Duterte did more for women, kids than rivals–PDP-Laban

The political party of presidential candidate Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte on Thursday said he may have done more for decades to promote the welfare, health, safety and empowerment of women and children than any of his rivals for the presidency.

Duterte, who remains the front-runner in several voter preference polls, refused to apologize for his rape joke in a campaign sortie in Quezon City last week, disowning a statement his publicists had prepared and sent out to the media on his behalf.

In a statement, PDP-Laban spokesperson Paola Alvarez said Duterte may be the only mayor of any city or municipality to assign a battery of lawyers to handle all the legal concerns of abused and battered women in Davao City.

She also cited Duterte’s health programs for pregnant women and their babies, as well as the Child-Minding Centers he put up to take care of children while their mothers are at work.

“Mayor Duterte is well-loved as an overprotective father by women and children in Davao City because they know he is ready and willing to sacrifice his own life in order to protect them from criminals,” said Alvarez.

Alvarez said Duterte is being “unjustly and unfairly pilloried over a misunderstood statement” he made on a hostage-taking incident in 1989 that resulted in the death of an Australian lay missionary.

Alvarez pointed out that Duterte even offered himself in exchange for the freedom of the hostages. When negotiations failed, the mayor also put his life on the line by leading the operation against the criminals, she said.

Mistranslation

Alvarez said she was speaking not only as spokesperson of PDP-Laban but also as someone who had seen Duterte from up close and witnessed the many projects he had initiated for women and children.

She said that if elected president, Duterte will not only be the protector of women and children and the oppressed in Davao City, but of the weak and the marginalized in the entire Philippines.

Alvarez said she was appalled “that something that may have been lost in translation is being used by Mayor Duterte’s political detractors to demonize him.”

She argued that Duterte committed the blunder because Tagalog is not his native language.

“There’s a very real language barrier that Visayans like me and Mayor Duterte have to hurdle in order to avoid being misunderstood when speaking in Tagalog or in Filipino,” said Alvarez. “Sometimes we are successful in putting our messages across, sometimes not.”