The Philippines: Progress Despite Needles

After six months in office as President of the Philippines. Diosdado Macapagal. 51, has created a double image of himself. At home he is the man-of-the-people who is vigorously reforming his country. Internationally he plays the man-of-the-world who is showing increasing independence from the U.S.

The first image has endured since last November’s election campaign against the corrupt Carlos Garcia regime, when Macapagal ran as a tao (common man) who would never forget his humble beginnings. The second was created when the U.S. Congress unexpectedly voted down the long-promised Filipino war claims of $73 million, and Macapagal swiftly canceled a scheduled official visit to Washington (TIME, May 25). Since then, talking about Laos, Macapagal has needled the U.S. for failing to back the anti-Communists of Southeast Asia and for throwing its support to “neutralists.” It seems, cracked Macapagal, that the U.S. is more deferential to “its enemies than to its friends.”

U.S. Ambassador William Stevenson, formerly president of Ohio’s Oberlin College, described U.S.-Filipino differences as a “lovers’ quarrel.” It is a little more than that. Macapagal is successfully trying to shake off the Garcia campaign charges that he is an American lackey, at the same time is telling the U.S. that the Philippines must not be taken for granted. He is also seeking, says a U.S. observer, to give his own people a greater sense of “national dignity and identity, rather than hostility or xenophobia.”

Cocky Gambits. Continuing his nationalist spree, before leaving on a trip to Spain and Pakistan, Macapagal last week took on still another Western power by claiming Philippine sovereignty over the 29,387 square miles of British North Borneo.* More significant than these cocky gambits is the fact that Macapagal seems determined to base them on democracy and free enterprise at home. He understands the challenge, for the tao, with whom Macapagal identifies, are desperately poor, unlike the top 10% of the Filipinos who receive nearly half the nation’s personal income. An estimated 5,000,000 peasants have a per capita income of only $27 a year, which means malnutrition and rags. Unemployment and underemployment run to 20%.

Macapagal fights against this reality by personal example. Gone are the lavish presidential entertainments of the Garcia era, including the weekly poker game at which the boss handed out political favors to his cronies. While ex-President Garcia relaxes in obscure luxury at his Quezon City mansion, his successor has thrown open the presidential palace, with its private zoo, to the public; the state dining room has been largely unused. Macapagal has published a complete financial statement of what he owns (total assets: $34,485), has issued an unprecedented decree that neither his own nor his wife’s relatives may participate in any government deals.

His administration presses court cases against officials who acquire “unexplained wealth.” More important. Macapagal has raised the salaries of government workers and the armed forces. With his usual public-relations gift, he drives a Chevrolet and issues palace breakfast invitations to honest taxi drivers who return lost wallets.

Protracted Woo. All these efforts to destroy the prevailing Filipino attitude of bahala na (easygoing fatalism) depend largely on U.S. help. As an incentive to foreign investors. Macapagal has made the peso convertible, with good results—the first four months of this year show a $23 million surplus in balance of payments compared with a $27 million deficit for the same period last year. He is hoping to set up a private, U.S.-Philippine development bank. But he is often hamstrung by a Congress still dominated by Garcia’s Nacionalista Party, whose members cannot be turned out until the next elections, when Macapagal’s new double image may well win him a majority.

Despite his recent needling of the U.S., Macapagal last week sent Vice President Emmanuel Pelaez to the U.S., aboard the first jet flight of Philippine Air Lines from Manila to San Francisco. After protracted State Department wooing, Pelaez agreed to fly on to Washington for informal White House talk. Pelaez may well echo what Macapagal himself said last week: “The Philippines’ role in Asia is to demonstrate that democracy works. It will be the most eloquent proof and justification of our following the U.S. The success of Philippine democracy is a demonstration of the American idea of freedom.”

* Ownership of Borneo, the world’s third largest island, is also shared by Indonesia and the British dependencies of Brunei and Sarawak. North Borneo once belonged to the Filipino Sultan of Sulu, who let it go in 1878 for an income of some $1,500 a year. The Philippine government maintains that the Sultan was merely leasing his Borneo lands; the British indignantly reply that the territory was sold in perpetuity.