In the Philippines, political dynasties die hard

In light of the death toll from Monday’s election violence, now over 40, political warlordism looms large.

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost.com
Published: November 24, 2009 10:17 ET

MANILA, Philippines — Political violence on a scale never seen before has rocked the Philippines, with the brutal murders of 46 people, sparking new and grave concerns about the role of family dynasties in the country’s political system.

The victims — relatives of politicians, lawyers and several journalists — were abducted by around 100 armed men in Maguindanao province, in the southern Philippines. By Tuesday, 46 bodies had been recovered, according to police.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo placed two southern provinces under a state of emergency on Tuesday.

Many of the victims were beheaded and brutally shot and hacked, according to Esmael Mangudadatu, a vice mayor of a small town whose wife, sister and other kin were among those believed dead.

The incident blanketed the whole country with a sense of doom, made especially stark since Filipinos have been celebrating the recent victory of boxing phenom Manny Pacquiao and CNN’s selection for Hero of the Year, Efren Penaflorida, a young man who drives around a pushcart to teach poor kids how to read and write.

The gruesome violence was a brutal reality check that once again underscored just how deadly Philippine democracy can be and, perhaps more importantly, how little has been done to eliminate one of its scourges: political warlordism.

“[Monday's] outrage brings this country closer to failed state status,” said Inday Espina-Varona, editor of the Manila newsweekly Philippine Graphic. It was a “brutal and barbaric display of naked power,” said Carlos Isagani Zarate, a lawyer from Mindanao, the main region in the southern Philippines. Two of Zarate’s colleagues who were lawyers of Esmael Mangudadatu were among those presumed dead. “This is a tragic commentary of our so-called democracy,” Zarate added.

While often exalted as the epitome of U.S.-style democracy in Asia, the Philippines has not quite lived up to the hype, if we go by the violence Filipinos witness every election season. In the 2007 midterm elections, more than 100 people were killed in election-related violence. In the 2004 elections, the number of deaths was even higher, at more than 200. But nothing — Zarate said not even during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos — came close to the brutality of Monday’s attacks.

What made the incident more incendiary is the fact that at least a dozen journalists, who were covering the relatives of Mangudadatu as they went to the provincial capital to file his candidacy papers, were likewise killed, further cementing the Philippines’s notoriety as the most dangerous country in the world for journalists next only to Iraq. “Never in the history of journalism have the news media suffered such a heavy loss of life in one day,” the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders reacted in a statement.

Political families or dynasties, with their warlords and private armies, rule the Philippine political landscape, especially in the provinces. They are products of the Philippines’ colonial experience, with the Spanish and Americans nurturing them to protect each other’s interests. Even after the country gained independence in 1946, the system — which can only be described as feudal — persisted, with land-owning Filipino families forming their own dynasties, building their own private armies and running for public office to protect their interests.

According to the Center for People Empowerment in Governance, a Manila think tank, there are an estimated 250 political dynasties in the Philippines. Of the 265 members of Congress in 2007, it said in a report that year, 160 of them belonged to these powerful families.

In the same report, the center said these political dynasties almost singlehandedly engendered a culture of election fraud. “Fraud recycles the political dynasties and keeps them in power. It breeds generations of cheaters and manipulators, corrupt politicians, mediocre executives, bribe takers, absenteeism in Congress,” it said.

Apart from fraud, these dynasties flourish because Filipinos tend not to vote according to class, ethnicity, religion or even ideology. As a result, the Filipino family has become “the most enduring political unit and the one into which, failing some wider principle of participation, all other units dissolve,” wrote Brian Fegan, an American anthropologist and historian, in his book “An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines.”

Monday’s violence is typical of the dynamic between Filipino political dynasties. The victims, the Mangudadatus, are themselves a powerful political clan in at least two Muslim provinces in Mindanao. Esmael Mangudadatu, the vice mayor of Buluan town, is challenging the governorship of Maguindanao province whose governor, Andal Ampatuan, belongs to the Mangudadatus’ main political rival. Esmael Mangudadatu alleged on Monday that the Ampatuans launched the attack to frustrate his attempt to become governor, which is perhaps the most important office that a political dynasty should have in order to remain in power.

Prior to this incident, there had been violent attacks perpetrated by either side and Esmael Mangudadatu, in television interviews on Monday, admitted that he had sent his wife and other female relatives to file his candidacy for him, thinking that his opponents would not harm women. He was wrong: The military says 13 of the 21 bodies they recovered Monday were those of Mangudadatu’s women relatives as well as his two women lawyers.

What made this case even more politically intriguing is the fact the Ampatuans are allies of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. They have thrived in Maguindanao largely because of Arroyo’s patronage.

In the 2004 elections, Andal Ampatuan, who was already governor at the time, publicly promised to Arroyo that he would deliver most of Maguindanao’s votes for her and her party. He did, with two of the towns they controlled delivering zero votes to Arroyo’s opponent — sparking allegations of massive election fraud. In fact, the allegation that is hounding Arroyo — that she cheated her way to the presidency in 2004 — had its beginnings in Maguindanao province, with the Ampatuans allegedly behind the whole thing.

The Ampatuans had denied the election fraud charge. They have not issued any statement to refute the recent attacks, while Arroyo has promised to investigate the carnage and bring the perpetrators to justice.

In any case, there has always been a call over the years for government to dismantle these private armies. The latest one was sounded off by Amnesty International in a statement on Monday. “The government must prohibit and disband private armies and paramilitary forces immediately,” said Donna Guest, the group’s deputy director for Asia-Pacific.

Political movements have also been launched to break the stranglehold of political dynasties on Philippine democracy. These have had some few successes but, overall, the dynasties still rule.

In fact, Arroyo herself has demonstrated that a powerful political family is crucial to survival in the rough-and-tumble world of Philippine politics. Her two sons and her sister- and brother-in-laws are all members of congress. Her allies even created a new district in one province so that one of her boys can run there.

Storm may be over, but trouble still brews

An outbreak of a water-borne disease in the Philippines highlights the inability of communities to cope with the storm’s aftermath.

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost
Published: October 28, 2009 06:53 ET

MANILA, Philippines — Nearly a month since a tropical storm dumped unprecedented amounts of rain that flooded much of Metro Manila and its nearby provinces, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos are still suffering from its aftermath, particularly from an outbreak of a water-borne disease called leptospirosis that has killed so far 167 people and infected thousands.

Apart from leptospirosis and other diseases, tens of thousands of residents in the capital and elsewhere in Luzon, the main island north of the country, remain homeless after two storms in short succession, Ketsana then Parma, destroyed houses, properties and crops.

The Philippines isn’t new to devastation wrought by storms and typhoons, but these recent ones have been particularly crippling, especially in poorer areas. Several districts of Metro Manila remain flooded in waist-deep water, raising concerns that the leptospirosis outbreak could worsen.

Health officials have said that the outbreak of the disease is one of the largest in the world. Leptospirosis is a constant threat in flooded areas and has been made significantly worse by continual floods in the wake of Ketsana and Parma.

“This is unprecedented,” health secretary Francisco Duque III said last week. “There’s been no situation like what we have in the Philippines where within less than a month’s time we have doubled or tripled the average number of cases in a year’s time,” Duque said.

“We have also already sent an SOS to the international community because this is one of the biggest outbreaks, not just in the Philippines but in the world,” he said.

The World Health Organization estimates that as many 4,000 could be infected by leptospirosis, which is a bacterial infection caused by the urine of rats and vermins, among other mammals, in flooded areas. The disease, if untreated, can damage the kidney, among other effects. Symptoms include high fever, severe headache, muscle pain, chills, redness in the eyes, abdominal pain, jaundice, hemorrhages in skin and mucous membranes, vomiting, diarrhea and rashes.

The government estimates that as many as 1.7 million people are at “high risk” of exposure to the disease and that more than 1.2 million residents still live in inundated villages, most of them in the capital. In Pasig City, whole communities remain flooded and residents have turned their neighborhoods into canals, with gondola-like contraptions now serving as a means of transportation for many of them.

The additional problem created by the outbreak has put further strain on the already dwindling resources of the government, which has appealed to the international community for help after the typhoons destroyed millions of dollars in crops and property.

Government hospitals have not been able to cope with the rise in leptospirosis cases and, this week, the government convinced private hospitals to take in patients. The health department said it would subsidize the cost of the treatments, which can range from $100 to as much as $400, depending on the complication. For poor families who are invariably the ones most affected by the outbreak, this expense — $400 is equivalent to two months salary of a minimum wage earner — can be forbidding.

Alarmed, the World Health Organization announced last Thursday that it was sending in a team to help the Philippine government cope with the outbreak.

In many ways, the outbreak of leptospirosis and the rising incidents of illnesses — such as diarrhea, E. coli infections and skin rashes — underscore the sheer inability of the affected communities to cope with the destruction brought by the storms. For example, the continued presence of floodwater has been blamed on the clogged drainage and sewage systems of cities and towns comprising Metro Manila, many of which have slum areas where houses block waterways.

As if this were not enough, tens of thousands of residents who live in at least 500 evacuation centers may not be able to find new homes as the government, under pressure now to do something about the slum communities that are choking Metro Manila, attempts to relocate them to other areas. Kadamay, an urban-poor group, has criticized the government for forcing these residents to live in relocation sites with no viable means of livelihood.

The immediate and lingering impact of the typhoons has put further pressure on the government to find more money to finance its rehabilitation efforts. It announced last week that it would float $1.1 billion worth of bonds precisely for this purpose. But critics now say that that would only add to the country’s ballooning debts, which now stand at $51.8 billion. Interest payments alone for that debt would eat up a fourth of the country’s whole budget for 2010.

Some Filipino officials find it unconscionable that the government still insists on paying these debts — and even adding to it by borrowing more — at a time when the country needs all the resources it could gather to rehabilitate itself. They are demanding a moratorium on debt payments.

“We should request foreign lending institutions for a debt moratorium so that we can realign and use a sizeable portion of the hefty debt service fund to the projects aimed at alleviating the plight of disaster victims,” said Aquilino Pimentel Jr., a senator.

“It would be the height of insensitivity and callousness if the government continues to allocate billions toward debt servicing when the Filipino people are in desperate need for relief,” said Satur Ocampo, a congressman. “It will take years to rehabilitate the damaged areas, and it is certain that it will take much longer for the Filipinos severely affected by the calamities to get back on their feet and recover physically, emotionally and psychologically,” he said.

The administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has ignored such appeals and instead tried to reassure Filipinos that the government is doing its best to mitigate the impact of climate change, which has been blamed for the unusual amount of rainfall, and environmental degradation. On Friday, Arroyo signed a law, the Philippine Climate Change Act of 2009, that would put in motion programs to deal with climate change. After the signing, the President called on Filipinos to get serious about climate change.

“We will be seeing more and worse Ondoys and Pepengs in the future, if we do not start greening our ways and our environment now,” Arroyo said, referring to the local names of Ketsana and Parma.

Ripple effect of typhoon Ketsana deals poor a double whammy

For thousands of Filipinos with no homes and nowhere to rebuild, the hardship of the storm has only just begun.

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost.com
Published: October 7, 2009 06:45 ET

MANILA, Philippines — These days, Danilo Fabre spends his time asking friends and neighbors where to look for cheap wood. His home, a hovel right beside a creek in a district called West Kamias, in Quezon City, was completely demolished by typhoon Ketsana, which struck the Philippines on Sept. 26, inundating nearly all of the capital of Manila.

With their homes gone and with his community — a shantytown right beside the creek — still struggling to put their lives back together after the disaster, Fabre can be found on most days either lining up for relief goods from government and charity organizations or sitting by the curb, chatting with friends, exchanging tales of those harrowing days of deluge.

“I pity my youngest,” Fabre, 46, said in an interview. “She’s still so small and now we have nothing, not even milk to feed her.” The baby, at barely one year old, is the youngest among his five children.

All across Metro Manila, the region composed of 17 towns and cities that was the hardest hit by Ketsana, similar tales of woe now ring familiar among the poor.

There’s Danny Regenio, a 45-year-old car painter with five children whose home in Tatalon, another poor district also in Quezon City, was flooded and razed by a raging fire at the same time. “It was just the worst thing,” he said, recalling how he and his neighbors clambered up to their roofs in order to evade the flood and the fire.

There are Fabre’s neighbors who lived in huts beneath a bridge and who are now homeless. Although some huts remain nearby, it wasn’t the same as it used to be, said Fabre. “We were poor but we were all together and we were happy,” he said. Now, even the nightly wailing of the videoke bar nearby is gone.

In Pasig City, another Metro Manila city, mothers complained about not being able to send their sick children to the public hospitals, which are still closed because of the flood. When another typhoon, Parma, struck the northern Philippines over the weekend, sending rains on Metro Manila, residents of a district beside the Pasig River panicked, thinking that another flooding was on the way. Thankfully, Parma was not as devastating as many had feared, though the rain brought ankle-deep water to the homes of many of the poor in many sections of the city.

As in the past, what Ketsana underscored is the extreme vulnerability of poor Filipinos to calamities. According to the National Disaster Coordinating Council, the typhoon affected 629,466 families or 3,084,997 individuals. According to the government, Ketsana killed 288 people while 18 died due to Parma.

Today, more than a week since it wrought havoc by dumping an unprecedented amount of rain on Manila and its environs, thousands of Filipinos have not been able to even remove the trash and debris that accumulated around them, exposing them even more to diseases and illnesses.

While the government, with the help of countless NGOs, charity organizations and even the United Nations, has been trying its best to respond to the needs of the poor, these remain largely unmet. As a result, the U.N. on Monday appealed to the international community for more help, as much as $74 million.

And now, according to Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro’s Monday announcement, the government is prohibiting slum dwellers from rebuilding their shanties on waterways. As a result, Metro Manila’s poor are faced with the real problem of where to rebuild their lives. Prior to Ketsana, the government recorded 70,000 families that had illegally built their homes on these canals, creeks and bridges. Many had their homes destroyed by the typhoon, while many remain.

But relocation seems imminent at this point, with everybody — from government officials to geographers — now proclaiming that removing those shanties as well as the garbage that clogs Metro Manila’s drainage system should be a priority.

Teodoro, who also chairs the National Disaster Coordinating Council, said in an interview that the structures that constrict the waters are the reasons why floodwaters remain in many parts of the capital more than a week after the disaster.

Jose Lito Atienza, the environment secretary, agrees and said, in a separate interview, that “the first thing that should be done now is to remove the garbage and those structures.” He threatened to sue any mayor in Metro Manila who will defy such a move, saying that these local executives have allowed the garbage to accumulate in the first place.

Kilusang Mayo Uno (May First Movement), the country’s largest labor group, cautioned the government on Tuesday against arbitrarily demolishing these shantytowns without viable relocation plans for those affected.

“We agree that flood-prone areas should be vacated and that these are not fit for human residence in the first place. Even poor people say so. We believe, however, that the best way to leave these spaces vacant is to create new homes for our urban poor,” said Elmer Labor, chairman of the Kilusang Mayo Uno, in a Tuesday statement.

Pamalakaya, a group of fisherfolk, criticized the government for even thinking about removing the houses of poor residents around the Laguna Lake, where floodwater had accumulated and spilled over into several communities. The forced eviction, said Salvador France, vice chairman of Pamalakaya, would displace “100,000 lakeshore residents mostly small fishermen and poor people who have been living in Laguna Lake surroundings for generations.”

According to the nonprofit economic think tank Ibon Foundation, Ketsana “could cause lasting poverty and severe difficulties” to the majority of the families it affected.

“They will face greatly increased expenses for housing, housing repair, medical care, education and personal effects. Among the critical spending they may be forced to cut back on to accommodate these is on food with corresponding adverse nutritional and health implications,” the foundation said.

It added that “among the most affected areas are urban poor communities which have high concentrations of informal sector work and, hence, of families in insecure and particularly vulnerable livelihoods.”

To residents like Fabre, all this sounds like they have been dealt a double whammy. “If they are going to remove us here, where would we go?” he asked. Many of those who suffered like him are probably asking the same question.

Philippines government falls short in storm relief

Devastating floods claimed more than 200 lives and left survivors asking what Manila officials did with all their prevention funds.

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost.com
Published: September 29, 2009 16:47 ET
Updated: September 29, 2009 16:52 ET

MANILA, Philippines — It was one of the most colorful sections of the capital Manila, a row of houses painted in bright, pastel hues.

Adding to its allure was the river fronting it and the foliage that, though sparse, hinted at orderliness. Commuters who passed by marveled at the beauty of the facade. But it was, indeed, nothing but a facade, since behind its vibrant colors was a slum community similar to the many poor neighborhoods here.

On Saturday, as tropical storm Ketsana swept through the capital and several provinces in the northern Philippines, killing more than 200 people and displacing hundreds of thousands from their homes, the facade at the village called Industrial Valley Complex in Marikina City was smeared with dirt. The residents behind it were devastated.

On Sunday, after Ketsana poured down a month’s worth of rain and flooded much of the capital, dozens of residents — their hands and feet and bodies soiled with muck — went through what was left of their belongings. The candy-colored pretense doing nothing to hide their misery and the destruction the storm caused. As of Tuesday, Philippines authorities put the death toll at around 250, and expected it to rise yet as they continued to pull bodies out of swollen rivers and debris-strewn streets.

In a way, the pretty trimmings to the Industrial Valley Complex provide some irony to this disaster: they reflect what some here say is the government’s mere lip service to disaster preparedness. After all, the head of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, Gilbert Teodoro, ran commercials months ago urging the public to prepare for precisely this kind of natural disaster. More than anything, many view those commercials as a form of self-promotion; he has been chosen as the administration’s candidate in next year’s presidential race.

In Marikina, a city east of the capital, there are many such colorful facades, each conveying the message that the city is pretty and orderly. In fact, the former mayor of the city, Bayani Fernando, was appointed the chairman of the Metro Manila Development Authority precisely because he promised to turn this metropolis of 16 cities into another Marikina, where streets are clean and the city appears ever-prepared to face disasters.

As it turned out, among the Manila cities, Marikina City was the hardest hit by the storm, thus bursting the myth Fernando had created for himself. Fernando’s political ambition — he said he would run for president — is probably another fatality of Ketsana.

On a larger scale, critics of the government say Ketsana only highlighted a serious problem facing the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo: an utter lack of practical means to face the effects of environmental destruction and climate change.

“The incalculable damage wrought by Ondoy” — the local name of Ketsana — “brings us face to face, yet again, with the irony at the center of our fate as a disaster-prone nation: We are very good at organizing relief operations once disaster strikes, but we are a failure at preventing disaster in the first place,” the Philippine Daily Inquirer intoned in its editorial on Monday.

The government has so far not responded directly to the accusations that it has not been doing enough, although it acknowledged that it had been overwhelmed by the disaster. “We are concentrating on massive relief operations. The system is overwhelmed, local government units are overwhelmed,” said Anthony Golez, a spokesman for the National Disaster Coordinating Council.

President Arroyo, meanwhile, has ordered all government agencies to allot all the resources they could muster to help the survivors, even declaring that she would allow the use of the presidential palace compound as an emergency relief center.

Teodoro, the chairman of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, said: “We feel their anger and pain but it is physically impossible to reach each and everyone with the conditions that we face.”

The government has also appealed for more help. “We are appealing for international humanitarian assistance,” Teodoro said Monday. “The potential for a more serious situation is there and we cannot wait for that to happen.”

Environmentalists have cautioned that the government needs to be ahead of the curve, as escalating climate change will almost certainly send increasingly severe weather toward the Philippines.

Scientists and experts “have warned that the Philippines will experience extreme weather events, floods, landslides and worsening poverty because of climate change. This should have prompted the Arroyo government to map out plans and policies to lessen and help its people adapt to these problems. However, these warnings were left unheeded by the government as proven by the poor response and the magnitude of suffering and destruction the Filipinos experienced due to the recent disaster,” said Meggie Nolasco, an activist with the nonprofit Philippine Climate Watch Alliance.

Indeed, survivors of the disaster, while thankful for the relief goods that have been coming their way, criticize the government for not warning residents early enough about the flood or for not having enough resources to deal with the calamity.

Survivors stayed overnight on the rooftops of their houses waiting to be rescued as the water swelled below them. Hundreds remained trapped inside their homes on Monday. Various media reports say survivors have been seething with anger at the government for not doing enough and for not coming quickly enough. On radio programs, residents called in to lambaste the administration.

A congressman, Teofisto Guingona III, resurrected his earlier allegation that President Arroyo had spent more than 800 million pesos of disaster emergency funds on her travels abroad, an allegation the administration had denied. The attack on Arroyo has become such that Filipinos circulate on Facebook a video of a person purported to be one of her sons shown buying liquor at the height of the storm. In a photo also circulating on Facebook, Arroyo is shown visiting a flooded neighborhood in pink boots.
Analysts even went so far as to say that the government’s inadequate response could worsen the unpopularity of President Arroyo, who, as it is, is the most unpopular president in the country’s history since the dictator Ferdinand Marcos because of the many corruption scandals she has been facing since 2004.

“This will have a big political impact on the government,” said Ramon Casiple, executive director of the Institute for Political and Electoral Reform, according to Reuters. “People are wondering how the government spent its budget for flood control projects. The government was caught unprepared by the heavy rain brought by the typhoon,” Casiple said.

For victims like Alwyn Alburo, an editor at GMA, a television network, the havoc Ketsana wrought on Manila was an occasion to reassess whatever attraction the metropolis held for him. “We’re planning to move back to the provinces,” Alburo told GlobalPost on Monday.

Alburo’s house in Marikina was completely flooded on Saturday, in a situation that he described as “like scenes from the apocalypse.” All of his belongings inside the house were destroyed. He lost, too, his Labrador. “She loved to swim but that was in the beach. I’m not sure whether she likes it in floodwater,” Alburo said. “I hope somebody finds her.”

Filipinos mourn “people power” icon

Corazon Aquino, ex-president of the Philippines, is dead at 76.

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost
Published: August 1, 2009 13:42 ET

MANILA — She was the closest the Philippines ever had to a living saint. And when she died on Saturday, from colon cancer at the age of 76, Filipinos grieved as though they had just lost one.

Inside a Catholic school in Manila where the remains of Corazon Aquino lay for public viewing, Filipinos from all walks of life lined up to get a glimpse of “Tita (Auntie) Cory,” undaunted by the heavy downpour that had drenched the capital all day. Nuns and priests with solemn faces walked past the shivering masses and the rows and rows of white, green and yellow flowers that covered the campus. On the railings going up to the school’s gym, yellow ribbons flapped forlornly in the rain.

“This is such a sad day for me and my family,” said Digna Labalan, a 50-year-old businesswoman who lined up on Saturday evening to view Aquino’s casket a few hundred meters away. In 1986, like hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, Labalan had gone to Edsa — the main highway in the capital where the “people power” that toppled Ferdinand Marcos took place — and participated in what has been called a “bloodless revolution” later emulated in many countries in the world.

But Labalan said she was “relieved and happy that Aquino had gone to heaven, no longer in pain.” Aquino suffered greatly from the cancer — she was on morphine when she died. Across the country, trees and fences had been festooned with yellow ribbons, the symbol of the housewife who challenged the dictator Marcos and went on to become the country’s first woman president.

An image of a yellow ribbon had replaced profile pictures on Twitter and Facebook. Churches all over were holding daily masses for the stricken former president.

A daughter of one of the country’s wealthiest families, Aquino was thrust into the political limelight after the assassination in 1983 of her husband, Benigno Aquino Jr., the arch enemy of the dictator. When Marcos rigged the election in 1986, Filipinos revolted, drove Marcos away to Guam (he later died in exile in Hawaii) and installed the housewife as their new president.

Although her six years in office were tumultuous — she survived at least six coup attempts — Aquino restored the democratic institutions that the dictatorship had systematically destroyed during two decades in power.

But many say Aquino could only do so much. For instance, her centerpiece program — agrarian reform — did little to alleviate poverty in the countryside or end the festering communist insurgency. Indeed, her family’s vast landholdings managed to escape this program, prompting cries from the left that Aquino never transcended her class interests. Worse, some of the most notorious atrocities against peasants and farmers occurred during her term, such as when her troops massacred more than a dozen farmers demonstrating near the presidential palace.

Under pressure from some in the military to which she owed a great deal for protecting her from the coup attempts, Aquino launched a “total war policy” against the left and the communist insurgency — unleashing, for example, armed paramilitary elements, many of them members of fanatical religious cults, against communists and suspected communist sympathizers. This resulted in massive human-rights violations that continue to this day.

Many Filipinos also expected her to repudiate billions of dollars in debts that the dictatorship had incurred. But, under tremendous pressure from international creditors, she did not, and Filipinos are still paying for these debts.

When she spoke before a joint session of the U.S. Congress in 1987, she practically begged America to throw the Philippines a lifeline. “You have spent many lives and much treasure to bring freedom to many lands that were reluctant to receive it,” Aquino told her American audience. “And here you have a people who won it by themselves and need only the help to preserve it.” That same day, legislators approved a $200 million emergency loan to Manila.

But despite all that, Aquino managed to keep her nose clean, keeping her promise that she would be the opposite of Marcos. During her term, not one corruption allegation was leveled against her.

“She was the epitome of integrity and graciousness,” said Christian Monsod, who was appointed by Aquino as chairman of the elections commission. “She never interfered, she never called me while I was at the commission,” he added with an apparent dig at current President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whose regime has been hounded with the allegation that she cheated in the 2004 election by calling up an election official as part of the plot to steal the vote. Arroyo has always denied the charge.

Aquino, who was Catholic-educated, was also deeply pious. She liked the company of nuns and would often talk about suffering as a gift from God, as a way of testing her faith. She developed a close relationship with the late Cardinal Jaime Sin, who was often described as her most important ally in the fight against Marcos.

According to members of her family, Aquino died in the early morning Saturday while praying and clutching her rosary, her children surrounding her at the hospital where she had been confined the past several weeks as her cancer worsened.

“She was a mentor to me,” said Rodolfo Lozada Jr., a whistle-blower in one of the corruption scandals confronting Arroyo and whom Aquino publicly supported when he came out against the current president. “She told me to never lose faith,” Lozada said, gesturing at the casket that bore the woman who had provided hope to Filipinos during their darkest hour, wearing her signature yellow dress, a rosary in her hand.

We love you, Manny

Filipinos fawn over boxing champion and national hero Manny Pacquiao.

By Carlos H. Conde
Published: May 14, 2009 06:52 ET
GlobalPost.com

MANILA — In a nation starved of heroes, Manny Pacquiao has become what one writer called a “multi-tasking hero.” He is considered more than the world’s greatest boxer: He embodies, it would seem, everything that Filipinos are hankering for these days.

People want Pacquiao to run for public office — for president, if possible. Officials want him to be a peace negotiator with rebels. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo just appointed him an “ambassador for peace and understanding.” The Philippine justice secretary named the boxer his “special assistant on intelligence matters,” whatever that means.

A week ago in Las Vegas, Pacquiao demolished Britain’s Ricky Hatton in the second round of a 12-rounder, a fight now widely regarded as one of the best in the history of the sport. When he flew home on Monday, he received a grand welcome unlike any ever received by a Filipino: His motorcade paraded through the streets of Manila, blue, white and red confetti flying endlessly, Filipinos by the roadside stretching out their arms, almost in supplication. Not even the pope’s visits to this deeply religious Catholic nation elicited such displays of admiration.

“I love you, Manny!” became a familiar shriek, echoing the country’s sentiments toward a 30-year-old man who, when he was a teenager, sold cigarettes to commuters in the streets of General Santos City, trying to support a family wallowing in extreme poverty — the typical Filipino experience. As for many Filipino youths, boxing proved a way out for Pacquiao.

Today, Pacquiao wears Armani. He owns houses and properties here and abroad. He owns a basketball team. And his mother, Dionisia, sashays in front of television cameras glittering with gold and diamonds, wearing expensive clothes, clutching the latest Louis Vuitton purse.

People flock to his house in General Santos, a city in the south, and ask for financial help wherever he goes (he is now worth billions of pesos, having amassed more than $12 million from his recent fight). A recent report in the Philippine Daily Inquirer said that a woman shouted to him during Monday’s parade to please give her children.

One city wants to build a statue of him, which could be illegal in a country where monuments can only be dedicated to dead heroes. The Philippine postal system has printed his image on a stamp, making him the first athlete to be given the honor.

And Pacquiao’s singing career seems to be on the upswing: His CD is now a certified hit. When a Filipino singer was criticized for changing the notes of the Philippine national anthem he sang during Pacquiao’s fight, the boxer, as if to spite the critics, offered to sing it himself the next time he steps into the ring.

Pacquiao inspires as much hyperbole as awe. Lennox Lewis, the former heavyweight champion, wrote recently in Time magazine’s “100 most influential” issue, “The grip he holds over the Philippines is similar to Nelson Mandela’s influence in South Africa.”

Lewis added that Pacquiao, included on Time’s list, is “almost like a god” in the Philippines. Each time Pacquiao fights (he has won five titles from five different weight classes, a first for any Asian), soldiers and rebels stop fighting for a day, incidents of crime fall dramatically, and the streets stop heaving with traffic — stuff that otherwise happens only during Holy Week.

The Philippines has never had an athlete like Pacquiao. But many Filipinos contend that Pacquiao’s popularity obscures the problems that beset the country.

“Never in the history of boxing has a fighter been so admired and loved by his people and served as a single unifying force in a country that regrettably resonates with divisiveness,” sports analyst Ronnie Nathanielsz told Newsday.com.

Apart from possessing the world’s deadliest left hook — the one that landed on Hatton’s chin, knocking him unconscious before he even hit the canvas — Pacquiao also has a golden touch, politically speaking. Politicians swarm all over him; they take every opportunity to be photographed beside him. (These pictures later appear in campaign posters and literature.) The few politicians he has endorsed during past elections have won hands-down.

He is not just the king of the ring — he has become a kingmaker of sorts in a political landscape that values personality over ideology.

Pacquiao’s series of victories has provided the unpopular Arroyo administration with several public relations bonanzas, as the latest win over Hatton did this week.

“Did Hatton hurt you?” Arroyo asked Pacquiao during his courtesy call to the president on Monday. “Not so much,” Pacquiao replied, and quipped, “He could not take the punch of the Filipino nation.”

For a country enduring seemingly never-ending scandals involving corruption and politics, Pacquiao is a respite. Since his victory over Hatton, Filipinos have forgotten about these many scandals. He has dominated the press so thoroughly, boxing out other events, news and issues.

Most believe that it is impossible not to feel extreme pride about Pacquiao. “You can’t be a Filipino,” wrote the columnist Conrado de Quiros, “and not marvel at the marvel Pacquiao has become.”

Mall nation

Malls serve as cultural centers in a nation where many live on less than $2 a day.

By Carlos H. Conde
Published: May 2, 2009 08:42 ET
GlobalPost.com

MANILA — These days, there’s no escaping the mall. It used to be that Filipinos like Sheila Largoza went to the park during their days off. A maid, Largoza is not affluent enough to be able to spend a few hundred pesos a week at the mall. But come the weekend, that is exactly where she finds herself.

On a recent Sunday, Largoza, 23, and a friend were killing time at the SM Mall of Asia, the largest mall in the Philippines, which is located by the Manila Bay. “The parks in Manila are no good,” she said, looking below at the mall’s promenade, with its magnificent view of the setting sun. Despite having spent a good two hours inside the vast shopping center, Largoza and her friend hadn’t spent a single centavo on anything.

In many ways, the pull of malls in the Philippines goes beyond shopping, as Largoza, with her $90 a month salary, illustrates. These air-conditioned malls have become more than a substitute for public parks in this tropical country. They have come to define Filipino consumer culture and, to a large degree, the character of the modern-day, remittance-dependent Filipino family.

Eighty percent of Filipinos go to the malls at least once or twice a month, according to a 2008 survey by the Nielsen Media Research, even though nearly half of the population lives on $2 a day or less.

This data alone would seem to suggest a disconnect between consumer habits and economic reality, but consider this as well: Three of the world’s largest shopping malls, according to computations by Forbes magazine, are in the Philippines, for which the International Monetary Fund has predicted a poor performance of zero percent gross domestic product growth for 2009. It is topped on the Forbes list by only one other country: China, with four malls on the list and 8 percent forecasted GDP growth.

Moreover, families of overseas Filipino workers, whose billions of dollars in annual remittances help prop up the economy and encourage consumer spending, are a regular fixture at the malls, which now have foreign-exchange or remittance centers with lines so long that converting currency can often take between 15 minutes to half an hour.

It is easy to see why Filipinos are mall-crazy. One can practically spend a whole day at the SM Mall of Asia, which is the largest in Asia and the third largest in the world — it has 4.2 million square feet of “gross leasable area,” or a floor area of 148 acres, larger than the Vatican.

Here, Filipinos not only shop — they play, they stroll by the bay, eat at the numerous restaurants and cafes and the cavernous “foodcourt,” watch movies in the large cineplex that has an IMAX, or simply sit in the open parks outside and inside the mall and enjoy the breeze blowing in from Manila Bay. There’s even an ice-skating rink, where the best skaters in the Philippines have trained.

“It can be overwhelming,” Largoza, the maid, said of the mall. Often she and her friends just watch the shows at the “activity center” or hang out by the bay, fiddling with their cell phones and gossiping.

At a forum last year at the University of the Philippines on “mall culure,” sociologist Maria Rowena SA Briones addressed the Filipino fascination with malls: “The mall slogan ‘We’ve got it all for you’,” which the SM mall chain uses, “gives the impression that when you go to a mall, everything is easy and fanciful. It makes you feel so good about getting what you want/need — the distinction is quite blurry — so that even if you don’t have money or you need not buy anything, you will anyway.”

It is a compulsion that has made Henry Sy, the owner of the SM chain that has malls all over the Philippines, the richest Filipino and one of the most affluent men in Asia. It is the same compulsion, developed almost single-handedly by SM, that propelled other Filipino entrepreneurs — several of them titans of Filipino industry and business — to go into the mall business.

So what effect has this “mall culture” had on Filipino character and identity?

“Malls have become our parks and cultural centers,” wrote the author Antonio Hidalgo in an essay on the subject. These malls, he said, “exercise an important influence on the development of our culture and values.”

The rapid spread of malls throughout the country, Hidalgo added, “probably has the effect of providing common experiences to previously very disparate ethnic groups that had been sheltered in the cocoons of their sub-cultures. Put in another way, the malls can be seen as moving us towards a more unified culture by spreading the big-city values of Metro Manila throughout our archipelago.”

Of pirates and profits

Welcome to busy Manila Bay, where sailors haggle and commercial ships find their crews.

By Carlos Conde
GlobalPost.com
Published: April 19, 2009 11:36 ET

MANILA — Miguel Jacob is a fixture on TM Kalaw Street.

His neon green folder held aloft, he weaves through the men gathered near Manila Bay, not saying a word unless someone checks out the words and numbers on the paper he thrusts in their face.

When that happens, Jacob launches into a spiel designed to convince his audience to ship out to sea with his company. One can always tell a negotiation is taking place the moment Jacob hunches over and begins speaking in a low voice.

Jacob, 25, is a recruiter for MichaelMar Philippines, an agency that places Filipino sailors on the container ships and bulk carriers that ply the world’s shipping routes. He and several others like him are denizens of a veritable sailors’ market along TM Kalaw Street, near what used to be Manila’s prostitution strip.

Here, sailors — nearly a thousand on most days — find jobs, haggle for the best salaries, commune with their colleagues and exchange gossip about the various recruitment agencies.

For young sailors like Jacob who dream of the sea, the market is their first destination. Although so-called manning agencies are still a popular choice, the sailors’ market offers more opportunities for Filipino sailors, who man the most ships worldwide. The agencies run dozens of the booths at the market, where competition often leads them to offer higher salaries.

Like a flea market, the sailors’ market doesn’t have anyone actually running it. The government permits the use of the sidewalk and a portion of a public park and a non-governmental group comprised of sailors maintains an office nearby. The group offers assistance, including free lodging, chilled water and wi-fi connections, to the sailors who endure the heat and smog to linger at the market all day.

The sailors and recruiters here are constantly negotiating. Those who are waiting to hear about applications or who simply have time on their hands can play chess, protected from the searing sun by the tall mahogany and mango trees and makeshift tents.

Vendors, meanwhile, sell anything from pirated DVDs to snacks, chilled bottled water, used shoes, newspapers, even houses. One entrepreneur offers full-body massages; on a particularly hot day this week, a shirtless sailor sitting on a plastic stool gets the brisk body work while many others line up for the same treatment.

Then there’s the eye-and-ear cleaner, who, for a small fee and using nothing but a cotton bud or tweezer, cleans eyeballs and plucks the hair — and wax! — off his clients’ ears. It’s not a pretty or comfortable sight but the sailors who mill around seem to enjoy it — just another boredom-buster as far as they’re concerned.

It wasn’t always like this at the sailors’ market, whose growth over the years is linked to the development of seafaring in the Philippines. According to the Overseas Employment Administration, 30 percent of the world’s merchant sailors — about 270,000 people — are Filipinos. They are among the eight million Filipino workers overseas whose remittances — more than $16 billion last year — help keep the economy afloat.

It’s not clear when the sailors’ market began, but it started to take on a life of its own when those waiting for their appointments at the manning agencies across the street would kill time in the shade. The area transformed from a mere waiting shed for sailors, who are mostly from the provinces, into an area teeming with sailors and vendors who quickly followed.

“It’s better than the mall,” said a sailor, who only identified himself as Ronald, scanning the crowd in front of him. Ronald, who comes from Roxas City in the central Philippines, has been here twice and hopes to find a job as a utility man, an all-around crew member who does menial labor such as cleaning toilets.

Ronald said he’s not aiming for a higher position right now because the global economic crisis has caused some Filipino-manned ships to cancel their trips. He cannot afford to be picky.

“We’ve heard of sailors who couldn’t find board ships because of the crisis. Some recruiters have also been offering lower wages,” said Michael Cardenas, a utility man who is working temporarily as a recruiter for Technonav Crew Management. Cardenas was one of several sailors and recruiters who said they were concerned about the state of the global economy and its impact on their job prospects.

And as for the pirates of Somalia, the current scourge of the seafaring world who now hold more than a hundred Filipino sailors hostage — the most of any nationality?

“There is always a danger in what we do. But the benefits outweigh the risks,” said Jacob, himself a sailor and the father of a child, who hopes to earn as much as $800 per month working on a ship, almost four times the minimum wage in Manila. “We have to think of our family and our future.”

Davao’s safety comes at a high cost

Human Rights Watch report says the city’s vigilante-style justice is being copied.

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost.com
Published: April 12, 2009 10:20 ET

MANILA — Davao City is one of the most orderly cities in the Philippines. Located about 600 miles south of Manila, in the island region called Mindanao, it prides itself on its durian (the spiky, pungent fruit), its tuna, its pristine beaches, and the fact that, in terms of land area, it is one of the biggest cities in the world. One Asian newsweekly has included it several times in its list of the “most livable cities in the world.”

Unlike in most cities in the Philippines, a visitor can stroll the streets of Davao at 2 a.m. and not feel the least bit worried. Indeed, many tourists swear by the safety of the city, run by Rodrigo Duterte, a mayor Time magazine once called “The Punisher.” It’s a label that Duterte and many Davaoenos are proud of — but the security comes at a high cost to those who live in the city’s slums.

Like many cities, Davao — with a population of more than a million — has its own filthy, inner streets with a parallel universe. Gang members, drug dealers and street children fill the streets of these slums, much to the consternation of local officials, who consider them a blot on the city’s beauty, and utterly expendable as well.

In these slums, the Davao Death Squad has murdered nearly 1,000 residents since the late 1990s. In January, assassins murdered an average of one person each day.

There had been much debate over the years about whether the Davao Death Squad really exists. Duterte once said the vigilantes were nothing but a figment of the imagination of journalists and his critics.

But a report released this month by the Human Rights Watch says otherwise. In the report “You Can Die Anytime,” the group said the Davao Death Squad exists and represents a trend now being copied by many other Philippines cities — to deal with crime the “Dirty Harry” way.

In its study conducted in the Philippines last year, Human Rights Watch determined that vigilante killings in Davao City have increased from only two victims in 1998 to 124 in 2008, and that the police and the courts have failed to investigate, let alone prosecute, most of these cases. Most of these killings took place in broad daylight and in public places.

According to Human Rights Watch, which interviewed gang members and former members of the Davao Death Squad, there actually exists a group in Davao, led by a man called amo (boss), who determines who gets killed. The amo assigns a particular hit based on a list of targets acquired from village officials or the police. He hands out the weapon, and sometimes even a photograph of the target. Before the murder is carried out, the group coordinates with the nearest police station to ensure that policemen will arrive late to the crime scene to allow the gunman to get away.

The weapon of choice has been a .45 caliber pistol. But lately, the killers have been using knives, perhaps, according to Human Rights Watch, to buttress the police’s claim that these deaths were the result of gang wars. According to families of victims I spoke with in 2002, some of the killers used a butcher’s knife called a kolonyal: they would stab a victim in the left shoulder, the better for the kolonyal to pierce the heart and other vital organs.

“The continued death squad operation reflects an official mindset in which the ends are seen as justifying the means,” the report said. “The motive appears to be simple expedience: courts are viewed as slow or inept. The murder of criminal suspects is seen as easier and faster than proper law enforcement.”

It also found that the Davao Death Squad has been copied in several Philippine cities and that there has not been any outrage from the public, except from activists and human rights groups.

“Duterte and other local officials continue to deny the existence of any death squad. But in recent years, mayors and officials of other cities have made statements attempting to justify similar killings in their own cities,” the report said. “Sadly, Davao City is seen by some as a model for fighting crime.”

Indeed, Duterte has repeatedly won reelection by promising to eliminate crime. Residents support him when he threatens criminals with death, usually on his television program.

“I will not hesitate to kill them. I don’t care about minors,” Duterte once told reporters, referring to members of teenage gangs, several of whom, some as young as 14, have been killed over the years. “If you are a criminal,” Duterte said publicly in February, “you are a legitimate target of assassination.”

But as can be expected in an environment where extrajudicial means are accepted, even encouraged, the inevitable happens. On the evening of July 17 last year, 20-year-old Jaypee Larosa was shot dead by three gunmen near his home in Davao City. According to eyewitnesses, one of the men approached the body, took off Larosa’s baseball cap and muttered: “Son of a bitch. This is not the one.”

Like most cases, Larosa’s case remains unsolved.

The showman of Manila

In a top hat and “barong Tagalog,” Carlos Celdran entertains, and sometimes offends, tourists to the Philippines.

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost.com
Published: March 19, 2009 20:39 ET

MANILA — Carlos Celdran has been called “Manila’s pied piper.” But a more apt description might be a clown with a sledgehammer, who smashes long-held notions about Philippine history and culture.

As the city’s most popular guide, he can often be found leading a pack of 30-odd tourists, many of them westerners, on his weekly tours of the city’s cultural and historical sites.

In addition to drawing on his background in visual and performing arts — Celdran conducts his tours wearing a top hat and “barong Tagalog” (the national shirt for Filipino men), and waving a miniature American flag — he injects his tours with a liberal political bent that is both irreverent and entertaining.

For example, at a recent tour of Intramuros — the “walled city” in Manila where Spaniards protected themselves against a mob of Muslims in the 16th century — Celdran wowed his mostly Caucasian audience with politically charged references, all delivered in his vaudevillian style. He described the Roman Catholic leadership in the Philippines during that period as “Catholic Talibans” running a “theocracy” that suppressed Filipinos’ desire for independence.

And inside the San Agustin Church — considered the mother of Philippine colonial churches — Celdran herded his audience into a chamber filled with tombs of Filipinos who died in World War II. He launched into a tirade against World War II U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, blaming him for destroying Manila (here he showed a photograph of a bomb from a U.S. plane) in an attempt to get rid of the Japanese.

Celdran also ridiculed MacArthur as a showman, alleging that when MacArthur landed on the shores of Leyte, he re-staged the event so a Life magazine photographer could perfectly capture the moment he waded into the water.

“He was a better actor than a general,” Celdran, pipe in hand, boomed, eliciting a faint but firm snicker from one of the elderly Americans in the group.

In a way, Celdran knows whereof he speaks. A pudgy 36-year-old of Spanish, American and Chinese descent, Celdran studied fine arts at the University of the Philippines and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design before shifting to performing arts. He interned with New York City’s Blue Man Group and later formed a performing arts group in Manila.

He put his interest in Philippine culture and history to use by joining Manila’s Heritage Conservation Society, where he was a volunteer tour guide. “I would wear no costume, and people would get bored halfway through my spiel,” he once told a writer. So Celdran decided to branch out on his own.

His success is well known: In 2007, he was recognized as one of Manila’s “Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs” by the Philippine Center for Entrepreneurship.

Celdran relies heavily on costumes and props, and draws on his theatrical background. He wears a headset connected to the portable speaker dangling from his waist, and has a small music player, which he uses to play Filipino folk songs and “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” To heighten the tension about a tale of Filipinos killed in World War II, he snaps his fingers rhythmically; at another point, he slams shut a book of old pictures so hard that his audience is startled.

Today, his walking tours are by appointment only (he’s strict about confirmations), and they’re limited to 30 tourists. His business grows through word of mouth and on the Internet, despite the rather steep price tag: about 1,000 pesos per person (roughly $20).

In addition to his tour of Intramuros, Celdran offers tours of Manila’s Chinatown and an overnight tour of Corregidor, the island off Manila Bay that the Americans and Filipino used to defend the country from the Japanese during World War II. Growing in popularity is his “Living La Vida Imelda!” tour, which takes visitors to the cultural sites that former first lady Imelda Marcos built in the 1970s and 1980s (this tour involves 1970s attire). “It is infused with disco music, gossip, geo-politics of the Cold War and everything you did not need to know about Imelda,” he said.

Despite the politics that creep into his tours, Celdran pooh-poohs the notion that some might get offended or turned off. “It’s all song and dance,” he whispered as he sashayed down the cobblestones of Intramuros. “Don’t take it seriously.”

Philippines: The resiliency of Abu Sayyaf

Once on the run, a terrorist group makes a comeback

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost.com
Published: March 15, 2009 11:20 ET

MANILA — In 2006, the Philippine armed forces, backed by U.S. military support, launched one of its biggest offensives against the terrorist organization Abu Sayyaf.

The operations resulted in the deaths and capture of the group’s key leaders as well over 200 followers in the two years that followed. Both Manila and Washington hailed as a success the campaign against a band of terrorists known for their kidnappings, beheadings and bombings.

But the atrocities, particularly the kidnappings, continued. Last year, more than 30 people were kidnapped in the Muslim region in the southern Philippines where the Abu Sayyaf is active. And in January, the group made its boldest move in recent years by abducting three workers — two of them foreigners — of the International Committee of the Red Cross. It kidnapped another one, a Sri Lankan peace volunteer, in February.

The local headlines screamed that the Abu Sayyaf “is back.” In truth, they never really left. A confidential government report said that the group raised more than $1.5 million in ransoms last year while its followers grew from 383 in 2007 to 400 in 2008, according to The Associated Press.

The resurgence of the Abu Sayyaf inevitably raises questions not just about the capacity of the Philippine government to deal with the terrorist group, but also about whether the joint Philippine-U.S. counter-terrorism campaign here, dubbed early on as the “second front in the U.S. war against terror” (after Afghanistan), has been effective.

While recognizing the value of the technical, logistical and humanitarian support the Americans have provided to the Philippines, Pete Troilo, director for business intelligence at risk analysis group Pacific Strategies and Assessments, contends that “one need not look past Iraq or Afghanistan to recognize that containing small pockets of rogue elements is nearly impossible, even for the most well-trained and equipped U.S. military units.”

Washington has maintained that its presence in the southern Philippines is mainly for humanitarian purposes, such as building schools and wells, and to advise and train Filipino troops in counter-terrorism. U.S. troops, however, have reportedly taken crucial roles, albeit noncombat ones, in specific campaigns against the Abu Sayyaf, most notably the one in 2002 that resulted in the rescue of Gracia Burnham, an American missionary from Wichita, Kansas, who was kidnapped in 2001. Her husband, also a captive, died in the operation.

The Americans, however, can only do so much in the fight against terrorism here.

For one thing, the Philippine constitution forbids them from engaging directly in combat on Philippine soil. Then there’s the disarray within the Philippine military, an institution that has been characterized repeatedly as ill-equipped and inept and is being buffeted by political scandals and intrigue that often lead to unrest from within — at the same time that it is fighting not just terrorists but communists and separatists.

Mars Buan, a national-security and terrorism expert with Pacific Strategies and Assessments, says the Abu Sayyaf is a “resilient force despite suffering many leadership losses.” The group has likewise linked with Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian terror network with believed ties to Al Qaeda, further boosting its image among the militant Islamic set. But to say that it has survived purely because of its resilience would be giving it too much credit, Buan said.

“The Philippine government is partly to blame for the Abu Sayyaf’s continued survival,” Buan said, pointing out that “rarely does the Philippine military maintain a high level of operational tempo.”

Apart from the military’s own troubles, the Abu Sayyaf is also a loosely connected terrorist group, with as many as eight factions that operate autonomously and separately from other factions. “These factions can independently link with other militants, generate funds, plan, and execute terrorist attacks,” Buan said.

Indeed, the loose nature of the Abu Sayyaf can be a public safety nightmare, with many criminal gangs committing acts that are later attributed to the group. According to the police as well as experts, not all kidnappings in the Muslim region were committed by the group. Buan estimated that only 30 percent of these were done by the Abu Sayyaf.

The widespread poverty in the Muslim region — more than half of its residents live below the poverty line, more than twice the national average — has made it prone to criminality. The same poverty led many to join not just the Abu Sayyaf but separatists groups like the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which has been fighting to reclaim Muslim lands forcibly taken by Christians over the decades. Ongoing peace talks have failed to produce any agreement.

And this poverty has been traced to a Manila-centric policy on the southern Philippines that effectively disenfranchises Muslims. Until Muslims “are given the opportunity to exercise their right to self-determination, problems like that of the Abu Sayyaf will remain or will just take another form,” said Abhoud Syed Lingga, an Islamic scholar who heads the Institute of Islamic Studies in Cotabato City, in the southern Philippines.

Moreover, Lingga says the presence of the U.S. military in Muslim areas only feeds to the resentment many Muslims feel against Manila. “The humanitarian efforts of the U.S. is commendable but it is not the right solution.”

Welcome to the Philippines, the “most murderous country in the world” for journalists

Faced with rising violence, more Filipino journalists are arming themselves.

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost.com
Published: March 5, 2009 14:31 ET

MANILA — The assassins made sure Ernesto Rollin was dead.

The first volley of gunfire sent him reeling to the ground, bloodied. His companion, a woman identified in reports as Ligaya, had walked ahead while Rollin parked his motorcycle. She was startled by the gunshots. She turned around and ran toward Rollin, now slumped on the pavement. But one of the gunmen stopped Ligaya, pointed his gun at the fallen journalist and fired one more bullet into the back of his neck.

Rollin’s assassination is a scene that is being replayed throughout the Philippines with alarming frequency, further cementing the country’s reputation as “the most murderous” country in the world for journalists, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Rollin, 40, was the first Filipino journalist murdered this year. Seven were killed in 2008. And it looks like the violence is not going to stop soon.

Less than a week after Rollin’s murder, another journalist, Ronaldo Doong, was attacked in Digos City, in the southern Philippines. Luckily for Doong, the gunman’s weapon jammed, and he and a companion managed to escape death.

On Mar. 5, Nilo Labares, another radio journalist in Cagayan de Oro City, also in the southern Philippines, was ambushed by gunmen. The motive for the attack was unclear. Labares is known for his hard-hitting on-air commentary that often poked fun at politicians and public figures.

These attacks, and the ones before them — 99 journalists have been murdered in the Philippines since 1986, the year the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was notorious for human rights abuses and for jailing journalists, was deposed — have unnerved Filipino journalists for years.

Most of the victims are in the provinces where journalists, although relatively free to air or publish whatever they want, have to contend with warlords, politicians and criminal syndicates. In these communities, particularly where governance is weak, people turn to journalists, oftentimes radio commentators, who can be shrill and rambunctious in their commentary and reports.

Tonette Orejas, a journalist in the province of Pampanga, knows only too well the trouble a journalist can get into. For three years, she carried two weapons in her purse — a .40-caliber Glock and a .22-caliber pistol — after she received death threats for an investigative story she wrote on a Filipino politician for Newsbreak, a news magazine.

Orejas recently stopped carrying the guns after the threats, which came via phone calls or text messages, subsided. “There is no immediate and real danger to me right now,” she said in a phone interview on Thursday.

But for the past three years, she lived on the edge. “A journalist’s life in the Philippines is never normal,” Orejas said. The guns, she said, provided security and comfort. “I didn’t want to be a sitting duck.” Thankfully, she was not attacked and never had to use the weapons.

Orejas isn’t alone in taking these measures. Joel Sy Egco, a reporter for Manila Standard-Today, a Manila-based newspaper, has founded a journalist group called ARMED (Association of Responsible Media), which provides gun training to journalists.

“We must train and be vigilant because our attackers would pounce when we least expect it,” Egco said. He believes that once assassins know that their target could be armed, they would think twice.

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines views the rise of ARMED as a symptom of the failure by the authorities to stop the killings by prosecuting successfully not just the assassins but the planners behind them. Although the police have arrested suspects in a few of the cases, the conviction rate is low and not one mastermind has been brought to justice. Moreover, several suspects in these killings were police officers.

Then there’s impunity, which is worsened by the fact that extrajudicial killings in the Philippines are not limited to journalists. All over the country, leftist activists, human-rights advocates, farmers and peasants, even minors suspected of having committed petty crimes, have been assassinated. The situation has alarmed human-rights groups here and abroad, with some saying that the abuses have become worse than those during the Marcos dictatorship.

The U.S. State Department, in its 2008 report on human rights expressed concern over the killings. “Arbitrary, unlawful, and extrajudicial killings by elements of the security services and political killings, including killings of journalists, by a variety of actors continued to be major problems,” the Feb. report said. Although the number of killings and disappearances dropped dramatically in recent years, “concerns about impunity persisted.”

To many journalists, the atrocities have forced them to reevaluate their commitment to the career. “Oftentimes, I would wonder if this is all worth it,” said Orejas. “But I always end up telling myself that journalism is my life and damn if I allow my enemies to take that away from me, silence me, or to even kill me.”

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.”

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.