BoholAnalysis

  Recently, one cannot help but notice several anti-insurgency slogans painted in red letters on white sacks, hung conspicuously in public places in the province.   I have seen a few of these, even near the Dauis Plaza.     It feels bizarre, to say the least.   Dauis town, for example, is a tourism destination and have not been considered a hotbed for communist insurgency historically.   Seeing these slogans can potentially scare tourists that tourism stakeholders are trying to lure back and visit the province.     Vice Governor Rene Relampagos echo this concern during a meeting of the Regional Peace and Order Council in March this year.   It was reported that the vice governor sought clarification from the Philippine National Police, which identified Bohol, along with Negros Oriental, as the region’s “red” areas.        In his response, Regional Intelligence Chief Police Lt. Col. Robert Lingbawan said that the “red-tagging” is caused by “monitored recov

(image courtesy of gearpatrol.com) Last Friday, 22 March 2012, I met a Phd student from Belgium Sebastien and his wife Ally at Holy Name University where Sebastien was temporarily stationed while doing his fieldwork in the Philippines.  Sebastien studies climate change adaptation and participatory planning in the Philippines for his degree at the University of Namur (F.U.N.D. P) and he chose Bohol as the place to conduct his fieldwork though he plans to cover a few other sites in the Visayas.  I met Sebastien through email when he sent me a letter of inquiry after reading a paper I wrote and presented in the Development Studies Association conference in the United Kingdom sometime in 2008.  I explained to him the context of the research he told me his research interests. When they finally decided to come to the Philippines, they went to Bacolod first to explore possibilities of conducting the research there.  We met in Manila a few days after they arrived and still offered

I arrived in Tagbilaran after three weeks of academic theorizing on development and inequality at Brown University.  Several news, unpleasant ones, greeted me, over a breakfast of corned beef and rice.  There was new case of burglary with arson at Paz Pharmacy, located along Gallares Streets. The Bohol Chronicle reported, on its Wednesday edition (June 22), that the pattern was similar to what happened to B and J Computer in May this year. As I am writing this, I am facilitating a workshop in Naic, Cavite.  My wife called me, a few minutes ago that two of our neighbours experienced attempted cases of burglary, resulting to a loss of P1,000 to one of them. I shudder at the thought that Tagbilaran is no longer safe, as I still want to cling to the memory of a not so distant past when roaming the streets was not a problem at all, and robbery and burglary of this scale were never heard of. In 2011 alone, several alarming cases happened. In January, the church of Loboc was burglarized we

President Arroyo (PGMA), in her recent Bohol visit, lauded again the provincial government as a model for local efforts to reduce poverty and promote peace. Ironically, this declaration was set against a background of a series of robbery cases, unsolved political killings, and undocumented violence across the province. This recognition of Bohol, however, is not a recent phenomenon. Two years ago, the Galing Pook Foundation awarded the Bohol Poverty Reduction, Peace and Development Program as one of the best practices in local governance in the country in trying to promote peace, through poverty alleviation and development (GPF 2006). Poverty alleviation programs in Bohol started started out as an anti-insurgency solution rather than a design to achieve poverty reduction. As a matter of fact, one of the first maps related to the province’s poverty reduction efforts was an insurgency map which became the basis of the targeting of provincial poverty programs. Barangays were classified as