Ateneo's Selective Compassion? It's a Gift to the DDS

By Joey Salgado

Ateneo is not just a school along Katipunan. It is a Jesuit institution with a carefully cultivated identity of nurturing men and women for others, a tradition of social justice advocacy going back decades. The leadership of civil society and the liberal opposition, the loudest critics of Duterte-era abuses, is populated by Ateneo alumni.

Yet when one of its student-athletes, a poor boy from Mindanao, drowned in their care, Ateneo retreated to the default response of local elites when confronted with demands for accountability: manage the narrative, contain the damage, and wait for the controversy to die down.

The tragic deaths of Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili of the Ateneo men’s basketball team go beyond the question of negligence. They offer a window into the class divide and institutional failures that have made former president Rodrigo Duterte's brand of populism not only possible, but enduring.

The tragedy is putting to the test whether a Jesuit university lives its proclaimed values. Uncomfortable questions are surfacing: would the response have been the same had Baterbonia been the son of a prominent politician or business leader? Would the explanations to the family have been this thin, bordering on indifferent?

For many, the answers are obvious. And that view, that the poor are recruited to serve an elite institution but are not fully protected by it, is precisely the grievance that populists convert into political fuel.

This is why the DDS moved fast while the “pinks” moved slowly.

Senator Robin Padilla showed up at the wake and is seeking a Senate investigation. The mother has engaged the services of Duterte-linked lawyers. Online, DDS bloggers are fanning the controversy with their trademark divisive rhetoric and us-versus-them framing. Together, these moves reflect a political operation that has positioned itself, rightly or wrongly, as the champion of the aggrieved masses against the institutions and elites who continue to exploit them.

What makes this particularly damaging for the liberal opposition is the silence of its most prominent voices. Senators Risa Hontiveros and Bam Aquino, regarded as possible presidential bets of the pink forces in 2028 against Sara Duterte, have been conspicuously absent in the formative stages of this conversation.

Hontiveros and Aquino have built their public identities on speaking for the vulnerable. A poor boy from Mindanao dies in the custody of one of the country's most elite institutions, their alma mater, and it took them days before issuing carefully-worded comments.

The DDS will make sure that such silence will be remembered. In the brutal street brawl of electoral politics, being perceived as the party of Ateneo, of the elite, of the exclusive school that recruited Baterbonia and then failed him is a liability no amount of pro-poor rhetoric can easily offset.

Those defending Ateneo’s posture of silence while demanding accountability from everyone else must be reminded that Duterte's appeal goes beyond the enigma of a strongman. It captures the accumulated anger of millions of Filipinos who feel ignored and ridiculed by the educated, English-speaking elites.

If Ateneo and its alumni in the liberal opposition and civil society are to live up to their university’s ideals, they must accept that Ateneo owed Baterbonia not just a scholarship, but protection. And it failed him. In death, his family is entitled not just to transparency, but the courage to own up.

So far, Ateneo has offered condolences. That, as his mother said, will not bring back her dead son.

This is an updated version of an article that also appears in Rappler