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Issue That Never Was, and Never
Will Be
Jan 2012
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Kapatiran Issue
That Never Was, and Never Will Be, January 2012
REVIEWS
- Jeremy Agar
“POLICING
AMERICA ’S EMPIRE: The United States , The
Philippines And the Rise Of The Surveillance State ”
by Alfred W McCoy, University Of Wisconsin Press ,
Madison, 2009
Alfred McCoy has written the most thorough account of
American relations with the Philippines that the general
reader is likely to come across. It’s a history with
meticulous detail, the product of an academic career
that’s concentrated on the tortuous story of the
connections between the US and Southeast Asia . McCoy,
who previously exposed a Central Intelligence Agency role
in the Asian drug trade (“The Politics Of Heroin In
Southeast Asia”, 1972), is specifically interested
in the workings of the Police and the Army, American
creations in large part.
“Policing America ’s Empire” is a history
of US-Philippine relations, stretching back to 1898, when
America invaded the archipelago, expelled a tiring Spain
, and announced that the upcoming century was to belong
to America . Unlike European colonists, who acquired
their empires in earlier days of sail power and muskets,
the US typically did not feel it needed to exert explicit
political rule. It would control through local proxies, a
method which President McKinley called “benevolent
assimilation”. He couldn’t then go the whole
way and allow formal independence, but, rather than being
a judgement about the needs of power, this seems to have
been the result of racism and cultural bias. Manila self
rule, McKinley cautioned, would be “vastly more
unwise and even more disastrous than it had been in
DC” (which was full of black people). Neither
Washington DC nor Manila got a vote.
Just as, a century later, Bush the Younger used 9/11 to
“justify” his attack on Iraq, McKinley’s
pretext for invading the Philippines was the sinking of a
US warship in Havana, the main port of a then-Spanish
Cuba. When no convenient target presents itself,
governments have to lie. Before the Bush-Blair
“discovery” of weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq , the 1965 Gulf of Tonkin “incident”, an
invention by President Johnson of Vietnamese aggression,
triggered the US assault on North Vietnam . McCoy hints
at the parallels and patterns within 20th Century
history.
The trick in the Philippines was to deploy enough US
personnel to keep a watch on events while relying on
locals for the brunt of the dirty work. In the early
years one third of the Manila City budget went to the
Police, while one of the three Police Commissioners was a
Filipino. The money tap necessitated a 500% tax increase
and guaranteed corruption. From the start of their
occupation the US fostered the power of local elites, who
came to depend on American sponsorship. In a tactic since
followed by cities hosting Olympic Games or World Trade
Organisation conferences, low-life Americans were shipped
home in an attempt to create an aura of expat cultural
and racial superiority.
The US established a Division of Military Information to
set up files on all influential Filipinos. This could
have been the world’s first attempt at bureaucratic
mass surveillance, useful for dangling carrots (patronage
and cooption) and spreading divisive misinformation and
playing dirty tricks. When necessary the stick could
whack sense into troublemakers. US policy was to
“kill off the leaders and enlighten the
masses”.
Marcos Was The Americans’ Boy
Necessarily, the Philippines being scattered and
heterogeneous, local warlords are generally left alone to
dispense local injustice. A dictator like Ferdinand
Marcos, who campaigned, inevitably, on a law and order
platform, centralised the Police and Army, but even in
periods of centralised power, the local fiefdoms are
granted a free rein. As the elites have a common interest
in suppressing democracy, the system usually works well
enough for them all. There’s enough plunder to go
round. According to McCoy, Marcos spent $US50 million on
bribes just for his 1969 re-election campaign.
The Americans want to project their power regionally and,
as long as no Viet Cong-type movement surfaced, they
wouldn’t have worried about what went on in the
provinces. Their problem is that the Philippines have
never been pacified*, and the US military has never been far
from direct engagement. The President in Manila , any
President, works within the space left between the US and
local powerbrokers. It’s a recipe for systematic
abuse. All that’s certain is that the interests of
the Philippine people won’t be the motive for
policy.
*The New People’s Army of
the Communist Party of the Philippines has been
continuously waging a classic peasant-based guerrilla war
across the great majority of the Philippines ’
provinces for more than 40 years. Prior to that there was
the unsuccessful 1950s’ Huk guerrilla war waged by
the former Communist Party. Separately, there has been a
Muslim separatist guerrilla war continuously in the
southernmost provinces since the 1970s. Ed.
In 1978, Marcos agreed to extend the lease for US bases
in exchange for $US500 million in what both parties
agreed to call “aid”. A State Department
honcho, Richard Holbrooke, explained the dilemma:
‘We had to choose between using our bilateral
relationship for human rights objectives and using it
first for putting our military facilities on a stable
basis”. Human rights or a stable military? They must
have agonised over that for all of two seconds. Holbrooke
is now President Obama’s Special Envoy to
Afghanistan , one of several hints that policy
hasn’t changed.
McCoy divides Philippine history since 1945, when the
Japanese were pushed out, into three periods. The rule of
thumb is that in the post-war period, there were the 3
G’s: guns, goons and gold. Then, from 1965-1986,
there was Marcos. “People Power” toppled the
dictator, but as McCoy mournfully records, post-Marcos
it’s all about the 3 C’s: celebrity,
criminality and Chinese - as in ethnic Chinese moneymen.
Warlords, Death Squads & Kleptocrats
Resistance has been persistent but, reflecting its often
disparate origins it, too, tends to be inconsistent.
Whenever human development looks to be in the offing, the
killers get busy, so that sentences like this are
frequent: “A liquidation campaign raged across
central Luzon for a full year, hunting down
environmentalists, community organisers, journalists,
pastors, and land reform advocates”.
All sorts of agendas are in play. McCoy talks about the
interplay, during Cory Aquino’s 1986-92 Presidency,
between “criminal gangs, fanatical cults, and
ex-Communist guerrillas”. One crazed Christian
zealot couldn’t find the guerrillas he was supposed
to hunt so he attacked human rights groups instead. When
McCoy notes that the Philippines is said to have the
world’s highest murder rate - though it’s
highly variable between regions - the information is
almost incidental. An outfit pleased to call itself the
Legal Action Group saw its role to be “targeting
so-called Communist front organisations engaged in
development, media, and religious work”. The threat
of justice has a way of uniting oppressors into making
their country safe for injustice.
Joseph “Erap” Estrada, an actor, was a
celebrity President (1998-2001), an example of the
post-Marcos C’s, evicted in 2001 by People Power 2
amid accusations of pocketing kickbacks. McCoy says he
alienated provincial rivals by trying to privatise
gambling profits for himself. In a brazen comeback bid,
Estrada, who used to keep the Presidential mistress in a
23,000 square-foot house, one of 18 Presidential
mansions, ran second in the May 2010 Presidential
election. The winner, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino,
son of the late President Cory Aquino, is from a rival -
and more respected - political dynasty. Such is politics
Philippine-style.
Aided and abetted by the US , the State has resorted to
terror on a mass scale four times in recent history:
“Thus coercive capacity was fashioned under colonial
rule, legitimated by the country’s later
Constitutions, and reinforced by popular demands for
public order in the face of rising criminality. But in
the half century since independence in 1946, the
Philippine Executive’s reliance on coercion rather
than negotiation has been encouraged by periodic
infusions of US aid and advisers, contributing ever more
efficient means of armed suppression, from the CIA’s
counterinsurgency operations in the 1950s through US
counterterrorism training since 2002”.
McCoy concludes with the observation that after 9/11 an
enhanced technical sophistication has allowed the
watchers to keep a clamp on freedom unobtrusively and
atrocities are generally limited to outlying islands.
Traditional methods, he suggests, the crudities of a
McCarthy or a Nixon, or a Marcos, perhaps, would have
been resisted. In the Philippines , where indirect
methods have always been tyranny’s default option,
cooption and bribery might have some way yet to go. McCoy
makes another pertinent, if unwelcome point: at least
eight million educated middle class Filipinos have
recently emigrated, potentially restoring the social gap
between the oligarchs and the masses, and, with it, the
oligarchs’ freedom to oppress.
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