Fiesta time: fun and political murder threats

the fiesta parade was yesterday and the party at the city plaza was last night. So the dogs kept me up barking at the passersby, waking me up last night. We are close enough to the plaza that people park on the street around our property.

I put a dead treelimb in the hole where the lid on the recently covered drainage ditch collapsed, so hopefully no one will fall in it.

The mayor was at the parade, surrounded by cops. He cannot run again and the plan was for his sister to run as mayor (these things tend to be kept in the family), but now she isn't, due to threats. (or maybe not: The rumor was told to me by the maid but Kuya denies it. Kuya dislikes this mayor, and takes the other side, because the rest of the family backs the mayor. (Family feud anyone?)

I even found someone posting threats against the mayor on Youtube and reported two of the videos. What worried me was that he has over 250 followers.

Since the threats are in Tagalog, apparently no one there noticed the problem, but it does make you wonder about posting terroristic threats being overlooked, and I wonder if anyone else saw the videos.

Politics here tends to be a blood sport between clans, as this payback murder suggests... our nephew was killed along with the present mayor's brother when his father ran against the other mayor ten years ago.... and a later attempted assassination against the son (who is now mayor) occurred when he arrived at a restaurant on the way home from one of our relative's funeral, killing the body guard and several people at the restaurant.

which is one reason why Lolo told me not to go out alone to shop etc. (the other reason is that there are kidnappers for ransom in the area).

Sigh.

Ah, but the clueless will blame this all on Duterte, never mind that our area has a long history of being the "wild west" of the Philippines due to political murders, a problem that goes back years...

and not just our area: the Maguindanao massacre happened on Gloria's watch and the rumors were that they thought they could get away with it because..."Hello Garci"....

As this 2009 TIME article notes:

But the killings starkly exposed a nationwide malaise: the fierce competition for regional power among the country's small élite of a few hundred families and clans that control an inordinate amount of the national wealth — and the desperate lengths some will go to protect their hold on power.

in other words, follow the money.

but they arrested a druggie who was behind the murder of a local priest: the reason is that he was helping a rape victim and the perpetrator's family decided to stop him from doing this.

of course, no one here completely trusts either the cops or the courts: For example, is this a case of false arrest, or are they pretending to be innocent because they are activists?

I could probably find out the real facts here, since our maid is an active member of the Gabriela party, but I really can't follow the gossip of what is going on, although Lolo does.

Lolo's brother was chief of police, but after he died (heart problems that run in the family), our family went into medicine instead of politics, which is why we have relatives all over the world.