Editor’s Be aware: Political dynasties at the moment occupy 29% of native posts, up from solely 19% in 1988. They maintain 80% of the nation’s gubernatorial posts, in comparison with solely 57% in 2004. In Congress, they now management about 67% of seats from 48% in 2004.
Which means that most of our provinces are ruled by leaders who come from households or clans which have dominated native politics for years, and the nation’s legal guidelines, which residents are subjected to, are principally crafted by them.
On this collection on political dynasties in 2022, Rappler takes a detailed have a look at the individuals and households who wield large energy and proceed to have a agency grip on their respective localities. Their model of politics and train of their political clout affect not solely the end result of native elections but additionally the selection of our nationwide leaders.
BACOLOD CITY, Philippines – Within the coronary heart of Sugarlandia, voters within the Could 9, 2022 elections face a troublesome alternative.
On one facet, there’s Evelio “Bing” Leonardia, Bacolod’s longest-serving mayor, who stays saddled with the trapo (conventional politician) label regardless of the town profitable the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Trade (PCCI) most business-friendly award.
On the opposite, there’s billionaire Alfredo “Albee” Benitez, whose claims to progressive management shattered when he endorsed Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the unrepentant, accountability-dodging inheritor of a dictator.
Each have interaction in patronage: big-ticket raffles and concert events masquerading as marketing campaign occasions from Benitez and, from Leonardia, packed “support” occasions that typically violate his COVID-19 pandemic managers’ pointers.
Benitez, former third District consultant, heads a household poised to turn out to be the province’s dominant fats dynasty – with members concurrently holding elective posts and passing these amongst one another.
His brother, Francisco “Kiko” is an unopposed reelectionist for his older brother’s previous congress seat. Albee’s son, Javi, an actor, is working for mayor of Victorias Metropolis, host to the nation’s largest sugar refinery.
Now Albee is reaching for the crown jewel, highly-urbanized Bacolod.
Town’s political leaders, largely skilled in nature, face a historic problem. The province’s political clans – many with hyperlinks going again to the Marcos dictatorship – have made this metropolis’s 2022 mayoralty race their enterprise.
Shadow of dictatorship
Governor Eugenio Jose “Bong” Lacson, who helps Vice Preident Leni Robredo, and Vice Governor Jeffrey Ferrer, the highest campaigner within the province of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., are holding tight to the 2019 coalition between Love Negros and the United Negros Alliance (Unega).
It’s an settlement that advantages incumbents. The coalition’s overwhelming drive discourages critical challengers, liberating assets and energies for handpicked candidates in key battleground areas – like Bacolod.
Benitez’s endorsement of Marcos was a bitter blow to Bacolod residents who initially noticed him because the “progressive” various to Leonardia.
This metropolis within the Nineteen Eighties was a regional middle of anti-Marcos protests in opposition to social inequities and rights abuses focusing on sugar employees and their supporters, together with clergy and non secular employees.
Benitez and Ferrer, additionally former mayor of La Carlota Metropolis and 4th District congressman, have household hyperlinks to Marcos.
Benitez is the son of Conrado “Jolly” Benitez, Imelda Marcos’ deputy within the ministry of human settlements, and Betty Bantug, who was government director of the Cultural Heart of the Philippines.
Ferrer’s spouse, Juliet is the granddaughter of Marcos crony and banker Roberto Benedicto, and daughter of tv producer and director Kitchie Benedicto-Paulino.
Many sugar planters backing Robredo and opposing Marcos’ candidacy can not forgive Benedicto and different cronies who robbed the sugar trade within the guise of defending producers.
Many hacienda house owners have been compelled to desert their holdings. Nearly 200,000 laborers and their households confronted hunger.
Laboratory of battle
Festering socio-economic woes fueled the expansion of the communist insurgency throughout the Marcos years. A brutal state response made little distinction between armed rebels and authorized activists.
Marcos didn’t topic sugarlands to agrarian reform. A lot of the provincial political elite’s reluctance in direction of Robredo revolves round her lawyering for farmers preventing to personal land.
The late president Corazon Aquino included sugar haciendas below her authorities’s Complete Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) but it surely stays incomplete within the province, the place there’s a enormous backlog in distribution.
Nationwide Federation of Sugar Staff (NFSW) secretary-general Butch Lozande additionally mentioned the dearth of help methods like farm enter subsidies has compelled as a lot as 70% of CARP beneficiaries “to lease their lands again to landlords and financiers”.
Various modes like inventory distribution have likewise led to the re-concentration of land and a return to previous energy dynamics.
Labor injustice stays prevalent within the sugar trade with many discipline arms incomes lower than the authorized minimal wage.
The land nonetheless stays a primary supply of battle and President Rodrigo Duterte’s rule has seen a massacre amongst militant agricultural employees, their attorneys, and rights defenders.
From July 18 to twenty-eight in 2019, armed males went on an orgy of violence, killing 21 folks within the province.
In 2020, Sara Alvarez, a volunteer for human rights group Karapatan, was gunned down in Bacolod Metropolis, the province’s ninetieth sufferer of what rights teams have known as extrajudicial killings.
Pandemic woes
The COVID-19 pandemic worsened poverty, taking jobs from 900,000 of Negros Occidental’s 1.4-million labor drive and sidelining half of the capital’s employees.
Native pandemic losses hit P9.5 billion in July 2020. Lockdowns pushed again launching plans of 25,000 new enterprise registrants in Bacolod.
When 28 of 30 mayors within the province signed a manifesto in April 2021, urging Benitez to contest the Bacolod mayoralty race, they confused the necessity for a extra dynamic and collaborative pandemic administration plan.
Benitez has served professional bono because the province’s financial advisor since 2019. He tapped his nationwide community to assist increase the province’s COVID-19 testing operations within the final quarter of 2021.
He performed a key function in establishing the Negros Occidental Complete Well being Program, the place well being playing cards give residents entry to free session and full-course remedy medicines, and sponsored in-patient care, on high of PhilHealth advantages.
However there’s a disconnect between Benitez’s dynamic well being program and his help for Marcos, who was a part of a regime that allowed Negros Occidental’s kids to die of malnutrition whereas cronies grew fats from corrupt buying and selling monopolies and usurious crop loans.
Dominance
Albee’s political debut positioned him on the high tier of native elective workplace. After his third time period in Congress, brother Kiko took over his submit, working unopposed.
The candidacy of his son, Javi, a political neophyte, shoved apart incumbent Vice Mayor Jerry “Didi” Jover who had backed Kiko’s candidacy and was a part of the Benitezes’ Asenso (Progress) crew within the 2019 elections.
The Bantug/Palanca/Benitez households have dominated Victorias for 3 many years.
Javi’s working mate is his uncle, incumbent councilor Abelardo Dizon Bantug III, Albee’s first cousin. (Editor’s word: A earlier model of this story mentioned: “Javi’s working mate is his cousin…” Abelardo Dizon Bantug III is Javi’s uncle. This has been corrected.)
Two different cousins are on his council slate: Francis Frederick “Derek” Palanca, the son of incumbent three-term mayor Francis Frederick P. Palanca, and Dino Acuña, former metropolis administrator.
Mayor Palanca is now the second nominee of the Abang Lingkod partylist, which claims to symbolize the pursuits of peasant farmers and fisherfolk.
The clan’s dominance began when Severo Palanca turned mayor in 1992. After Severo accomplished three phrases, sister Remedios, Albee’s grandmother, warmed his seat from 2001 to 2004 as he slid all the way down to vice mayor.
Severo returned as mayor after that break, staying put for 3 phrases along with his deputy, now the incumbent mayor, till retiring at age 80.
Severo led a 3rd class municipality into turning into a part metropolis in 1998. Victorias gained the 1995 Galing Pook Award, municipality class, for funding its mass housing program Workers’ Dream Village via a bond flotation.
Albee helped draft and shepherd what’s now the Sugarcane Trade Improvement Act, which goals to enhance the competitiveness of an trade that employs 700,000 Filipinos and gives P70 billion yearly to the nationwide coffers.
Crown jewel
Albee’s playing and leisure conglomerates and expanded holdings in mass media have been used to nice impact in his marketing campaign – slick livestreams, full-blown concert events.
Leonardia frames 2022 as a battle between tumandok (natives) and pangayaw (outsiders), an apparent reference to Albee’s third District stint.
The challenger solely modified official residence in April 2021 however the billionaire is blood kin to the Palanca household that owns Bacolod Metropolis’s sprawling reclamation complicated.
Grandmother Remedios and Simplicio “Sammy” Palanca, founding father of the Bacolod Actual Property Improvement Company (Bredco), are siblings.
With Sammy’s dying in 2021, the clan must bolster help throughout the metropolis authorities to stave off competitors.
It’s attention-grabbing that incumbent lone district consultant Greg Gasataya’s challenger, Dan Atayde of Grupo Progreso, is a advisor of Bredco.
There’s discuss of a long way between the youthful Palancas and the Benitez brothers, who weren’t overtly concerned in Bredco’s improvement, however Albee has backed the corporate in opposition to any menace.
Energy and the purse
The previous president of publicly-listed Leisure & Resorts World Corp. (LRWC) has all the time resigned throughout his public service stints.
However his political ambitions can’t be separated from his enterprise empire and that of the Palancas, with their 250-hectare reclaimed space, and a three way partnership with the Philippine Reclamation Authority (PRA) and Bacolod Metropolis to develop 108 hectares for business and industrial use.
Albee had filed a invoice for the development of a 36-kilometer coastal street linking Bacolod to the northern cities of Talisay, Silay, and Victorias, and E.B. Magalona city.
Bredco is eyeing a 2,000-hectare reclamation challenge in Talisay via a Public-Personal Partnership (PPP).
Bredco president John Palanca Alonte has talked about Lucio Co as a strategic companion and investor. However the Bacolod agency’s improvement imaginative and prescient is in step with Albee’s dream of seeing the town because the Visayas’ technological chief.
LRWC operates bingo parlors, resorts, casinos, and an internet gaming enterprise based mostly on the Cagayan Particular Financial Zone and Free Port.
It has 9 subsidiaries, together with one which offers in junkets of excessive gamers and one that makes a speciality of leisure realty improvement.
The conglomerate may reap a bonanza because the native companion of Macau’s Galaxy Leisure Group in Boracay island. Duterte had earlier thumbed down casinos on the island however then rotated in 2021 to greenlight the on line casino challenge. (READ: Duterte permits on line casino to function in Boracay to reinforce gov’t funds)
Large-ticket tasks want years of gestation earlier than launching. A chief government place, say for 3 phrases, will cement the foundations of an increasing enterprise empire. – Rappler.com
