It’s not one of the earth-shaking puzzlers of Philippine life in this century, but a question outsiders looking in still ask whenever someone dies in either a UP fraternity hazing or inter-fraternity war: why should a young man with his entire life before him, especially a scholar, risk serious injury or even death for the supposed privilege of fraternity membership?

UP, for those who don’t know much about the Philippines, is the University of the Philippines. It’s a state university acknowledged to be the best in the country, to which vast numbers of ambitious young men and women apply every year-among whom, however, only a few are eventually admitted.

UP is also home to several Greek-letter societies or fraternities, the concept of which was imported from the United States during UP’s early years. Founded in 1908 by the US colonial government, UP was for decades even after the US relinquished formal sovereignty in 1946 a virtual copy of US universities, with their ring hops, hay rides, and yes, fraternities and sororities.

The fraternity concept, however, underwent a sea change somewhere along the line, primarily in terms of most fraternities’ involvement in campus violence, both in their initiations as well as in the “rumbles” that have become synonymous with fraternities.

So pervasive in fact is the identification of violence with fraternities that to them as role models may be attributed the proliferation of groups that call themselves fraternities but are actually little more than street gangs in the poorer, working-class areas surrounding Manila’s “university belt,” where dozens of fifth-rate colleges and universities are concentrated.

The subliterate members of these gangs, mostly drawn from out-of-school youth but including students from “diploma mill” high schools and colleges, apparently see in the fraternities of their alleged betters in UP only the violence, which they, too, can dish out a-plenty and which therefore makes them the equal of any car-owning, clean-cut UP scholar. Among these “fraternites” are in fact groups that include women as members (!), whose memberships are often premised either on their acceptance of physical violence or sexual abuse-the hirap (beatings) or sarap (sex with the male members of the “fraternity”) choice women are offered in these gangs.

Yet fraternities are not supposed to be about violence and exploitation but service, Greek-letter societies supposedly being special organizations of either the bright or the privileged who are in a position to contribute to the University. Over the years whatever service they have provided has steadily receded into the background, however, fraternities being pictured in the minds of non-fraternity members-or “barbarians” as fratmen disdainfully refer to them-as groups of club-wielding neanderthals ready to beat each other’s brains out. Fratmen are, in the public mind as well as among the vast majority of non-frat members in UP, the real barbarians, or worse.

This image has been nurtured, however, less by the frequency of hazing-related or inter-fraternity rumble deaths than by the often sensational circumstances that accompany such deaths. Those that have occurred over the last few years have invited media attention because they happened in UP, the students of which are perceived as future leaders of government, industry and the professions.

There is also the fact that some of the dead have belonged to the UP elite in terms of scholarship and high grades. Dennis Venturina, a student of public administration who was killed in a fraternity rumble in 1994, was a graduating student who was a candidate for honors. Alexander Miguel Icasiano, the public administration student (again!) killed during a hazing last August 16, was also an exceptional student.

Why such promising young men should in the first place join a fraternity, thereby risking life or at least limb during initiations that they know are violent, as well as in inter-fraternity confrontations, has been attributed to fraternities’ meeting “real needs.” One of these has been identified as the need to belong, which implies the hankering of immature minds for the anonymity and unanimity of the herd, as well as the relief from the burdens of thought an authoritarian organization (fraternities are not democracies) offers. Fraternities in short offer something, though on a lesser scale, a church or a political organization like the Nazis offer, and which the home cannot provide.

They offer more. In feudal Philippines, where beyond what you know is the greater imperative of whom you know in order to succeed, fraternities provide a network of support and patronage from fraternity alumni in strategic positions in government, the professions and industry.

The young men with already promising futures who join fraternities are in short making sure that that future is even more promising, fraternity membership assuring access to “brods” who can open even wider the doors to opportunity that mean wealth and power in Philippine society.

Fraternity alumni do take their loyalty to their fraternities seriously, these loyalties even transcending the imperatives of politics. During the martial-law period, for example, political dissidents, who were UP graduates and who had “brods” in the defense and military establishments, received better treatment than those without. Take note of that newspaper photograph in which two of the Alpha Phi Beta frat leaders suspected of participation in the hazing of Icasiano are shown at the National Bureau of Investigation. They came accompanied by an alumnus “brod,” Sen. Robert Barbers, to better assure themselves of preferential treatment

The decision to join a fraternity, for the promising young man in UP, is in short very likely to be a calculated act of future self-advancement, and not primarily an immature mind’s need to belong and hankering for peer support. If anything this suggests the “maturity” of cynicism-denying ideals, it looks at the real world, with all its demands for connections and patronage, and seeks to adjust to it rather than to change it.

It doesn’t speak well of the kind of students UP is attracting and graduating. It implies that what drives the promising young is not service to society but self-advancement. This is no secret in UP, however, which in a study on its own students conducted a few years ago discovered that its students are generally competent and endowed with leadership qualities. What they don’t have is social awareness, and therefore a social conscience.

That much has been evident to faculty members shocked at the average UP student’s drive, not for knowledge towards service to society and people, but for high grades, period (the better to assure them of a well-paying job after graduation). It’s also a sneaking suspicion among the handful of remaining UP student activists who can’t get a decent crowd to join the latest demonstration against the Visiting Forces Agreement. Get high grades, chill out, stay away from demonstrations, serve yourself and not the people is only too obviously the UP student’s current guide to life and the pursuit of happiness.

That contradicts UP’s once less than respectable image as the haven of radicals and is the result of the “me-first” outlook the authoritarian period (1972-86) in the Philippines encouraged. The fraternities in fact began to decline at the height of the UP student movement in the ’60s, but picked up again in the black ’70s, when their lack of social consciousness was a safe alternative to social awareness and its consequences: prison, death, or what’s even worse to the Filipino middle class, poverty.

The trend continued after 1986 when, helped along by the imbecilic assumption among some academics themselves that with the Marcos regime gone everything was okay, fewer and fewer students regarded social involvement as meaningful.This in a country mired in exquisite poverty, hobbled by an incompetent and uncaring leadership, and steadily being ruined by a ruling class with its suitcases packed and ready to jump into the next flight to the United States once the forests and rivers give out!

Given the social bases of the resurrection of the fraternities in UP, coming soon, we can all be assured, is more of the same. Among UP fraternity circles is in fact the conviction that the current furor created by the death of Alexander Icasiano will die down soon enough, and that, despite the strict rules in fraternity hazing UP has, which mandate expulsion for hazing-related offenses, and the existence of the Anti-Hazing Law which criminalizes hazing, violent initiations will continue.

Though this sounds like arrogance, it isn’t so much arrogance as a form of cynicism based on an accurate understanding of how Philippine society, with its laws that are not observed, and its dependence on patronage, operates. Philippine society, including UP and their elders, have taught these barbarians well.

Forty percent of Filipinos, says an SWS survey commissioned by the opposition, believe that Mrs. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo will cheat in behalf of her candidates this May. Twenty percent don’t think so, but another 35 percent aren’t sure–which means that they’re entertaining the possibility that she would. Together with the conviction among some 60 to 70 percent of Filipinos that Mrs. Arroyo should either resign or be ousted from office, these figures look like a record among all the people who have occupied Malacanang since 1946.

The belief that the regime will cheat is rampant among Filipinos. The SWS survey merely confirms the validity of anecdotal evidence culled from conversations with taxi drivers, students, and fishwives. It is based on Mrs. Arroyo’s basement level credibility, which is itself based on what the public knows about the 2004 elections.

The same SWS survey found that 86 percent of the public are aware of the “Hello Garci” scandal, in which someone who sounded very much like Mrs. Arroyo was caught talking by cell phone to former Elections Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano to make sure that she would win by a million votes.

Mrs. Arroyo also has an added distinction among those who have had the luck, skill or gall to reside in Malacanang. She is notably lacking in what is politely called “charisma”. Many Filipinos–say 60 percent?–simply dislike her because they sense an insincerity and a calculation in every word she utters, the way they sense the same insincerity in anyone who’s trying to sell them damaged goods. In another culture Mrs. Arroyo wouldn’t win an election for dog-catcher, let alone for president.

If Mrs. Arroyo is not popular, what she is, say her detractors, is manipulative. She is so good at making things happen behind closed doors and under the table that she can’t help but do what she’s good at, and what that is, is to cheat.

That she and the cabal of cretins and crooks she heads will cheat thus appears to be a foregone conclusion. But the really important question is why. The easy answer is to remain in power, which by itself may explain many things, but may not explain all.

The perception that Mrs. Arroyo and company will cheat–or otherwise do anything else that will assure regime dominance in both the local as well as senatorial elections–is reinforced not only by the brazen lawlessness of the acts of its crew of operators and hatchetmen, but even by their own shameless statements.

Everyone knows by now Raul Gonzalez’ declaration that he would pay each barangay captain P10,000 to deliver a 12–zero sweep of regime senatorial candidates in their respective communities. At least two Commission on Elections lawyers are suspected to be behind the selling of party-list accreditations cum victory to help assure regime dominance in the House of Representatives. In addition, among the party-list groups already accredited by the Comelec are those organized by the relatives of regime politicians, and even one headed by the brother of Comelec Chair Benjamin Abalos.

The campaign to completely transform the party list elections into one more trapo (traditional politician) domain includes the systematic effort not only to demonize Bayan Muna and its allied organizations but also to decimate their ranks through assassinations, in the fine arts of which the Philippine military is more than adept.

In fact the military, if it has been anything at all, has been busy, busy, busy these elections not only in campaigning against Bayan Muna and company, but also in urging voters to vote for the regime’s own party list groups. The military has also decided, after fielding troops in metro Manila, to deploy 200 more soldiers in the capital and, in what must surely be the most outrageous joke of the decade, to conduct a “voter education campaign” with the connivance of the Commission on Elections, and the naïve and muddle-headed approval and involvement of the Catholic Church’s Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV).

While all this and more do indicate a focused determination to prevail in the elections through whatever means, they also suggest something even more sinister.

The sheer arrogance and total absence of any scruple in the regime initiatives for fraud, manipulation, vote-buying and terrorism in these elections suggest plans beyond fraud to include the outright provocation of unrest.

These plans are likely to be an already laid-out scheme on how to deal with the protests that–thanks to its own brazenness–will surely follow such an electoral atrocity as, say, a 12 to zero regime win in the Senate, and regime dominance in the House of Representatives at the expense of opposition and militant party list groups.

The deployment of troops in Manila would be indispensable to that plan, which would consist of dispersing protest, arresting protest and opposition leaders, and justifying a level of repression beyond February 2006 in the chaos that would follow.

Electoral fraud at levels comparable to 2004, in short, would trigger precisely the kind of protest the regime would welcome and is likely to be anticipating even now, because it would provide the excuse for total repression–with, of course, considerable help from the misnamed Human Security (Anti-Terrorism) Act. In another Marcosian slip, Defense Secretary Hermogenes Ebdane in fact declared some weeks ago that the military would intensify its “anti-terrorism” campaign after the elections.

There is thus more to these elections than the growing probability of fraud by a fraudulent regime. What the elections are turning out to be is the prelude to the total restoration of authoritarian rule to ensure regime survival and dominance.

They should be, considering how much in common they have.

Both have managed to hang on as head of state of their respective countries despite the avalanche of scandals, ranging from accusations of corruption, cronyism, human rights violations, and poor governance that in other places would have been enough to dislodge any politician from power, but in the case of Thaksin and Macapagal-Arroyo so far have not.

Both have had “the middle class advantage,” even as both came to power at the same time. The advantage consists of the apparently vast capacity of the middle class, whether in Thailand or the Philippines, to tolerate and even reward the most blatant abuses.

Thaksin and his Thai Rak Thai (Thai Love Thai) Party came to power in 2001, and were almost immediately engulfed in a series of corruption scandals. Indicted by the Thai National Counter-Corruption Commission earlier on charges of undeclared and hidden wealth amounting to some US$100 million, Thaksin managed to evade conviction when the Thai Constitutional Court acquitted him by a vote of 8 to 7.

The charges alleged that Thaksin, while deputy prime minister in 1997, put millions of shares in several companies in the name of, among others, his driver, security guards and maids—a practice with which Filipino politicians are only too familiar.

Despite that and other succeeding scandals, Thaksin has remained in power since he became prime minister in 2001. Thai Rak Thai in fact won so overwhelmingly in the parliamentary elections of February 2005 that it has almost absolute control of the Thai parliament. That compares favorably with Mrs. Arroyo’s hold on the House of Representatives, as most recently demonstrated by the House’s killing of the impeachment complaint against her.

The critical Thai press attributes Thaksin and his party’s staying power to, among other factors, the willingness of the middle class to tolerate corruption and other wrong-doing rather than risk instability. Besides, Thaksin promised economic recovery from the financial crisis of 1997, and he seemed to be delivering in terms of boosts in foreign investments and the recovery of the Thai currency, the baht. Corruption and other government excesses seemed a small price to pay for these seeming gains.

Mrs. Arroyo has had the same middle class advantage. Although, unlike Thaksin, whose 2000 and 2004 mandates have never been in doubt, it is her mandate in 2001 and 2004 at the root of the political crisis, Mrs. Arroyo came to power on the crest of middle class disgust with the government of Joseph Estrada in 2001. She has managed to remain in power despite accusations of electoral fraud in 2004 primarily through middle class indifference to and tolerance of probable fraud, and the vast corruption that it knows has metastasized in the government during Arroyo’s watch.

Thaksin’s remaining in power despite the corruption and other scandals that have haunted his watch distresses Thai academics and critical media. But there is at least his success in presiding over the Thai economic recovery to account for his popularity. Arroyo does not have the advantage of success that Thaksin has, but proof of failure, and has never been as popular.

Both, however, have the same attitude towards the media. Both regard the media as focused on the negative, and as hindrances to development, and both have lectured the media on what they regard as proper behavior. Like Arroyo, Thaksin is extremely sensitive to criticism. Thai journalists and media watch groups worry over the future of press freedom in Thailand because of Thaksin’s aggressive efforts to silence media through a variety of ways. The same worries haunt media groups in the Philippines over Arroyo’s efforts to erode press freedom and free expression.

While Mrs. Arroyo has so far limited herself to the occasional tirade, and to the usual government practice of corrupting those media practitioners willing to be corrupted, Thaksin has gone farther. Himself a media magnate, he has bought shares in critical media organizations through his political and business cronies in the hope of turning these organizations from critics to enthusiastic supporters, and filed charges of libel and other suits to silence others.

It is in the area of human rights where the two governments most have an uncanny resemblance to each other. Human rights groups have accused the Thaksin government of “severe human rights violations” in Thailand’s southern provinces where a Muslim insurgency is raging. One of the most recent cases was the death in October, 2004 of 86 protesters already in the hands of Thai security forces.

The extra-judicial killings ( or “salvaging” as they’re known in the Philippines ) of 2,500 suspected drug dealers during a much publicized government campaign to wipe out the drug trade has also been criticized by the Thai press, human rights groups, and even the United States government.

Compare this to the killing of journalists in the Philippines to which the government has turned an indifferent eye, the violations of human rights in the conduct of the anti-terror and anti-Muslim campaigns in the Philippine south, and the political assassinations that since 2001 have been escalating in the Philippine countryside, and you have two countries both under governments so focused on remaining in power they’re willing to do anything. Arroyo and Thaksin must be comparing notes.

(Business Mirror)

The US war for the annexation of the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century meant the arrival and basing of more and more US troops in the country to “pacify” it. These soldiers were so successful in their task that by the time the US had control over the entire country, somewhere between 750,000 to a million Filipinos, mostly civilians, were dead.

The Second World War temporarily drove US troops out, but they returned in 1945 to “their” military bases here. Upon the “grant” of Philippine independence in 1946, the US retained control and sovereignty over some two dozen military bases including rest and recreation facilities.

Between 1946 and 1990, hundreds of incidents involving US servicemen and Filipinos were recorded, among them the shooting of the latter at the periphery of the US bases as well as rape and other common crimes. When the likelihood of conviction was strong, which was often, US military authorities spirited US servicemen accused of violating Philippine laws out of the country and beyond prosecution.

These were among the “irritants” that eventually led Philippine senators to refuse to sign a new treaty in 1991 that would have extended the life of the US bases in the Philippines.

The departure of US troops mostly based in Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base was accomplished with little economic loss to the bases-dependent towns of Angeles and Olongapo. It also reduced the social problems these and outlying towns had had to live with for nearly fifty years, among them illegitimate births, venereal disease including AIDS, and the steady growth in the number of prostituted women.

Despite the supposed economic advantages the presence of US troops provided, the bases were at odds with the country’s interests. Clark and Subic, once the hub of the US Pacific basing system, were US enclaves in which the US could do anything without host country consent, and were also launch pads for intervention.

The US bases in the Philippines played a crucial role in the Vietnam War, in effect involving the country in a war opposed by large sectors of the populace. In EDSA 1, fear of US military might assembled in the bases kept Marcos from attacking. US Phantom jets also flew over Manila in 1989 to show rebel troops where US sympathies lay.

The respite from US troop presence was short-lived, however. In 1998 the United States and the Philippines signed the Visiting Forces Agreement. In 2002, the US “war on terrorism,” and the alleged links of the kidnap-for- ransom group Abu Sayyaf with the Al-Qaeda network, became the excuses to allow US troops into the country to “advise” Philippine troops in the latter’s anti-terrorism campaign.

The Philippine Constitution bans foreign troops without a treaty. It is the VFA–an agreement, not a treaty–that has allowed US troops into the country to engage in joint military exercises with Philippine troops and to “advise” them.

The legal bases for the return of US troops into the country–and they have been here since 2002, participating in one exercise after another–could be endlessly debated. But it was the Arroyo government that allowed them back in, and it is the same government that will decide whether they should remain.

Like most Philippine governments, almost all of them distinguished by their readiness to serve US interests, the Arroyo regime has been creative in finding legal and other justifications for doing what it wants. In this case, and as any casual reading of Palace statements recently will show, what it wants is for US troops to remain in this country.

Only outrage on a scale it believes could add to its present instability can deter the regime from this path. This path is determined by its current perception that it needs US support to survive the present crisis, just as Mrs. Arroyo needed it for the 2004 elections.

To prevent the November 1 Subic Free Port gang-rape of a 22- year- old Filipina by, allegedly, six (or five) US Marines, from further eroding her already negative approval ratings, Mrs. Arroyo will have to show that the VFA will not allow foreign troops to get away with such crimes, if the evidence shows that the Marines are guilty.

Although the VFA gives Philippine authorities jurisdiction over US troops who violate Philippine laws, US military authorities only have to request that it waive this jurisdiction for the Philippines to do so (Article II, subparagraph d of paragraph 3 of the Agreement). In addition, the US commander can certify that the alleged offense was committed while the Marines were on duty to put them under US jurisdiction.

If the evidence is strong for conviction–and Subic Free Port and other lawyers are saying that it is–the US is likely to make the request, or to certify that the Marines were on duty even while they were brutalizing their victim. As a matter of US policy, no US government personnel can be tried or imprisoned in another country without US government consent.

Still on the assumption that the evidence is strong, the US policy to protect its personnel (what are we a superpower for?) will conflict with the Arroyo regime’s interests. This will force it to look for some means that will allow the Marines to go scot-free without damaging its already sub-zero credibility. Among those means could be suppressing the evidence by paying off or intimidating witnesses, and convincing the rape survivor and her family to withdraw the rape complaint.

As for the legal loopholes, Raul Gonzalez of the so-called Department of Justice nearly let the cat out of the bag by making noises about the Philippines’ being prevented by the VFA from keeping the suspects in the country. But legalist contortions should be the regime’s last resort, since no one is likely to believe it.

Expect witnesses to recant or disappear in the next few weeks or so as the regime frantically maneuvers to get out of this latest mini-crisis while assuring the US that none of its democracy-loving, liberty-defending, anti-terrorist, crusader homeboys will ever see a day in a Philippine jail. Those Filipinos who know their history have a name for this. It’s called reliving the past. It’s also known as betrayal.

(Business Mirror)

Section 18 of Article VII (The Executive Department) empowers the President to put the Philippines or any part of it under martial law “in case of invasion or rebellion,” but only for 60 days.

The same section compels the President to report to Congress, both Houses of which can jointly revoke a declaration through a simple majority vote. If Congress is in recess, as it currently is, it must convene within 24 hours of any declaration of martial law. Meanwhile, upon the complaint of any citizen, the Supreme Court may review the factual basis for the declaration, and what’s more, must decide on the petition within 30 days.

A declaration of martial law would be extremely problematic for Arroyo and her crew. Moreover, they also have the current political situation to contend with, among them the division in the Philippine Armed Forces, which some media groups say is running at 70 percent of the officer corps against Arroyo and 30 percent for.

These numbers do not favor her declaring martial law, the implementation of which would be the military’s burden. But it’s not only the limits in the 1987 Constitution, but also the impact of such a declaration on civil society, academia, the military, and the international community that has stayed Arroyo’s hand.
 
This is as far as a declaration is concerned. The implementation of authoritarian policies without the benefit of a declaration is a different matter, and that’s what we’re seeing now: the gradual imposition of de facto authoritarianism. Apparently, this approach is succeeding. Few people are the wiser, lulled as they are by their focus on legality.  This makes the Arroyo regime more dangerous than the Marcos regime. At least the latter had the decency to declare that it had imposed authoritarian rule so everyone could run for cover. .

Those who believe in good faith that the country can rest easy just because Arroyo can’t declare martial law unless she’s gone mad, would be wise to look around them. If they’re honest, they will see sure signs of de facto authoritarian rule, the latest being the police attack on the prayer rally last Friday, October 14, which was attended by former Vice President Teofisto Guingona, Senator Jamby Madrigal, Party-List Congressmen Satur Ocampo and Joel Virador, and Catholic Bishops Deogracias Iniguez and Antonio Tobias, among others.

That attack with water cannon was preceded, and is likely to be followed, by the almost daily suppression of the right to assemble freely—a right guaranteed by the very Constitution Ramos and others say prevents Arroyo from declaring martial law.

The police the next day in fact dragged out martial law era justifications for the Friday attack on the prayer rally. Among them was the claim that the rallyists provoked them and deserved the treatment they got, and the absolute lie that some of the rallyists were armed.

The arguments in fact smelled of assumptions one is forced to describe as anti-democratic and ignorant because that’s what they are. One is that the police, instead of protecting citizens and their rights, must protect themselves from them. Another is that “provocation” by unarmed citizens is enough justification to attack them with nightsticks, fire hoses, anti-riot shields and brass knuckles. As if that were not enough, the police and their Malacanang bosses also had the temerity to say that Guingona and the bishops were being “used” by the leftists in attendance in the prayer rally.

It should be obvious that while citizens assert their Constitutional rights by exercising them, the Arroyo regime is engaged in the gradual and methodical suppression of those rights.

It thinks it has found a way around the Constitution through its “no permit no rally” and “Calibrated Preemptive Response” policies.

It is also engaged in a campaign of intimidation through repeated threats to declare a state of emergency, and ramming through Congress the Anti- Terrorism Bill so it can arm itself with a “legal” means of repression despite the Constitution. Meanwhile, the systematic assassination of political activists in the Philippine countryside, which began in 2003, is continuing as part of this tactic (the most recent occurred in Tarlac last Sunday).

But as methodical as it is trying to be, it is such a clumsy, bungling regime it can’t help but commit such blunders as last Friday’s attack on a prayer rally.

Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial rule with the entire military behind him, a middle-class clamor for order, the support of much of the business community, and the reality of political and military assistance from the United States. The Marcos regime nevertheless collapsed in 1986.

In 2005 Arroyo faces a divided military and business community and sectoral and people’s organizations united against her, while she’s certain only of tentative and lukewarm US support. And yet to stay in power she keeps committing such blunders she’s forcing the Church into unifying against her, and, through attacks like that of Friday’s, more and more members of civil society, militant groups, and even the middle- classes into the streets, while the disgruntled elements of the military nurse their growing resentments and bide their time. There is madness in this method.

(Business Mirror)

It’s the country most Filipinos want to visit. But if you’ve ever been involved in any group or activity faintly progressive; if you have relatives or friends who have been; or you’re from a country the US says harbors “terrorist groups”, it’s tempting fate to go. No matter how vague or past your involvement, it can earn you a strip search, an interrogation session with the FBI or immigration, summary deportation, or even indefinite detention.

Retired Philippine Army general Raymundo Jarque and his wife Xenia found this out last week when they landed in Dallas. Singled out for interrogation, the Jarques, at 67 years old just the right age for terrorists, were also denied food while awaiting deportation, and jailed in their underwear. The charge: possible terrorist links because Jarque was a National Democratic Front consultant in peace talks in the 1990s.

The Jarques went to the US to visit relatives. Like many Filipinos, they’re linked by blood to that country through sons and daughters, cousins and uncles, nieces or nephews who live there.

The US is not a nice place for non-whites and dollar-poor people to visit even in the best of times. You don’t really want to live there–not if you think there’s more to life than McDonald’s, a gas-guzzling car, Mickey Mouse prancing around Disneyland, and indulging one’s earthly appetites at the cost of one’s dignity and self-respect. But I confess: I’ve visited the US several times to see relatives, and even briefly lived there during arguably better times.

In 1978 Jimmy Carter was US president. Carter had inherited the US policy, in place since the Johnson administration, of supporting dictatorships. But the US tolerated opponents of dictatorship within its borders. Many Filipino exiles opposed to the Marcos regime were there in the late 1970s, and they could lobby Congress, publish anti-dictatorship tracts, and hold public discussions without fear.

But while dissenters were tolerated, the US government continued to support Marcos with economic and military aid. The conflict was between the US’ supposed adherence to democratic rights and the demands of its imperial interests. Those interests the architects of its foreign policy sought to defend and advance at all costs, including mass murder.

Since the Reagan presidency the contradiction has been resolved in favor of repression at home and naked aggression abroad. As well as self-determination among nations, the Republican gang of George W. Bush has also savaged due process and other individual rights on the excuse that it’s necessary to defeat “international terrorism”.

If Nixon bombed Vietnam and Cambodia, and George W. Bush Iraq, the Democrats’ Bill Clinton did the same to the Sudan and the former Yugoslavia. It’s in the policies at home, not abroad, where the Republicans and the Democrats differ. At least at home minority and immigrant rights as well as those of visitors were to some extent respected by Democratic administrations.

US immigration treats every visitor from a poor country as a potential overstaying alien whatever party is in power. But nowadays if you’re Asian, or just look different, you’re likely to be regarded as a possible terrorist as well. The worst thing to be is Muslim and/or Arab, which makes Indonesians, Malaysians, some Filipinos, but especially Middle Eastern folk likely victims of racial profiling at US immigration counters.

There are enough horror stories on the treatment of “terrorists” to fill a hefty volume, among other reasons because the US Patriot Act permits the summary deportation or indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without the benefit of lawyers and visits by relatives.

But the scramble to visit and live in the United States continues because the poverty rampant in the US world order (800 million people go to bed hungry daily) drives millions from their countries to look for opportunities abroad– especially in the US.

And yet poverty is no stranger to millions of US residents. Some 37 million are poor, and millions of US children often go hungry. Also an extremely violent place, some 30,000 people are shot dead every year in the US, and 65,000 more injured. School shootings by students have been described as “an epidemic.” Assaults, rapes and armed robberies are common, with one violent crime for every 47 US residents occurring yearly. Two million people are in US prisons, in the construction of which it excels as it does in war and mayhem.

Racism is as common as grass in the US, where everything’s right if you’re white, but everything can be wrong if you’re not. And they start them young. Grade school children blithely hurl such racial epithets as “Nigger”, “Spic”, “Chink” etc. at each other when they quarrel. It’s a habit of thought that stays with them all their lives, whether on the job, in school or on the street– where your being a “Slope” (Asian) or a homosexual can earn you a beating by racist gangs.

“America” isn’t in the heart. It’s in the colonial mind, “Amerika” being the reality. You don’t really want to live there, and visiting it is like visiting Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Except that today you don’t have to be Jewish, just different.

(Published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer and INQ7, September 30, 2005)

The House reeks with the names of the wives, children, sons and daughters, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, cousins, nephews and nieces of congressmen and senators long dead, but who live on in their kin and progeny. The Senate is no different, and neither is Malacanang, whose current resident is herself the daughter of a past president.

Over the last six decades since the country’s independence was formally restored, only a handful of new players in Philippine politics have in fact emerged to take their place in Congress. For the most Philippine political institutions remain in the control and management of practically the same names Filipinos have been familiar with for over half a century–if not others who, if they go by different names, are nevertheless related by blood or marriage to the same political families.

We know them all. They go by the such old names as Marcos and Macapagal, Osmena, Roxas, Magsaysay, and Aquino, as well as by the more recent Defensor, Angara, Remulla, and even Dilangalen.

The persistence of political dynasties reveals how seriously flawed Philippine democracy is, and validates the view that the state is no more than the executive committee of the ruling class. It is also testimony to a damaged electoral system run by money and patronage, which prevents the middle classes and even more certainly the poor from breaking the monopoly on power of the landlords and big businessmen who also control the economy.

Though they do not say so, and may not even be conscious of it, the dynasties are united by certain common goals and interests, the most basic being their commitment to the preservation of the political, economic and social systems that have assured their dominance, wealth and power in this country.

This commonality of interests was initially subdued, a mere undercurrent, in the House deliberations over the Arroyo impeachment complaint. After all it did seem that the members of Congress were divided along party lines rather than united by their common elite interests.

But that hope turned out to be futile, like the hope that integrity and national interest would compel more than a handful of members of the majority to cross party lines. Instead it was the critical numbers of pro-impeachment members of Congress who crossed over into the Arroyo camp because of Malacanang inducements.

On the day of the vote on whether the House membership would accept the Justice Committee report which dismissed the impeachment complaints, the commonality of elite interests thus assumed obvious dominance in the way the members of Congress voted–or did not vote.

An impeachment trial could have given Gloria Macapagal Arroyo her “day in court”. But even more critically, it would have given those in control of the political system a chance to dispel the widespread belief that the country’s political institutions are easily manipulated through bribery and backroom deals. They did not seize the opportunity, but the chance to further fatten their personal bank accounts.

By making sure no trial took place, the majority allies of Mrs. Arroyo in the House of Representatives, and their new-found collaborators, as well as Mrs. Arroyo herself, instead succeeded in doing two things: they prolonged the agony of the nation; and, as the Senate did in 2001, they brought the issue to the streets for the sovereign people to decide.

To these two signal achievements we must add a third. Once more, as in 2001, except that this time it is the aptly named Lower House that did it, Congress has demonstrated not only its own total bankruptcy, but also the utter futility of anyone’s relying on the so-called mechanisms for redress enshrined in the laws. The supposed implementers of these laws are to blame, not only because their own interests take precedence over public interests, but also because those interests are personal as well as dynastic.

Consider the case of Imee Marcos, who recently did an Arroyo by apologizing for her failure to even show up for the crucial September 6 vote.

Of the possibility that at least some of those who voted to throw the impeachment complaint out did so for money or favors there is ample indication. The Tuesday, September 6 vote screamed it to the rooftops.
Malacanang shouted the loudest when it boasted that it had released pork barrel funds to “selected” members of Congress the better for them to remember how to cast their votes. But it was silent on what other deals it made to assure that Mrs. Arroyo would not be impeached. Among those possible deals was almost certainly one with the Marcos family.

That those who had been loudly defending Mrs. Arroyo would kill the complaint was expected. What was not was the absence and abstention of the allegedly pro-impeachment members of the House.

These worthies–among them the six alleged allies of former President Joseph Estrada, but most outstandingly Imee Marcos–seem to have found some compelling cause to be absent, thus assuring the defeat of the pro-impeachment bloc. The rumor is that they were induced by millions of reasons from Malacanang–as well as by a probable deal between Mrs. Arroyo and Joseph Estrada, which could include the latter’s release from his Tanay, Rizal confinement– to betray the nation as well as the bloc to which for months they had loudly proclaimed they belonged.

In the case of Ms. Marcos who has so many billions a hundred million is small change, the rumor is that some arrangement allowing the burial of her father Ferdinand in the Libingan ng Mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery) is already in the works.

Ms. Marcos alleges that she flew to Singapore on the day of the vote because her vote would not have made any difference. What she doesn’t say is that if her vote would not have made any difference she could have voted anyway. But it seems that her not voting was the condition for the grant of some Malacanang reward.
Whatever largesse Ms. Marcos and company will be getting from Malacanang the country will soon know. Whatever it is, however, Ms. Marcos missed a chance to redeem her family’s bad name, which now not even a hundred Marcoses buried in the Libingan ng Mga Bayani can salvage.

It doesn’t help the Marcos name any either that Ms. Marcos not only failed to vote, but is now regarded as being all along part of a conspiracy to help assure Mrs. Arroyo’s victory, even as she was able to sit in the meetings and discussions of the pro-impeachment groups as Malacanang’s fifth column.

It now seems that Oliver Lozano, a Marcos lawyer, deliberately filed–on the instructions of his clients, of course–the flawed impeachment complaint first to assure that it would be shot down and no other complaint addressed, because of the constitutional prohibition against Congress’ entertaining more than one impeachment complaint each year.

Rumor their reasons may be, but the behavior of Marcos and company by itself has once more demonstrated the bankruptcy of the process that, under the law, should have afforded the nation some sense of what really happened to its votes in 2004. As things now stand the crisis and the agony continue, the unresolved issue being Mrs. Arroyo’s legitimacy and right to govern a country where 80 percent of the population would prefer to be governed by someone else.

Who that someone else should be has been a major point of debate for months and has helped keep Mrs. Arroyo in Malacanang. The Constitution of course says that if Mrs. Arroyo resigned or was incapable of discharging the duties of the Presidency, her vice president would assume the post.

But it is not the clarity of the Constitution at issue, but Noli de Castro’s fitness for the post. It is not only his fabled incoherence as far as governance is concerned that has fueled those doubts, nor the suspicions alone that he himself might have been involved in electoral fraud. There is the even more crucial concern over whether replacing Mrs. Arroyo with de Castro would really be a solution to the perennial crisis of the flawed political system.

As Vice President in 2001 Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was the supposed solution to the crisis of 2000-2001, but turned out to be nothing of the sort. Mrs. Arroyo has in fact turned out to be part of the same Philippine problem that has haunted this country for decades: its fatally flawed elite leadership whose vices of corruption, incompetence and dishonesty far outweigh its virtues .

Filipinos had hoped then that despite their doubts over Mrs. Arroyo’s capacities and principles, she would govern not only competently and transparently, but also with the country’s interests rather than the usual familial, class and foreign interests in mind. Mrs. Arroyo, it was also hoped, would abandon traditional politics and nurture the new.

Her failure to address the most pressing Philippine problems, the runaway corruption that has characterized her watch, as well as her singular focus on the elections of 2004, were the key and interconnected issues that created a situation of constant crisis, and which have led to the present one. The twin allegations that her husband and son have been taking jueteng pay-offs in the manner of former President Joseph Estrada, and that Mrs. Arroyo cheated in the last elections as supposedly proven by the infamous “Garci tapes” are in truth merely the most recent expressions of the same crisis.

The present crisis is thus only a continuation, although the lowest point, of a crisis that Mrs. Arroyo’s brand of governance and politics has made inevitable. What is obvious is that the crisis, though created and fed by the corruption and incompetence of the Arroyo government and the fraudulent elections over which it presided in 2004, is the result of a system as bankrupt and as flawed as its beneficiaries and protectors.

The corruption of the political and electoral system, due principally to the dominance of the political dynasties that have monopolized power in this country for six decades, has made Philippine elections no more than a farce, even as the centers of power in this country, Malacanang and Congress, have been exposed as nothing more than centers of dynastic greed and incompetence.

The consequence is paralysis and despair among the vast majority Filipinos who know that the only thing that can ease their suffering and halt the decay of their country and society is radical, meaningful change. But they see little or no chance of that in a political system ruled by the same handful of families that has been steadily driving the country into perdition for over six decades.

(Unpublished commentary)