When young people — some of them students and children — are killed in military encounters in the Philippine countryside, the questions don’t stop at who fired first. In this episode, journalist and host Caloy Conde sits down with veteran reporters Inday Espina-Varona and Dana Batnag to dig into what we actually know about the latest reported gunfight, and what we’re still not being told.
They walk through the basics of International Humanitarian Law — the rules that govern armed conflict even in a country’s own backyard — and ask whether those rules were followed. Who counts as a combatant? What protections exist for those who are wounded? And why does any of this matter in a conflict that the government prefers to frame as a simple counter-insurgency operation?
Then there’s the uglier part: the memes, the haha reacts, the “corned beef” jokes that flooded social media after the bodies were identified. Inday and Dana break down what it means when a society learns to laugh at the dead — and who benefits from that kind of cruelty. This is a long conversation, so we’ve split it into three parts.
Watch them in order, or jump to the section that matters most to you.
