Pinoy Penman

Manileño for May 2006


WHAT WAS the government thinking when it moved against the most critical members of the Philippine press following the issuance of Presidential Decree 1017?

Police raided the editorial offices of the Daily Tribune—an opposition paper few people had taken seriously before the raid—and, more ominously, tried but failed to secure a warrant to search the offices of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ). There were strong indications that the government had sought to muzzle ABS-CBN’s running reportage of the six-hour standoff at Marine headquarters last February 26. Sliding from the sublime to the ridiculous, the snicker-prone Secretary of Justice, Raul Gonzales, threatened to go after the Panay News, a small provincial rag from his hometown that’s been a thorn in his side.

Granted, no journalists have actually been hauled off to prison (excepting the odd columnist picked up at a rally), and no papers or stations have actually been shut down (although one radio program suddenly found itself gutted). There’s been nothing like the wholesale closure of media and arrests of editors, columnists, and reporters that immediately followed the declaration of martial law in 1972.

On the other hand, Gonzales hasn’t stopped waving the sword of sedition over the heads of President Arroyo’s staunchest critics—singling out the PCIJ for his special attention, and making no secret of the fact that he has been monitoring the center and its associates for, among others, posting on its website “many things I consider as inciting to sedition.” Those “many things” include the “Garci” tape and its transcript, which nearly brought Arroyo down last July, and which Gonzales insists violates the anti-wiretapping law, but which, as PCIJ Executive Director Sheila Coronel points out, had already been publicly played in Congress itself.

Clearly, PD 1017 wasn’t crafted to gag the Tribune and Panay News, whose paid subscribers could probably fit in three taxicabs. The administration’s real targets can only have been the media giants and the nastiest nettles—ABS-CBN, the PCIJ, Newsbreak, et al. (and especially the Lopez-owned ABS-CBN, the Lopezes being in the political doghouse these days).

So why didn’t the administration move more forcefully against these targets? Because it couldn’t afford to—not yet—not while its political support remains squishy at best. (In the most recent Pulse Asia survey, more than 60% of Filipinos still wanted GMA out of office.) Taking on ABS-CBN or the PCIJ would have revived the very specter of martial law that Arroyo has been at pains to avoid with her halfway declaration of a “state of national emergency” and galvanized what, to her good fortune, has been an inchoate opposition.

It’s the same reason and situation that explains why, all the noises aside, the government can’t take draconian action against the officers and soldiers it’s accused of plotting the most recent coup, leaving it to the military to sort out internally its seething dissensions. GMA knows that she can quote the Constitution all day (the same Constitution she conveniently set aside for Edsa 2), but also that there’s no deep wellspring of affection for her in the barracks. Very few soldiers, if any, are going to kill and die for her—or maybe even something so abstract and so often perverted as “the Constitution.” How many Marines and Scout Rangers can you put in the stockade?

(I should note that, on the other hand, those perceived to be weak at the moment—primarily the Left—have been picked on with impunity, with labor and student leaders and journalists being reported killed by police or military elements.)

Where we are these days is a larger standoff, with the government making blustery threats and the opposition refusing to vanish but failing at the same time to muster the critical mass it needs to unseat Arroyo. That 60-plus-percent disapproval rating shows that, for whatever reason, most Filipinos don’t like their president; on the other hand, it’s a dissatisfaction that has yet to cohere firmly enough to result in a regime change anytime soon.

The administration would like to have us think that this inaction is a sign of political maturity, just as George W. Bush might post the same low ratings and yet not have to worry about serving out the rest of his term. It could be, indeed, that we Pinoys are learning to play it cool, after decades of incendiary, street-level activism.

Maybe so. Maybe this impasse, this period of shadow-playing, is a good time for all Filipinos to take stock of their positions, consolidate their forces, map out options, cultivate new leaders, and, just as importantly, see what can be negotiated, given the emerging realities and opportunities on the ground.

On the other hand, threatening the media with sedition in the same cavalier way by which any anti-GMA rally gets dispersed these days cannot lead to anything but a hardening of positions—and a revelation of the true nature of what we are dealing with. No matter how raucous or ridiculous the Philippine press may occasionally get, a government and a justice secretary who can find the time and energy to intimidate writers can’t be any better, and can offer little comfort to those who still believe in a free press as a cornerstone of a modern democracy.

Manileño for April 2006

This is an early copy of my column for next month's issue of the San Francisco-based Filipinas Magazine, but I'm putting it out because of the quick turn of events; the Marines stand-off took place tonight, and more developments are certain to happen very soon.



AS I WRITE this, a state of national emergency has just been declared in the Philippines by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, citing attempts by various forces “in tactical alliance and engaged in a concerted and systematic conspiracy to bring down the duly constituted government elected in May 2004.”

About a dozen military officers and soldiers—including a general—have been taken into custody; one opposition newspaper, the Tribune, was raided; in the first round of street protests, police dispersed the crowds with truncheons and water cannons, arresting at least 22 people, including the prominent social critic and commentator Prof. Randy David. Rep. Crispin Beltran was arrested—on a 21-year-old charge of rebellion. Government spokesmen singled out the media for special censure, accusing some elements in it of abetting the incipient rebellion.

Predictably—in something that I’m sure was repeated a million times over—I got a frantic text message from my sister Elaine in Virginia, asking me what was going on and if the country, as some news reports had it, was falling apart. I told her no; there’d been some confrontations, but the whole thing to me was a calculated over-reaction on GMA’s part—a Palace coup, if you will, meant to defang and declaw her enemies before they could strike against her.

I recall how, just before Christmas, some political-junkie friends and I had gathered around a dinner table, and how the most astute among us (not me) had predicted this Palace coup. “She’ll hit them before they can hit her,” he said—and she just did.

There will, of course, be quite a few people—I’m guessing many of them on the other side of the Pacific—who’ll be saying that this is precisely what we needed, after months of indecisive and seemingly fruitless bickering and brawling between the administration and opposition in the wake of the “Hello, Garci” scandal.

On the surface of things, GMA may have had some reason to move.

Was there a military plot to unseat her by force? Probably—although not to the extent that it would actually have succeeded at this point. It’s been no great secret that her grip on the military is tenuous at best, especially among young officers who owe her nothing and are sick of corruption at the top.

Is there a broad coalition of civilian forces ranged against her? Certainly. In a feat that not even Marcos was able to achieve, she’s managed to amass the strangest collection of adversaries, from Cory Aquino and Eddie Villanueva to Ping Lacson and Jinggoy Estrada. (The even stranger thing is that the broader this coalition has gotten, the looser it’s become, making it easier for GMA to rule over the fundamentally divided.)

Was the government in any “clear and present danger”, as it alleged, of being illegally overthrown? Probably not. Even with the expected heightening of tensions and ratcheting of rhetoric on the 20th anniversary of Edsa 1, there was no palpable sense on the street—before the “state of emergency” announcement—of a critical mass a-building on a scale large enough to constitute another Edsa.

As far as quite a few Filipinos were concerned, that precisely was the problem: the steam seemed to have gone out, for the time being, of the protest machine that nearly brought the Palace down last year. True, the military was and is restive—but few Filipinos have the stomach for military rule, although more and more had begun looking to military intervention as their only hope for a quick change of regimes. The arrest of a few officers and enlisted men—instead of, say, a hundred of them across the services—merely emphasized how much work the rebels had ahead of them in terms of both planning and PR.

So why did the Palace strike? Those for GMA would say that it was to put all the foolishness to rest and get on with doing business; those against her, on the other hand, see the move as further proof of her deep sense of insecurity, despite the bravado projected by a recent speech during which she insisted on being “the best person” to lead the country.

What’s becoming clear to both sides is that she’s increasingly displaying a personal intolerance of opposition—even from within her own Cabinet—and intends to hang on to the full term she believes she’s entitled to, no matter what. A clampdown would give her a freer hand to move on with her reform agenda away from the incessant carping of her detractors—or at least that’s what her spokesman would say. And why not, indeed? As some of my US-based friends would urge, why not just drop all the bickering and rally behind GMA to modernize the nation?

We’d love to do that, folks; no one wants to march in the noonday sun, only to get whacked over the head by a policeman’s truncheon. GMA’s reform agenda looks good on paper—except that she hasn’t lifted a finger to implement, say, real electoral reform. And until she dusted this “state of emergency” rule out of the Constitution, and riding on a small economic bubble, it was even looking like the Lucky Lady would outlast her critics.

But once again, by arresting enemies and silencing pesky journalists, a shakened and still shaky government is proving that primal fear and survival instincts—not any modern philosophy of governance—rule the roost in Malacañang.

We are in a state of emergency—though not quite in the way the Palace sees it.

Manileño for March 2006



WITH PHILIPPINE summer and the vacation season just around the corner, our thoughts turn naturally to domestic tourism, to those day-long or even weekend sorties that refresh both body and spirit, and get us away as far as possible from the political and environmental muck of Metro Manila.

Thankfully, there’s still a lot of beautiful countryside to be visited out there. For those of us back home, our most obvious choices would be Tagaytay, the Batangas beaches, maybe Villa Escudero, or—turning northward—Subic, Baguio, and, for a longer stretch, Sagada or Vigan. If we have to hop aboard a plane, it would be to Palawan, Davao, Boracay, Bohol, Camiguin, or Cebu.

We might justly complain about a few things here and there—about the garbage problem in Boracay, for example, or the traffic in Cebu—but on the whole we can still expect to have a reasonably good time, on the beach or on the verandah (or the corner sari-sari store) with a bottle of San Miguel beer (on the rocks, of course, Pinoy-style) and a jaw of fresh tuna or strips of pork belly broiling on the side. We can expect to be smothered in tubfuls of fresh fruit, garlands of sampaguita blooms, scoops of macapuno and ube ice cream, and serenades of kundimans. That’s the idyllic summer experience most of us crave even and especially after decades of shuttling to and from work in the dark bowels of some Western metropolis and toiling away in some gray cubicle, brightened only by that tacked-on picture from our last visit home.

There’s a twist a-borning to this scenario, however. More and more Filipinos are taking vacations out of the country to nearby places in Southeast Asia, both to get a taste of something new but not too strange and to escape what to others may seem fabulously exotic but to the locals has grown stale. And it isn’t because our disposable incomes have suddenly gone up, far from it.

Thanks to cut-throat competition in the regional tourism market and to the emergence of budget airlines like Tiger Airways, it’s now actually become as cheap if not cheaper to travel to Hong Kong or to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore than to, say, Davao, to which a round-trip ticket still costs almost P6,000, or $100.

For that same $100 (plus travel tax of P1,620 if you’re a Filipino citizen), you can get round-trip airfare, airport transfers, a hotel for three days and two nights, and breakfasts—not in Davao, but in Hong Kong. (If you find that hard to believe, check out the inside pages of the Manila broadsheets.) And yes, some of us have actually gone on these budget trips. Granted, you won’t be staying at the Peninsula, and “breakfast” might mean coupons for the McDonald’s around the corner, but what the heck, just how far, literally, can $100 get you in the States?

Flying into Clark, Singapore-based Tiger Airways is charging an incredible $9.98 one way from Singapore to Manila, Macau, Phuket, and Bangkok, among other Asian destinations.

This is good news for us Manileños, many of whom might otherwise never see an airport better than our own (and what a tragedy that would be). But it’s also a reminder of how much more work we need to do to boost our own tourism offerings and potentials vis-à-vis what’s out there, and by “work” I don’t mean just sending out more government officials on junkets to Frankfurt or San Francisco.

I mean beefing up our infrastructure and improving transport—not just across the islands, but within our cities themselves, where the infernal, heavily pollutant traffic is often the worst disincentive that visitors remember. How can we ever hope to compete with a destination like Thailand (and its 12 million tourists a year to our measly 2 million) if it takes forever to get from Point A to Point B just within Manila—say, from Sulo Hotel to the Ayala Museum, or from the Ayala Museum to the Luneta?

Let’s start with the Gordian knot that’s our new international airport and all the legal tangles it’s gotten into. I know that the corruption alleged to be at the bottom of it has to be rooted out, but—knowing how long corruption trials take in our country—must we all wait for the roof to rust before we get to use the terminal? A friend once observed that, in other countries, governments caught in that kind of bind would go after the grafters, then open the facility in the meantime. In our case, we let the grafters be, but shut the place down.

This started as a sunny paean to summer, so I’ll get back on track by suggesting that those of you who’ve been away too long take a break and luxuriate in the shade of our palm trees, on our blinding white beaches. Suffer the airport, suffer the politics and the pollution, get out of Manila, and remember the best of what you left behind. It’s a hopelessly impoverished Pinoy who’s forgotten what summer in the islands is like, for which those of us stuck here can still be forever grateful.

Manileño for February 2006



(Just to remind you--and myself--that's there's more to life than whatever Steve Jobs brings to it, here's my current column-piece for the San Francisco-based Filipinas magazine.)



AS WE ENTER the New Year with our hopes and fears all tangled up one with the other, it may help to list down the issues and concerns we in the Philippines can expect to face in 2006. Not surprisingly, most of them involve President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who defied most predictions (including this corner’s) and has clung on to power despite what even her supporters have acknowledged to be a deep-seated dissatisfaction with her government and lingering questions about the legitimacy of her rule.

The mood in Manila these days seems to be that we’re stuck with GMA for better or for worse for some time to come. The impasse will give both sides time to regroup, as well as give the economy time to stabilize after 2005’s crippling bouts with political jitters, oil price hikes, the expanded value-added tax or EVAT, somewhat relieved only later in the year by the sudden buoyancy of the peso, which reached the mid-P53 to the dollar mark from a low of around P56, thanks to a record infusion of about US$10 billion into the economy from overseas remittances.

In other words, we’re not out of the woods yet, far from it; on the other hand, we’re masters at survival and getting by, and while we may moan and whine our way from one day to the next, we Pinoys will find a way to manage and eventually prevail, as we did over the 20 years of the Marcos regime. Nobody wants or expects GMA to sit in the Palace that long, but it’s beginning to look possible that she may, after all, stay in office until 2010, whether as a strong(wo)man fortified by emergency powers or as a lameduck presiding over a transition from the presidential to the parliamentary system.

Let’s go over that list of potential flashpoints for 2006:

1. Garci and all it means. As much as Malacañang may wish for the issue (and former election commissioner Virgilio Garcillano himself) to simply evaporate, it won’t. Too many important questions have been left unanswered, and the Palace’s attitude of “Nothing’s been proven, so nothing wrong happened” can’t be believed by anyone with brain larger than a worm’s. While the Palace’s allies can quash parliamentary debate, the Garci issue has tainted and diminished the Presidency. Even if GMA stays in office, the historical damage will endure.

2. Charter change. The 55-member Constitutional Commission convened by GMA herself has now submitted its recommendation to scrap the 2007 elections and have Mrs. Arroyo serve as both head of state and head of government during the transition to a parliamentary form of government until 2010. “President Arroyo, who is being asked to resign by many Filipinos, will ironically have additional powers under the proposed Constitution,” a spokesman for a lawyers’ group opposing the recommendation said. Senate President Franklin Drilon has vowed to fight the proposal, even as the ConCom—led by former UP President Jose Abueva—has denied being a rubber-stamp assembly.

3. The military. Nobody—not even the Palace itself—seems to know what the military really thinks, or how solid or fragmented it is. The passions and frustrations behind the Oakwood mutiny of 2003 are a continuing threat, and GMA’s perceived misuse of the military for her own political survival has disaffected many officers up and down the line. Former AFP comptroller Gen. Carlos Garcia was convicted of corruption, but he’s just one in a squadron of fat-cat generals who enjoy palatial mansions and luxury cars while ordinary soldiers fight in substandard boots. Even among those once victimized by martial law, a progressive-minded military is emerging as the last hope for rapid and decisive change.

4. The economy. There are some bright spots in our otherwise-consumption-driven economy (new malls and bazaars are mushrooming in Pinoy suburbia, eager to absorb all that OFW money), such as the phenomenally vibrant business-process-outsourcing or call-center industry. But the exodus of our best technical and managerial talent continues, and those left behind are at great pains to put food on the table and send the kids to school. The imposition of 10% EVAT in late 2005—to be raised to 12% in February—tightened the economic screws even further. Many experts agree that the P80 billion expected to be raised by the EVAT is sorely needed to reduce the budget deficit, but lingering doubts about the quality of governance—in other words, about how wisely that new money will be spent by a regime accused of massive corruption and politicking—are dampening expectations.

On another front, expect shock waves from Malacañang’s recent moves against the Cojuangcos and Aquinos (who now stand to lose Hacienda Luisita) and the Lopezes (Meralco is being dunned for P42 billion in alleged debts to Napocor).

5. The judiciary. The President’s appointment of the prolific, affable, and liberal-minded Artemio Panganiban as the country’s 21st Chief Justice was widely hailed as a good choice. But the independence of Panganiban—who actively helped to install GMA as president by persuading then Chief Justice Hilario Davide to swear her in—will soon be tested by legal challenges to GMA’s “gag order” on her appointees and to measures arising from the proposed shift to the parliamentary system.

Despite Davide’s efforts to clean it up, the Philippine judiciary remains beset by serious problems—including the fact that 35% of its positions remain unfilled because of low salaries.

That’s more than enough for a year, but whatever happens in 2006, it’s certain to be a very lively and interesting one.

Manileño for January 2006



I write a monthly column titled "Manileño" for Filipinas Magazine, based in San Francisco, and I'll archive those columns here as well.



GIVEN THE lingering political crisis in the Philippines—a crisis of faith, of whom and what to believe in, more than anything else—it’s becoming more difficult to tell young Filipinos what to think and what to do.

Even President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s staunchest supporters will concede that her moral authority has been undermined by the “Hello, Garci” scandal that remains steadfastly unresolved to this day—thanks to GMA’s own successful stonewalling. Congress, the Senate, and the opposition offer few palatable alternatives or reasons to feel hopeful about the future.

Sen. Mar A. Roxas—often touted to be our next best President, should the presidential system survive the current clamor for something different—faced this dilemma recently when he was asked to speak at a gathering of youth leaders at the University of the Philippines. While he came with a prepared speech, he must have sensed their unease with being told for the umpteenth time that they were “the fair hope of the Fatherland” without any clear roadmap out of the current mess into a less fractious, more engaging scenario. So Roxas tossed his speech aside and did what a politically savvy youth leader should—he left the podium and started a conversation with them from the stage, talking to them about the things that mattered: career and country.

What was on Roxas’s mind—and he would advert to this in his talk—were the troubling results of a recent survey on Philippine youth and education, conducted only last September by the Philippine Business Leaders Forum. That survey—taken across the country and over a broad spectrum of college students from different economic and social backgrounds—showed that as much as 93 percent of Filipino students were planning on leaving and working abroad, preferably, and not surprisingly, in the United States. The survey also revealed a deep pessimism among the youth about economic and educational prospects in the Philippines.

While the survey didn’t say anything we didn’t already suspect, its statistical confirmation of our worst fears adds even more urgency to the need to find and offer hope in our benighted situation, beyond the administration’s insistence on sweeping “Garci” under the rug and the opposition’s dubiously quick fixes. Once our kids feel that their country isn’t worth their time and talent, then we might as well kiss the Filipino future goodbye and leave this country literally to the dogs.

So what did Mar Roxas end up telling the students? Something that’s almost too obvious when you come to think of it: “If you really want to study and work abroad, then go—go with my blessings! Learn something, and earn something. Then come home, and help us out.”

It’s an option that Roxas himself took when he went to Wharton for his MBA and then joined Allen and Co. as an investment banker. For all we know, he could have stayed there forever, enjoying the high life, if fate hadn’t lent a hand and killed his congressman-brother Dinggoy, whose position he assumed (that’s just the way it is with these surnames). Mar warmed up to the job; he learned the political ropes, got an important education bill passed in Congress, mastered trade policy in the executive branch, kept his nose clean even when his boss Erap slipped in the muck, and was mightily surprised when he topped the next senatorial elections, repackaged as “Mr. Palengke.” Today he treads an increasingly fine line between being that rarity of rarities, an unsullied politician most people like or can get to like, and being rendered irrelevant by the rush of larger and noisier forces swirling around him.

But Mar Roxas may have come to the same realization that an even younger fellow senator and Liberal Party mate, Francis Pangilinan, has already expressed: the older generation of political leaders is as good as lost, a complete write-off, hopelessly mired in its hang-ups and contradictions. The present furor will reach its inevitable climax and resolve itself one way or another—with a great possibility of blood being spilled in the interim. And then the real work will begin, the awesome task of rebuilding a country, an economy, and a political culture from Ground Zero.

That’s the post-apocalyptic scenario that Roxas’s seemingly blithe exhortation will feed into. For those who can and those who want to, spending some time abroad will feed not only their bodies but also their minds, by exposing them to the kind of environment that will make them demand better things for their families and communities back home. Not all will return for sure—but those who do could make a critical mass of people who have seen the future and who want it now.

“Go abroad!” may not sound very patriotic, but it’s no longer just the lack of good jobs that’s pushing young people away. A few weeks ago, three young men suspected of being carjackers were stopped by the police in Ortigas—and then, as an onlooker’s video camera whirred away, were gunned down at close range in their parked car, so forcefully that you could see the bodies jerk from the force of the bullets. The police chief relieved the trigger-happy cops—only to reinstate them a day later, because, he said, “We don’t want to give carjackers the wrong signal.” They remain on the streets today.

Very few young Pinoys may be in the business of carjacking, but even for those who aren’t, that chilling episode sure sent a message they’re not likely to misunderstand: just staying here could kill you. Go away!