PR STUNT? | Is the Veloso family being used by leftist groups and the Aquino admin?
Celia Veloso received flak from netizens after she had announced to the media that the Philippine government especially President Benigno Aquino III had nothing to do with Mary Jane Veloso’s reprieve. The Veloso family is now in hot water and are in fact tagged as ingrates.
As ironic as it seems, people who actually supported the bid to save Mary Jane’s life now appears to be singing a different tune. Some are now calling for Veloso’s execution to push through.
The Indonesian government is now in a difficult position. Despite the appeals of other countries to at least suspend the firing squad of their citizens, the Indonesian government still executed eight of the nine drug convicts last April 29. Veloso’s life was the only one spared.
Sensitive of not putting Indonesian President Joko Widodo in a bad light, the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs reiterated that Veloso’s execution was stopped because of her recruiter’s sudden decision to surrender and not because of pressure from our government.
Indeed, without that event, Indonesia will be hard-pressed to explain why Veloso was saved while a schizophrenic Brazilian convict was executed. It will be a blot on the image of toughness that Widodo is trying to project to the international community.
At this point, it is important to ask why her mother Celia Veloso seems to be very antagonistic toward the government. Here are my thoughts:
1. Celia Veloso and her Family were influenced by the leftists and were promised something in return
It is hard for me to imagine that a nobody like Celia Veloso would go against the most powerful person in the country, unless someone had asked her to do that. Since the 2016 election is fast approaching, Migrante International is milking the issue without the family’s knowledge to raise its public profile. Next year, the group will most likely seek a seat at the House of Representatives through the party-list system.
2. Celia Veloso and her family’s outrage towards the government was staged by the Aquino Government itself
We all know that Aquino’s trust and approval ratings have dropped to all-time lows since the Mamasapano debacle and was not able to recover ever since. The government must have regarded stopping Mary Jane’s execution as an opportunity to redeem themselves.
Thus, they encouraged the Veloso family to express outrage against the government to get the attention and sympathy of the people. If the goal of their act was to save Aquino’s ratings and rally public support for him, they have certainly achieved it. You see, even people who are not exactly administration supporters have taken the time to defend the government from the Velosos’ tirades.
It’s ironic how these people hated the idea of killing Mary Jane and then suddenly condemned her and her family just because the mother turned against the government. As unfortunate as it seems, the support and sympathy of the people toward Mary Jane and Celia Veloso have turned into disgust in just a snap.
As I’ve said earlier, no one would go against the most powerful person in the country knowing the fact that he saved your daughter from imminent death and with the case still very much unsettled.
*Edrian Echague is a marine engineering graduate of the Philippine Merchant Marine School – Las Pinas, where he served as president of the supreme student government from 2012 to 2013. He won as one of the ten outstanding maritime students in the Philippines during the said school year.
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I am still a little confused… Was her execution cancelled or just postponed?