It seemed, oddly enough, just another battle between big business and government, and a cultural and heritage institution that has the last of the few remaining green spaces in the metro. We’ve seen many of these throughout Duterte’s leadership, and often enough these stories die down quickly and the next thing we know big business has destroyed biodiversity and risked the lives of communities in the name of say, an unnecessary monstrosity of an airport in the middle of Bulacan (hello San Miguel Aerotropolis).
But this one wasn’t going to go away because unlike all the other stories, there was pushback of the government office concerned. And it is this kind of pushback that we haven’t had the past five years, when even the grapevine has been shut down, just like mainstream media.
And with elections so close and so many projects getting railroaded, it’s important to look at instances like this one and realize how the propaganda war is being waged by Duterte allies in big business in exactly the same way that government has waged it. The same strategies of soundbites and bullying, confusion and distraction, containment and damage control. All dependent on mainstream media complicity, of course, and a majority’s decision to not ask the difficult questions, or evade the parts that might actually give us answers.
After all, it only takes the next trending issue to erase this from our semi-conscious state, which makes it easy for projects to be railroaded. The next thing we know Duterte has unilaterally approved the project and threatened anyone who gets in its way.