Assaulting the Eagle

At some point during every U.S. high school debate on colonialism in the past dozen years, an earnest youth has pointed with pride to the Philippine Republic and its unflagging loyalty toward its onetime occupiers. Last week the U.S. learned with a jolt that this comfortable conviction needed reexamination. From Manila U.S. Ambassador Charles ("Chip") Bohlen headed back to Washington to report on the Philippine government's increasingly vocal antagonism to the U.S. Two days later, in an ostentatious bit of tit for tat, the Philippines' Ambassador to Washington Carlos P. Romulo was abruptly recalled to Manila.

Last week's display of mutual irritation was only the latest and most dramatic evidence of a progressive deterioration in U.S.-Philippine relations. In recent months prominent Filipino politicians have proposed anti-American measures ranging from economic discrimination against U.S. products to renaming Manila's Dewey Boulevard. Last month President Carlos Garcia declared that Asians "must move away from complete dependence on the protective might of the U.S.," began to drop hints that he hoped to develop an independent Philippine foreign policy based on close cooperation with other Southeast Asian nations, including cold-war neutrals.

To justify their jabs at the U.S., Garcia & Co. cited a long list of grievances, old and new. The U.S., they complained, had still not settled a $972 million "omnibus claim" covering, among other things, damage done during the World War II fighting in the Philippines. It had yet to come through with the bulk of the $125 million in credits and development funds promised Garcia during his visit to Washington last June. After four years of Philippine pressure and 2 1/2 years of on-again, off-again negotiations, the status of U.S. military bases in the Philippines remains unsettled. Most heinous of all in Garcia's eyes, Washington had refused to grant him the $100 million he wanted as a stabilization fund for the shaky Philippine peso. (Officially valued at 50-c-, the peso can be bought almost anywhere in Southeast Asia for a quarter.)

The Empty Bag. For most of these grievances, the Philippine government was at least as responsible as the U.S. The negotiations over U.S. bases are stalled because of Philippine insistence on greater criminal jurisdiction over G.I.s than the U.S. has granted any country in which it has troops. Garcia returned from the U.S. without the stabilization fund loan after being indiscreet enough to boast in advance that the loan was in the bag. But U.S. officials reply that he had been privately warned on three occasions beforehand that he had no hope of getting it. Unreasonable as Garcia's complaints might be, they lent themselves to the suspicion -voiced last week by Ambassador Romulo -that "Philippine friendship is being taken for granted by the U.S."

If the U.S. had continually to beware of such a suspicion, coming from an ambassador so proud of his American connections, the fact nonetheless was that Old Pol Garcia has apparently concluded that pulling the eagle's tail feathers is the only way his Nacionalista Party can hope to hold its own in the Philippines' congressional elections next November.

The Transformation. In the two years since the death of able, hard-driving President Ramon Magsaysay (TIME, March 25, 1957), amiable, luxury-loving Carlos Garcia and his friends have done much to diminish the luster of the Philippines as Asia's democratic showcase. A costly industrialization program, crop failures, fluctuating export prices, corruption and administration ineptitude have caused gold and dollar reserves to sink to a scant $100 million. (The nation's trade deficit last year was $120 million.) While the fat cats of the Garcia administration whoop it up at posh Manila gambling joints, 1,360,000 Filipinos (out of a labor force of 8,800,000) are unemployed or underemployed.

Garcia's own popularity has plummeted. In mid-December, when he arrived at Manila's Rizal Stadium to see the world championship flyweight fight between Argentina's Pascul Perez and the Philippines' Dommy Ursua, the and crowd the Philip greeted him with a thunderous boo, which ended only when somebody ordered the band to play the national anthem. When it was announced that the President and his wife would present the belt to the winner, booing broke out all over again.

Garcia's response to such dissatisfaction was to direct criticism against the U.S. in stead. Says Garcia's Vice President (and bitter foe) Diosdado Macapagal: "The new line of nationalism is nothing more than an attempt to cover up corruption and divert the voters' attention." So far Garcia's assaults on the U.S. have had no substantial visible effect on the affection in which the mass of Filipinos hold the U.S. -an affection so strong that Ramon Magsaysay used to proclaim: "Let who ever wants run as an anti-American. I'll run as an open pro-American and beat him easily." Recalling Magsaysay's max im, some of Manila's political pundits thought that Carlos Garcia was making the biggest mistake of his long political career.

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