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06 January 2004 Crime,
punishment and elections
I THOUGHT I would check out what the
average man and woman on the street was reading, so I bought one of the
more popular tabloids to scan the news.
As expected, the coverage was pretty much about crime and cleavage. The
front page had a headline screaming, "Ayoko! [I don't want
to!]" ... accompanied by a picture of a woman to explain the "ayoko."
Inside, they had the lurid details of the crime, involving a woman in
Iloilo province whose corpse had been found floating in a river. What
people thought was a drowning incident turned out to be a murder and
rape case. I will spare you the graphic details.
There were many other crime stories: a brawl during a cockfight in
Quezon province that led to the death of one of the protagonists; a
21-year-old woman in the province of Pampanga left pregnant by a married
man, and driven to murder her infant; a judge in Ilocos Norte province
assassinated in his home.
Then there was the story of a 17-year-old houseboy who had come to
Manila from Samar province to work for a "Doņa Irene," doing
odd jobs such as cleaning house and helping to sell sweepstakes to put
himself through school. Apparently, Doņa Irene had been an abusive
employer, scolding the houseboy for every small mistake he made,
including his use of "po" and "opo." Tagalog was
banned in her household and she insisted that he answer her, "Yes,
Seņora" or "No, Seņora." One day, after he had come
home from school, he fumbled on something his employer asked him to do.
An enraged "Seņora" kicked him and that was it. The houseboy
claimed he couldn't remember what happened next, except that he had axed
her to death.
Ho-hum. So, what else is new? Precisely, that was what I thought, too,
but wait, there's a catch to all this: The tabloid I bought was Tiktik
magazine, dated Oct. 28, 1961. I was flabbergasted to learn that the
1961 issue was Volume 25, suggesting that crime-and-cleavage reporting
dates way back.
My point in featuring a 1961 issue of Tiktik is to dispel the myth of
the good old days. There seems to have been enough of sordid crimes to
sustain a 42-page magazine like Tiktik, which was published twice a
month. The pictures were certainly much milder: The front page "ayoko"
picture was not a photograph but an artist's rendition, but inside there
were quite a few rather gross photographs of murder and rape victims.
That issue of Tiktik also allows us to compare the causes of crime, then
and now. Tiktik's crime stories suggest how poverty, abusive employers,
cultural stigma (as with the single mother who killed her infant) drove
people into crime, a situation that's all too similar to what we still
have today. The main difference is that in 1961, we don't see references
to drugs, or pornography, unless of course Tiktik itself is to be
blamed, as our anti-porn crusaders might claim today.
The front cover of Tiktik declares the magazine as "serving your
loved ones in life." The magazine probably catered to people's
voyeuristic instincts, while offering morality stories, with the message
that crime doesn't pay. The details about the motives for the crime,
such as the abusive employer, become part of this morality play.
The police and detectives were apparently more popular then, having
almost celebrity status, with Tiktik featuring their photographs,
sometimes together with the suspects they had arrested. The back cover
of Tiktik invites people to make a career of crime-busting, with a full
page ad for the Philippine College of Criminology and its sister
institution, Manila Law College.
Inside Tiktik had a declaration of its circulation, required by the
Bureau of Posts. They ran 56,000 copies of their latest issue, more than
what some of our newspapers do today. A sampling of the ads tells us
that its readers included some from the middle class: there were ads for
construction supplies, TV and radio repairs and several medical clinics
offering the latest in medical technology. A year's subscription to
Tiktik, covering 26 issues, cost seven pesos. That wasn't a small
amount, when you consider that the poor houseboy from Samar learning to
say "Yes Seņora" was being paid 15 pesos a month.
This particular issue of Tiktik was interesting because it talked about
national elections, which were coming up in November. (I hadn't realized
the extent of our borrowing from Mother America, all the way up to the
election month!)
What did Tiktik have to say about the elections? There was an editorial
cartoon showing a bomb labeled "Eleksyon," with a lit fuse.
The editorial read "Kwidaw!" (Spanish-Tagalog word for
"Be careful!"), warning of possible election violence in the
provinces of Pampanga, Cavite and Batangas, the regions of Ilocos and
Bicol, in the Visayas and Mindanao.
There were two other articles on the elections. One tackled the
strengths and weaknesses of each of the presidential candidates. The
incumbent, President Carlos Garcia, was running for reelection and was
criticized for not having solved problems of unemployment, national
debt, government waste and corruption, and too many taxes. Garcia's vice
president, Diosdado Macapagal, was also running and the criticism
against him was that he was arrogant and was campaigning mainly by
blaming Garcia for all the country's woes.
The others running for president in 1961 were Senator Puyat, Senator
Pelaez, Congressman Osmeņa and a popular actor, Rogelio de la Rosa, who
was already a senator.
Tiktik carried another article focusing on De la Rosa, by creating an
imaginary conversation involving two women and a man, starting off with
an Aling Teray offering to tell her friends about a dream she had. Mang
Kadyo asks if the dream offered tips for bets in the "jueteng"
illegal numbers game (yes, jueteng was up and around in 1961). No, Aling
Teray replied, she had dreamt of President Manuel Quezon shaking the
hands of Rogelio de la Rosa, proof for her that the actor was meant to
be president. There's a heated exchange of views between the two, and
another neighbor, with Mang Kadyo grumbling that women didn't know
anything about politics and that you needed more than good looks and a
good heart to run the Philippines.
That year, Filipinos threw out Garcia and elected Macapagal president.
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