During his six years as president, Rodrigo Duterte did nothing to help detained human trafficking victim Mary Jane Veloso.
When Duterte gave his blessing to Indonesian President Widodo to “please go ahead if you want to execute her,” he abandoned his duty to protect the rights of Filipinos overseas. Six years passed without any sort of political or diplomatic initiative from the US-Duterte regime for Mary Jane Veloso’s safe return and clemency.
At the 2018 International People’s Tribunal, Mary Jane’s mother Celia Veloso questioned: “What is puzzling with the government is that there’s already an admission about Mary Jane’s innocence, faultless; but why does Duterte and Cayetano refuse to allow Mary Jane to submit testimony to a court?” The US-Duterte regime failed to go after Mary Jane Veloso’s traffickers by letting her testify and prove her innocence.
As Digong let Mary Jane suffer in detention and on death row for six years, he claimed to have waged wars on “drugs” and “insurgency”. In reality, he massacred thousands of Filipinos who faced realities similar to Mary Jane: victims of widespread poverty, desiring of better lives for their families, and planted with drugs and weapons to be judged and executed for crimes that they did not commit.
Now that her daughter Sara Duterte is vice president, she has done nothing to help the lives of millions of overseas Filipinos. Instead, she has lost OFW and public trust by wasting the people’s funds on her confidential and intelligence funds.
Sara Duterte nabbed Php 125 million in confidential fund spending in just 11 days, using names such as “Mary Grace Piattos” in acknowledgement receipts to cover up her suspicious spending spree. All that money, paid in great part by our remittances, instead could have gone to help so many OFWs in distress, detention, and death row abroad through government aid and assistance.
We must not let the Dutertes keep denying help to many more kababayans like Mary Jane Veloso. Filipinos overseas who face widespread Philippine government neglect do not deserve corrupt officials like the Dutertes who misuse public funds with impunity. This is why we support the people’s ongoing effort to impeach Sara Duterte: we are one with the growing clamor to hold the Dutertes accountable for their repeated abandonment of duty to the Filipino people.
As we support the impeachment complaints against Sara Duterte in Congress, we must also raise the alarm not only against the Dutertes, but even Marcos Jr, who also misused Php 4.56 billion on confidential and intelligence funds in 2023. The Marcoses’ splurging of the government budget is absurd to overseas Filipinos, especially as cases of human trafficking, labor exploitation, and unjust detention and death row abroad are on the rise.
For us migrants, abuses of public funds and public trust by the Dutertes and Marcoses alike must not stand: we deserve a government that serves the people, not their own pockets, not their own interests.
Impeach Sara Duterte! Panagutin ang mga Duterte, singilin ang mga Marcos sa kapabayaan sa mga migrante at mamamayan!
