Pet Melliza

By Pet Melliza / The Beekeeper/ November 22, 2021 ILOILO CITY - A mother and her 17-day old baby languish in detention - not in any jail facility, but of all places - in a hospital that sports the lofty imageries of “holiness”, “motherhood”, “women’s and children’s” welfare, whatever. Yes, the Holy Mary  Women and Children Hospital just did, rather, is still doing that as of this writing to Sherryl Faliseo Hijalda, 34 and her baby. For all intents and purposes, she and her little angel are its detainees; both are held against their will in violation of Republic Act 9439, enacted 18 years ago, November 27, 2007.  The Holy Mary Women and and Children’s Hospital at Pavia, Iloilo has sentenced them to indefinite detention for unpaid bills. That, too in effect, condemns them indefinitely to face harsher terms for their way out from forcible detention until they shall have paid their balance. The “holy” hospital bills the mother and baby P1,900 daily for room rental. The baby is the...

 ILOILO CITY (July 16, 2021) - Witches dominating the office called national inter-agency task force (NIATF) on infectious diseases are succeeding - not in healing people from or constricting statistics on the spread of, COVID—19 - but in confusing them to mad scramble. Early afternoon today, employees of government and private offices and commuters are scrambling after news broke that an NIATF grand witch announced that Iloilo City and Province (total population: 2 M) are under enhanced community quarantine  (ECQ). They wanted to go home early fearing they might be stranded, again. ECQ is the most constrictive mode of mass quarantine. All offices and save the “essential” ones, even the courts,  are locked down. Roads are off limits to public vehicles, only one person is allowed per household to go out to do groceries, buy medicines and whatever errands the traveler who must wear a quarantine pass is tasked .  Many a sad tale of the ECQ occurred of civil liberties cu...

‘Insult to Filipinos’, Defensor scion calls Duterte-Duterte Tandem ILOILO CITY (June 9, 2021) — “Legal but politically wrong.” “Big insult to the Filipino people.” That’s how former Iloilo Gov. Arthur D. Defensor, Sr. describes the scenario the ruling PDP-Laban is cooking up to field President Rodrigo R. Duterte to the vice-presidency and his daughter Davao City mayor Sara Duterte to the country’s top post in May 2022 national elections. Defensor, 79, who describes himself “keen political observer”, calls the arrangement of a vice-presidential candidate choosing a presidential running mate “complete departure from tradition” where the presidential hopeful is given the option to pick his/her running mate. “It is legal, the law doesn’t prohibit that but it is politically wrong...and an insult to the Filipino people,” Defensor tells Aksyonh Radyo anchor John Paul Tia in his morning commentary today. Defensor, former PCGG commissioner and House representative, aside from his past as govern...

By Pet Melliza The beekeeper Quo vadis, Toyota - Iloilo? The harrowing experience of a call center agent and his mother in the hands of Toyota - Iloilo could give potential customers goose bumps and second thoughts of patronizing that company, that is, if they knew that. “Gino” bought a unit from its casa  last January and paid their monthly installments until March, P17,000 each month through BDO.  May 19, 2021, an agent “repossessed” it. The man who presented himself sent by Toyota did not tell the poor call center agent the car was up for repossession. “Only  inspection,” he said.  He asked for the key which was promptly given him, opened the door took pictures of the interior, went out to open the hood and took additional pictures of the engine, the tires and the sides of the vehicle. He then announced repossession and zoomed away never to return. Gino and his mother went to Toyota - Iloilo to be informed that indeed the car, a red Vios, was repossessed because o...

 Woke up this morning, at past 3 to be more exact, to be hit by a grim news that an esteemed colleague in the legal profession, Angelo Karlo Guillen, is battling for his life at a hospital. He was assaulted by two masked men who stabbed the side of his head and his back with a screw driver, around 9 pm past, March 3, 2021, at Luna Street, Iloilo City. The attackers fled with his bag containing his lap top. We are made to believe the incident was plain robbery. No, the plot has been hatched in the air conditioned offices of the very institution that is supposedly bankrolled by taxpayers to protect us.  I am referring to government particularly its security forces - the police and armed forces. Atty. Guillen, "AK", as he's fondly called, is a human rights lawyer. He stands for the rights of the marginalized and downtrodden. He's an activist lawyer, if you may, and one of the 42 arrested in Iloilo City on Labor Day, May 1, 2020, after he responded to the incident at Jaro...

KAPITOLYO KANG YRONG-YRONG (Feb. 18, 2021) —Iloilo Province (pop. 1.8 million) seeks to shield itself from the African Swine Fever (ASF) by rushing an ordinance banning live hogs, frozen hog meat and pork products to include processed and canned pork from regions where the viral disease is raging — Luzon, Mindanao, Eastern Visayas and the islands of Mindoro and Masbate. Proposed Provincial Ordinance No. 2021-16, authored by SP Matt P. Palabrica, also requires swine transport vans and trucks from entering Iloilo sans certificate of disinfection from ports of origin. The measure compliments requisites already en place, that is, department administrative orders (DAO) issued bus the Department of Health (DOH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Department of Agriculture (DA) that the Coast Guard, Marina and the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) enforce in ports in the country. Last month, provincial veterinarian Darrel Tabuada granted permits to transport 21,000 head of hogs from the...

ILOILO CITY (February 15, 2021) — TODAY, the news of police “rescuing” minors at the Lumad Bakwit School at the Talamban campus of the University of San Carlos, Cebu City, has gone viral in social media. The PNP calls that “rescue” but human rights groups and participants of the Bakwit School, denounce it an assault on their rights. It baffles sanity to see the incident as “rescue” by the police of children who were precisely at the sanctuary to seek protection from state-sponsored human rights abuses. They are refugees; they fled their mountain homes in Mindanao away from government forces, the very reason for their status as internally displaced persons. The more accurate term is arrest or assault; the video footages show it by the angry and terrified looks of the children screaming while being taken away or “rescued”, to use the term coined by their attackers. Philippine Star reports the figure of those “rescued” or arrested:  21 students of whom 15 are minors and their two teac...

ILOILO CITY— SANTA BARBARA TOWN, 15, kilometers north of this capital city, has just missed the boat. The Department of Agriculture decided instead to build its “AAA” or “triple A” abattoir elsewhere. The deal was, the DA shoulders the cost of building the facility; the town provides the site or the land to build it on. Had that plan materialized, Santa Barbara will be the only one on Panay Island to boast of having an “AAA” slaughterhouse. The DA, wanting to stay away from the bickering elders that delay the project, decided instead to pick Passi City, 56 km from here, as recipient. The town’s elders quarrelled where to build it, who the real estate agent to deal with. And that still rages to date after the town lost the opportunity to host the “AAA” abattoir.  Passi City’s existing “AA” abattoir has attracted Monterey, one of the country’s biggest, to process its hogs that the company transports in refrigerated vans to other provinces in Western Visayas and beyond the regional bo...

Duterte sycophants in the Lower House are hard selling the dismantling of protectionist provisions in the Constitution via cha-cha (to hide Duterte's agenda of term extension). They want to convince us these provisions are the culprit for our economic woes nowadays as parodied by the photo below, thus cha-cha and Pedro and Maria will live happily ever after. These honorable nitwits and dimwits (Iloilo solons included) refuse to see the connection between corruption, mismanagement, abuses, ineptitude and what-not of the Duterte ruling cabal, with the dwindling buying power of the mamamayan.

 Aside from invoking "academic freedom" as ground to oppose defense secretary Delfin Lorenzana who unilaterally abrogated the Soto-Enrile accord, University of the Philippines--Visayas chancellor Clement C. Camposano, also asked him to revisit his (Lorenzana's) alma matter, the Philippine Military Academy (PMA). Lorenzana unilaterally abrogated January 19 the agreement signed by student leader Sonia Soto and then defense secretary Juan Ponce Enrile in 1982 to protect students from police and military presence in schools intended to clamp down on dissent and protests. The accorded was firmed up June 30, 1989 by UP president Jose Abueva and DND secretary Fidel V. Ramos that set the guidelines for the police and Armed Forces to follow in their operations in the UP system throughout the country.  Paraphrasing Camposano interviewed on Aksyon Radyo: UP has no monopoly in having students who took to the hills to join the rebel New People's Army (NPA). Practically all schools...

Wakanda Hall requires payers of real property taxes to pass through the proverbial eye of the needle at its treasury. Many eyes of the needle, actually. I've been through that recently but won't narrate that entertaining episode in the first person. Actually, the apparatchiks of Wakanda are the ones deserving of the needle, not the eye of it but its very tip that needs to be thrust to their butts repeatedly. But that's another story. First eye of needle: falling in line.It takes at least an hour for seniors. The city is magnanimous enough to offer seats to them rather than put them in a tourously long line that defies Covid19. Second eye of needle: assessment. You submit the Tax declaration and location of property. It's about 20-30 minutes for your name to be called; you're handed the assessment of your tax obligation with the instruction to go to a window to pay garbage fee that doesn't assure you diligent waste collection anyway. Caveat: you'll be g...