterminds and their accomplices are ever charged in court, why, they just pay up, because in this country, only the poor pay.
