[Rappler’s Best] A woman worth saving
Did you spend the past weekend off social media? Good for you! This means you were spared the tragi-comedy featuring the Vice President and her chief of staff, both of whom had an online meltdown that juiced our chat groups and otherwise ho-hum existence.
This was a display of power in its raw and cunning form — by the camp of the unfiltered, garrulous Vice President and the Martin Romualdez-led House of Representatives that triggered Sara Duterte to go ballistic: an order to send her chief of staff to the dingy women’s correctional (subsequent panic attacks and negotiations managed to bring her to a posh hospital in Quezon City, though she was moved to the government-run Veterans Memorial Medical Center on Saturday upon a House panel’s order).
Everything that happened after followed the playbook of Philippine politics in this age of psy-ops, trolling, and elections happening six months from now — and against the backdrop of an election somewhere else where a cocky and polarizing felon won a resounding mandate. If you’re not yet satiated by what you’ve watched and gossiped about, read and watch all about the weekend spectacle here.
Now take a pause and look at this through the lens of Mary Jane Veloso — not blessed with power, pedigree, or patrons — who has been locked up for over a decade in an Indonesian jail simply because she is poor. I don’t mean to trivialize the circumstances that made a court convict her, but if she were given just a sliver of power and resources that we saw last weekend, she would have been long freed, still laboring every day but without the dread of a death sentence.
For we live in a society that rewards the wicked and condemns the poor. Many Filipino women are Every Mary Jane. We have a mountain of evidence to show that.
But today, some good news about Mary Jane. Indonesia has agreed to send her home, in effect lifting the death penalty thrown at her. So how come she’s still alive when, in 2010, a court had already sentenced her to die by firing squad?
Because Filipinos from all over the world mobilized and organized to save her. Oh, it was a glorious time when social media was seen as a potent force for change and citizens were sharing the same sets of facts and truths.
Rappler was barely three years old then when our citizen engagement arm, Move.PH, facilitated the global online campaign to #SaveMaryJane that brought together church groups, overseas Filipinos, NGOs, youth and labor movements, activists, and others.
Mary Jane was scheduled to be executed on April 29, 2015. (Here’s everything you need to know about her case.)
On April 26, 2015, a global action to #SaveMaryJane kicked off online. Two days later, the appeal had become the fastest growing petition on Change.org, gathering more than 162,000 signatures and sparking a global conversation on the fate of human trafficking victims.
- Indonesia delayed her execution following what they said was a plea from then-president Benigno Aquino III, who broke protocol to make his request reach the Indonesian president at the time, Joko Widodo. This photo shows the late Aquino making that critical phone call.
- A month later, various groups launched the #SaveMaryJane alliance.
- Her own narrative of what she went through is compelling and gripping. Read it here. One crucial fact: her own recruiters were convicted in a separate case in the Philippines.
- After Rodrigo Duterte got elected as president in 2016, efforts were renewed to save Mary Jane from death row. But Jokowi himself said Duterte would not interfere to make the Indonesian court change its mind.
And so I leave it at that. There are causes worth fighting for. There are women worth saving — like Mary Jane.
Here’s to a week of less drama. – Rappler.com
Rappler’s Best is a weekly newsletter of our top picks delivered straight to your inbox every Monday.
To subscribe, visit rappler.com/profile and click the Newsletters tab. You need a Rappler account and you must log in to manage your newsletter subscriptions.