A press release stated that about 11,000 Bicolanos will benefit from medical action program and a total of nine barangays will benefit from engineering civic action program.
Bicol region was devastated by typhoon reming in 2006 that left many people dead and missing, it damaged a great amount of livelihoods and properties. But the region is now slowly getting back to its former status, there's development and improvement on the lives of the Bicolanos after the devastation.
Of course additional help will do but Bicolanos are resilient enough to stand and fight again.
They are using that worse experience of the people to pursue this Balikatan. They said that Balikatan Exercises will focus on humanitarian work, but it is hard to believe that on the midst of global economic crisis especially in the USA, they still manage to pursue this Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA).
The United States military has the largest number of foreign presence and accounts for most VFAs.
Why don’t they do these on their own land for their own development and action in response to global crisis?
And how sure are we that they will be focusing more on disaster rehabilitation and rural development projects without them getting any gains.
Are they trying to pay us back with their humanitarian works for they will learn more on different techniques of warfare?
We are not even sure how these foreign servicemembers would behave on our localities. One example is the Subic rape case in 2005, four U.S. Marines were charged of raping a local woman with whom they had been drinking.
If incidents involve severe crimes like robbery, murder, manslaughter and sex crimes, then VFA is a major political issue to be considered carefully.
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