DAVAO CITY (MindaNews /12 June 2026) – ​The death of a student is a quiet horror every educator dreads. In the medical school where I teach, our institutional reflex to tragedy is swift, quiet, and unconditioned by blame: when a foreign student under our care tragically drowned, the priority was immediate, seamless assistance to the family. Responsibility could be parsed later; comfort and dignity had to be delivered at once.

​It was through this lens of professional experience — and profound grief — that I watched the fallout from the drowning of Rene Clert Baterbonia and his teammate Divine Adili.

​Rene was an exceptional basketball talent, a Palarong Pambansa MVP recruited from Agusan del Sur to play for the Blue Knights of the Ateneo de Davao University (where he finished high school this year) and for college, the Blue Eagles of the Ateneo de Manila University. But to look at Rene simply as a rising athlete is to miss the true weight of his story.

Rene was a monitored child under the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps). He was a young man from Mindanao carrying the collective, desperate dream of his family to escape systemic poverty, sending up to 80% of his incentives back home to his parents and six siblings. When he drowned during a team-building activity, a family’s entire lifeline was instantly erased.

​The public fracture that followed exposed the raw nerve of our nation’s political divide. Because of Ateneo’s prominent stance on social issues, including the extrajudicial killings (EJKs) of previous administrations, critics rushed to weaponize the tragedy. Did the university respond too slowly while investigating? Was there a fatal gap in communication and immediate support, as Rene’s heartbroken mother publicly recounted?

​While Ateneo was certainly no perpetrator of violence, the perceived delay in an absolute, family-first embrace, left a vacuum that political adversaries eagerly filled. In institutional crises, when empathy is not visibly immediate, the public fills the silence with its own malice.

​Yet, as a teacher and an observer of our social landscape, the deeper, more unsettling questions lie beyond institutional crisis management. They lie in how we, as a society, distribute our empathy.

​Why must the struggle against poverty be so brutally individualized?

​Our current neoliberal framework loves the narrative of the “exceptional poor.” We eagerly celebrate the single athlete, the working student, or the brilliant scholar who somehow out-muscles a broken system. We turn survival into a high-stakes lottery, demanding that a child possess extraordinary talent just to secure a basic standard of living for their family. Rene became the beautiful, inspiring face of that narrative. But when we rely on the exceptional individual to save the family, the entire structure becomes incredibly fragile. A single accident, a single current in the ocean, and the safety net vanishes.

​Furthermore, the public outpour of grief for Rene stands in uncomfortable, hypocritical contrast to our collective silence regarding other communities in Rene’s own home region of Caraga, Mindanao.

​Consider the 2015 ALCADEV incident in Barangay Diatagon, Lianga, Surigao del Sur — just a province away from where Rene grew up. There, a Manobo indigenous community refused to wait for a broken system to save them. They built their own agricultural and livelihood school (ALCADEV) to lift their children out of poverty collectively. Yet, because their self-determination and resistance to large-scale mining threatened the status quo, their alternative school was branded as subversive. It culminated in a horrific massacre: the school’s executive director, Emerito Samarca, was murdered inside a classroom, and tribal leaders Dionel Campos and Juvello Sinzo were executed in front of the entire community.

​Where was the mainstream nation’s grief for ALCADEV? Where was the structural empathy for the poor communities of Toboso, whose efforts to mainstream their poverty through fact-finding missions led to the slaughter of journalists and human rights defenders?

​The uncomfortable truth is that society wept for Rene because he was the “deserving” poor—compliant, talented, operating safely within the approved boundaries of sports and institutional education. He did not threaten the status quo.

​But when marginalized communities organize collectively to resist the very systems that create their poverty — whether through alternative schools in Surigao or labor organizing in Negros — they are met not with grief, but with suspicion, apathy, or state-sanctioned violence. We are comfortable crying for the poor when they are isolated, tragic victims of an accident. We turn away, or actively condemn them, when they become defiant agents of their own collective liberation.

​If our empathy is conditional on the poor remaining quiet, exceptional, and solitary, then our empathy is part of the problem. Rene Baterbonia’s legacy should certainly remind us of the urgent need for emergency preparedness, safety protocols, and Basic Life Support training in school programs. But more than that, he should be the face that forces us to look at the system itself.

​True, consistent empathy means recognizing that a family’s right to escape poverty should never depend on their child’s ability to sink a three-pointer on a university court, nor should it cost a tribal leader’s life in a mountain school. It should depend on a society that values their basic humanity, whether they are playing within the system or fighting to survive at its margins. It should depend on the society that values their basic humanity and their aspirations for a better society – responsive to their needs and rights. (MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Dr. Jean A. Lindo is an anaesthesiologist. She chairs Gabriela Southern Mindanao and is Secretary General for Mindanao of the Gabriela Women’s Party. She teaches Community Medicine at the Davao Medical School Foundation, Inc.)