Execution

Friday, 01 April 2011 05:25

Written by Neric Acosta

The face of migrant labor came to the fore this week and jolted yet again our collective national consciousness. In the hours leading to the execution of three Filipinos convicted of drug trafficking in China, that face was of sheer anguish, pain and heartrending grief. The families of the convicted Filipinos on death row in Xiamen, China were a visage of unspeakable sorrow, with one mother physically writhing in utter torment and disbelief when learning about her daughter’s harrowing fate. Or a sister exploding in anger and blaming the government for failing to save a loved one from the harshness of China’s death penalty law.

When Sally Villanueva, Ramon Credo and Elizabeth Batain were executed by the Chinese judicial system by way of lethal injection on March 30, 2011 the whole nation was immediately served notice that to a large and real extent the Overseas Filipino Worker is at the mercy of the foreign employer or host government. The OFW, for all of his or her heralded heroic status as ‘savior’ of what may be an otherwise moribund economy, is buffeted by the vagaries of global labor and migration – and by the more dangerous realities of illicit global trafficking of drugs, contraband goods, and human beings.

Sally Ordinario, Ramon Credo and Elizabeth Batain and their families have claimed that they have been victims or mere pawns in the cryptic world of international narcotics trade. They are called ‘drug mules’ – largely unwitting conduits of sellers and buyers of lucrative substances like shabu, heroin and cocaine shipped clandestinely across borders, hidden inside the lining of suitcases, or tucked or sewed onto underwear or clothing. But they are, in the eyes of judicial systems like China’s, guilty of a heinous crime punishable by death.

As they became ‘dead man or woman walking’ and the country’s media kept a whole nation abreast of their impending fate, government worked the wires and diplomatic channels to at the very least commute their death sentences and save them from death’s door. Vice-President Jejomar Binay was sent to China by the President to appeal to the Chinese government for mercy on behalf of the convicted. The controversial refusal of the Philippine government to send a representative to the Nobel Peace Prize awarding ceremony in Oslo in December last year, in deference to China, was in fact justified at some point as an official gesture to help Filipinos like Ordinario, Credo and Batain escape the imminent gallows of death, as it were. The awarding of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiabo, a Chinese dissident imprisoned for his political beliefs, was seen as direct affront to China, which aggressively lobbied or pressured other countries to boycott the Nobel ceremonies.

All that, if indeed it was meant as a gesture of appeal to save the three Filipinos, came to naught this past week. When President Noynoy Aquino learned that the executions were carried out in the end, he reportedly fell silent and proceeded to the Palace chapel to pray for the souls of Ordinario, Credo and Batain. A pall had fallen over the country, and while unlike the paroxysms of anger and grief that engulfed the country in 1995 when domestic helper Flor Contemplacion was hanged in Singapore for murder, this was still and all a gripping national moment of bereavement. Every Filipino, after all, practically has a family member, neighbor, or friend working in any of the hundred or so countries in the world. These 12 million OFW’s around the globe are separated for long periods from spouses and children, and uprooted from a home culture to give, in rather cruel irony, a chance beyond survival for their families.

From a strictly individualist or liberal standpoint the act of smuggling illegal drugs into a country is something the person charged or found guilty must face on his own, or must be solely accountable for. If the laws that are applied in the country where one is tried or convicted are seen as harsh or inhuman, acknowledging a country’s sovereignty dictates that we simply respect its laws and justice system and leave it at that. But the sheer number of our labor force – close to a third in fact – demands the prioritizing of ‘assistance to nationals’ or ATN as a hallmark of Philippine foreign policy. And just like the public uproar and flood of sympathy for Contemplacion, or Sarah Balabagan in the United Arab Emirates in 1997, or Angelo dela Cruz in Iraq in 2005, the national sentiment over OFW matters that involves life-and-death urgency is fraught with deep emotion and assumes symbolic currency. The three-generation spread of the OFW phenomenon ordains, arguably, a national thread of affinity with the OFW plight -- or allows for the ordinary Filipino to identify with the hapless but not, as the executions in China would show, faceless or nameless OFW’s caught in the random misfortunes of working abroad.

The poet intones that a single human death diminishes us all. When Sally Ordinario, Ramon Credo and Elizabeth Batain were sent to their deaths on March 30, the face of Filipino migrant labor was not only that of mourning and resignation, but of collective lamentation over the unremitting failure of a society to uplift a people from widespread poverty and their seemingly interminable lot of being torn from homes and homeland – to keep, paradoxically, homes they leave behind secure and a homeland’s economy afloat.

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