The Philippines

ONE, during a tropical downpour, an Englishman stopped his automobile at a Manila street intersection. To his surprise, a Filipino policeman opened the door of the car and hopped in beside him. “I couldn’t get a cab,” said the policeman apologetically. “I wonder if you’d mind dropping me off by the city hall?" The incident persuaded the Englishman to stay in the Philippines. He married a Filipino and now uses the anecdote to establish his point that the Philippines is the only country in Asia where Westerners are accepted on a basis of friendship and full equality.

Friendliness and hospitality are national characteristics, but they have been carried to the point where they have even become national liabilities. Countless thousands of Manila’s more than two million inhabitants neither work nor wish to work, since they are confident that their relatives and friends will see to it that they do not go hungry or want for some sort of shelter over their heads.

In the Muslim areas of southwestern Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago, there is a suspicion of strangers. This is based primarily on religious fears that outside contacts may further the spread of Christianity, which already embraces 90 per cent of the archipelago’s 25 million inhabitants. But elsewhere, in the cities, towns, and 22,000 barrios, the Filipino lives up to his reputation as the most gregarious and friendly of all Asians.

Occasionally it has seemed that friendship for the United States has worn thin. This was the case in the middle of 1959, when protracted negotiations for the revision of the 1947 agreement on military bases and the United States rejection of Manila’s “omnibus” claim for war-damage payments amounting to $900 million helped to create a virulent anti-American campaign.

The late Senator C’laro Recto, who never forgot nor forgave the United States for the humiliating treatment he received as a collaborator, was a constant and articulate critic whose diatribes were readily acceptable to many intellectuals and to sections of the Manila press. Newspaper headlines accused Americans of murder at Clark Field ; there was talk of U.S. “economic colonialism” and of the need to rid the economy of its foreign domination.

Smarting under charges of inefficiency and corruption, the administration sought to exploit the situation to its own advantage by inspiring a state of nationalization, or “Filipino First” legislation, which, it believed, would pick up votes in the 1959 mid-term elections. Although the ruling Nacionalista Party managed to win the majority of the seats in the Senate, the results precipitated an agonizing reappraisal on the part of President Carlos P. Garcia.

Better relations with the United States

From a hospital bed the President initiated a series of changes designed primarily to give his administration a more savory character in the eyes of the 1961 presidential electors, but which contributed also to the restoration of amiable relations with the United States. He withdrew his support from the Communist-infiltrated National Progress Movement, soft-pedaled the nationalization issue, and appointed as Secretary of Finance 41-year-old Dominador Aytona, a protege of the late President Ramon Magsaysay well known for his integrity.

The publication of a memorandum of agreement on the military bases in October, 1 959, had already paved the way for better relations with the United States. Some, if not all, of the Filipinos’ complaints were met by reducing the valid term of the bases from 99 to 25 years and by the further agreement that consultation should take place between the United States and the Philippines regarding combat operation and the establishment of long-rangemissile bases.

Four other U.S. moves that helped to end the anti-American campaign were a $23 million payment in compensation for the 1934 gold devaluation, long authorized but not appropriated; the introduction into the U.S. Congress of a bill authorizing the payment of $73 million to the Philippines in settlement of wardamage claims; a temporary increase of 176,000 tons in the U.S. sugar quota; and finally, the highly successful Eisenhower visit.

Points still at issue

The only danger now, as proAmerican Filipinos see it, is that the United States may again be tempted to take the Philippines too much for granted and to forget that there are still points at issue. For instance, the contentious question of jurisdiction over criminal offenses committed by on-base but off-duty American servicemen remains unsolved and is complicated by the fact that Filipinos and Americans work together on the bases. The feeling persists even among the most favorably disposed Filipinos that the United States has often been undiplomatic and stubborn in handling the bases problem. It took ten years to persuade the United States that the Philippine flag should be flown alongside the Stars and Stripes at the bases.

In the field of economics, there are also grievances. The free-trade provisions of the Bell Trade Act arc seen as having been deliberately designed to delay the industrialization ol the Philippines, and though Washington may regard the wardamage payments and the compensation for gold devaluation as settlement in full of all Filipino claims, this is not an opinion with which Manila concurs. On the contrary, a small army of civil servants is still working to reconstruct the claim on which the $900 million “omnibus" bill was based.

Finally, the opinion persists that the sugar industry in the Philippines has never received really sympathetic American consideration. Its permanent quota of 954,000 short tons, decided more than twenty-five years ago, was temporarily increased for the year 1960 only because of the Cuban embargo, and though the United States consumption increases 200,000 tons each year, the Philippines has never received a share of the increase.

For the immediate future, however, there is nothing that could be interpreted as a danger signal in the relations between the two countries. President Eisenhower’s pledge that the United States is firmly and irrevocably committed to the defense of the Philippines had an immediately reassuring effect. There is real fear of Communist China, and, among the more thoughtful sections of the community, no little concern about the loyalties of much of the local Chinese population, which, though numbering only 300,000 to 400,000, has a strangle hold on retail trade and rice milling.

From steering a course that was covertly anti-American, President Garcia has even moved to.the point of indicating that he would welcome American missiles in the Philippines. In fact, of all the base areas in the Far East, the only one today that seems genuinely secure is the Philippines.

That is good news for the United States and its other allies in the West Pacific, since the 7100 islands in the archipelago, situated as they are on the edge of the Asian mainland, occupy a highly strategic position in both cold and hot war. Important to the containment of Communism in peacetime, they are essential to the control of the North Pacific in the event of war. And with the growth of neutralism and pacifism in Japan, their readiness to accept American protection as a form of insurance has added significance.

The rising economi

No substitute exists in the Philippines for the Japanese industrial complex. The Philippines is far from developing into another workshop of Asia, but there are encouraging signs that it has fully recovered from the appalling wartime damage that killed a million of its people and wrecked its economy. It now grows enough rice to meet the requirements of its rapidly expanding population of 25 million. Exports in 1959 passed the billion-peso mark for the first time to give the country its first favorable trade balance since World War II. The gross national product increased by 4.2 per cent.

Rural families made vast fortunes in real estate and are now turning to industrial development. A managerial class has begun to appear, and a determined effort is being made to impose standards on the school system, which hitherto has been more notable for quantity than quality. The Philippines spends a quarter of the national budget on state education, and in addition to the University of the Philippines, which ranks with the best in Asia, there are twenty-four private universities and several hundred colleges which assert that they teach at the university level. One university in Manila has 4000 medical students; another has nearly 50,000 undergraduates.

The quest for learning is clearly there; the requirement now is that the country’s five million students should receive an education in fact as well as in name, thereby equipping themselves to fill the needs of an expanding economy.

Natural resources are adequate. Of the millions of acres of potential farmland, only about half is under cultivation; the soil is volcanic and rich. About half the land area is covered with forests, including extensive stands of valuable hardwood. Though coal is scarce, the hydroelectric potential is huge, and there is ample iron ore for a modest steel industry.

Corruption in government

A major blight is corruption, which has both hampered economic growth and destroyed the people’s confidence in government. Manila newspapers assert that corruption has never been worse than it is today. an opinion that even some Nacionalista Party members do not dispute. Nacionalista Party member Arsenio Lacson, Manila’s fiery and efficient mayor, who has been mentioned as a possible contender for the presidency this year, calls the current administration an “organized gang of bank robbers” compared with which the notoriously graft-ridden Quirino administration was merely “a set of pickpockets.”

Like many others, he is not impressed with the efficiency of President Garcia’s drive against corruption, which has mostly caught only the smaller fry and, in particular, the followers of Senate President Eulogio Rodriguez, who is also president of the Nacionalista Party and a contender for the party nomination in the presidential election this year.

The departments under the control of Secretary Ayton a arc a notable exception. Hundreds of cases of malpractice have been unearthed by Ayton a since he took office at the beginning of 1960. Customs and internal revenue collections have risen sharply. In principle, the opportunity for graft and fraudulent conversion which exists with a multiple exchange rate is also being eliminated by a gradual move toward a more realistic single exchange rate.

Many Filipinos are cynical about the prospects of eliminating political corruption. Their experience has led them to the conclusion that one party is as corrupt as another and that to exchange the Nacionalistas for the Liberals is merely to provide the opportunity for a new group to enjoy the spoils of office. They yearn for another Magsaysay, who used his wide presidential powers to enforce honesty in government, but there is no Magsaysay in the offing.

In matters of policy, there is little difference between the two main parties; they are both loose collections of individuals. Expediency and patronage dictate loyalties. A few highly respected progressives and independents polled an impressive number of votes in the mid-term elections, but they lack money and organization and have prospects only in alliance with one of the two major parties.

Communism no serious threat

The Communist Party is illegal, and the remnants of its militant organization, the Hukbalahap, which a decade ago even threatened Manila from its almost impenetrable swampland north of Manila Bay, can now muster fewer than a thousand armed men. Captured documents recently suggested that the Huks, who have been quiescent since the Magsaysay era, plan a new terrorist campaign in outlying provinces, especially around the American bases. Their chances of success are remote. In this unsophisticated environment it is easier to meet the Communists in a shooting war, however, than it is to contend with their recent tactics of infiltrating government and respectable institutions and enunciating seemingly respectable ideas — a tactic which is too abstract for many Filipinos to understand.

Today there are known Communists in the Department oi Labor, in serious student organizations at the universities, where they have introduced a xenophobic brand of nationalism, and in the once militant National Progress Movement. Their activities excite some fears among Westerners in Manila, but they cannot, at this stage, be regarded as a serious threat.

In no other country in Asia is the democratic ideal so firmly embedded. Its interpretation sometimes strikes the Westerner as license rather than freedom, especially in the press, which washes the national linen in a manner that would bring immediate arrest and indefinite suspension in almost every other Southeast Asian country.

The result has been a healthy stirring up of civic consciousness. A candidate for appointment to the permanent staff of the foreign Office this year was asked whether, in view of the governmental malpractices he read about in the newspapers every day, he felt there was any hope for the Philippines. “Of course, we all know there is corruption,”the candidate replied, “but while there are men of honesty, integrity, and good faith in this country - and there are — the Philippines will pull through.” He got the appointment, and the Philippines got the services of the type of youth the country needs if it is to begin to move out of its economic and political adolescence.