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The Philippines, The First Vietnam and The Next Vietnam

By David Curry

"REBELLION!", shouted the headlines of newspapers around the world. The dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whose reign seemed infinite, had been replaced by a comparatively diminutive female leader whose aristocratic rhetoric. There was just enough hesitation in supporting her from the Reagan administration to make all of us who had opposed Marcos feel that some degree of victory had been won. I clipped my copy of the "REBELLION" headline from the Chicago Sun Times, tacked it on my bulletin board, and breathed a sigh of relief that what had seemed an inevitable Vietnam-like military involvement for the United States had been avoided.

As the months passed, my earlier uneasiness returned. News from the Philippines revealed an Aquino balancing act of the increasing civil unrest and rightist coup attempts. While I was getting a routine blood test, a Filipino hospital technician, who noted my VVAW pin, told me that he had served in Vietnam too. After a brief conversational "feeling out", he told me that he had recently left the Philippines out of fear for his life. His teenage brother had been tortured and murdered by government soldiers. I naievely suggested that the situation had probably changed since the fall of Marcos. He told me that these events had transpired since Aquino had come to power. This fall, The World, the church magazine of Unitarian-Universalists reported that head of the Unitarian Church in the Philippines, a critic of Marcos and later Aquino had been murdered. The suspected perpetrators were right-wing death squads.

My old fears have returned. The Philippines were the first Vietnam. The Philippines can be the next Vietnam. The Philippines may be the last Vietnam.

The First Vietnam

The Spanish began their conquest of the Philippines in 1565, Spain's total destruction of the indigenous Filipino culture was so absolute that little is known of the pre-Spanish era. One description says, "Filipinos ... lived in many separate communities, linked by a well-developed system of trade and some loose political compacts, with widespread literacy." As with the French conversion of the pre-colonial languages of Vietnam into a Roman character script, the Spanish destruction of the "old" literature served as an important component of the total and brutal destruction of a culture in order to facilitate colonization. Almost unending violent uprisings of the peoples of the Philippines testify to the need for Spanish concern. Spanish dominion was fundamentally tied to the tyrant's ability to divide the Filipino people into two classes: one class who benefited from Spanish rule and one class whose suffering and laboring made Spanish rule profitable for both the Spanish and the Filipino upper class.

The first of the popular uprisings to merit the Western designation of "revolution" occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. Perhaps, the difference in this case was that the songs of wealthy Filipino landowners educated in Europe provided an ideological base for the rebellion. They had realized that their upper class status and European education did not provide them with social and economic equality with the Spanish. In 1896, the central intellectual leader of the insurrection, Jose Rizal, was executed by the Spanish, and the revolution became a military campaign. By 1896, the Spanish had been driven by the Filipinos into the besieged city of Manila. Only the Spanish fleet prevented the fall of Manila.

Half a world away, historical forces conspired to thwart what might have been the emergence of the independent nation of the Philippines, The United States of America in its stated desire to bring independence to the people of Cuba entered with great enthusiasm into the Spanish-American war. Second only to Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill in that brief burst of American war-making tradition was Admiral Dewey's destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. For the Filipino people, the strategic situation changed. Instead of imperial Spain occupying besieged Manila, the Filipino insurgents faced U.S. military forces. The U.S. was regarded by many Filipino and American intellectuals as the birthplace of republican democracy in the post-Dark-Ages world. Many of the better0educated among the Filipino forces must have felt a sense of optimism.

President William McKinley spoke for those who defined American foreign policy when it came to the "Philippines business" as he called it.

"When I ... realized that the Philippines had dropped into our laps I confess I did not know what to do with them. ... I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way—I don't know how it was, but it came: (1) That we could not give back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonorable; (2) that we could not turn them over to France and Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient—that would be bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave them to themselves—they were unfit for self-government—and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was; and (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow0men for whom Christ also died. ...the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department, and I told him to put the Philippines on the map on the United States, and there they are, and there they will stay while I am President!"

On February 4, 1899, the education and Christianization of the Philippines began. American gunboats steamed up the rivers pouring into Manila Bay, firing 500-pound shells into the Filipino trenches. According to Luzviminda Fransisco, "... the American troops jokingly referred to it as a 'quasi shoot' and dead Filipinos were piled so high that the American used the bodies for breastworks ..." Given the hopeless inferiority of their enemy whom the Americans called "niggers, "barbarians", and "savages", the invading forces showed no tendency to display the least demonstration of humanity much less follow the "rules of the war". Ironically the American military had just culminated a similar war against the native American population who had likewise stood in the way of economic development.

The battered Filipino force remembering their hard fought victories over the Spanish mustered their courage and reorganized their revolutionary units into guerrilla bands. This effective retrenchment and the almost universal support for the insurgents among the Filipino population left the Americans in a situation that they would face several decades later in Vietnam. The further the Americans were drawn in their areas of fortification and control, the more vulnerable they became to ambush, harassment, and "suicidal" military attacks by massed insurgent forces. The American military was "bogged down" in its first Asian war.

Bloody, ruthless, and costly in Filipino life was the campaign to subdue the Philippines. Early in the campaign, an American general observed, "It may be necessary to kill half of the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords." As a year passed, it became more evident that the enemy was not a "faction" of the Filipino people but the entire population. In early 1901, the entire population (51,000) of Marinduque Island was forced into the concentration camps. The torture and slaughter of civilians was not an uncommon feature of the campaign. As General J. Franklin Bell said in late 1901, "All consideration and regard for the inhabitants of this place cease from the day I become commander. I have the force and the authority to do whatever seems to me good and especially to humiliate those in the Province who have any pride." Though the war was declared "over" by President Roosevelt in 1902, it really has not ended until this day. Estimates of the Filipino death toll by that date range from 600,000 by General Bell to 1,000,000 by contemporary Filipino historians. The uneasy peace gave the American government a fatal sense of security that they were now a significant actor in the Asian theatre. It was assumed that military force can attain any U.S. strategic or economic objective in Asia. America's first Vietnam in the Philippines became the fatal seducer that so seriously cost the American people in Korea and Vietnam.

The Next Vietnam

The continuous of American domination in the Philippines is not one marked by fair play and democratic nation0building. The formula remained the same—before and after the Japanese occupation—duplicity, injustice, and sometimes murder, but always the old Spanish strategy. To retain foreign control of the Philippines, two classes of Filipinos are needed—one small class loyal to the foreign controllers and one larger class serving the interests of both the other class and their foreign overlords.

Oppression alone does not make a Vietnam-like military misadventure. The other necessary element is an organized local opposition with a unified ideological focus. During the Japanese occupation, the Hukbalahap came into being as the People's Anti-Japanese Army. When the U.S. regained control of the islands, it did not hesitate to invest its trust in Japanese collaborators rather than risk providing any legitimacy to the Hukbalahap or even neutral elements in the Philippine government.

Despite a low intensity war waged against rebellious elements in the "independent" Philippines during the late 40's, 50's, and 60's, the U.S. came closest to losing its control through its partnership with Ferdinand Marcos. Elected president in 1965, Marcos initially seemed to be just another American puppet ruler. It was his uncanny financial acumen that distinguished Marcos from his predecessors. Largely due to his finances, Marcos became the first president of the Philippines to be elected to a second term in 1969. Several sources attribute Marcos's wealth to his ability to manipulate the U.S. government's payments to its many Filipino employees through its massive military presence. Whatever the basis of Marcos's early economic miracles, we know that his more recent "economic miracles" are the object of federal indictments for which his only defense seems to be his flagging health.

Two crises came into a head in 1972, one for the U.S. and one for Ferdinand Marcos. For the U.S., civil liberties guaranteed by the Philippine constitution had led to unforeseen consequences including a growing opposition to the U.S. military bases in the Philippines and a readiness to normalize trade barriers with Japan. For Marcos, the Philippine constitution forbade his election to a third term as president. There was one easy solution. On September 21, 1972, Marcos declared martial law citing as his motivation growing "threats to democracy".

For the next fourteen years, Marcos and his wife Imelda continued to exercise their talent for self-enrichment. For fourteen more years, the Marcos's served as an increasingly vulnerable target for critics of the U.S. policy in the Philippines. One of the more outrageous catastrophes of the Marcos travesty occurred on August 21, 1983, when Benigno Aquino, a major opposition leader to Marcos returned to Manila from the United States. The reaction this challenge was as simple to Marcos as it was embarrassing to the U.S. Marcos probably had Aquino shot in the back of his head as he descended from his plane at Manila International Airport. The chain of events that followed might have inevitably led to American military action in the Philippines had it not been for the availability of an invaluable political opportunity embodied in the widow of the slain Aquino—Corazon "Cory" Aquino.

As Raymond Bonner notes, "As traumatic as the Aquino assassination was ... , as great as it impact was in the Philippines, it did not, contrary to conventional wisdom, precipitate a fundamental change in the Reagan administration's pro-Marcos stand." What mattered according to Bonner's quotation from an unnamed senior State Department official is something else. "They [the Reagan administration] didn't ease him out because he was corrupt. They eased him out because he lost control of the country." What the U.S. needed was someone who could control (or, at least, appear to control) the Philippines. Bonner describes the behind-the-scenes efforts that projected Cory Aquino into the struggle for power in the Philippines. Before she advanced on Marcos, Aquino as a political entity was created by a staff of U.S. supporters and advisors. Her whole campaign was tailored for her U.S. audience long before it was distributed to its Filipino consumers. The crucial election that gave Aquino her source of legitimacy was carefully orchestrated by U.S. interests. Filipino allies were not too difficult to obtain, but the complete charade that affected the departure of Marcos was a complex process that goes beyond the goals of this article. On February 25, 1986, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos left the Philippines.

Some time has passed. The World Bank has evaluated Mrs. Aquino's land reform policy as "fundamentally flawed". Human Rights Watch's Annual Report revealed that in 1988 the Philippines passed Columbia to become the number one nation in the world in disappearances and murders of human rights workers. Task Force Detainees of the Philippines which originally supported Aquino's election reports that 11,000 persons were arrested for political crimes in the Philippines in 1988. The two-class policy of subjugating the Philippine is still working, at least for the time being. Mrs. Aquino has made many compromises. The presence of the U.S. bases are unchallenged. Two-thirds of the population of the Philippines live in rural poverty. The New People's Army (NPA) continues the guerrilla struggle that began over 90 years ago. The Philippines could still easily become America's next Vietnam.

The Last Vietnam

Another Vietnam might not destroy the American people. After all, Americans, left and right, have slowly begun to service the wounds of that conflict. But there may be more involved in a Vietnam in the Philippines. When the U.S. launched its military presence in Vietnam, it was a matter of carving defensible fortresses out of unclaimed land. In the Philippines, the American bases are long-standing institutions. Their legitimacy in the eyes of the U.S. government make Lincoln's obsession with Fort Sumter seem trivial.

The American bases are the one obstacle that all American collaborators in the Philippines must overcome. The Military Bases agreements of 1947 provided the justification for two extremely large U.S. military bases in the Philippines—Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base. According to Schirmer and Shalom, the agreement assured the bases presence for 99 years, "prohibited the Philippines from granting base rights to say any other country, and placed no restrictions on the uses to which the U.S. could put the bases, nor the types of weapons that it could deploy or store there." As Raymond Bonner points out on Aquino's earlier position on the bases, "Mrs. Aquino was opposed to the bases in principle. As a nationalist she didn't like the foreign influence; as a woman and Catholic she was sickened by the seediness surrounding the bases, the abuse and exploitation of women, the thousands of teenagers who had turned to prostitution. But her positions on the bases did play well in Washington. So she modified it." For an American public obsessed with the fate of Amerasian children in Vietnam, the births of generations of Amerasian offspring around the U.S. bases in the Philippines apparently holds no currency. Thanks to the thriving market in human flesh and narcotics around bases, the AIDS epidemic has found fertile ground and grown proportionally.

Carlo M. Recto contributed a long career of public service to the Philippines. His career's earlier years are marked by an unsurprising upper-class Filipino's political service to u.S. interests. His later years were devoted to a striking awareness of what the U.S. bases really mean for the people of the Philippines. Just before his death, Recto recognized the true purposes of the bases,

"American commentators candidly admit the purpose of these bases is not our protection against, but our invitation to enemy attack in order to protect the people of the United States at the cost of the lives of our own people. ... I am the first to admit it is understandable that political and military leaders of the United States should devise ways and means of protecting the lives of their own people. If in a nuclear war they stand to lose 100 million in the first few hours of a concentrated enemy attack, it would be natural for them to try to minimize their causalities by diverting the attack. Overseas bases, like those in the Philippines, are precisely the diversionary objectives for such enemy attack on the United States."

Recto's realization through astute is limited in its vision. As Hayes, Zarsky, and Bello point out in their American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific, the Americans and the Soviets have each invented a nuclear commitment to controlling the Pacific theatre. It no longer takes two to make a nuclear holocaust. The U.s. is unequivocally committed to protecting its nuclear hold on the Philippines. There was no such commitment or tradition in Vietnam. The U.S. will not give up the Philippines as easily as it gave up Vietnam—as if that were not cost enough. Those nuclear weapons in the Philippines, though originally deployed to distract the fire of our enemies might just as well be turned on the "enemies" who are blessed with their presence.

The Filipino people understand what is at stake there more than anyone else. These excerpts from a poem by Ruben Anib, an NPA guerrilla say it well:

Death shall have no dominion
The people realize you from its shackles
And hold you in being in their hearts
Fallen comrades you arise anew with the masses

Never shall you cease to serve
Future is long/generation arriving
You prove selflessness unto death opens us earth
Cracks us rock/and death shall have no dominion

In 1520, the Spanish conquistador Ferdinand Magellan captured the imagination of would-be explorers and adventurers of many generations to come. Magellan was the first European to sail around the world. At least, he was the first European to lead an expedition that sailed around the world. Magellan himself didn't complete the voyage.

There were two multi-color illustrations of Magellan in my fifth-grade history book. One showed the gallant explorer striking a majestic pose looking across the bow of his ship. The caption read "Magellan: the First Man to Circumnavigate the Globe". The other illustration showed Magellan face down in the mud in a jungle setting. Its caption read "Magellan: Killed by Savages on an Island in the South Pacific".

Magellan was killed by Chief Lapu-Lapu on the Philippine island of Mactan. Since all written records of the event as recorded by the people of the Mactan were later destroyed by their Spanish conquerors, we can't know how the Spanish conquistador failed to measure up in the eyes of the Philippine inhabitants. (The Christian Spanish destroyed all existing Filipino written documents on the basis that they were "pagan".) We only know that Western European culture's conquest of the word for God, glory, and gold came to an end for Magellan in the Philippines. Unless modern day conquistadors grow and learn or are controlled by those of us who do grow and learn, we and all of humankind will join Magellan in his fate.

—David Curry, Chicago Chapter, National Staff, VVAW