SENADO 2016, sino nga ba?

When politicians armed themselves with weapons and money to gain power, senatorial candidate Walden Bello stood out when he armed himself with books and theories.

 

Even as a child, he began to question the strict upbringing of Jesuit schools. His father created advertisements while his mother composed songs, and he did not feel his education focused on him but only on his rich, socialite classmates.

 

“I wasn’t from that background,” he said in a 2002 interview in the journal “New Left Review,” “[I] was instinctively opposed to their strict class bias, in a pre-political way.”

 

The politics of his times shaped Bello’s educational direction. When he graduated from Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) in 1966, attempts for a communist insurgency grew and President Ferdinand Marcos’ election loomed nearby.

 

He left the country to pursue a postgraduate sociology degree in Princeton University in 1969, a year before Marcos’ elections.

 

Bello’s political awakening, however, did not fully start in his home country. He studied and worked with communists in local communities as they fought against the counterrevolution to Chile’s Allende political bloc.

 

“The experience gave me a healthy scepticism—running clean against much standard American political science on developing countries—about the democratic role of the middle class,” Bello said.

 

Bello was ready to be a full-blown activist in the Philippines when he joined Katipunan ng Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP) which was allied to the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). However, his passport to his home country was confiscated.

 

Bello supported an insurgency in exile.

 

As the CPP sent him to different states to teach, he developed studies apart from the party’s interest. The World Bank interested him as he studied how it channeled funds from the United States bilateral aid into Marcos’ pockets.

 

His work became the book “Development Debacle” which contained 3,000 pages of documents from the World Bank. This ushered opposition from the working and business class against Marcos that fuelled the EDSA People Power revolt in 1986.

 

After EDSA, he ended up in disagreements with the CPP on its community-centered political scope and said that the party should be involved with both local and global issues.

 

CPP Chairperson Jose Maria Sison has spoken up against Bello after he has claimed to be the recipient of threats of human rights violations from the New People’s Army (NPA) in 2004.

 

“He is… a highly paid hack whose air miles of traveling and hotel bills can compete with those of high ranking officials of the US State Department,” Sison said in an online statement. “Bello has a purpose for inventing the canard that the revolutionary forces are out to get him and others merely for talking and writing against the revolution.”

 

All the while, Bello joined nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in the United States and Asia that worked on global economies and advocacies, such as Oxfam and Greenpeace. He also authored 14 books.

 

Bello continued his life as a professor in the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman but also as a politician.

 

He ran as Akbayan partylist’s Representative to Congress and authored bills supporting overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), such as the Overseas Absentee Voting Act of 2003. The bill allows OFWs to register and participate in the country’s elections.

 

Continuing his resistance to Church policies, Bello supported the passage of the RH law.

 

He also authored the Freedom of Information (FOI) bill, which still hangs after several hearings in Congress.

 

On Mar. 11, 2015, however, Bello resigned as the partylist’s Representative after the party showed support for President Benigno Aquino III during the Mamasapano incident.

 

He called the administration a washout. “Admitting responsibility would mean admitting that 44 SAF personnel and 18 MILF combatants were sacrificed in an operation that mainly served Washington’s anti-terror war,” he said, “something that would be extremely costly politically once all the facts are out there.”

 

After 2 divorces, Bello married Thai executive Suranuch Thongsila in Pennsylvania on April 13, 2015 for what a Rappler report called “practical purposes.”

 

On Oct. 13, 2015, Bello declared in a statement that he will be running for Senator as an independent after being convinced by his supporters in a series of discussions.

 

“I am running because because I hate power and the only ones you can trust with power are those who hate power,” he said in his blog.

 

Despite his old age at 69, Bello remains attached to his books and theories but also grounded to political past and present political experiences. Whether Philippine politics can still include the likes of him or not is a different matter.

 

References:

<https://www.binghamton.edu/sociology/people/walden-bello.html>

<http://www.waldenbello.org/component/option,com_expose/Itemid,35/>

<http://www.waldenbello.org/about-walden/>

<https://www.facebook.com/WaldenSaSenado/>

<https://www.facebook.com/walden.bello>

<http://newleftreview.org/II/16/walden-bello-pacific-panopticon>

<http://www.philippinerevolution.net/statements/20041230_walden-bello-exposes-himself-as-a-pro-us-pseudo-progressive>

<http://www.rappler.com/nation/89863-walden-bello-married>

<https://twitter.com/waldenbello>