The other girls giggle. “She’s not old enough to vote,” says one.
“We’re all for Cory,” says another. “Even the mama-sans are for Cory.” The mama-sans are the combination madams and bunny mothers of these establishments. They hire the girls, make sure you buy drinks, and charge you a “bar fine” if you take anybody home.
I ask a mama-san, and she agrees. “Everybody here is for Cory. Only owners are for Marcos.”
And I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I visit an owner, an Aussie thug who runs one of the B-girl joints on Pilar Street. He’s about forty, blond, thick-chested, with mean blue eyes and an accent as broad as the space I’d give him if he were swinging a chair in a bar fight. His office is a windowless upstairs room. The desk is covered with thousands of pesos, bundled in rubber bands.
“The tourist trade has gone to hell,” says the Aussie. “And it’ll get worse with all the crap you reporters are turning out about the election. But something’s got to be done for the Flips, doesn’t it? They can only take so much, can’t they? Now they’ll be up in the hills with the New People’s Army or some bloody thing.”
Thugs, whores, cabbies, street Arabs, gin jockeys—these are by nature conservative folk. When you lose this bunch, your ass is oatmeal. You’d better pack your Dictator-model Vuitton bags and pray the U.S. Air Force will Baby Doc you someplace nice.
To think that they had an “election contest” in the Philippines is to get it all wrong. It was a national upchuck. It was everybody with sense or scruples versus everybody corrupt, frightened, or mindlessly loyal.
Marcos, like any good crime boss, knew how to command loyalty. He co-opted the two traditional political parties and formed them into his own nonideological New Society Party, the KBL. He declared martial law to avoid giving up office in 1972 and then changed the constitution so he could rule by decree and be reelected in perpetuity. He sent hit men after some of his enemies, jailed others, and forced the rest into exile. Then he ruined the Philippine economy by granting monopolies on everything from sugar milling and copra processing to grain importing and by pumping oceans of government money into lame and corrupt corporations—a system known as crony capitalism.
According to Newsweek, American and Philippine economists estimate that Marcos and pals shipped as much as $20 billion out of the country. We’re not talking about Michèle Duvalier’s fur collection. Twenty billion dollars is more than half the Philippine gross national product, enough money to turn the archipelago into Hong Kong II. By comparison, total U.S. aid to the Philippines since independence in 1946 has been less than $4 billion.
Reporters who do duty in the third world spend a lot of time saying, “It’s not that simple.” We say, “It’s not that simple about the Israelis and the PLO,” or “It’s not that simple about the contras and the Sandinistas.” But in the Philippines it was that simple. It was simpler than that. Ferdinand Marcos is human sewage, an evil old power-addled flaming Glad Bag, a vicious lying dirtball who ought to have been dragged through the streets of Manila with his ears nailed to a truck bumper.
GOONS, GUNS, AND GOLD
As a traditional phrase describing Philippine elections, “goons, guns, and gold” doesn’t cover it. I know everyone has heard this election was stolen. But, Jesus, the cheek of the thing. The fix was more obvious than a skit on this season’s Saturday Night Live.
Marcos had complete control of Philippine television. On Manila’s Channel 4, the anchorman was a smirking toadeater named Ronnie Nathanialz—in looks and delivery, a sort of Don Ho from hell. He was known locally as TV Ronnie Sip-Sip Tuta. In Tagalog, tuta means “puppy” or “lap dog,” and sip-sip is something worse than ass kissing. TV Ronnie’s news broadcast would go: “Good evening, viewers, and welcome to popular Channel 4 news. Tonight we continue our unbiased coverage of the honest, fair, and peaceful Philippine elections where much-admired President Ferdinand E. Marcos is showing a commanding lead according to all reliable commentators.”
I’m not making this up. If you listened to Channel 4 for more than a minute, you’d start boxing yourself on the ears, trying to get the steady hum of bullshit out of your head.
Then Channel 4 would broadcast a taped segment from COMELEC, the government election commission. Functionaries would hold an empty ballot box up to the camera (“Nothing in the hat!”), then show all the locks and seals to be attached to each box and demonstrate how this box would be carefully moved under military guard from hither to thither, and so forth. It looked like the election was being fixed by a high school magic club.
On election day, between seven hundred and a thousand foreign reporters spread across the country watching voter-registration records being destroyed, ballot boxes stolen, opposition poll watchers barred from their stations, and army trucks full of “flying voters” moved from one polling spot to another. Marcos was doing everything but training circus animals to vote.
About half an hour before the polls closed, I had my driver take me to his precinct so he could cast his ballot. It was a comfortable middle-class neighborhood called Bay Palms. The polling place was a tidy scene, voters standing neatly in line, ballot boxes screened for privacy. A quietly enthusiastic crowd of Aquino supporters was gathered at the proper legal distance from the polls.
And the military was right in the middle of it, a full company, armed, with a general standing on a truck screeching through a bullhorn. Volunteers from NAMFREL, the National Movement for Free Elections, were nearly in tears.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“The military is here to close the polls exactly on the hour,” said a matronly woman, “even though the people waiting in line to vote are supposed to be able to do so as long as they were in line before three o’clock.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Bay Palms is an anti-Marcos district,” she said. “And in the next district, Guadalupe, only a mile away, our volunteers are calling for help. There is violence and thugs and the ballot boxes are being stolen, and we have begged the military to go stop the violence in Guadalupe, but they are here making sure this polling place closes on time instead.”
My driver came back. “I can’t vote,” he said. “They’re making sure the polling place closes on time.”
I went back to the hotel and ordered a drink. A moment later an Australian television crew came running into the bar, their eyes as big as pie plates. “In Guadalupe,” one yelled, “there’s violence and thugs and the ballot boxes are being stolen!”
“And they shot at us,” yelled another, “and took our camera at gunpoint and smashed it and grabbed the videotape!”
The Australians, being as dumb as Australians, called the police. In a little while there were a couple of greasy Criminal Investigation Service agents in the bar, drinking it up on the Aussies’ tab and hinting broadly that for 10,000 pesos maybe the videotape could be found, but probably not until after the election.
I went up to my room, hoping that I had some drugs I’d forgotten about in my luggage. TV Ronnie was on the air with the Metro Manila chief of police. “Yes,” said the chief, “there have been no reports of election-related trouble in the Metro Manila region.”
A SALVAGE HIT
“The election was marred by violence” is a nice phrase. It summons images of teens with cans of aerosol mayhem, going out to deface campaign posters. Photographer Tony Suau and I went to investigate one such mar or scuff near the town of Moncada, in Tarlac province, about 130 kilometers north of Manila.
Political killing in the Philippines is called “salvaging”—the victim has been “salvaged from communism.” This was not one of the big murders that made headlines in the United States or even in Manila. The opposition papers gave it one paragraph and spelled the man’s name wrong. He was Arsenio Cainglet, a tenant farmer in a rural barangay called Banquero Sur.
Arsenio was the barangay captain for the UNIDO opposition party. We had to drive a long way from the paved road to find his house, thro
ugh miles of flat rice land tufted with stands of bamboo and coconut palms, looking everything like snapshots my drafted buddies brought back from Vietnam. At a hut that serves as the Banquero Sur town hall and medical center I found two members of the CHDF, the Civil Home Defense Force, which is supposed to be for anti-guerrilla self-defense but has been used more often as a local enforcement arm of the KBL. This pair looked like somebody gave the town drunks M-16s. They were surly but seemed frightened by Tony’s cameras. A touching omniscience and potency was being attributed to the foreign press just then. And not many people with blue eyes ever venture to Banquero Sur anyway. They gave us directions to Arsenio’s home.
Several dozen mournful people stood in the yard. Fifty feet away were three uniformed policemen surrounding a fat-necked man in civilian clothes. “Please don’t use my name,” said Agent Ramos of the Criminal Investigation Service. He wore a large gold ring and gold Rolex and reported no progress on the case. “Mayor Llamas is investigating,” he said, pointing to a thin chain-smoking man of about sixty talking to the people in the yard. The moment I turned my back, Agent Ramos and his policemen slipped away.
Rodolfo D. Llamas is actually the ex-mayor, and not of Moncada but of the next town down the road, Paniqui. He was there because he’s the UNIDO District Coordinator.
At sunrise on the previous day Arsenio Cainglet was sitting in front of his house holding his favorite fighting cock. A man in civilian clothes drove up. The villagers described him as “with a big hat, big jacket.” He shot Arsenio five times with a .45 automatic. Arsenio said, “Bakit?”—“Why?”—and fell dead on the spot. He was forty-three years old and had nine children, ages one to eighteen.
“Arsenio was looking for me a couple of days ago,” said Llamas, “but I was in Manila on election business. I would have gotten him to a safe house if I had known in time.” He said he’d given money to his own family and sent them out of town. “I go home by the back way.”
The Cainglet house was made of nailed and lashed bamboo and set on stilts. Its two rooms were reached by walking carefully up a set of steep bamboo-log rungs. I could feel the structure sway from our weight. They’d brought the coffin up there somehow, a crude but elaborately carved and gilded casket with a glass cover, like a reliquary’s, over the open top half. Arsenio’s mother, a tiny old woman, was trying to embrace the whole box, wailing and rubbing her forehead on the glass. The corpse was fierce, Mexican-looking—black hair combed straight back and dead features set in an angry frown no American mortician could have accomplished.
“The KBL was trying to turn him,” said Llamas, “get him to change sides, but he wouldn’t go along.”
Sunlight shone into the little house through the walls and even the floor. A modest buffet had been laid out for the mourners on a table beside the household altar. Arsenio’s widow showed me, in the palm of her hand, one of the .45 slugs that had been dug out of his body. She had an expression on her face I don’t think we have in our culture, a kind of smile of hatred.
Cory Aquino didn’t even carry the barangay. The vote had been Aquino 99, Marcos 206. I asked the people in the house—the eldest daughter, who’d been to high school, translating—if this reflected the political feelings of the village. There was an audible collective snort. The mourners looked startled. Some of them laughed. Then they were silent.
“They don’t want to talk,” the daughter said. “They’re scared.”
When I came outside Llamas hinted I might escort him back to the paved road. He was traveling with four bodyguards.
FOUR HUNDRED YEARS
IN A CONVENT, FIFTY
YEARS IN A WHOREHOUSE
Spain owned the Philippines from 1521 to 1898, and America from 1898 to 1946. Pundits summarize this history as “four hundred years in a convent, fifty years in a whorehouse.” Manila today looks like some Ancient Mariner who has lived through it all. The boulevards are tattered and grim and overhung with a dirty hairnet of electrical and phone wires. The standard-issue third-world concrete buildings are stained dead-meat gray by the emphysematous air pollution. Street lighting is haphazard. Ditto for street cleaning. The streets themselves are filled with great big holes. Fires seem to be frequent. Visits from the fire department less so. There are numerous burned-out buildings. Every now and then you see what must have been charming Old Manila architecture—tin-roofed houses with upper stories that jut over the streets and windows boxed by trelliswork. Now these houses sag and flop. They don’t seem to have been painted since the Japanese occupation. In fact, the first impression of Manila is of a defeated city, still occupied and exploited by some hostile force. Which has been more or less the case—Imelda Marcos was governor of the Metro Manila region for the past decade. You see her handiwork in occasional pieces of huge, brutish modernism rising uninvited from Manila’s exhausted clutter. There is, for instance, the Cultural Center Complex, plopped on some landfill disfiguring Manila Bay. One of its buildings is the Manila Film Center, which Imelda rushed to completion in time for a 1982 international film festival. The story goes that the hurriedly poured concrete roof collapsed, burying forty or more workers in wet cement. No attempt was made to rescue them. This would have meant missing the deadline. The floor was laid over their corpses. Supposedly, Imelda later held an exorcism to get rid of the building’s malevolent ghosts.
During the election, standard journalistic practice was to go to Forbes Park in the Manila suburbs, where Marcos’s cronies were wallowing in money, then make a quick dash to the downtown slums—“Manila: City of Contrasts.” Tony Suau was shooting a polo match in Forbes Park when one of the players trotted over between chukkers and said, “Going to Tondo next, huh?”
I visited one pretty rough place myself. It was occupied almost entirely by gang members, teenage boys with giant tattoos over their arms, legs, backs, and I don’t know where else. The gangs have names like Sigue-Sigue Sputnik and Bahala Na Gang. (Sigue-sigue means “go-go”; bahala na means “I don’t care.”) Members slash themselves on the chest to make ritual scars, one for every person they’ve killed. Each gang’s turf is blocked off, with one or more kids guarding the entrance with clubs.
Actually, things were pretty clean around there. Nice vivid religious murals had been painted on the walls. Fishponds had been dug and vegetable gardens planted for the residents.
What I’m describing, however, is the Manila city jail. It’s a relaxed place where friends and family come and visit all day. There are no cells, just long barracks where prisoners sleep on low wooden platforms. If they like, they can build their own tiny huts.
Hard to know what to say about a country where the only decent low-income housing is in the hoosegow.
The warden, a cheerful stomachy man, greeted me in his office while he pulled on his Adidas sweatpants. He was the only solid Marcos supporter I met. “What an open, free society to have such democratic debate,” said the warden about the elections. I complimented him on his jail. He bought me a Sprite.
The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I’ve seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts—squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this.
The world’s a shocking poor place and probably always has been. I think I’m no hairless innocent about this. But the Philippines is an English-speaking nation with an 89 percent literacy rate. It has land, resources, and an educated middle class. It has excellent access to American markets, and it’s smack on the Pacific Rim, the only economic boom region in the world right now. It used to have one of the highest standards of living in Asia. There can’t be any excuse for this.
And when you think you may actually get sick from what you’ve seen, you come to Smoky Mountain.
This is the main Manila trash dump, a vast
fifty-foot hill of smoldering garbage, and in that garbage people are living—old people, pregnant women, little babies. There is a whole village of dirty hovels, of lean-tos and pieces of sheltering junk planted in the excrement and muck. These loathsome homes are so thickly placed I could barely make my way between them. The path in some places was not a foot wide, and I sank to my ankles in the filth.
People are eating the offal from this dung heap, drinking and washing in the rivulets of water that run through it. There are children with oozing sores, old people with ulcer-eaten eyes, crippled men lying in the waste. They live worse than carrion birds, pulling together bits of old plastic to sell. There’s not much else of value in the rubbish. Not even the good garbage gets to these people.
In Smoky Mountain you don’t feel disgust or nausea, just cold shock. I looked up and saw an immense whirlwind of detritus spiraling away from the dump’s crest, something that would take a malnourished Dorothy off to the Dirt Oz.
I went back to the hotel and put on a pair of Bass Weejuns. I’d been told that Imelda wouldn’t let anyone into the presidential palace in rubber-soled shoes. She is reputedly as crazy as a rat in a coffee can, and the statuary on the palace grounds bore that out. It looked like she had broken into a Mexican birdbath factory.
You got a whiff around Malacanang Palace that you were dealing with people a few bricks shy of a load. At the gate, there was intense inspection of footwear and pocket tape recorders. I had a borrowed press ID with Tony’s Suau’s picture on it hanging around my neck. Tony and I look about as much alike as Moe and Curly, but this bothered the guards not at all.
The reception hall had obviously been decorated by a Las Vegas interior designer forced to lower his standards of taste at gunpoint. I mean, it had a parquet ceiling. There were red plush curtains and a red plush carpet and red plush upholstery on gold-leaf fake-bamboo chairs. The chandeliers were the size of parade floats, all wood, hand-carved, and badly too. And the air conditioning wasn’t working.