Distant Voices (66 page)

August 1979 to April 1994

Manila

AS YOU FLY
into Manila the silhouette of Mount Pinatubo rises like the sharpest of jagged teeth. All around it is a carpet of grey. This is lava from the eruption of last July, still moving like sticky sand, sinking ever deeper into the earth, petrifying forests and putting rivers to flood.

Pinatubo is part of a chain of recent disasters; two weeks ago a typhoon killed some 6,000 people in Leyte. These are vulnerable islands; but if it is true that nature strives to compensate, it has done so here with fertility of land and foreshores and sea that should sustain a large population, especially one as resourceful as that of the Philippines.

This has not happened. Children die easily here. Last week a study published in Manila revealed that a third of the population was so impoverished they could not get enough to eat, and that overall poverty was now 70 per cent: a rise of more than 10 per cent since Corazon Aquino became the ‘people's president' in 1986.
¹
Of course, the reasons are complex; Filipinos have a long history of colonial exploitation; yet Aquino's failure, and unwillingness, to give anything but tokens to the people in return for the civilised uprising that saw off Marcos is widely regarded both as a betrayal and a potential catalyst. ‘1986 was our finest hour in the eyes of the world,' said J. P. Arroya, Aquino's first executive secretary, in a moving speech the other day. ‘We had blazed an historic trail in mankind's long struggle for freedom.
President Aquino walked in a sea of praise. Why, then, receiving so many compliments herself, did she not ask something for the rest of the people?'
²

He was referring to the interest payments that consume almost half the national budget and to Aquino's decision, announced in an emotional speech before the US Congress, that ‘the Philippines will pay every penny of its debt'.
³
That much of the foreign debt is based on fraudulent loans, negotiated secretly by Marcos and his cronies, was not allowed to intrude upon her standing ovation. ‘She did not simply campaign for office,' wrote the journalist James Goodno in his fine book,
The Philippines: Land of Broken Promises
, ‘she led a national crusade for liberation. She symbolised hope . . .'
⁴

But no more. When Imelda Marcos returned home the other day, her lawyer expressed the new mood when he said, ‘Listen, it's ridiculous: it's absurd! Every Tom, Dick and Harry here in the Philippines has this problem. No one is ever prosecuted.'
⁵
The ‘problem' was the charge that his client had pilfered $5 billion from the national treasury. Whether or not corruption is greater now than under Marcos is debatable: and no one suggests that Cory Aquino indulged in Imelda's famous habits. Rather, with the hope invested in her, she put a liberal face on an illiberal system and so legitimised and refined the feudal enrichment of the few at the expense of the majority.

This is vividly demonstrated by her ‘land reform'. Land reform is what rural people have dreamt about since the Peasants' Revolt. It was Aquino's first promise; and in 1988 the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law was passed, allowing the government to buy land and distribute it to tenants and agricultural workers with long-term, low-interest loans. Instead, the law's ‘loopholes' have turned it into a bonanza for landowners. It allows land to be transferred to family members; landowners can choose the best lands to keep and corporate farms need only give tenants nominal ‘shares'. All coffee, cocoa and rubber plantations are exempt.

Aquino offered to use her own, vast estate,
Hacienda
Luisita
, as a model for the reformers to emulate. As a
haciendero
, a member of one of the landed oligarchies, she and her brothers own a 60,000 hectare sugar plantation north of Manila. It is run strictly on class lines, with the Cojuangcos (her family) and their managers living in a village of mansions with a country club and a golf course.

Most of the cane cutters and the
sacadas
, the very poor migrant workers, pay for water and electricity, and in the tradition of the
peon
, supplement their low income by borrowing from the Cojuangcos. Their debt, plus interest, is subtracted from their wages: a microcosm of the nation. Aquino's workers, wrote James Goodno, ‘are on the whole willing to concede the management a good life so long as they are treated with dignity. This is not always the case. The president's brother, Congressman José “Peping” Cojuangco, pampers his race horses and roosters. His horses live in cool, comfortable stables and the fighting cocks occupy individual shelters. Extra care protects them from disease.'
⁶
No such care and protection is extended to the
sacadas
and their children.

In 1989, with much fanfare, the Cojuangco family sold shares to a third of its workers. They kept control of 67 per cent and the most profitable sugar mill. The dividends amount to about seventy pesos a month, which, as Goodno points out, ‘is hardly enough to feed an average family for one day'.
⁷

The centrepiece of the Aquino Government's ‘economic restoration' is a vast export zone, known as the Calabarzon ‘superproject'. It exemplifies the most discredited kind of imposed ‘development'. Dreamt up in Washington and funded mostly by Japan, it has been one of the ‘economic reforms' demanded by the International Monetary Fund, along with higher taxes, public spending cuts, mass sackings and other wonders of ‘structural adjustment'. The head of the National Economic Development Agency has described the scheme as ‘a giant fabrication'. In resigning, she said the last thing the country needed was more debt.
⁸

The ‘superproject' will destroy about 6 per cent of all
food-growing land – land on which more than eight million people live and depend. Japanese, American and other Western factories will rise from the former paddies and fields. Most of the farmers have been given little or no notice; bulldozers have arrived; compensation is minimal. ‘When all this is gone,' Teresita Vallez, a farmer, told me, ‘how will we ever compensate for the farmland destroyed by Pinatubo? Our children will end up as squatters in Manila.'

Many of the sons have already joined ‘the groups', meaning the resistance. ‘A big fight is coming,' people say matter-of-factly. I spent the early morning and night with a police unit who scour Manila for homeless children. The lieutenant in charge shook his head and said, ‘It's not something I would have believed possible a few years ago. But now the poverty is too terrible. My men pick up kids in a van that doesn't have lights because we can't afford to replace them. We can't afford to be policemen unless we drive a taxi or sell ice-cream cones.'

We drove along Roxas Boulevard, with squatters' shanties on one side, and the high walls of ‘forbidden cities' on the other. These are where the rich, the politicians and many foreigners live. They have their own water supply; the lawns are lush and rubbish is collected. No one gets in without ‘screening', which means fingerprinting for maids and nannies. ‘Why do they need all those men with pump-action shotguns at the gates?' said the lieutenant. ‘Maybe the politicians in there are feeling guilty. Or maybe they are afraid of those people and their kids that tap-tap on the windows of their cars at traffic lights.'

What Aquino has demonstrated is that presidential elections are irrelevant contests between the same ‘trapo' (traditional) groups. Foreign journalists tend to write about Philippine politics as a freak show, preferring the stereotypical Filipino immersed in religion and an attitude of
bahala na
(‘What the heck'). The
Daily Globe,
one of Manila's lively papers, ran a finely ironic front page which had pictures of Cory Aquino and Imelda side by side, showing both of them giving away charity, ‘food and promises' to the poor.
⁹
Cory
continues to play the ordinary housewife she is not and Imelda attempts to reincarnate Evita Peron. Imelda is still making statements like, ‘The only wealth is in my heart.' (Recently she said of her late husband, whose mummified remains have been brought back from Honolulu: ‘He looks even better now.')

Filipino journalists travelling with them say that neither appears to comprehend the degree of bitterness and anger that lie just beneath the surface of the courtesy and tolerance that greet them. If ‘people power' took the Marcoses, and the world, by surprise in 1986, it is likely to do so again. The truth is that Filipinos have fought back in spite of their colonial past; yet each time real independence has seemed within grasp, a reformist elite, promising ‘freedom', ‘land reform' and ‘democracy', has been entrusted with power.

By attacking the mass organisations that spearheaded ‘people power', the Aquino Government wasted no time in reinforcing the historical pattern. Many of Marcos's repressive labour laws were retained. Vigilante groups, or ‘anti-communist associations', were given a free hand. Called
Tadtad
(literally ‘chop chop') and MACHO (‘Mobile Anti-Crime Hit Operatives'), they have intimidated the mildest opposition in the slums and the countryside, where they have close ties with the Army. This is similar to the ‘low-intensity conflict', or organised terror, that has plagued Central America. Less than two years after the euphoric days of Aquino's coming to power, Amnesty International reported, ‘Political killings carried out by the government and government-backed forces in violation of the law have become the most serious human rights problem in the Philippines.'
¹⁰

In the face of this, the ‘open mass movement', as the resistance is known, has mobilised – carefully avoiding peripheral confrontation. The leading trade union federation,
Kilusang Mayo Uno
(KMU), which can claim much of the credit for getting rid of Marcos, now has 700,000 active members. Added to this is the civilian force of the Peasant Movement of the Philippines, the KMP; and the million activists of the National Democratic Front. The NDF is a
Philippines phenomenon. Whereas all over the world the student movement faded in the 1970s, here it went from strength to strength. The NDF's groups range from Christians for National Liberation, to the communist New People's Army.

The NPA, which has never been defeated, has about 22,000 members, of whom half are guerrillas. According to James Goodno, ‘the NPA influences 20 to 25 per cent of the population . . . But the revolutionary movement is far larger . . . An extensive underground network stretches from southern Mindanao to northern Luzon. And, for the first time in Philippine history, radical mass movements actually exist in most provinces and cities.'
¹¹

However, many in the resistance are careful not to underrate the power of the army, or the willingness of the United States to be ‘invited' to put down a popular uprising. It used to be said that the Philippines was ‘another Vietnam waiting to happen'. I was never persuaded of this; the analogy seemed too pat. Now, as the distant rumbling of another kind of volcano grows, the signals are familiar.

November 22, 1991

WHEN BRECHT WROTE,
‘By chance I was spared. If my luck leaves me, I am lost,' he might well have been referring to Nicaragua. In 1979, it was because President Carter was preoccupied with the American hostages in Iran that Nicaragua was spared the usual intervention when its people rose up against the tyrant Anastasio Somoza, of whom Richard Nixon had said: ‘Now that's the kind of anti-communist we like to see down there.'

Exploiting their luck, the Nicaraguans went on, precariously, to lay the foundations of a decent society unheard of in most countries of the region. Indeed, they smashed the stereotype; no more did they work on ‘Somoza's farm'; no longer were they victims, accepting passively their predicament.

The depth of the Nicaraguan revolution struck me when I stayed in a frontier community, El Regadio, in the north of the country. Like everywhere in Nicaragua, it is very poor and its isolation has made change all the more difficult. However, within a few years of deposing Somoza, the Sandinistas had established a ‘well baby clinic', including a rehydration unit which prevents infants from dying from diarrhoea, the most virulent Third World killer.

When I was there no baby had died for a year, which was unprecedented. The production and consumption of basic foods had risen by as much as 100 per cent, which meant that serious malnutrition had disappeared. There was a new school attended by children who, before 1979, would have laboured in the fields; and a total of eighty-seven people,
mostly middle-aged
campesino
women, had learned to read and write. One of them, a large mixture of jolliness and shyness called Petrona Cruz, mentioned to me the word,
pobreterria
, for which there is no precise translation. ‘It's the equivalent of people calling themselves the scum of the earth,' she said. ‘It was a view of ourselves based on shame, on believing that things could never change. The word doesn't exist
now
.'

Many in the West may have forgotten, if they ever knew, the political subtlety of the Nicaraguan revolution. In the early days there were Stalinists, Maoists, liberals and even conservatives among the Sandinistas, but the dominant strain were genuinely non-aligned radicals and visionaries, who were probably closer to Mexico than Havana, and to ‘liberation theology' than Marx. A friend of mine, Xavier Gorostiaga, a Jesuit economist, told me, ‘When the North Americans reduce our uniqueness to a jargon they themselves do not understand, they deny the power of our nationalism. For example, the most powerful influence on Marxism here is Christianity and our Indian heritage. In Nicaragua today to be a Christian can
mean
you have a real option for the poor.'