The Philippines: A Bothered Archipelago

THE PHILIPPINES

In the grubby streets of Pasay City, a suburb of Manila, a most unusual group of men gathered last week. They were members of an obscure political sect called Lapiang Malaya (Freedom Movement), and they were armed with long bolo knives and dressed in peculiar blue uniforms with red and yellow capes. At the command of their leader, an old (eightyish) fanatic named Valentin de los Santos, they had come up from their homes in the paddy fields of southern Luzon. Their mission: to march on the presidential palace in Manila and overthrow the government.

As they lined up for the march, troopers of the Philippine Constabulary blocked their path. The 380 or so warriors were unafraid. They believed that the pebbles that they held in their mouths rendered them immune to death.

Waving their bolos, they charged straight into the stuttering M-16s of the Constabulary. Within minutes, 33 of them lay dead, 47 wounded. The rest were arrested for sedition and put in prison.

Dodge City East. The tragic massacre was sadly symptomatic of the breakdown of law and order in the Philippines. That breakdown is only one of the many complex and interlocking problems that plague the 21-month-old administration of President Ferdinand

Marcos. Despite his unquestionable sincerity and ability, Marcos so far has been unable to make much headway toward solving them. Unless he is suddenly able to reverse his country’s present trends, many Filipino and U.S. experts fear that the Philippines have all the signs of becoming a major trouble spot in Southeast Asia.

The surging lawlessness has spawned a crime wave that has turned the Philippines into a kind of Dodge City East, where just about everybody packs a pistol, and news of muggings and murders crowds most other stories off the front pages of the newspapers. One reason for the lawlessness is the Philippines’ high unemployment rate, which is near the 15% mark and getting no better. The average income for the country’s 33 million people is a meager $500 a year, and buying power is being forced down by rising living costs. The government’s huge bureaucracy is unresponsive to economic problems and shot through with corruption and graft.

Not surprisingly in this climate, the far leftists are making more converts. Masaka, a Communist-front farmers’ league, has tripled its membership to 21,000 in the past eight months. Active again in Central Luzon are the dreaded Huks (TIME, March 24), the backwoods Marxists who nearly toppled the Manila government in the early 1950s before they were brought under control. Warned a Senate report last month: “Today it is Central Luzon. Tomorrow it may be the whole country.”

New Nationalism. When he took over, Marcos seemed almost ideally equipped to cope with the country’s problems. But his development plan, which aims at, among other things, spreading new industries throughout the islands and thus helping the country’s lagging industrial growth to catch up with the rise in population, requires foreign investments of at least $1 billion. Because he has lost control of the Senate to the opposition Liberal Party and a handful of defectors from his own Nacionalista Party, Marcos has been unable to get through the laws that he needs to attract money from abroad. His plan to distribute land to the peasants has run aground on the obduracy of the landlords and the ineffectiveness of his own administrators. He has made some headway in rooting out corrupt officials in the customs bureau, thus cutting down on smuggling losses.

Marcos’ job is made no easier by a wave of nationalism that is sweeping the islands. Unfortunately, much of the feeling is anti-American and thus anti-Marcos, since he is openly on the U.S. side. Many Filipinos complain that he should steer a more neutral course. His rivals in Congress, for example, are badgering him for sending two battalions of engineers to Viet Nam, threaten to force him to recall them. To show his independence, Marcos has publicly demanded the return of the U.S. Navy’s Sangley Point Air Station to Philippine control. Though Washington would like to make Marcos look good, it is not yet willing to go that far.

Though he is besieged by troubles, Marcos is a long way from being beaten. In fact, the very gravity of the present situation may work in his favor. “The stakes are much too high,” writes Manila Times Columnist Maximo V.

Soliven, “to permit us the luxury of surrender to despair.”