Bakal boys

There are the sob stories of poverty, and then there are the bakal boys of Manila and Cainta — children and adults turned rooftop brigands, clinging to moving trucks like feral Spidermen, prying loose steel bars for resale.

This isn’t Dickensian London, though it might as well be. Oliver Twist has traded his cockney accent for Tagalog slang and a rusty hacksaw. Only the soot has changed, from coal smoke to Manila smog.

Cainta Mayor Keith Nieto, playing Old Testament prophet, wasted no time in pronouncing judgment.

The boys were arrested, their families profiled, and a kind of civic banishment declared: if their parents were beneficiaries of Cainta’s housing program, they’d be evicted. A child’s misdemeanor becomes a family’s exile.

For this Contrarian who hails from the bibingka capital, that’s Exodus signed and sealed from the mayor’s office, an eviction notice written in stone tablets.

Manila knows this parable too well. Along R-10, Mayor Isko Moreno wrestled with his own version of bakal boys — teens and grown men who treat moving cargo trucks like trapeze acts, hunting for a bar to pry or anything they can fence for cash. Different locality, same script, played out in the gray theater of Metro Manila’s streets.

And then there are the other bakal boys, the ones who don’t risk broken bones on truck roofs but lean against steel railings on dim corners. They wear faded jeans and sandos, and instead of rebars, they peddle flesh.

Motorists roll down windows, ask “Magkano?” and strike bargains under the hum of streetlamps. Steel of a different kind — bodies framed by poverty, bent by necessity.

What ties them together is survival, yes — but let’s not canonize it either. Some climb trucks because there’s no food at home. Others choose shortcuts because honest work looks harder than going for a quick score. Poverty explains much, but it doesn’t excuse everything.

Still, collective punishment — banishing whole families because one child stole? That feels less like justice and more like weaponized misery, where the poor are not only penalized for their desperation but also for their bloodlines.

The script, unfortunately, is decades old. Bakal boys have been recycled in police blotters since the early 2000s, headlined regularly in the crime section, their names and faces blurred into statistics.

Each mayor vows to “end the menace.” Each time, the bakal boys return. Why? Because a kilo of rice is still bought faster with scrap steel or a risky deal than with promises of “inclusive growth” whispered at ribbon-cuttings and economic forums.

How about hard hats instead of handcuffs, welding torches instead of crowbars and apprenticeships instead of arrest sheets? How about turning steel from contraband into livelihood, from weapon to tool, from crime story to employment record?

Admittedly, compassion doesn’t sell as easily as punishment, and steel bars are easier to count than second chances. Why not? Political optics, after all, thrive on the spectacle of arrests, and not the slow, unglamorous work of rehabilitation.

So, now, the escapades of the bakal boys get recycled — some perched dangerously on truck roofs, others leaning against railings. Different hustles, same hunger.

The crowd claps for the theater of law and order, forgetting the inconvenient truth: that the real crime is not just hunger, but also the absence — or avoidance — of honest work, the kind that builds futures instead of court cases.