For Which It Stands: The Philippines

Not everyone looks to Obama for hope and change.

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost
Published: January 26, 2009 10:42 ET

MANILA, The Philippines — In her light-green blouse, black trousers, colorful necklace and gold earrings, Carol Araullo looked decked out for a PTA meeting.

But she soon showed that she is anything but. At a recent forum in a Philippine university, Araullo used a calm, firm voice to lambast the U.S. for its support of Israel. Outside the school, she and other activists continued with their anti-U.S. rhetoric. Several days earlier, on Jan. 16, Araullo and other leftists had burned American flags in front of the Israeli embassy in Manila, chanting “down with U.S. imperialism.”

As the chairwoman of the largest leftist organization in the Philippines — the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (New Patriotic Alliance) — Araullo, 55, is one of the most recognizable faces of the Philippine left.

In large part, Araullo’s life has been driven by U.S. policy toward former Philippine leader Ferdinand Marcos. Her animus toward the U.S. began when she was at the University of the Philippines. In 1972, Marcos, buoyed by Washington’s support, declared martial law and ushered in one of the darkest periods in Philippine history. Like many activists who sought refuge from the growing communist insurgency, Araullo briefly went underground. She was later arrested, tortured and jailed for several months.

After her release, at the urging mainly of her family, Araullo went back to university and finished her bachelor’s degree, graduating cum laude. She decided to study medicine. “That was the only way I thought I could continue with my activism, to personally help and treat people violated by the regime,” Araullo said. As a doctor, she helped organize medical students and health professionals in their struggle against Marcos, who was finally deposed in 1986.

Today, Araullo remains convinced that U.S. policy is the single biggest stumbling block to the Philippines’s development.

Her view doesn’t reflect the majority opinion here. To most Filipinos, the U.S. stands for something else: a benevolent ally, a longtime friend, a place where anyone’s dream can be a reality (most Filipinos emigrants settled in the U.S, after all). The Philippines has embraced U.S. culture in profound ways, as is evident in the enormous popularity here of anything American.

But as Araullo’s activism lays plain, there are other Filipinos who are deeply critical of the U.S.

America, she and others here argue, has controlled the economic and political life of the Philippines for decades. She points to payments on the interest of the huge foreign debts that Marcos racked up during his regime: The interest payments — to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and U.S. financial institutions — are the largest allocations in the current national budget. Instead, Araullo argues, this money should be going to pay for basic health services and education.

“The U.S. has been playing a very significant role in our country’s history, and not in a good way,” Araullo said.

Activists such as Araullo often complain that the country remains poor, a “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” state, largely due to its history of Spanish and U.S. imperialism. In his 1989 book “In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines,” Stanley Karnow writes that America and the Philippines’s “common past had ordained both their present and their future.”

Which is why, to many Filipino activists, Obama’s rise won’t do much to restore the U.S. relationship with the Philippines, Araullo said. “He promises a new era for America and the world, but so did every other Democrat who won, and nothing changed,” she said.

The Philippines may not be at the top of Obama’s to-do list. Zachary Abuza, a professor of political science at Simmons College in Boston and an expert on southeast Asia, said Obama will be too distracted domestically to give the Philippines, or southeast Asia for that matter, significant attention.

“I think there is a tendency among Filipinos to overstate their importance to Washington,” Abuza said. “During Bush’s first term, he did give a lot of importance to the Philippines, but by his second term, so mired in Iraq, the Philippines fell off Washington’s radar screen.”

Rey Asis, an activist who helps organize migrant Filipinos in Hong Kong, echoed this view. “What we are up against is a system known for unjust wars, occupations and exploitation,” he said. “Obama is just one man. If he can overhaul the system, I’d be happy to change my mind about America.”

As for the coming years, Terence Krishna Lopez, another activist who joined in the burning of U.S. flags during protests, thinks the slogan “down with U.S. imperialism” won’t go out of vogue here under Obama’s administration. “It has survived the decades for a reason,” he said.

And so, on Jan. 20, the day Barack Obama was inaugurated in Washington, Araullo and her leftist colleagues marched to the U.S. embassy to demand that Obama withdraw the American troops stationed in the Philippines since 2002 and stop giving aid to the Philippine military, which has been accused of horrendous human rights violations.

They also denounced what they call America’s “silent war” in the Philippines. They accuse the U.S. of intervening in the Philippines’s internal affairs by participating in police and military exercises under the guise of training.

“The U.S. has run roughshod over our sovereignty for decades already,” Araullo said. Obama, she added, must demonstrate that “it can’t be business as usual.”

An Ebola strain surfaces in Philippines

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: January 23, 2009

MANILA: A worker at a pig farm in the Philippines was infected with the Ebola Reston virus, the first known case of the virus jumping between pigs and humans, officials said on Friday.

Tests by health experts from the Philippines, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the worker had developed antibodies to the virus.

Unlike the highly virulent strains of Ebola found in Africa that induce hemorrhagic fever, Ebola Reston is thought to pose little serious health risk to humans but has proved fatal to monkeys and pigs.

Although the worker, whose identity, gender and age the officials withheld, has not shown any symptoms of illness over the past 12 months, health officials are not taking chances. They plan more thorough monitoring of the two farms where the disease was first detected among pigs in December.

“We emphasize, however, that this finding presents a negligible risk to human health,” Francisco Duque 3rd, the Philippine health secretary, said at a news briefing on Friday.

Duque said tests are still being done on blood samples from 50 workers exposed to the infected pigs at the farms in the provinces of Bulacan and Pangasinan, north of Manila, to determine the extent of the outbreak, although initial tests yielded only the one positive result. Further results could become available next week, he said.

Before it appeared in pigs, the Ebola Reston virus had been confined to monkeys. It was first detected in 1989 in Reston, Virginia, in the United States, among monkeys from the Philippines. Since then, at least two more outbreaks in monkeys were reported.

Dr. Julie Hall, an expert on communicable diseases with the World Health Organization, said Ebola has five different strains, with three “associated with high mortality rates in humans.”

Hall said that since 1989 antibodies to Ebola Reston had been found in 25 other people from various countries who had been in close contact with monkeys. None of them, she said, developed any significant illnesses from the virus.

Nevertheless, Duque said health experts from at least four international agencies had agreed to conduct a 10-day test mission in the Philippines “considering the potential implications for animal and human health and welfare.”

Officials said this underscores the fact that little is know about Ebola Reston and its ability to jump between species.

Duque, responding to a reporter’s question, did not dismiss the possibility that the farm worker had infected the pigs rather than the reverse.

“We can’t say for sure that it is not dangerous to man,” Lo Wing-lok, an infectious diseases expert in Hong Kong, told Reuters. “Viruses jumping across species is always worrying,” he said.

3 Red Cross workers kidnapped in Philippines

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: January 15, 2009

MANILA: Three workers from the International Committee of the Red Cross were abducted Thursday by men believed to be members of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group in the southern Philippines, officials said.

The abduction, the latest in a string, took place in the town of Patikul, on Sulu, a southern island province where Abu Sayyaf and other rebel groups have been active.

Military officials identified the victims as Andreas Notter of Switzerland, Eugenio Vagni of Italy and Jean Lacaba of the Philippines.

The military said it had conducted a “hot pursuit” operation and recovered the victims’ Red Cross vehicle.

Lieutenant Steffani Cacho, a spokeswoman for the army, said the workers had arrived on the island two days earlier.

“They were advised about the security situation on the island, but because the ICRC is a neutral organization, they refused armed escorts,” Cacho said in an interview.

Although there was no immediate claim of responsibility, “the possibility is great” that Abu Sayyaf was responsible, Cacho said. Recent kidnappings in Sulu and Basilan, another island province nearby, have been attributed by the military to the group.

The Red Cross in Manila said its three workers were in Sulu to inspect a jailhouse as part of its efforts to improve prisons in the Philippines.

“I am appealing to the Abu Sayyaf to free those people, because they are neutral in any conflict,” said Richard Gordon, chairman of the Philippine National Red Cross, Reuters reported. “They do not realize this, but these people help them if they get wounded and get them out of the conflict areas.”

The abductions took place near the Sulu provincial jail, where the workers had also carried out water and sanitation projects, said Roland Bigler, a Red Cross spokesman in Manila.

Cacho said the Red Cross had alerted the authorities when the victims failed to make their flight Thursday morning to Zamboanga, a city near Sulu.

Militant Islamist separatists on Basilan and other southern islands formed the Abu Sayyaf group in the early 1990s. It has been designated by the United States as a terrorist organization, and its ranks, officials here say, have been greatly reduced because of a joint counterterrorism effort by the Philippine and U.S. governments that began in 2002.

Abu Sayyaf was blamed for an incident in 2001 when three kidnapping victims were beheaded and another in 2004 when a ferry was bombed, killing 100 people. In recent years, it has been trying to fashion itself again as an Islamist organization, and, according to officials and experts, has allied with Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian terror network linked to Al Qaeda and implicated in numerous bombings in Indonesia.

Lately, Abu Sayyaf has degenerated into kidnapping, extortion and banditry, and it has become notorious for rapes and decapitations.

Military and police officials said that more than two dozen people had been abducted in the south since October, apparently by Abu Sayyaf, including a 9-year-old girl who was released in late December after two months in captivity. Reports indicated that ransoms had been paid in some of the abductions.

“They’re back kidnapping people for money,” said Cacho, the army spokeswoman.

Destitute, jobless, and on the move again

Philippine workers and the great migration

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost.com
Published: January 9, 2009 14:22 ET

MUNTINLUPA, Philippines — Diona Cepeda has a college degree and a background in computer science.

But on a recent drizzly afternoon she sat in a local street market, swatting away flies that buzzed around piles of meat that her sister-in-law was selling. Surrounded by shanties and run-down stores, the ground slimy with wet dirt, it seemed like an odd place for Cepeda to be.

She has little choice. Cepeda has to help at her sister-in-law’s stand. And she has to help around her brother’s nearby home, or what passed for it: a cramped hovel sandwiched by other equally decrepit houses in a slum in Muntinlupa, the southernmost city that makes up the sprawling Metro Manila.

The neighborhood is noisy and dirty. Across from Cepeda’s house a group of teenagers, several shirtless despite the slight rain, whooped it up as they played billiards. Below them, a small, open sewer snaked along.

Born to a poor family of eight children, Cepeda is the only one who has graduated from college. Because of that, the expectation has always been that she must help in her siblings’ education. Personal pursuits, like having a boyfriend or marriage, took a backseat. But Cepeda recently fell victim to the global economic crisis and lost her job. She hasn’t been able to find a well-paying position since.

“You can’t imagine the pressure I am in,” she said.

And so her quest for a better life for her and her family has led to the path that 9 million other Filipinos – 10 percent of the Philippines’ population — have taken since the 1970s: seek employment in other countries. It’s a path Cepeda has tried before.

“Tomorrow, I am going to a recruitment agency. I don’t know what job they will give me, but I am willing to take anything,” Cepeda said as her nephews Gabriel, 7, and Michael, 1, wrestled in front of her. Cepeda’s brother, Zandro, a jobless former security guard, looked down on the floor covered with torn linoleum. Tears welled in his sister’s eyes.

“We try to make do,” Zandro Cepeda said, gesturing at the skewered chicken marinating in a stainless pot on the family’s dining table. His wife, Jocelyn, will sell the barbecue at the street market.

Cepeda said she won’t leave if she can find a better-paying job here. “Believe me, I tried,” she said. After graduation, she worked for eight months as a security guard at Robinson’s, a chain of shopping malls in Manila. But the hours were long and the pay was bad.

Recently, she tried applying as a salesperson at SM, which owns the largest malls in the Philippines and three of the biggest in the world. She was told that they only hired those between the ages of 18 and 25.

Cepeda, 26, bristled at what she considered a form of discrimination, though in the Philippines companies often only hire people who are young and, as classified newspaper ads put it, “with pleasing personality.”

So in an environment of rising unemployment — an estimated 12 million are jobless and underemployed in the Philippines this year — Cepeda said she had no choice but to swim with the rising tide of overseas Filipino workers, or OFWs, as they are called here.

These OFWs are spread throughout the globe, from Hong Kong to the U.S., Canada, the U.K., the Middle East and elswhere. This economic diaspora pumps $17 billion a year into the Philippine economy, making up more than 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. The remittances boost consumer spending and generally keep the economy here afloat.

But it is never easy for jobseekers like Cepeda. Many fall victim to unscrupulous recruiters or end up being abused by their employers. And in their effort to gain employment abroad they resort to usurious lenders who charge as much as 20 percent interest.

Indeed, Cepeda’s top priority once she gets hired for work abroad is to pay the nearly $2,000 she owes lenders – money she used to pay her recruiter the first time she applied for work abroad in late 2007. She was sent to Taiwan and employed by Sintek, a company that makes LCD screens.

But only a year-and-a-half later, the global economic downturn heaped more misery upon her already difficult life.

Cepeda and more than 100 other Filipino co-workers at Sintek lost their jobs. “OFWs were crying at the airport,” she recalled the day she arrived home in November. “Some of these lenders were even at the airport to make sure the OFWs paid them. It was terrible.”

Cepeda had no money when she returned home. Her brother had to fetch her at the airport.
According to government statistics, 2,500 Filipino workers in Taiwan alone have been laid off due to the ongoing economic crisis.

“Overseas work has been my family’s lifeline the past year,” she said. In addition to sending money to her parents regularly while in Taiwan, Cepeda was able to help send a brother to school. “And now this,” she said.

So Cepeda waits, shooing flies from meat, mingling in a crowd of the destitute, still surrounded by the poverty she has been trying to escape all her life.