Remarks: State of Civic Space Briefing with Development Partners
June 16, 2026
To our development partners, development organizations and workers, the Office of the High Commission of the United Nations Human Rights, the Embassy of Norway, friends, comrades, and guests, Jose Rizal, who we are celebrating his 165th birthday this June 19, wrote the next batch of novels after the first novel, Ninay (Pedro Paterno, 1885), that remains unmatched as the greatest in Philippine literary history even in the present. In Chapter 10, “The Town of San Diego” of the novel Noli me Tangere (1887), the returning Ibarra after completing his education in Spain, rides his carriage across San Diego, Rizal’s adaptation of Manila. Ibarra recalls the sites from the streets and landmarks of San Diego, filled with nostalgia about the past and bliss of hopeful things to come in seeing the familiar remaining in the town. In the final chapter, however, the town and its people are in disarray: Ibarra’s love interest commits suicide after discovering she is a daughter of the friar; her adopting father, Kapitan Tiago, has become addicted to opium, the friar is guilt ridden, and Ibarra needs to flee the town to evade arrest. In the previous chapter entitled “Noche Buena,” Sisa, a woman made mad by her poverty, dies after knowing the death of her youngest, Crispin, and without seeing his son, Basilio. She is buried by the seriously wounded Elias, who eventually dies “without seeing the dawn” or without seeing the San Diego and the country overcoming its social and political maladies.
Noli me Tangere captures the country’s oppressive conditions of Spanish colonialism. The novel is unrepentant in its critique, but in its reading, reduces the available breathing space, providing very little respite in the life and death of the characters-citizens and in the community-nation. I liken the stifling conditions of state authority to the people described by Rizal in his first novel as the related conditionalities of the present state of civic spaces to its current people, as amply described, supported by presentations of data and their own experiences by Minet Jerusalem of the Defend NGOs Alliance, Jen Guste of CPDG, and Tinay Palabay of Karapatan that render our development work, already lacking support from the government, makes it more difficult to reach out to the most disenfranchised and powerless or the historically marginalized that have very little or no access to government supported citizen formation and transformation.
These are the worst of times for development work, further aggravated in the era of populist leadership in the country and worldwide, including two or three presidencies in the country: one currently in the ICC, the other still current, and another forthcoming in 2028, unless impeached in the ongoing Senate trials. This state accumulation of attacks against its people and their defenders negate due processes and redress of grievances, the dwindling safety nets for the poorest of the poor beyond ayuda, tulong pangkabuhayan, Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), and other band aid solutions to historically weighted social and political issues. The Cold War rhetorics and operations are ever alive in the Philippines: those in power (them) versus those with no or little access to power, meaning the majority of our citizens, mostly coming from the broad poor sector.
Red-tagging has become a normative social experience for progressives, activists, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists and development workers, among others, with the narrative flow from red-tagging to vilification, terrorism cases filed, including finance terrorism, violence, and political killings. Added to this, the intensifying poverty, highly uneven distribution of wealth, dwindling access to quality education, jobs, decent wages, housing with water and electricity, and overall quality of people’s lives, more blatant human rights violations, now systemically targeted against those considered as probable enemies of the state, and further aggravated by the intensifying corruption now in the billions with flood control projects or non-projects, culture of impunity, mobilization of disinformation and misinformation, increasing militarization and fascism, the sustenance of patronage politics in all walks of our citizens’ life. There is no respite from heavy weight of social injustice in the political, economic and social institutions and structures.
But our resource persons and partners are hopeful. Rizal was hopeful. In his sequel to Noli me Tangere, he resurrects the disgruntled Ibarra as the merchant Simoun, Basilio becomes a doctor in the novel El Filibusterismo (1891), and lacking a critical political literacy among the people or movement for change then, proposes a failed anarchist plot to bomb and annihilate those in power. In the final chapter of this second novel, the problems still lack solutions, the happiness and needed change are still unreachable. Rizal ends with the Simoun’s treasure chest being thrown into the sea to be rediscovered once the time and space of social change are ready. Nearing a century and a half of this pending reality.
Community journalist and poet RJ Ledesma was hopeful, too. He is one of the casualties of the Negros 19 or the Toboso massacre, and writes in the poem “Not Memorial But Fugitive: Towards a poetics of the revolutionary archives” the necessity for struggle to serve the people:
“But the insurgent imagination outlives the frame. What the Whole-of-Nation calls noise, I call a poetics: something stuttered, delayed, recoded, something that resists translation into a legible narrative of resolution. I return to fragments not because I’ve given up on meaning, but because fragmentation is the only honest form I can write in. To remain in pieces is sometimes the only way to remain at all. Let the poem glitch. Let the record blur. Let the sentence unspool. This too is memory. This too is survival.
To live in Negros is to also know death as something familiar, not in the abstract, but as a presence that lingers in the hallway, in the field, in the middle of an unfinished sentence. What may appear as a refusal of intimacy or melodrama in these para- archival forms. Is in fact a different kind of intimacy: one shaped by the weight of grief without outlet, without ceremonial release. This refusal is not detachment, but a strategy for carrying the dead without turning them into symbols. In the ruptures and silences of language, in the gaps where no narrative fits, there is a practice of mourning that tries to keep the lost near, even when their names are no longer ours to speak.”
We mourn, we remember, we memorialize, we move forward. We all remain hopeful in our development work because we want to secure what are due for the most powerless and vulnerable. Development work, now more than ever, needs to raise political literacy to render viable counter-citizenship claims. We continue to commit to consciousness raise among the powerless and vulnerable, to organize, to mobilize for social and historical change that equitable benefits them who have little or no access to equitable, sustained and inclusive economic, political and social access to development.
#MakibakaWagMatakot
#LahatNgSangkotDapatManagot
#AbolishNTF-ELCAC
#ReleaseOurFundsToContinueOurServicesToThePeople
#FromTheRiverToTheSeaPalestineWillBeFree
Magandang hapon na puno ng pag-asa sa ating lahat.