Powder Keg of the Pacific

Corruption and army abuses breed resentment against martial law

In Negros Occidental province of the southern Philippines, children with flowers carried a small white coffin along a country road leading through sugar-cane fields. The casket contained the body of Juan Latorgo. His grieving mother, Estrellita Latorgo, 21, says that she took her son first to the local hospital and then to a witch doctor. Neither could arrest the symptoms of malnutrition that killed Juan, at the age of seven months.

In Zamboanga City, a building contractor complains that the illicit kickbacks he is forced to pay to obtain government contracts have jumped to 20%. Nowadays, he adds, even "someone from the Government Auditor's Department [supposedly an anticorruption watchdog agency] comes along and demands his own payoff to keep quiet."

In Quezon City outside Manila, a middle-aged nun speaks passionately of working with and for "the poorest of the poor." Approvingly, she describes surrounding rural areas as having been "liberated" by Communist insurgents. Why? "I am a Catholic," she explains, "and I try not to think about blood when I think of my hatred of Marcos. But if not a knife or a bullet for him, I wish for one small cancer cell to do what needs to be done."

From the rice fields of northern Luzon to the coconut groves of southern Mindanao, anger and rebellion are rising in the Philippines, a country that threatens to become a powder keg in the Pacific region. The resentment is directed primarily at the corruption-tinged, autocratic regime of President Ferdinand Marcos, who seven years ago imposed martial law on the 7,000 islands of the Philippine archipelago. Today he rules as both President and Prime Minister over a dangerously deteriorating society. Despite statistically impressive increases in his country's per capita income, poverty and hunger affect most of the Philippines' 46.5 million people, a population that faces increasing suffering as the country totters toward economic crisis. Violent crime is soaring so rapidly that even some government officials have recommended the easy licensing of firearms for self-protection. Abuse of power by the military, which has long been a coddled prop of the Marcos regime, has alienated millions of Filipinos from the government. Above all, there is a widespread sense that Marcos himself, a charismatic popular hero when he was elected President 14 years ago, has become the symbol of a plutocracy characterized by cronyism and corruption.

Despite a costly five-year military campaign, an armed rebellion among the Muslim Moros in Mindanao and Sulu has been contained but not suppressed. In other rural regions, the smaller Maoist New Peoples Army is growing in size. Marauding bands of N.P.A. guerrillas frequently harass army patrols and sometimes even occupy isolated villages for several days at a time. Few Filipinos, and even fewer knowledgeable Western observers, are convinced that the country is on the verge of becoming another Iran. But many fear that in the long run the confluence of injustice and bloodshed could threaten the Marcos regime and lead to revolution. Jaime Cardinal Sin, the country's spiritual leader as Archbishop of Manila, has clearly indicated his fears for the future if democracy is not restored. "The greatest punishment that God could give any country is civil war." he said recently. "That's what I want to avoid--civil war."

To the dismay of the U.S. and such other Asian allies as Japan and South Korea, Marcos has shown no sign that he is willing to ease up. Last week, in a major policy speech for his 62nd birthday, Marcos defiantly declared that he had no intention of lifting the martial law imposed in 1972. This decision, though not unexpected, came as a blow to both opposition leaders and Western diplomats, who have been privately urging the President to restore democratic rule before it is too late. It also did not augur well for observances of the seventh anniversary of martial law in many areas of the Philippines this week.

The potential for another U.S. strategic disaster in the Philippines has not been lost on policymakers in Washington. One highly classified diplomatic cable, circulated among the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, recently assessed the political prospects of key U.S. allies in the Far East. Its conclusion: while South Korea and Thailand face internal political threats that could lead to acceptable changes in their current governments, the Philippines faces a threat that could overturn the system of government itself. The worry in Washington is that even Marcos' non-Communist opposition, though still largely fragmented, is deepening and becoming more radical. The longer the President clings to a brand of autocracy that he calls "constitutional authoritarianism," it is feared, the more he could radicalize the opposition and thus pave the way for a neutralist or even leftist reorientation of the Philippines' traditionally pro-American stance.

That prospect is upsetting to the Carter Administration, and not just because of this country's abiding, almost sentimental "special relationship" with its former colony.* Washington is concerned about preserving the Philippines as its main military springboard in the Far East. In return for $500 million in military assistance over the next five years, the U.S. by treaty has "unhampered use" of the huge (97 sq. mi.) naval facility at Subic Bay and Clark Air Force Base on Luzon. Those installations face Indochina across the South China Sea. They played an important role in the Viet Nam War, and have acquired renewed geopolitical importance as the only counterweight to the Soviet Union's progressive military build-up in the Pacific, especially in Viet Nam.

When Marcos pre-empted his country's constitution by proclaiming martial law on Sept. 21, 1972, Washington gave its tacit approval. At the time, an unstable democracy was drifting toward anarchy. Marcos' decision to suspend the legislature, arrest many of his opponents, muzzle the press, and otherwise impose his own autocratic rule, seemed a harsh but necessary step to save the country from political and economic turmoil. Recalls a leading member of the Nixon Administration: "We could see that the country was going to hell in a handbasket, and we saw Marcos as the ablest man in the country and wished him luck in trying to get a grip on the situation."

Even the opponents of Marcos conceded that he scored some impressive initial accomplishments with a full-scale counterinsurgency offensive, a vigorous campaign against the twin evils of street violence and official corruption, and a headlong development boom aimed at reducing economic inequality. Despite the fading dream of a grandiose "New Society" that he originally promised his countrymen, Marcos still has the reluctant support of many middle-class Filipinos, who see no attractive alternative to his rule. One of the most respected businessmen in Manila, Economic Consultant Washington Sycip, acknowledges the multiplying problems and abuses but argues that the country's current predicament still compares favorably with the violence, political paralysis and economic stagnation of the pre-martial law era. He also plays down widespread reports that capital is fleeing abroad. "We don't see any case yet of major multinationals selling their companies because of lack of confidence in the country."

Growing numbers of other Filipinos, however, are no longer wilting to give Marcos the benefit of any doubt. Reason: the average citizen is being squeezed as never before. A slump in the world price of sugar, which is the mainstay of Philippine exports, higher oil costs and looming general recession have aggravated every painful symptom of the ailing economy. Inflation is expected to exceed 30% this year, and many families must spend 70% to 80% of their total income just on food. "If that goes much higher in the next year," says one worried diplomat, "anything could happen."

For millions, their country's poverty means hunger and starvation. Government surveys show that serious malnutrition affects 30% of all Filipino children and as many as 80% in the poorest provinces. Marcos1 ambitious wife Imelda, 50, who serves as a kind of velvet glove to his iron hand, has made the fight against hunger one of her well-publicized projects. At her ultramodern Nutrition Center of the Philippines in Manila, visitors are shown an elaborate audiovisual presentation of current schemes: "Nutribuses," "Nutrinoodles" and "Nutripaks" of dried food in cellophane envelopes supposedly distributed to the poor. In fact. Mrs. Marcos' programs affect only a small minority of the hungry.

Reported TIME Correspondent Ross H. Munro after a visit to Negros Occidental: "Nowhere does the gulf between Nutrition Center show business and reality seem wider than in the provincial hospital of Bacolod. The hospital's 'Nutriward' has a total capacity of only twelve children, all suffering from marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition. The young patients seem to have been transplanted from the famines in Bangladesh and the sub-Sahara earlier in the decade. Big eyes staring from skeletal heads, matchstick limbs, bloated bellies. A priest of the province gloomily estimated that 70% of his parishioners do not have enough to eat: "Two meals a day, just some rice and vegetables; fish is a luxury."

One hospital worker at Bacolod angrily told Munro that several patients had died for lack of medicine after a former administrator looted the institution of more than $500,000. In Manila, a U.S. drug company executive says bribery is so ingrained in the system of government procurement of medicine that he forbids his salesmen to solicit business from the Health Ministry. While expressing admiration for many Filipino businessmen and technocrats, George Suter, head of Pfizer Inc. of the Philippines and president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Manila, shrugs: "They have to pay off."

Corruption today is endemic in the Philippines, and there are countless stories in Manila of how graft has enriched friends and relatives of the presidential family. One scheme that apparently generates enormous bribes is the system of government guarantees for loans made by foreign lenders to Filipino businessmen. The going rate for such guarantees is said to be 10% of the value of the loan--unless the Filipino businessman has the right connections with key figures in the Marcos government.

The system of graft has filtered down, most notably in the military. Soldiers manning checkpoints in the countryside regularly shake down farmers for a fixed tribute: 30-c- for every sack of copra going to market. Corruption can also breed brutality. Members of the paramilitary Philippine constabulary are widely accused of extorting protection money from village storekeepers on penalty of gangster-style fires and explosions.

In his speech in Manila last week, Marcos once again pledged to "cleanse the ranks" of the armed forces, but few Filipinos believe such sackings can make much of a difference or that mere dismissal is a sufficient deterrent. More significantly, in the same speech Marcos drew a cheer from assembled soldiers when he announced another round of military pay raises. The fact is that Marcos must have the loyalty of the armed forces, not only to preserve his own rule but also to carry the fight against continuing armed rebellion on two separate fronts.

Since the Marcos government began pouring in troops in the mid-1970s, hostilities in the southern Philippines have noticeably diminished, even though the armed Muslim guerrillas, officially estimated at 10,000, still make life difficult for the army. Military helicopters ferrying the dead are an almost daily sight at Zamboanga City's airport. On the other hand, a hit-and-run guerrilla war being waged by the N.P.A. in northeastern Luzon, Samar and four other regions is steadily intensifying. Though believed to number only 2,000 to 3,000 armed guerrillas, the N.P.A. operates with hundreds of quicksilver squads, each with five to ten men and women who seem to be everywhere and nowhere as they flit from one "ambush of opportunity" to another. "The N.P.A. still isn't in a position to engage the army in a frontal confrontation," says a clandestine leading member of the outlawed Communist Party. "But that day will come."

In the view of many observers, that day may still be a long way off. They feel that Marcos, while under bruising pressure from several different directions, is still in no imminent danger of being overthrown, because no mass revolutionary movement of sufficient breadth and organization has yet coalesced against him. The opposition, while widespread and vocal, is still a scattershot assemblage of disparate groups that do not yet show any serious sign of forming a common front comparable to the Islamic-leftist coalition that originally brought down the Shah. Democratic moderates are still divided by longstanding rivalries, but they are being increasingly united by the intensity of their distaste for Marcos and resentment against what they perceive as his U.S. support. The most popular opposition leader is former Senator Benigno Aquino, 46, a onetime provincial warlord, who has been Marcos' political prisoner since 1972. Last year Marcos forces had to do some urgent ballot-box stuffing to prevent Aquino from outpolling Imelda in a legislative election, even though Aquino conducted his campaign from a prison cell. Some diplomats believe that Aquino, as a free man, would defeat Marcos handily in a national election, which helps explain why Marcos is not about to free him or call an election.

The Roman Catholic Church, to which 85% of Filipinos belong, is by no means united either. Most bishops either stand aloof, or behind Marcos. In the parishes, however, hostility to martial law and its abuses has led many priests and nuns to help the Communists against Marcos. Those leftist sympathies, in turn, are said to have compelled Cardinal Sin to try to hold the church together by raising his own voice against the regime. A conservative on most issues, the outspoken primate has begun rebuking Cabinet ministers and publicly urged Marcos to call honest elections or step down. He has also challenged Imelda on church-state issues, most notably on her plans to build an imposing 14-chapel basilica at a cost of more than $100 million. After the Cardinal pointedly suggested that the money could be better spent on the poor, Marcos himself quietly shelved the project.

The increasingly anti-American mood in the opposition does not augur well for the future of U.S. bases in any post-Marcos government, whatever form it may take. Washington has now made clear to Marcos that it would like him to lift martial law and restore democratic processes. This change in attitude since the Nixon days is not just a reflection of the Carter Administration's sensibilities about human rights but is also a product of hard-bitten realism: How long can Marcos last if he remains inflexible? Says a militant nun: "We Filipinos are often compared to the water buffalo. It is such a passive, faithful, hard-working creature. But sometimes with no warning, it runs amuck and gores its master." The unanswered question is whether the master of the Philippines will heed a warning that has now been made loud and clear.

*The Philippines was ceded to the U.S. by Spain after the Spanish-American War in 1898, became a self-governing commonwealth in 1935 and achieved independence in 1946--with a constitution modeled on America's own.

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