CIA METHODS OF TORTURE APPLIED TO MORONG 43 IN THE PHILIPPINES

CIA-KUBARK TORTURE METHODS AND PSYCHO-WAR SCHEMES INFLICTED ON 43 HEALTH WORKERS IN THE PHILIPPINES

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
Philippines Cultural Studies Center



The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) occupies center-stage again in the Philippines, the laboratory in 1950-1960s for the Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam inspired by CIA agent Edward Lansdale who is credited for defeating the communist-led Huk uprising. Attention is being given to the CIA systematization of coercive techniques in handling prisoners, including diverse forms of torture, zealously implemented by the police/military officials of the corrupt, unpopular Gloria Arroyo regime.
Since the Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo prison scandals, the world public has now become sensitized to the moral/political problem of torture, whether used in peace time or in war. In 1997 The Baltimore Sun first exposed the CIA’s training manual applying torture against anti-government subversives in Central America. The manual refers to the 1983 Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual based on the Vietnam-era predecessor called the 1963 “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation.” Interviews of both victims and security agents in Honduras confirmed that kidnapping, surveillance, infiltration of spies, crowd control, torture and murder in the 1980s were committed by the U.S.-supported Honduran, El Salvadoran and Guatemalan military in the war against communism during President Reagan’s administration.
The CIA 1983 manual focuses on interrogation methods that, though prohibited by domestic and international law, can be used with approval by higher authority. The manual emphasizes that the questioner “has total control over the subject and his environment.” It recommends stripping suspects naked, keeping them blindfolded, and manipulating the “environment to create unpleasant and intolerable situations.” Old measures have been refined and geared for psycho-war: depriving prisoners of food and sleep, keeping them in rigid positions, threatening family and loved ones and showing how they are suffering or are in danger, bribery, etc. Why are these effective? Because “the threat to inflict pain may trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain.” This supplements actual physical pain inflicted in the course of arrest and incarceration.
The thrust of the 1983 CIA torture formula is psychological: ‘The pain which is inflicted upon [the detainee] from outside himself may actually intensify his will to resist…but pain which he feels he is inflicting upon himself is more likely to sap his resistance” (Cohn et al, 1997). Hence, the need for the prisoner to maintain rigid positions” etc. in which “the immediate source of pain is not the ‘questioner,’ but the subject himself.” Once a confession is obtained, the pressures are lessened so that this “friendly handling” will induce further cooperation. What stands out, however, is the emphasis on prolonged solitary confinement and other types of sensory deprivation which generates unbearable stress, anxiety, etc. Hypnosis, drugs, medical, chemical or electrical methods could be used to accelerate acquiescence, with help from psychiatrists, anthropologists/cultural experts, medical personnel, and so on.
The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee noted in a 1989 memorandum that the early 1963 KUBARK manual used in Vietnam was used in Honduras, with slight tweakings to produce the 1983 version. A Website on “Is there a torture manual?” by Josh Clark states that both manuals coincide in methods of inducing a detainee to volunteer information: “Artificial light, isolation, unfamiliarity and disorientation through solitary confinement and sensory deprivation,” sleep deprivation, prolonged stress, electric shocks, etc., are combined with the more sophisticated coercive tactics demonstrated at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and other “rendition” prisons (http://science.howstuffworks.cpm /torture-manual.htm). In The Shock Doctrine (2007), noted author Naomi Klein details the academic origin and sociopolitical ramifications of this new paradigm of torture discovered during the Cold War but deployed and finessed by successive U.S. administrations to preserve its violent interventions and hegemonic control in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, courts in Spain and elsewhere are now planning to try officials of the Bush administration for crimes against humanity, with help from the US Center for Constitutional Rights.

Inventing a Global Conscience

Most informed people today know that in the light of Vietnam and the horrors in Chile, Honduras, Colombia, and other Cold War battlefields, the United Nations has tightened restrictions against torture. The 1985 U.N. Convention Against Torture, ratified by 25 countries (except the U.S.), strengthened the 1950 Geneva Convention prohibiting degradation and humiliation of war prisoners. The UN Convention defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession” (4 Feb. 1985 )
The Philippine group KARAPATAN has fully substantiated the Arroyo regime’s culpability in violating the UN Convention provisions, as well as the Philippine Constitution’s Bill of Rights. The 2007-2009 reports on human rights violations and extrajudicial killings in the Philippines by Philip Alston, U.N. rapporteur for human rights; by Amnesty International and by Human Rights Watch, among others, re-emphasized the need for the Philippine government to conform to United Nations and international law standards. What strikes this author is that since the Marcos dictatorship’s unconscionable crimes, followed by the hypocritical promises of reform by Aquino, Ramos, Estrada and Arroyo (the Melo Commission and Task Force Usig), international groups keep repeating the need for government action, when everyone knows that the oligarchic political-economic system and the social classes in control can never deliver justice and guarantee respect for human rights: not one military or police personnel has been convicted for torture, abduction, and extrajudicial killings in the last 40 years (see the various surveys in Buck and Wolf 2008).

The UN, Amnesty International, World Council of Churches, and others keep advising Arroyo to reform. But to no avail, as the treatment of the Morong 43 demonstrates since their detention last February. Forty-two community health workers and doctors were conducting health-skill training seminars in Morong, Rizal, Philippines, sponsored by legal public organizations when they were arrested at the farmhouse of Dr. Melecia Velmonte, a retired medical professor at the University of the Philippines. They were violently frisked, blindfolded, and held incommunicado in a remote military camp—a prolonged experience of State terrorism predicated on the unproven guilt of the suspects (San Juan 2010).
In March the Philippine Court of Appeals denied their constitutional right of habeas corpus on the basis of a Marcos-era doctrine that such detainees can no longer be released since the AFP/PNP has filed a case in court (that is, the charge of illegal possession of explosives and firearms, planted by the arresting agents). This despite the defective warrant of arrest and the legally flawed inquest proceeding. The Public Interest Law Center and the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers argued that the Court disregarded the litany of the violations of the constitutional rights of the 43 health workers during their unlawful arrest. While you read this, the experience of torture suffered by these 43 persons in the military camp worsens by the hour, 24 hours of every day.
In an incisive critique of the Court’s judgment, Prof. Gill Boehringer pointed out that the Court “ignored the illegalities committed in the search, arrest and subsequent proceedings,” supposedly “cured” by the filing of criminal charges (Bulatlat 12 April 2010). Two dissenting justices bewailed the toleration of illegal arrests and detention for the sake of a dubious “curative information.” In short, the Court favored the AFP/PNP instead of the 43 citizens, despite the illegality of the search and brutal detention process. Justice is on the side of the oligarchic State, not the citizens who are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Hobbes’ monstrous Leviathan, comprised here of the ruthless military, police, and the authoritarian Arroyo bureaucracy and retainers, reigns supreme—this despite the worldwide call for ending the torture and detention by the Catholic Bishops Conference last April 7, by the U.S. National Nurses United (with 150,000 members), and numerous international organizations. Indeed, Arroyo may have already surpassed Marcos in her regime’s flagrant atrocities and the military/police brutalization of thousands of suspected citizens, all in the name of free-market democracy and US hegemonic domination over the planet.

A Tradition of Dehumanizing

All the methods recommended in the two CIA manuals cited earlier were employed by the AFP/PNP and legitimized by the Philippine Court of Appeals. We cannot detail here the variations and nuances of their application. Of interest is the use of the element of surprise in the time and manner of arrest so as to achieve “the maximum amount of mental discomfort.” The CIA recommends early hours of the morning to arouse “intense feelings of shock, insecurity and psychological stress.” To prevent the detainees from relaxing and recovering from the shock, the manual recommends that prisoners be blindfolded, stripped and given a thorough examination, including all body cavities. When 300 soldiers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and Philippine National Police (PNP) personnel “with covered nameplates” descended on the sleeping quarters and training venue of 43 doctors, nurses and trainees, it was early morning. I quote their Press Statement of April 12: “They bodily searched our male and some female companions, herded us into driveway, handcuffed and blindfolded us and brought us to Camp Capinpin,” a tightly guarded headquarters of the 202nd Infantry Brigade.
The “standard operating procedure” of the CIA/Pentagon’s “shock and awe” strategy is followed. The detainees’ plea for lawyers, search warrants, and other demands were turned down; they were segregated, some in solitary confinement. Disruption of routine and normal life (their reduction to the level of object/animal) was fundamental. The detainees were handcuffed and blindfolded, harassed, threatened for 36 hours, 48 hours for some.” They testify that “We were deprived of sleep and from time to time questioned and forced to admit that we are NPAs [New People Army guerillas]. We were fingerprinted while blindfolded. Our pictures in three views were taken.”
Blackmail, continuous interrogation, repeated threats and intimidation, prolonged constraint (incommunicado), and deprivation of “normal routine” in eating and sleeping, constant surveillance, and everything “to induce psychological regression” by a superior force to bear on his will to resist”—all these can be gleaned from the following testimony released to the public under lawyer’s advice:
“Questioning, threatening and deceitful offers of house and lot, money and freedom in exchange for military ‘cooperation’ by our military captors continued at the detention center anytime of the day until the last week of February. Questions asked by our military captors were not related to the making of explosives or firearms. Some of us are still in isolation cells. We were deprived of legal counsel for 5 days after our arrest and doctors of our own choice. Five of our companions were deceitfully and forcefully removed from our detention center. They are made to cooperate with the military for the latter’s propaganda purposes and to testify against us….
Our outside morning exercises are curtailed, hot water and drinking water is limited or even stopped and sun drying of our laundry is banned if military captors get angry with us for no reason. Confiscation of paper, writing materials, tissue and even plastic continues. Bugging device is installed. We are photographed by our military captors when going to court hearings. We are videotaped when government officials visit us.” Other methods of torture include: denying privacy in the bathrooms, limiting visiting times for family, reshuffling detainees from one jail to another, solitary confinement, constant guarding even with relatives, threats of salvaging or extrajudicial execution; threat of being “roasted” or “rotting in jail,” or killed outright; threat of the arrest of father and mother, and various forms of intimidation.
Doctors from the Council for Health and Democracy, Community Medicine Foundation, and other organizations have “deduced that the military may have also electrocuted” the detainees and used chemical and pharmacological torture” (Marya Salamat, Bulatlat, 1 March 2010 ).

Sign Your Own Death Sentence

In earlier reports, we learn that apart from grueling interrogations, two of the detainees (Valentin Paulino and Ramon de la Cruz) were forced to admit their membership in the communist New People’s Army by signing affidavits. Paulino complained to his mother that the AFP was subjecting him to beatings and mental torture (BAYAN Press Release, 26 Feb. 2010; in Bulatlat Website). Two others were isolated and pressured to cooperate: Jennilyn Pizarro and John Mark Barrientos. Meanwhile, Cherrilyn Tawagon and Ellen Carandang were offered P50,000 as reward for “rebel returnees.” The detainees were served spoiled meager food, condemned by Father Diony Cabillas as “inhumane and cruel” (reported by Ronalyn Olea, Bulatlat, March 10, 2010).
Acting under orders from their superiors, including Arroyo, Gen. Jorge Segovia and Col. Aurelio Baladad have refused volunteer medical doctors to examine the detainees. Two of them, Dr. Alex Montes (who was physically manhandled earlier) and Glenda Murillo are suffering serious symptoms, but are denied proper treatment. The Permanent People’s Tribunal summarized the classic plight of KUBARK victims in their February letter to Arroyo based on the report of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights: the detainees “remained in handcuffs and blindedfolded for more than 36 hours; they were denied food and bathroom privileges, confined in dark cells, forced to listen to sounds of gunfire and slapped several times during the night. They were not allowed to speak to each other and they were forced to admit that they were members of the New People’s Army.” Up to now the AFP/PNP have refused to allow them to appear in the Commission’s hearings or move them to civilian facilities more accessible to their lawyers and families, all reminiscent of the heyday of the infamous Honduran Battalion 316 and Central American death-squads.
Recurrent in the testimony are practices such as sudden disruption of routines, solitary confinement, threats of pain (to the detainee or her family), sexual molestation, maneuvers of surveillance (photographing, etc.) to which victims of CIA-tutored agents (trained in the School of Americas from 1987 to 1991) were invariably subjected. Though discontinued in 1992 and replaced by the U.S. Army’s FM 34-52 Intelligence Interrogation Manual (see Wikipedia on “U.S. Army and CIA Interrogation manuals ), the techniques are obviously still used by the AFP and PNP whose officials receive training from US advisers and US institutions, following various military treaties and executive agreements between the two nations. Since formal independence from the U.S. in 1946, both the AFP and PNP have received millions of tax-dollars in funding for training, equipment and logistics from the Foreign Assistance Program of the U.S. Congress chanelled through the CIA, US-AID, and numerous conduits and transmission-belts.

Localizing Subaltern Punishment

A great portion of the infamous CIA KUBARK manual actually originated in the Philippines, according to Alfred McCoy’s meticulously documented book Policing America’s Empire (2009). McCoy describes how US colonial occupation laid the foundation for the current authoritarian state, notably exemplified by the Marcos’ martial-law regime. The neocolonial state from Roxas to Arroyo has deployed clandestine penetration, psychological warfare, disinformation, media manipulation, massive surveillance, vigilante or para-military violence, assassination, and so on, to suppress civic criticism and popular dissent. His narrative takes us to the 1950 Cold War and the partnership of President Ramon Magsaysay and Lansdale “when the CIA tested new counterinsurgency doctrines,” and later “helped build a massive anti-riot force for metropolitan Manila” (2009, 19).
The CIA and other US agencies were instrumental in training elite Philippine Constabulary units such as the Metrocom Intelligence Service Group (MISG) and the Fifth Constabulary Security Unity (CSU; later renamed Regional Security Unit 4). With such notorious torturers as Col. Rolando Abadilla and Major Rodolfo Aguinaldo, these units (with the help of the “seeds” of the private armies today, the Civilian Home Defense Forces) terrorized the population. From 1979 to 1989, the MISG and CSU displayed extreme brutality in using extensive electric shocks, sensory deprivation, temperature modifications, blindfolding, and psychological techniques such as those inflicted on the Morong 43. Col Abadilla studied at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Major Aguinaldo was trained by CIA instructors in still unverified sites.
The Marcos dictatorship prides itself in its record of arresting at least 70,000 people, torturing 35,000 and killing at least 3,257—2,500 of these victims were “salvaged,” that is, tortured and killed, with the scarred remains dumped for display to terrorize the public. Of the many tortured, McCoy cites the case of civic leader Trinidad Herrera. She was arrested in May 1977, “stripped naked, and forced to wind an electric wire around her nipple” by state security led by Edward Matillano and Prudencio Regis, who, after trial, were declared not guilty for any violation. McCoy also cites the case of Melvin Cayabyab, two months pregnant, who was sexually molested, “given electric shocks through wires placed on her thumbs and threatened with rape and application of electric shocks to her vagina and nipples” (406). McCoy observes that “these Filipino interrogators carried the CIA’s psychological paradigm into its ultimate dimension,” to an “expansive theatricality” and “lurid brutality” that may be seen, for example, in Lino Brocka’s still censored film, ORA PRO NOBIS or the recent film DUKOT directed by Joel Lamangan. Torture has become banal, even trivialized in bureaucratic U.S. State Department Human Rights reports and their nullity in impact.

Remembrance of Things Recurrent

After September 11, 2001, the US war on global terrorism (or Islamic extremism) has retooled the CIA methods for a new type of “low intensity warfare,” as former CIA agent Philip Agee noted in a 2003 review of US “covert actions.” “Low-intensity warfare” was the term for U.S. counterinsurgency in Central and South America, and in the Philippines (see Klare and Kornbluh 1989); its latest incarnation is the presence of a U.S. base of Special Forces in Zamboanga directing the raids against the Abu Sayyaf and the NPA (Docena 2008), and the series of AFP campaigns against the NPA known as Oplan Bantay Laya I and II.
William Blum reminds us that in 1987, during Corazon Aquino’s presidency, Reagan approved a $10 million, two-year plan for increased CIA involvement in the counter-insurgency campaign. The CIA undertook large-scale psychological warfare operations and U.S. military advisers routinely accompanied Philippine troops during their maneuvers” (2005, 190; see Smith 1976, for CIA relations with Macapagal, Arroyo’s father, and other Filipino politicians). With AFP/PNP assignment to US training centers and with the JUSMAG (Joint U.S. –Philippine Military Advisory Group) and the Visiting Forces Agreement enforcing and preserving Washington/Pentagon’s ascendancy over the Philippine state, we will see the KUBARK trademark visible in the stigmata of torture victims such as the Morong 43 and many others. Indeed, the CIA is alive and well in the Philippines, thanks to the subservience of the decadent quasi-feudal oligarchy, the traditional landlords and compradors whose mercenary generals and judges thrive while nine to ten million OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) remit $14 billion to prop up the bankrupt economy (San Juan 2007).
A huge library of human rights violations, extrajudicial killings, torture, abductions, etc. has accumulated during Arroyo’s tenure. One can cite the cases of human rights activists Eddie Gumanoy, Eden Marcellana, and Benjaline Hernandez who received the KUBARK treatment from Arroyo’s celebrated general Jovito Palparan. Other cases of torture by the military documented by the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, the International Action Center, and the Asian Commission for Human Rights include Pastor Andy Pawican; United Methodist couple Librado and Martina Gallardo; Nueva Vizcayan farmer Ruel Marcial; Pastor Berlin Guerrero; lay missionary Angelina Bisuna-Ipong; Reynaldo and Raymond Manalo, detained and tortured by forces under Gen. Palparan, named by the government’s Melo Commission as responsible for political killings.
In June 2007, Sophie Richardson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, urged the US to consider suspending military aid to the Philippines unless members of its military suspected in extrajudicial political killings have been prosecuted. Human Rights Watch released its 84-pages report entitled “Scared Silent: Impunity for Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines” which documents the Arroyo security forces’ involvement in murder of members of leftist political parties, nongovernment organizations, journalists, clergy, activists, and so on; none of the military or police implicated in these killings have been successfully prosecuted (“Dirty War by the AFP,” Newsweek 28 June 2007). As of October 2009, Arroyo is credited (since Jan. 2001) with 1,118 politically motivated summary executions, 204 enforced disappearances. 1,026 tortured victims, 1,946 illegal arrests, and 255 political prisoners (Lefebvre 2010). Even the recent US State Department report on human rights in the Philippines re-confirmed in general the periodic reports of KARAPATAN on continued impunity for the AFP /PNP in their barbaric ritual of torture practised on the Morong 43 and others.

Apocalypse Now or Tomorrow?

Prompted by the horrendous Maguindanao massacre of 60 civilians in the Philippines last November, Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth visited the Philippines this week to find out what is being done with private armies. “Nothing can be done about it,” leading presidential contenders Noynoy Aquino and Manuel Villar in effect replied. (Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 26, 2010). The recent furor over “waterboarding” terrorist suspects by the occupying US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan evoked the “water cure” systematically used against Filipino revolutionaries in the Filipino-American War of 1899-1913. That war also witnessed hamletting, scorched-earth tactics, shooting prisoners, and clandestine surveillance and assassinations by the US occupying army, a model used by neoconservative pundits like Max Boot for the ongoing US “democratization” of Iraq and Aghanistan. A recent survey by Canadian scholar Priscilla Lefebvre summed up the whole Arroyo tenure as a sustained “war against the people through State violence” (2010). Short of a revolutionary mass upheaval, it appears that the CIA KUBARK torture techniques and its legitimization by the policing and jurisprudence system in the Philippines still have a long way to be “tweaked” and streamlined before its final scrapping.

REFERENCES

Agee, Philip. 2003. “Tracking Covert Actions into the Future.” In Covert Action, edited by Ellen Ray abnd William Schaap. Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press.
Amnesty International. 2006. Political Killings, Human Rights, and the Peace Process. London. UK: Amnesty International. ASA35/006/2006/en/dom-ASA350062006en.pdf>
Blum, Wiliam. 2005. Rogue State. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press.
Boehringer, Gill. 2010. “Blighted: Philippine Jurisprudence and State Repression – The Morong 43.” Bulatlat (12 April):
Buck, Phillipp and Hannah Wolf, eds. “Political Killings and the Rule of Law.” Focus Asien: Schriftenreihe des Asienhauses. Berlin, Germany: Asienhaus / Action Network Human Rights-Philippines.
Cohn, Gary et al. 1997. “Torture was taught by CIA.” The Baltimore Sun (27 January).
Docena, Herbert. 2008. “Unconventional Warfare: Are U.S. Special Forces Engaged in an “Offensive War’ in the Philippines?” in The US and the War on Terror in the Philippines, edited by Patricio Abinales and Nathan Gilbert Quimpo. Manila:Anvil.
International Action Center. 2007. Fact Finding Report on the Philippines. New York: International Action Center.
Klare, Michael and Peter Kornbluh, eds. 1989. Low Intensity Warfare. Quezon City: Ken Incorporated.
Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine. New York: Picador/Henry Holt and Company.
Lefebvre, Priscillia. 2010. “A State of Terror: The Death of Human Rights in the Philippines.” The Bullet (E-Bulletin No. 346). (April 28).
McCoy, Alfred. 2009. Policing America’s Empire. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Morong 43. 2010. “Press Statement of the Morong 43.” Bulatlat (12 April).
National Council of Churches of the Philippines. 2007. “Let the Stones Cry Out”: An Ecumenical Report on Human Rights in the Philippines and a Call to Action. Quezon City, Philippines: National Council of Churches.
San Juan, E. 2007. US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines. New York: Palgrave.
___. 2010. “Global Protests Mounting Against US-financed State Terrorism in the Philippines.” Political Affairs (March 1-31, 2010).
Smith, Joseph B. 1976. Portrait of a Cold Warrior. New York: Ballantine Books.

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E. SAN JUAN, Jr. is emeritus professor of Ethnic Studies, English & Comparative Literature from several U.S. universities. He was recently a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. His recent books are In the Wake of Terror (Lexington), US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave), Critique and Social Transformation (Edwin Mellen), and Toward Filipino Self-Determination (SUNY Press). He recently finished a translation of the Tao Te Ching/Dao De Jing into Filipino, the national language of the Philippines (see the Wordpress Website “Philippines Matrix Project”).

From POLITICAL AFFAIRS.NET: Global Protests Against Arroyo State Terrorism

Online at: http://politicalaffairs.net/article/view/9333/

Global Protests Mounting Against US-financed State Terrorism in the Philippines
By E. San Juan, Jr.


After the terrible catastrophes in Haiti and Chile, the ongoing Philippine social “earthquakes” may seem trite, though they impact on close to a hundred million Filipinos. Its tremors are being registered by 3 million Filipino residents in the U.S. and a million in Canada. Apart from the paltry statistic that the majority in the U.S.’s longest neocolony, the Philippines, subsists on less than $2 a day, and ten percent of the population live abroad as low-paid migrant workers around the planet, one of the worst massacres in recent history occurred in Maguindanao, a strife-torn province in the southern Philippines.

The 2009 Human Rights Report of the US State Department released a few days ago scored the regime of de facto president Gloria Arroyo as guilty of the “killing of civilians and journalists.” To quote the Report: “Arbitrary, unlawful, and extrajudicial killings by elements of the security services and political killings…continued to be major problems…Members of the [State] security services committed acts of physical and psychological abuse on suspects and detainees, and there were instances of torture” (GMA News.TV, 14 March 2009). An unprecedented indictment, inconceivable during the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld tenure.

Rehearsal for Draconian Martial Rule

A flagrant instance of the impunity with which the Arroyo military and police are inflicting atrocities on civilians is the case of the “Morong 43.” On Feb. 6, 43 medical and healthcare workers were abducted and illegally detained while attending training seminars in Morong, Rizal. The event was sponsored by the prestigious Community Medicine Foundation Inc. and the Council for Health and Development. Over 300 soldiers and police barged into the farmhouse of well-known professor-physician, Dr. Melecia Velmonte, roughly blindfolded and handcuffed all 43 unarmed civilians and subjected them to 24-hours interrogation and all kinds of torture in Camp Capinpin, headquarters of the 202nd Infantry Brigade, Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).

After their lawyers filed a petition for habeas corpus, the AFP filed charges against them for illegal possession of explosives and firearms—evidences planted by the military and police. The Court of Appeals, relying on an outdated legal precedent (the 1985 “Ilagan versus Enrile” ruling) denied their right to be innocent before being proved guilty, ignoring the defective warrant of arrest and the AFP’s brutality. Punished physically and mentally by the shock of being judged criminals, the Morong 43 continue to be harassed and persecuted daily. A recent update names Vincent Paulino, Glenda Murillo and Dr. Alex Montes as suffering the effects of torture, according to Dr. Julie Caguiat of the Community Health Development Foundation, and Dr. Geneve Rivera, president of the Health Alliance for Democracy (report by Marya Salamat, Bulatlat, 1 March 2010).

Universal condemnation of the regime’s abuse has reached the imperialist heartland. US Senators Barbara Boxer and Daniel Inouye, and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, as well as officials of the US State Department, have been informed of the military abuses. The United Methodist Church sent observers to Camp Capinpin, while the World Council of Churches and the Permanent People’s Tribunal demanded the release of the Morong 43 (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 17 Feb. 2010; http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/). Joining them are two national labor groups, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Relations and the Asia Pacific American Labor Alliance, as well as numerous local Amnesty International chapters, BAYAN USA, and over 500 people’s organizations around the U.S. and Canada, that support the Filipino human-rights monitor, KARAPATAN, as well as the efforts of Chair Leila de Lima of the Commission on Human Rights who vowed to conduct hearings on the case by March 18.

Criminalizing Civil Rights

Fascist military officials manipulate the legal system to deprive citizens of fundamental human rights. Philippine Senators Jamby Madrigal and Pia Cayetano blasted the arrogant AFP officials, particulary Gen. Victor Ibrado, for criminalizing membership in leftist organizations and even lawful party-list groups such as Bayan Muna (illustrated by the persecution of Representatives Satur Ocampo and Crispin Beltran). Sen. Madrigal accused the AFP of arrogant conduct, insulting the victims by awarding medals to officials guilty of blatant human-rights violations (report by Michael Ubac and Alcuin Papa, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 24 Feb. 2010). Romeo Clamor, deputy secretary general of KARAPATAN, whose wife Dr Merry Mia-Clamor is one of those detained, noted that this outrage forms part of the regime’s failed counter-insurgency plan, Oplan Bantay Laya II, which brands progressive critics of Arroyo as fronts for the Communist Party and New People’s Army in order to label them “enemies of the state, ” thus justifying their warrantless arrest, kidnapping or disappearance, and summary execution (report by Janess Ellao, Bulatlat, 7 Feb. 2010; see the criticism of AFP vigilantism by Prof. Michael Tan, Pinoy Kasi column, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 9 Feb. 2010).

Consequently, Arroyo’s butchers, headed by Gen. Jorge Segovia, Col. Aurelio Baladad, and Col. Jaime Abawag, and their superiors refuse to be deterred. They take pride that no military personnel has so far been charged guilty for over 1,000 extrajudicial murders and forced “disappearances” since Arroyo usurped power in 2002. As Atty. Edre Olalia of the National Union of People’s Lawyers clarified the chain of accountability, Arroyo cannot leave office with impunity: “These illegal acts are being condoned or sanctioned by the highest officials of the land, from the Commander-in-chief and the AFP chief of staff” (Bulatlat 26 Feb. 2010).

Apprenticeship in Barbarism

The fascist militarization of the Philippine government started with the beginning of the Cold War, as noted by Renato Constantino (Insight and Foresight, 1977). Since Col. Edward Lansdale, the notorious creator of the “Phoenix” assassination program in Vietnam in the Sixties, trained AFP officials in US CIA schemes, the AFP and state security agencies have been infamous in terrorizing ordinary citizens. Hernando Abaya (in his biography, The Making of a Subversive, 1984), CIA agent Joseph Smith’s account, Portrait of a Cold Warrior, 1976), William Chapman (Inside the Philippine Revolution, 1987), and Jose Diokno (Anti-Americanism, 1984), among others, have documented US interference in local politics. AFP officials now entrenched in government and their apologists in the local court system are implementing all the torture and psy-war techniques learned from the CIA and US Special Forces in Latin America, Iraq, Afghanistan (as reviewed in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, 2007): electric shock, beatings, sexual molestation, bad food, deprivation of sleep and privacy, bribes, intimidation, separating detainees, threatening their families, and so on. This is synchronized with propaganda that the health workers are bogus, and they are members of the New People’s Army (stigmatized as “terrorist” by the Bush administration). All their Constitutional rights, as well as their basic human rights guaranteed by the United Nations Human Rights Charter and Covenants (to which the Philippine government is bound), are violated everyday.

A Filipina-American victim of the Arroyo paramilitary “death-squad,” Melissa Roxas, survived to tell her story of abduction and torture while on a medical mission to the Philippines last year. Roxas insisted that no human being should be deprived of liberty and dignity while trying to help people’s medical needs for lack of government concern. “Every day that the 43 health workers are not released,” Roxas argued, “it is one more day they have to endure pain, fear, and torture” (report by Jerrie M. Abella, GMANews.TV, 26 Feb. 2010)

Experienced observers of the Philippine situation have suggested that the Morong 43 is just an alibi, a media distraction to cover up Arroyo’s complicity in a far more heinous crime on top of unresolved corruption scandals. After all, the 43 health care workers are still alive, but 57 murdered people cannot be brought back to life. On November 23, 2009, those 57 civilians—including 32 journalists, with most of the female victims sexually mutilated—fell to the trap of Arroyo’s favored warlord, the Ampatuan clan of Maguindanao. By fake ballots and control of the electoral machinery in their fiefdom, the Ampatuans delivered the crucial thousands of votes that allowed Arroyo’s victory in the 2004 elections.

On December 2, 2009, in a special Press Release, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights Philip Alston, and Frank La Rue, UN rapporteur on freedom of expression, both condemned “the pre-meditated killing of political opponents” –a “tragedy of the first order.” They urged Arroyo to go “beyond a criminal law response” and take measures to prevent “election-related violence.” Last March 6, in London, UK, a joint forum of Amnesty International, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the National Union of Journalists in Great Britain and Ireland, together with the Campaign for Human Rights in the Philippines, held a commemoration program on the occasion of the 100th day of seeking justice for victims of the Maguindanao massacre. Jim Boumelha, president of IFJ, criticized in particular Arroyo’s Executive Order 546 which allowed the creation of neighborhood-watch type armed “force multipliers” (also known as Civilian Volunteer Organizations) as responsible for the Ampatuan massacre, as well as for countless disappearances and extrajudicial murders of activists (report by Rose Eclarinal, ABS-CBN Europe News Bureau, 6 March 2010).

From Impunity to Complicity

In the eyes of most Filipinos, Arroyo is directly and indirectly implicated with this ruthless bloodletting. The think-tank CENPEG (Center for People Empowerment in Governance) probed the origin of more than 200 private armies that Arroyo hypocritically vowed to dismantle after attempting to legitimize her martial-law exercise on Dec. 4 (Proclamation 1959). CENPEG traced it to Arroyo’s own support for political dynasties and their coercive instrumentalities: “It is an open secret that Pres. Arroyo coddled a local dynasty into a monster. The Ampatuans’ private armies were augmented not only to make sure that votes went to preferred candidates and political parties but also to pit lawless elements against rebels who threatened the clan’s local hegemony. Military soldiers, policemen and paramilitary units became part of the Ampatuans’ private armies….Civilian volunteer organizations (CVOs), said to be illegally formed, were armed as ‘force multipliers’ under Arroyo’s Executive Order 546, thus providing the pretext for their use not only by the Ampatuans but also by other local kingpins” (Issue Analysis No. 02, 27 Jan. 2010).

The Brussels-based International Crisis Group concurred in its 18-pages report that Arroyo “bears overwhelming responsibility for creating the conditions that led to the bloody massacre” (report by John Berthelsen, Asia Sentinel, 22 Dec. 2009). It concluded that “Political patronage by successive governments in Manila, most notably by the Arroyo administration, allowed the Ampatuans to amass great wealth and unchecked power.” Judging from the initial cavalier treatment of the Ampatuans by Arroyo’s advisers, and the failure of the AFP to apprehend all 183 suspects (one of them is Saudi Mokamad, head of the government’s 1507th Mobile Police Group) and the officious bureaucratic process of the investigations and trial, the consensus is that none of the private armies will be disbanded, nor will the collusion between political dynasties of oligarchs, military, local bureaucrats, compradors and transnational coporate interests, that have spawned the Abu Sayyaf and other bandit-groups, be diminished. It is even doubtful if any of the Ampatuans will be fully held accountable by the lopsided, heavily politicized justice system that tolerates the torture of the Morong 43.

Patronage over the Neocolony

On December 8, Representatives Howard Berman and Chris Smith introduced a concurrent Resolution in the US Congress condemning the senseless killing and called on the Arroyo regime to combat corruption and terrorism. This is like the proverbial appeal to the butcher to take care of the flock in the slaughter-house. But it is a symptom of ruling-class disenchantment at Arroyo’s gangsterism. Alarmed by the pattern of extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances of activists such as Jonas Burgos, and the torture of Melissa Roxas, the US Congress voted to withhold $2 million of the 2009 military aid to the Arroyo regime for failure to implement human rights stipulations attached to the Foreign Military Financing Act. The Senate Committee on Appropriations headed by Sen. Inouye is being pressured by various constituencies to cut off the use of American tax-payers’ money to finance Arroyo’s fascist measures to nourish her Bonapartist ambitions.

What can we expect in the weeks before the presidential brouhaha in May? The most likely scenario is that some of the health workers will be released on bail while others will continue to bear the brunt of military violence. “Divide and rule” policy will be applied. The Ampatuan trial will drag on until a compromise is reached with the incoming administration (assuming Arroyo does not grab emergency powers, declare a failure of elections due to defective automated poll machines, or stage bombings in line with the Marcos dictatorship’s formula for legitimizing martial despotism). The VFA will be modified to permit substantial US Special Forces, Balikatan Military Exercises, and other unconscionable practices to continue. It all depends on whether the US will be able to accomodate the Moro insurgents, or else shift their attention to Indonesia and Malaysia. Meanwhile, the war on terror will maintain the Abu Sayyaf as the scapegoat and pretext for continuing intervention in the Philippines. A dialectical-materialist analysis of the conjuncture of all the trends noted above spells the further disintegration of the neocolonial oligarchic status quo due to internal splits, the loss of US hegemonic sway with its gradual economic decline, and the resurgence of nationalist-democratic

influence on the middle strata, indigenous communities, and other sectors allied to peasant and proletarian mobilizations.

Seismic Alternatives to “Shock and Awe”

However, new developments might alter the balance of political forces. With the Feb. 3 murder of a Filipino civilian, Gregan Cardeno’s, employed by the US military in Camp Ranao, Marawi City, where the Philippine Army 103rd Brigade is based, and the electoral circus heating up to an obscene climax, the plight of the Morong 43 might be overshadowed—unless mass rallies and protests can connect it with the Ampatuan massacre. Surely, there will be the usual count of bodies in hotly contested electoral spots. Armed confrontations might heat up in regions where mining, plantations, and logging businesses flourish. The issue of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), as well as fear of new corruption inquiries, will force Arroyo to stifle any media expose of the maltreatment and sodomization of Cardenozz by US soldiers.

It’s not all quiet in the “western” front. Mobilization of OFWs in North America is going on parallel to those in Hong Kong, Europe and the Middle East. Not all such initiatives are enlightened, but most are symptomatic of neocolonial malaise. For example, a petition by concerned Filipino Americans concerning electoral fraud and violence was presented to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last March 10, with the request that a US delegation be sent to the Philippines. The model of Senator Richard Lugar’s observer team to the dictator Marcos’ 1986 “snap elections” was invoked. This is rather foolish and misplaced. What business tycoon Loida Nicolas Lewis and others should be persuading the Obama administration to do is to investigate and publicize to the US public the barbaric acts of their clients, Arroyo and her military minions. They should also demand the scrapping of the VFA which allows covert disastrous US military operations within Camp Navarro, Zamboanga City, for example, and allows US forces to engage in actual combat operations killing and wounding civilians under the guise of humanitarian and training exercises. The VFA violates not only the Philippine Constitution but flagrantly nullifies Philippine sovereignty. Countless Filipino lives have been sacrificed to service US imperial adventures since the slaughter of 1.4 million Filipinos in the Filipino-American War (1899-1913) with its inauguration of “waterboarding.” Not least of these global interventions are the genocidal “disaster-capitalist” (to borrow Klein’s rubric) wars against oppressed peoples in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Colombia, and elsewhere. Many of the victims of US drone bombings are women and children in villages in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan, and other countries.

One of the victims of the U.S.-Arroyo war on global terror is the Filipino woman named Dom-an, widow of Jose Pepe Riberal Manegdeg III, assassinated by paramilitary agents on 28 November 2005. In her public testimony, Dom-an played her bamboo flute before an audience at the Frontline 5th Dublin International Platform for Human Rights Defenders and denounced the Arroyo regime for its brutal persecution and murder of human rights activists and progressives, what she called the haunting “scars of Marcosian Martial Law” (SPHP Global Network, Feb. 2010; http://sphpglobal.ning/com/group/philippinejudicialreformsmoement/forum). Revitalizing a militant spirit of solidarity, Sister Mary Soledad Perpinan, chair of the Third World Movement against the Exploitation of Women, recently urged a gathering in MetroManila: “For the sake of gender security and nationwide peace, the urgent call is to put an end to US military presence and intervention. The time is to act now!”

SUTRANG KAYUMANGGI--mga tula ni E. San Juan, Jr.

Arroyo's Desperate Scheme: Torture Of Morong "43", A Rehearsal For Emergency Rule

Arroyo's Desperate Scheme: Torture Of Morong "43", A Rehearsal For Emergency Rule

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EARTH WIND FIRE WATER : Metamorposis ng Kalikasan -- E. San Juan, Jr.

LUPA TUBIG HANGIN APOY:
LUPA HANGIN APOY TUBIG


Metamorposis at Balat-kayo sa Daigdig ng Pakikipagsapalaran



1. LUPA

Nagulat namangha nang bumangga ang balikat natin—aksidente o itinadhana?--
sa pagsalikop ng Blumentritt at Misericordia, pook
ng aking kasibulan at paniningalang-pugad, di sinasadya.

Naligaw ng landas pauwi. Kundanga’y namulat sa ilang, iniilag-ilagan. Sa guhit-
tagpuan, nagkabungguan. Kaibigan, ito’y himutok ng kapus-palad.

Nakapangangalisag--nasa loob pa ba ako ng utak ng kung anong bathala,
binabalak pa, kung sakali. Gayunpaman, dapat magpasiya. Di bale, nawala sa gitna ng paglalakbay. Nasaan ang lagda, palatandaan habang inaabangan ang kagampan?

Buhay ko’y dapat isauli, tanggap ko. Dapat sundin, talimahin: muhon dito, bakod
doon. Ngayon, pagkaraan. Sapagkat gumanap na, aanhin pa ang bukang-liwayway? Ipagbilinan: subaybayan.

Ipinagmumuni: tigil na muna. Pag-aralan ang dahilig na tarundon, baluktot na
pilapil pasikut-sikot sa laberinto ng alabok luwad burak. Suriin ang talibis, tugaygayan ang likaw ng serpiyenteng nagkabuhol-buhol.

Ngunit di nagulo ang hanay ng mga bato sa daan. Orden vs. Anarkiya. Kung anong
mangyayari. Kahapon, ngayon na, hinaharap. Anong kahulugan ng kasaysayan? Tarukin sa kinalawang na ugat sa pusod ng gunita.

Samakatuwid, bawat hibla ng sinulid na sinukat, pulutin at ihabi ng sagisag sa
gulanit na talaarawan. Ngayon, kahapon, bukas.

Hinanap ang muhon bakod tanda lagda bakas na nakaukit sa tinataluntong
landas sa tanikala ng liku-likong panimdim.

Kronolohiya ng pintakasi’t pithaya. Bawat guhit o linya’y umiigting sa lambat ng
pagbubulay-bulay sa lansangang maalikabok. Nagpuputok ang dibdib, budhing mabalasik. Di masayod ng dunong o talino.

Huwag ituring na maligaya hanggang di ka natatalisod. Magulo pa sa sangkwaltang
abaka ang direksiyong naihayag. Walang tiyak na destinasyon, pinuluputan—totoo ba o hindi? Nagkukunwari lang?

Bawat hakbang ay lumilikha ng daan, saan ka man naroroon, kahit bumanggat
bumara sa binuksang tabing. Masdan mo: hiwa’y naghilom at di naglaon, lupa’y sumasalamisim, bumalong.

Kaluluwang nagkatawan, bagong ahon ako’t bagong salta, ngunit nabalaho sa
masukal na kalyeng tinahak, walang biro, habang namamaluktot ang malay sa gilid ng bangin, inaaninaw ang tulay sa dako po roon,

hinihimok bumalangkas ang teorya sa praktika, upang tuloy ilangkap at iugnay ang
kutob at hinuha sa bato’t putik ng katalagahan dito sa lupang kinagisnan.


2. TUBIG

Pinaglilirip ko kung bakit mabaho ang dagat sa baybayin ng Laguna Bay na
umaapaw sa basura’t dumi—sagisag ng kaunlaran ng bansa?

Di na sumasalpok ang alon sa batuhan ng pampang, at may pagkakataong nangyari
na di mo makuhang pumihit o bumalik—“One-way Street” lamang—ngunit disyertong lagusa’y dinidilig din ng alimuom ng daing at bumubugang hamog ng dalamhati

at sa sinumang makatagpo sa pagkakataong pambihira, para kang natuklaw ng kung
anong pangil na kumagat at bumaon sa ulirat, kaya hindi ka tuloy nakaabot sa kabilang baybay na laging inaasam-asam.

Tila ulol habang tumatawid sa tulay—Adyahan mo kami, Anghel ng ligalig at hilahil,
umahon, lumusong, umakyat, bumaba—humingi ng saklolo—

Umalalay ka, irog, sa pagsusumamo ng nawindang na muslak, kung pwede’y
ipamanhik--

Bakit di mapigtal sa isip ang larawan mong sumalampak doon sa matris ng unawa,
sumupling sa antig ng pagsuyo, imaheng kinulong sa inarugang dalumat, agimat o anting-anting laban sa ditang kay pait,

at kung saan sumupling ang tadyang ng libog at hibo ng pagnanais, doon sa langib
ng sugat, lapida ng kaluluwang naligaw habang sinusukat ang talim ng guniguning suwail taksil mapagkunwari, bakit hindi?

Sige, walang atras, bagamat sa salaming umaagos, mahirap maaninag kung sino,
kung ano—Adyahan mo kami, Anghel ng malikmatang pag-asang nilunod sa imburnal ng pangimpan at pagdidili-dili,

tanong ko sa iyo: Mapipigil ba ang daloy ng pangyayari at agos ng along
bumubuwag sa balakid baradong lagusan—hayan, masdan mo--nalulusaw ang anumang sagwil hanggang bakas na lamang ang masagap sa yapos ng inandukhang bait ng kayumangging lipi—

Galugarin ang masukal na loob bagamat nagiyagis, at baka doon nagtatago ang
lihim ng pagbabago—kilabot sa panimdim ang problema kung makababalik pa ang musmos na paglingap samantalang umaanti-antilaw ang sipat ng natisod na ulirat.

Harayang madaya, mapagparaya-- nagbabakasakali, labis sa hinagap lagpas sa
alulod ng kaluluwang inabot ng tabsing sa dagat—iwing hulagway na lumihis sa kinagawiang paghahambing at pagtatambal.

Bawat saglit nalululusaw hanggang bakas na lang ang maabot mo—sukat nang
sagipin, gumaod at sagipin ang nilumot na timbulan ng minimithing pagbabago

Dalangin ko’y matupad ang nais at atas ng puso, sukdang buhay ay ihandog sa
tunggalian ng uri, umahon, lumusong, ilunsad ang pita hanggang sa kandungan ng nagkubling kalaguyo (sumalingit sa gulo’t hinagpis) humimlay,

At doon, kung saan tumitibok pa ang lihim at lakas ng paglikha, ipalasap ang
luwalhati’t galak sa biyayang nadukal sa mga nabuwal, di magtutugot sa gitna ng kabuktutan at terorismo ng Estado, doon kung saan tumitining humihinahon unti-unti ang luntiang usbong ng pakikibaka at biyayang buko ng pulang dalampasigan.


3. HANGIN

Anong multo sa dibdib ang tumangis nang tumulak ang tren? nang umalis ang
bapor?

Di na abot-tanaw Sumasalimbay ang langay-langayan at doon naglambitin sa agiw
ng gunita kapagkwa’y biglang umulan winalis ang labi ng handaan sa hardin ng huling panambitan at inilibing sa hungkag na utak

Umihip bumuga ang libog sa buntot ng malikot na banog-lawin na nakaangkla sa
nakalalangong buhok ng mutyang nilalangit—habulin, labnutin, ikintal doon ang taimtim na pangako nilagom sa pagniniig

Itaob ang mga haliging humaharang sa aliw ng pakikibaka Hayun, nakatanod doon
ang kasapakat ng tadhana’t panahong nagunaw sa luhang nalaglag sa titig ng kwago ni Minerva

Lumipad na ang habilin at kung saan napadpad ang mensahe kung saang pook
naligaw hanapin at sunggaban ang hiyas ng sakripisyo upang makapagtawid-buhay hanggang di matagpuan kung saan ibuburol ang pinipintuhong diwata

Sinukat ng lasog na pakpak ang lugar ginagay ginalugad hinalungkat binunot ang
tinik sa noo ng sawimpalad tinanggihan kapagkwa’y
hinabol upang harapin ang balighong parabula ng kontradiksiyon

Baligtarin ang bakod na humahadlang sa angil at simbuyo ng kamalayan Walang
pasubaling nabagabag ang isip sa paghuhunos ng
talinghaga—Liksi, loobin ang pambihirang pagkakataon

Itaob ang dulang tapos na ang pista Baligtarin ang mangkok Pagtaklubin ang
taliwas at magkasalungat na nilalang sakmal ng pag-aalinlangan—Magpasiya sukdang ikasawi ng buhay!

Bawat oras bumibigat ang bagwis ng batu-bato Bumabalisbis ang ideyang
nagliwaliw—anong bilis ng pitlag ng balahibong inalagwa sa malayang himapapawid

Sumingaw ang bughaw na alimuom sa pusod ng gabing pawisan hapo sa
pakikipagtalik at di inaakalang makabubuntis kaya tuloy nagising ang mga impaktong malagkit ang hipo sa tarangkahan ng gunita at naninibasib

Sugo ng amihan: baliktarin ang batas ng kapalaran, bumalikwas sa utos ng tadhana

Huwag mag-alinlangan o mag-atubili tumingala’t tanawin kung ang buwa’y di
natinag ng lumalambong na buhawi’t unos ng mangungulimbat at sa dulo ng hagdan hudyatan tulungan ang mga nakiramay

Batiin ang nakasisilaw na buntung-hininga ng umaga habang pumapaimbulog ang
pulang bagwis ng panaginip lulan ang mga pangako hinala sapantaha hula—narinig ko iyon, maniwala ka, nasaksihan nang tumulak ang tren at umalis ang bapor at lumipad ang eruplano sa gawing kanluran



4. APOY

Pinukaw ang naglalatang na ningas ng aliw sa isang bar sa Pasay noong
nanininagalang-pugad—wika nila, krisis ng pagkatao-- hinahanap ko pa ang agham ni Siddhartha sa lupang tiniubuan

Di pa batid ang palaisipan ng paglimot sa sarili-- mula sa pusod at puyo ng
mapagbalat-kayong lungsod ng arkipelago sumibol ang diwang bumulas sa dingas at lagablab ng karanasan

Kailangan ang tiwala kung matutuklasan ang birtud ng imahinasyon sa daang
masalimuot sa tulong ng bantas pahiwatig titik ng sining sa tipanan nilagom sa aral ng paglalagalag

Katipan sa gubat ng utak itambad mo ang hubad na dibdib sa laro ng guniguni
upang makilala ang hulo’t luwasan ang direksiyon ng agos ng kabalantukang daan malayo sa hardin ng pagsisisi’t pagsasalawahan

bagamat kinulapulan ng pulang abong umuusok pa tinukso inudyakan subalit
ipakita ang noong sugatan sa Anghel ng hilahil at pakikipagsapalaran habang mitsa ng pulbura’y sumiklab at nag-alapaap sa kamalayan

habang sumisidhi ang pagnanasa sumikdong paghahangad ang bumighani’t
sumakop sa budhing naligaw sa pagitan ng kidlat at kulog malapit na sa dulo ng landas nakatutok sa gilid ng bangin

Hindi tinangkang matagpuang nakagulantang ang bangkay dugong dumanak sa
kurbadong lansangan ng Maynila Kinakailangang bang alamin kung sinong nasawi’t sinong pumaslang? Pakiramdaman lang, giliw, sa halip na timbangin

At tuloy nahubaran nanuot sa buto ang katotohanan habang agaw-dilim
pumapanaw ang kristal na bahag-haring lumubog-lumutang sa laot palaisipang kaleidoscope na sinuyo sa isip hanggang takip-silim

Ulilang nakipagsapalaran, nakipagdebate sa mga diwatang nalipasan ng gutom sa
pampang— Itigil ang panangis, tapos na ang laro’t paligsahan

Ikaw, taglay ang lason sakit na walang lunas pumipihit sa turnilyo’t banog-lawin
ng peti-burgesyang kontradiksiyon—

Itigil ang daing at huwag aksayahin ang panahon kahit mapariwara masdan ang
napigtal na ulap na namukod at hiwalay na lumangoy, nag-iisa, lubhang mapangahas. ulilang mandirigma

Hinablot sa matris ng paglalayag at pagsisiyasat ginahasa ng dahas ng dayuhang
sumakop—dapat tayong kumalas bumalikwas sa gabing nalugmok sa gilid ng dagat na binalot ng balatkayong ambil ng talinghaga mapagkunwaring salitang hitik sa gayuma

tumagos ang tawag mo ang bigkas mo nasilayan kita’t nagbago ang
panganorin—ipagpatawad mo, malikmatang paraluman, naidlip sa silong ng kabalintunaang haliparot, di ko mapagwari kung paano nahuli’t nagapos ang mayumi’t busilak na daliri ng umaga, samantalang

Hayun! buntalang bumagsak kislap ng bituing bukal sa titis ng iyong balintataw,
at sa dako pa roon, sunog ng salamander ng kababalaghang humahagibis sa daungan ng ating pagtatalik bago tayo nagkahiwalay

Hayun! tumatawid sa nabuwal na tulay sa ibabaw ng kinalawang na daang-riles sa
Blumentritt ng aking pagkabata umuusad lumalakad habang tulog -- balahibong nangalisag, huwag sanang pagdamutan--

Ikaw ba o siya? tayo, lahat -- ang somnambulistikong propeta ng iyong natupok na
kamusmusan at muling pagkabuhay.

_________

POLITICAL WITCH-HUNT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES

POLITICAL PERSECUTION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES, QUEZON CITY, PHILIPPINES: The “Strange” Case of Professor Sarah Raymundo

By E. SAN JUAN, Jr.




In the global North, the plight of academics being fired or denied tenure scarcely merits attention in the media. This is so starkly banal today when teachers’ salaries are either drastically frozen or cut back (as at Harvard University, University of California, etc.) while tuition fees are jacked up. Becoming redundant or retrenched has not spared professor-scholars in this unprecedented crisis of global capitalism. Economics has become politicized when Washington rescues failing banks with taxpayers’ money; politicians’ decisions can no longer be quarantined from the carnage in Wall Street.

During the decades of the Cold War, of course, it was routine for professors to be weeded out for being “commies,” Soviet spies, traitors, etc. When I was first hired in 1965 at the University of California, Davis, I had to sign an oath of loyalty to the U.S. government even though I was not a citizen. My former professor at Harvard, Howard Mumford Jones, was famous for refusing to sign that oath as a condition for being hired by the University of Texas then. During the sixties and seventies, radicals such as Bruce Franklin and Barbara Foley--to name only two of many--were purged for their activist stance in protesting the Vietnam War, torture and war crimes in Latin America perpetrated by the “shock doctrine” technocrats of disaster capitalism (to borrow Naomi Klein’s terms). Franklin and Foley are brilliant and prolific scholars, respected in their disciplines. But obviously it was not their intellectual worth but their anti-imperialist political commitment that brought down the wrath of the Establishment on their heads. Like all state apparatuses, the university is not a sacred “think-tank for alternative models,” but a cog in the machine for reinforcing the oppressive status quo and stifling dissent.

In the Philippines, as in embattled “third world” countries generally, it is difficult if not impossible to disentangle the academic realm from that of everyday political struggles. Everyday life is a mixed affair of politics, economics, and witchcraft. Traditional customs of peasant life based on kinship, religious beliefs, memory, habits, etc. disturb the presumably “neutral” market competition of equal citizens. Ethics is compromised in political skulduggery and business deals carried out by political dynasties, warlords, and corporate hustlers. The reification or commodification of life in industrialized bourgeois society has not materialized enough to fully compartmentalize the public sphere from the private. This is a product of uneven development and the unsynchronized process of imperial subjugation and exploitation.

In a peripheral dependent formation such as the Philippines, the sociohistorical field of power is constituted by the dynamic interplay of economics, politics and ideology. Class struggle, while anchored in production and property, proceeds on various interacting levels. If Filipinos suffer from a “damaged culture,” this can be viewed as a logical outcome of the legacy of over three hundred years of Spanish colonial domination and more than a century of being “tutored” by U.S. entrepreneurial democracy and market pluralism. Class and racial differences are supposed to wither away in the course of “free market” modernization. Except for the perennial “maoist” insurgents and recalcitrant Moros, Americanization succeeded in molding the thinking of the intelligentsia, especially the academic gatekeepers at the University of the Philippines, and the self-reproducing hierarchy of civil servants in the judiciary, military-police agencies, and so on.

Missionary Positions

After killing 1.4 million natives, the United States ruled the Philippines from 1898 to 1946 as a direct colony. The fruit of this “civilizing” experiment is nearly a century of severe underdevelopment of the economy and disintegration of the collective psyche whose symptoms are evident today. The colonial power preserved the feudal-oligarchic property system, overlayering it with the trappings of comprador electoral democracy. One result is the authoritarian Marcos regime (1972-1986) whose human-rights violations have now been surpassed by the corrupt Arroyo regime flourishing in the midst of extreme class inequality, nurturing barbaric warlords such as the Ampatuan dynasty responsible for the recent Maguindanao massacre of 57 unarmed civilians. Not that the U.S. ruling class is to blame for everything—indeed, the founding of the local educational system is supposed to be one of the durable contributions of U.S. colonialism to the heroic task of civilizing those “benighted” natives, Nonetheless, a large share of what Filipinos enjoy today can be ascribed to the “benevolent assimilation” policy of the wise suzerain William McKinley and his no doubt well-intentioned successors.

One of the institutions established by the U.S. colonizers is the University of the Philippines (UP). It was designed to produce functionaries to serve the ideological state apparatuses of the colonial state. The U.S. needed trained “little brown brothers” (William Howard Taft’s affectionate terms of endearment) to legitimize the particularist motive of capital as one identical with the general interest. Its prestige eventually rested on the nurturance of generations of scholars and a significant number of activist intellectuals since its founding in 1908. Despite what historian Renato Constantino called “the mis-education of Filipinos,” that is, the slavish worship of EuroAmerican values and its elite gurus such as Richard Rorty and Benedict Anderson, UP students led mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the sixties and ruthless US interventions in Latin America and the Middle East from the seventies up to the present.

Class struggles worldwide could not be kept away from the classroom. Not only has the UP served to train subalterns for the colonial bureaucracy; it has also exposed students (given the internal contradictions of capitalist rule in a semifeudal dependency) to counterhegemonic, revolutionary ideas. During my student days in UP in the fifties, the writings of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre, and later on of George Jackson, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Mao, and other progressive activists were disseminated among student-faculty discussion circles. From this arose organizations that spearheaded the national-democratic movement which challenged U.S. imperial hegemony and its support for the bloody dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and his successors, up to Arroyo. To a limited extent, the UP still serves as an arena of ideological -theoretical debates reflecting the intense conflicts and antagonisms of a nation of over ninety million most of whom live on less than $2 a day, under a brutal regime praised by Barack Obama and credited with over a thousand victims of extra-judicial killings, forced disappearances, and torture.

Subalterns Speak

Now comes the news that within the hallowed halls of “academic freedom,” which the oligarchy takes pride in as “the marketplace of ideas,” the persecution of a prodigiously talented militant scholar, Sarah Raymundo, is going on without much fanfare. Except for the local demonstrations of sympathizers from student organizations in the campus and, incredibly, the massive support of academics, public intellectuals, and professionals from around the world, her case is scarcely noticed by Manila pundits and commercializing media celebrities. Globalization thus works in contradictory and paradoxical ways.

Raymundo’s case may be a minor affair compared to the issues of global warming publicized at Copenhagen or the genocidal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Still, with the Philippines labeled a danger zone because of the unrelenting attacks by the Abu Sayyaf, one of the home-grown “terrorist” groups beloved by the U.S. State Department (the other being the Communist-led New People’s Army, stigmatized by then State Secretary Colin Powell), we might take the case of Raymundo as an allegory of what’s going on in that otherwise obscure tropical archipelago once noted for hosting the largest US military bases during the Korean and IndoChina wars—a nearly anonymous remote group of islands that is still remembered for Bataan and Corregidor and the thousands of Filipino and American dead sacrificed by General Douglas McArthur for the Empire’s honor.

Raymundo’s plight has been succinctly summarized by Dr. Walden Bello, a tenured sociology professor at the same University and now a representative of the party-list Akbayan in the Philippine Congress (accessible at ). Although trained by the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University, Bello knows the inner workings of the UP academic bureaucracy. The facts are simple: On April 2008, the tenured faculty of the Sociology Dept. in a vote of seven to three recommended granting of tenure to Raymundo on the basis of her substantial academic record. Seven months later, Raymundo was informed that the faculty decided to reverse their decision. What happened?

Wonders can happen, even in bureaucratic chambers, without covert CIA (or local military-police) cues. In the hiatus of seven months, the minority schemed to overthrow the majority by “manipulating the Chancellor for Academic Affairs” (to quote Bello) to demand that the majority who voted for Raymundo justify (again!) their decision. Surprise? This was evidently a ploy since the majority report affirmed that Raymundo exceeded the necessary requirements for tenure. Meanwhile, the college’s highest governing body, the College Executive Board (CEB), upheld the majority decision. Finally, the Diliman campus Chancellor Sergio Cao dismissed the CEB’s decision and refused tenure. In effect, the Chancellor sided with the minority. Why? Not because of Raymundo’s lack of academic excellence; everyone concedes that. It is because of Raymundo’s ethical stand, political beliefs, and civic conduct as the general-secretary of CONTEND (Congress of Teachers/Educators for Nationalism and Democracy) and active member of ACT (Association of Concerned Teachers) and the All-UP-Academic Employers Union. She is being penalized for those rare virtues.

Raymundo is alleged by her detractors to have been involved with groups in support of victims kidnapped, tortured and killed by the military, in particular Karen Empeno. To such vague and muddled allegations that she hid such involvements, Raymundo has fully responded in a substantial memorandum submitted on Nov. 16 to university president Erlinda Roman. She has never made her activism a secret to anyone. The department allegations are all shoddy innuendoes and insinuations, unworthy of even a C- sociology major. Roman, for her part, played the coy and hedging fox (or is it mealy-mouthed Pontius Pilate?) in her Dec. 14 memorandum to Cao and the current department chair Randolf David as she tendentiously recounted the whole rigmarole.

Admitting that there was no argument about Raymundo’s academic qualifications, president Roman seemed obsessed with a conundrum: whether the April vote really showed “consensus.” Given the contentious, politically charged milieu of everyday life in the Philippines from which the university is not immune, Roman believed that Raymundo’s politics fouled up, or more exactly problematized, consensus. The original vote of 7-3 did not truly express “consensus” if by the term we mean unanimous. It was hard to really determine what the department’s consensus was despite or notwithstanding the April vote, Roman thought aloud. In effect, that little word “consensus” became Roman’s alibi out of this sorry mess. Alternatively, it was her fortuitous disguise to appear neutral and above board, not least that she was exercising conscientious leadership of a great institution.
No, Roman was not a hypocrite, only a realist. Cognizant that the composition of the department’s tenured faculty had meanwhile changed with the dropping-out of Raymundo’s supporters, Roman ordered another vote, which this time yielded the right “consensus”: 4 for-6 against Raymundo. The latest is the really more authentic “consensus” for Roman. Beholden to her neoliberal patrons in the “old boys’ network,” Roman knows that she has to safeguard her clientele within the university by upholding departmental cliques, “yahoo” mediocrity, at the expense of a more inclusive, libertarian, democratic, forward-looking vision of higher learning. This is perhaps too much to expect, given the politicized genealogy of UP presidencies. Compounding authoritarian methods and chicanery with fatuous casuistry, this whole exercise has now become a sad comment on the abysmal sinkhole to which this group of UP faculty and administrators have succumbed.
In summing up his brief supporting Raymundo, Dr. Bello pleaded to president Roman to “reverse a terrible miscarriage of justice and reassert UP’s commitment to academic excellence.” He was appealing to one of the executioners. Of course, operating legalistically within the institutional framework, Bello could not do otherwise—even though the case had already been thoroughly politicized by Raymundo’s enemies, those against Raymundo’s radical left-wing politics. He had already alienated the “yahoos” of the sociology department, which contaminated alleged progressives such as Randolf David and Cynthia Bautista. Can the Board of Regents, the last resort for the aggrieved, succeed in resisting the proven inertia of institutions and overturn Cao, Roman, and David? Maybe, if the popular-democratic voices prevail. Probably not, given the scandalous shenanigans of the traditional politicians challenging the Arroyo clique.
I want to sketch a parenthetical aside here. A subtext or submerged narrative, threaded with complex nuances that I cannot elaborate here, lurks behind this instructive controversy. Despite Bello’s tie-up with the Akbayan party and his record of defending his World-Social-Forum personality against the suspicions of former comrades in the anti-imperialist National Democratic Front-Philippines and in Bayan-Muna party (with which ACT and CONTEND are allied), he seems to have transcended sectarian narrow-mindedness, not to speak of barkada scholasticism. Meanwhile, the media-savvy Randy David, a leading member of BISIG (Bukluran sa Ika-uunlad ng Sosyalistang Isip at Gawa; Association for the Advance of Socialist Words and Deeds), an admirer of Rorty and other Western elite missionaries, finds himself somehow aligned with conservative if not reactionary Neanderthals, or “yahoos” (to quote Bello). In a single stroke, he forfeited his claim to be a nationalist (in the tradition of his distinguished kin, Renato Constantino). Incidentally, BISIG is one of the groups allied with Akbayan; BISIG’s former chair, UP President Francisco Nemenzo and other colleagues figured prominently in the 1993 Forum for Philippine Alternatives which rejected the political strategy and tactics of the Sison-led Communist Party of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front-Philippines. Former comrades split, symptomatic of what was then happening in the Philippines during the retrograde administration of the late Corazon Aquino. For many academic leftists in a tributary shark-infested milieu, opportunism and obligatory tithes seem more functional if risky preoccupations in advancing careers than supporting human-rights organizations, or the cause of nationalist democracy. At any rate, this dialectical twist of events, one more proof of Lenin’s thesis that reality/practice is richer than theory, may augur a renewal of progressive and radical energies in the UP, despite Raymundo’s predicament. This may be a hope, but in a permanently crisis-wracked country like the Philippines, the improbable sometimes becomes realizable.

Lessons for Lilliputians

Our critique of abusive authority and conservative power needs to extend beyond the university precincts. As noted earlier, the neocolonial university is permeated with manifold contradictions symptomatic of the whole moribund system. To be sure, the balance of political forces may suddenly change and affect pedagogical agencies. One more Maguindanao massacre may stir up slumbering “people power.” If Raymundo’s case is not only flawed with procedural mistakes and ethical misjudgments, but also corrupted by scarcely veiled charges of political activism and humanitarian/social conscience on Raymundo’s part, it is shortchanging the victim if we do not put at the center of this whole affair the active complicity of Roman, Cao, Paredes, David, Bautista, Aquino, and others with a bankrupt regime that thrives on flagrant corruption, lies, mendacity, threats, and fascist violence—not least, the symbolic violence that the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu associates with bureaucratic discourse, authoritarian procedures, and administrative rituals, such as tenure-granting (in which academic capital trumps intellectual capital), that insure the petty privileges of a self-perpetuating, obsequious elite.
What is to be done and undone? The now notorious “culture of impunity” fomented by the shameless Arroyo regime seems to have descended on the Diliman campus and is saturating the hallowed classrooms and libraries of this once esteemed sanctuary of learning. As it did before, once in the McCarthyist-like persecution of a community of pro-people nationalist scholars as communist sympathizers during the Magsaysay-Garcia regimes; this U.S.-styled witchhunt was repeated periodically in the terrible nights of collective suffering and resistance from the time of Marcos to Arroyo.
But lose no hope, friends and partisans in the global commons. While the UP is slowly being commercialized and privatized, students and faculty who are relatively privileged are feeling the pressures of unemployment, anomie, environmental degradation, and ubiquitous military-police violence. While serving the neocolonial state and the predatory merchants of global capital, the UP remains funded by taxpayers and is ultimately answerable to the Filipino people. Resistance to capitalist globalization is gradually rising, as shown by this robust and enthusiastic international support for Raymundo and what she stands for.
In California and elsewhere, students and faculty are rebelling against state terrorism: cutbacks in salaries, privatization, lay-offs, deterioration all around. Many are beginning to grasp that higher public education is a social and human right, no less than health care, food, and adequate shelter. Peoples around the world are mobilizing against the global war of terror launched by the U.S. corporate elite. The Filipino people are crying “No more massacres” by Arroyo and her Ampatuan accomplices. Whatever the final arbitration of her case, Sarah Raymundo’s voice cannot be repressed or denied “tenure”—an index of the inexhaustible resources, energy and intelligence of the Filipino people fighting for justice and liberation in solidarity with others beyond the surveillance of the gatekeepers of the University of the Philippines and other public institutions.--###
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Dr. E. SAN JUAN, Jr. emeritus professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Ethnic Studies, was a recent fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. He recently taught at Leuven University, Belgium, as a Fulbright lecturer in American Studies, and at the University of the Philippines as visiting professor of English and Comparative Literature. He received his A.B., magna cum laude, in English and Philosophy from the University of the Philippines in 1958; and his doctorate from Harvard University. He has taught at the U.P. from 1958-60. 1966-67, 1987-88, and 2008. His recent books are Working through the contradictions (Bucknell U Press), US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave), Critique and Social Transformation (The Edwin Mellen Press), and Toward Filipino Self-Determination (SUNY Press).

THE MAGUINDANAO MASSACRE IN THE PHILIPPINES: A Commentary

ELECTORAL GORE: Warlord Violence, Oligarchic Decay, and U.S. Neocolonial Domination in the Philippines

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

The mass slaughter of 57 civilians in Maguindanao, Philippines, on November 23 by a local warlord diverted world attention from the much more heinous destruction of whole villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan by U.S. drones. So what’s new? In the Philippines, the number of victims acquires symbolic density by the resonance of contextual historic factors linked to US colonial occupation of the country from 1899 to 1946, and its neocolonial predicament today. How is the U.S. implicated in the massacre?

Three recent developments may be cited at the outset. First, Barack Obama anointed the unpopular Philippine president Gloria Macapagal during her visit to Washington early this year as the privileged Asian U.S. “connection” in the war against Al-Qaeda, giving a stamp of approval to her corrupt bloody rule. Second, the impending 2010 elections in the Philippines may jeopardize U.S. military-political maneuvers in Southern Philippines where organized Muslim separatists (specifically, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front [MILF] exist side by side with the shadowy, diminutive Abu Sayyaf—the pretext for regular U.S. military operations in the Philippines. Third, the U.S. is playing both sides, supporting the traditional oligarchy’s elite rule while negotiating with the MILF for access to land and resources in the areas they control. The role of the federally funded US Institute of Peace has been revealed in the laest negotitations between the MILF and the Arroyo regime. While the rest of the Philippines’s natural resources have been depleted, its 90 million citizens subsisting on less than $2 a day, the southern island of Mindanao borders Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Singapore strait, providing a strategic location for force-projection of severely constrained U.S. global power.

Its status as a former U.S. classic colony also makes the Philippines sentimentally close to the thinking and tastes of the U.S. plutocracy. The Filipino ruling class is the only Asian group tutored in US-style pragmatic liberalism by U.S. advisers/policy-makers for nearly a century, from 1899 up to the present. Business ethics and electoral politics follow U.S. paradigms. The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) as well as police units continue to be trained, supervised, and equipped by the U.S. Thus, while the country rivals Bangladesh in being an economic “basket-case,” with 10 million Filipinos working abroad as domestics and low-skilled contractual labor, it is vitally central to Washington/Pentagon’s scheme in maintaining global hegemony in the face of challenges by China, Iran, North Korea and of course the terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indonesia, Obama’s favorite Asian nation-state.

Let us return to the barbaric massacre of 57 (60 in a recent count) unarmed civilians in broad daylight by the local warlord Ampatuan clan in Mindanao where hundreds of U.S. Special Forces operate within AFP bases. The facts have been repeated in numerous news reports: In preparing for the 2010 elections, a convoy of the Mangudadatu clan accompanied by media workers and women lawyers on the way to the capitol to register for elections was by halted by Philippine National Police (PNP) forces with hundreds of Civilian Volunteer Organizations (CVO) supervised by the PNP. Both PNP and CVO are led by the Ampatuans. Together with other motorists passing by, they were directed to a farm road to be shot, the bodies of women mutilated, and all (together with vehicles) buried in mass graves dug by machines owned by the provincial government headed by the patriarch, Datu Andal Ampatuan Sr. His son Andal Ampatuan Jr. is now charged for masterminding this brutal slaughter in broad daylight, on a national highway, in Sharif Aguak municipality controlled by the Ampatuan clan. This murder of innocent civilians under such circumstances ranks as one postmodern example of “a crime against humanity.” But for many, it is just ordinary electoral gore/mayhem.

Who are the Ampatuans? While notorious in Philippine politics, this is their first entrance into a world stage of rogues—from Attila the Hun to George Bush and his neocon advisers. When Gloria Arroyo wrested the presidency in 2001, Ampatuan Senior was a Congressman with a record of past collaboration with the military in fighting the communist New People’s Army (NPA) and Muslim guerillas of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). His rise to power followed the contour of historic opportunities. Soon he became a military-sponsored elected governor of Maguindanao whereby he was able to manipulate the electoral machinery to secure the winning votes for Arroyo in the 2004 elections. This was repeated in the senatorial elections of 2007. The Ampatuans gained most favored spot in the Arroyo clique’s patronage system.

Consequently, the Ampatuan clan became the single dominating Muslim dynasty in Mindanao—except for Sulu Islands and Basilan, the Abu Sayyaf’s staging ground. Endorsed by Arroyo, Zaldy Ampatuan became governor of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), a bureaucratic category through which national funds are chanelled, supposedly to improve the welfare of the Muslim population in those impoverished provinces. The dynasty counts 18 officials in the government, including Zamzamin Ampatuan, Arroyo’s energy undersecretary. But that is not as important as their control of the coercive machinery of government and its access to bureaucracy and all institutions of civil society.

Under the regime’s counterinsurgency plan, known as Oplan Bantay Laya, the undermanned and poorly equipped AFP and PNP deploys the old U.S. tactic of using paramilitary groups, here the Ampatuans’ private army of about a thousand men. They are legalized as members of the Citizens’ Armed Force Geographical Units (CAFGU) and CVOs. During the emergency of 2006 when mass protests called for Arroyo’s resignation because of admitted cheating and other anomalies, Arroyo issued Executive Order 546 arming the CVOs and placing them under the Ampatuans’ control. The Philippine Army’s 6th Infantry Battalion as well as police units, together with tanks and firearms, also served the private interests of the Ampatuan clan. All of these—personnel, weapons, ammunition, communication apparatus—were involved in the November massacre, with policemen themselves participating in murdering the civilians.

How do we clarify this complex of events and persons from a historical-materialist viewpoint? Fierce class warfare and persisting U.S. domination of local institutions explain the convergence of diverse political and social forces. The Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CENPEG), a local research group, provides a starting-point by stating that the massacre displays “traditional politics at its madness.” It describes how “the compact between the strong-arm president and political warlords results in the militarization of the civilian bureaucracy and breeds despotism that undermines civilian authority. It transforms the local government system into purely electoral machinery for the mutual support and benefit among the powers-that-be. It also converts many Local Government Units (LGUs) into instruments of counter-insurgency instead of being made to address the generational problems of poverty and social inequality” (quoted from Issue Analysis No. 14). In effect, the culture of impunity—the extrajudicial killing, kidnapping and torture of thousands of anti-Arroyo activists in the last ten years—can be accounted for by the toleration of warlordism and symbiotic political dynasties necessary to maintain entrenched oligarchic power, the intensifying poverty of the majority, and rampant social injustice occurring everyday.

One of the more systematic analysis of why Philippine-style elite democracy seems to sustain a self-regulating elite dominating the majority has been written by Prof. Temario Rivera. In his essay “The Crisis of Philippine Democracy,” Rivera argues that while other developmental states in “the third world” succeeded in solving problems of national unity, rules of political contestation, agrarian reform and other key issues of socioeconomic modernization,” this did not happen in the Philippines because “the political oligarchy propped up by American economic and military power survived or evaded these cataclysms and sidetracked the effective resolution of these key issues” (from Oligarchic Politics, ed. Bobby Tuazon, Quezon City 2007, p. 151). The US plays a deeper role today in the production of what I call “electoral gore” by supporting antagonists and preserving the ideological-moral supremacy of free-market neoliberal institutions and practices, including the retinue of organic intellectuals attached to corporations, universities, NGOs, and private think-tanks.

This neoWeberian analysis, however, focuses on the weak, politicized administrative apparatus without attention to crucial economic and ideological factors. Weber tried to explain feudalism as the “routinization of charisma” in which power was organized in a patrimonial manner. Current American scholarship on the Philippines (from popularizer Stanley Karnow to Alfred McCoy) has been bogged down by this reifying approach, failing to account for the internal dynamics of the multiple historic forms of rent that Marx first analyzed. Weber borrowed the idea from Marx, but obfuscated it by focusing on the system of enfeoffment by which serfs were exploited. Weber also ignored the historic determinants of colonialism and neocolonialism.

Vassalage, modernized as clientelism or patronage, indeed still characterizes the behavior of political dynasties in the Philippines. The “warrior ideal” (embodied by Amapatuan Jr., for example), hereditary succession, ritual obligation, and implied contract of mutual benefit, still inform local political behavior, although reconfigured by globalizing business utilitarian techniques. In the case of the Ampatuans, however, the central role of bureaucrat-capitalism and comprador trade overshadows quasi-feudal ownership of land (mostly uncultivated due to war, corruption, etc.). T. J. S. George’s Revolt in Mindanao (1980) lists three types of Muslim leaders in Mindanao: development administrators, intellectual-parliamentarians, and revolutionary fundamentalists. The Ampatuans elude these categories, for the dynasty is a chiefly a product of neocolonial bureaucrat-capitalism fostered by the Arroyo clique’s manipulation of tributary politics for material gain, prestige, and survival.

Nor is religion invoked for legitimation. Traditional Islamic doctrines may underwrite customary practices but scarcely plays a role in preserving the Ampatuan politico-military stranglehold on territory. The MILF has monopolized Islam for its ideological potential and occupied Maguindanao territory. While rent and private landholding still yield surplus for dynastic luxuries, the parasitic dependence on funding by the national state (negotiated with World Bank and other foreign philanthropies), as well as USAID and other UN agencies, may be said to subsidize and enable the Ampatuan excesses. This supersedes patrimonialism.

The phenomenon is of course more complex than these notes might indicate. Manila columnist Conrado de Quiros employs a somewhat mechanical “cause-effect” grid to explain the Ampatuan atrocity as an effect caused by Arroyo’s fascist crimes utilizing state power, in short, the culture of impunity often cited by Arroyo’s critics. However, this culture which caused extrajudicial killings and corruption from Arroyo to the ordinary policeman cannot be defined simply as local mayhem and the Arroyo signature as the “epitome of warlordism.” Institutional structures and historical practices cannot be reduced tout court to singular personalities. Addressing the mechanisms of Moro political dynasty, Islamic scholar Julkipli Wadi takes account of plural causation. He uses Basilan governor Wahab Akbar as a model of the postmodern hybrid dynasties, making the Amapatuans genealogical dinosaurs. However, he discounts the historic force of U.S. intervention in our history, including Moro history.

In a public statement (27 Nov 2009) as chairperson of the International League of People’s Struggle, Jose Maria Sison succinctly formulates the overriding influence of U.S. hegemony as the framework within which the logic of the Ampatuan massacre can be grasped. He reviews the organic links of Ampatuan power with the CAFGU, CVO, the AFP and the PNP, national bureaucracy, counterinsurgency agencies, etc. Except for its lack of elaboration on the imperial mechanisms of transmission (provided by other general studies of Moro society such as CENPEG’S The Moro Reader or Marites Vitug and Glenda Gloria’s Under the Crescent Moon), Sison offers the left’s more comprehensive and substantial point of view on this specific event. I can only quote his conclusion here: “The US has been the most culpable for whipping up state terrorism and vigilantism by local tyrants and by army and police commanders under the pretext of combating communists and Muslims who are unjustly labeled as terrorists…. The US has provided the doctrine of warfare against the people and supplied the military equipment and training and other wherewithals of the reign of terror….Together with the Manila-based puppet government, local tyrants like the Amapatuans and all their military, police and paramilitary minions, the US is culpable and condemnable for pushing state terrorism and the gross and systematic human rights violations and emboldening the human rights violators to commit their crimes with impunity under the pretext of combating terrorism.”

In sum, imperial interventions may be said to “overdetermine” if not thoroughly elucidate the local dynamics of surplus extraction and distribution of social wealth and its accompanying political-ideological apparatus enabling reproduction of the total social relations. The full exposition of the political economy undergirding the Maguindanao massacre may have to wait for a trustworthy court investigation and trial of the suspects—the Ampatuan clan—which, judging from all accounts, may have to wait for the proverbial “kingdom come.”

In the meantime, I propose this structural explanation to understand the Maguindanao massacre and its future replication. Political coercion in neocolonial Philippines is nourished not only by the extraction of surplus product (value) from the labor of Filipino workers and peasants (including their Muslim counterparts) but also by the U.S.-led global war on terror and its imperial ramifications in the Philippine conjuncture. This war led by US finance-capital applies to the Filipino diaspora (10 million strong) and the immigrant predicament of ethnic communities such as Mexicans, Arabs, Africans, and so on in the Global North (Europe, North America). US citizens are implicated in the genocidal process occurring in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. In the Philippines, several million taxdollars are spent every year to support the AFP in counterinsurgency operations against the MILF and the NPA, or whoever the regime labels “enemies of the state.” They fund the killings and torture of Filipino citizens who dare to criticize the oligarchic system and resist globalized exploitation.

Few Americans know that the campaign against the alleged Al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf has been used since 9/11 for legitimizing the Visiting Forces Agreement. This agreement (not ratified by the U.S. Senate) allows U.S. troops and their clandestine military operations in the country in violation of the Philippine Constitution. This succeeds the Cold War strategy of suppressing any democratic move to eliminate the bases for class inequality, “failed state” symptoms, and regional fragmentation, using the Philippines as a springboard for interventions in IndoChina, the Middle East, and Asia as a vital region of global profitmaking (already documented by numerous studies). With the Cold War mutating into the global war of terror against oppressed subalterns and indigenous communities, the Philippines became the second battlefront (after Aghanistan), though lately supplanted by Pakistan. Still, as long as the Abu Sayyaf is deliberately fostered by a confluence of warlord/patronage politics and US clandestine maneuvers, one can expect more massacres in what William Blum (in Rogue State, 2005) regards as the United States’ longest-held colony on earth.--##

[RE-posted from MONTHLY REVIEW mr-zine 5 December 2009, slightly revised]

3 WAYS OF APPREHENDING MARIA LORENA BARROS

THREE PERSPECTIVES ON MARIA LORENA BARROS

BY E. San Juan, Jr.

Over the years, since her death on 24 March 1976 at the age of 28, Maria Lorena Barros, now a prototypical “woman warrior” of the New People’s Army, has become the object of veneration by national-democratic activists. She is by right a proletarian heroine, a diwata of the masses. She has earned her niche in the historical archive of the Filipino people’s national-liberation struggle.

However, we are still in the era of capitalist globalization, possibly the last epoch of imperialism. And the Philippines, a U.S. neocolony, is a colony of finance-capital, despite its nominal independence. This fact discombobulates the Establishment orthodoxy of postcolonial scholastics. We are still living under the rule of commodification and the unchallenged reign of exchange-value, the cash-nexus. Is there a Maria Lorena Barros mall or boutique somewhere?

Arguably, feminists and women-liberationists have almost made her into a cult-object. Maita Gomez’s biography, Lualhati Bautista’s play, and other cultural works have contributed to this process of fetishism within progressive circles. We need some critical reflection on this phenomenon. Rizal as well as Bonifacio, not to mention the Aquinos, have suffered the same fate. In order to release her from the reification of such mechanical history, known as “the life of Maria Lorena Barros,” we need to re-conceive that event into “actuality.” We need to re-vision this event outside the time-space of bourgeois history.

Time’s linearity dictates the irreversibility of that event. However, those who immersed themselves in this event or process can acquire new means and modes of struggling against imperialism and class (as well as gender, racial) domination in a totally different way, finding paths into another world and through that, “actualize” certain becomings that would not have materialized in the realm of historical events. Postmodernists Deleuze and Guattari (following Nietzsche’s notion of the “Untimely’) speculate on “the becoming without which nothing would come about in history but that does not merge with history.” Foucault called the frozen event a “present” in contradistinction to the “Actual,” the now in the process of our becoming other. The Actual is not a future event but a new mode of existence that we are now in the process of undergoing and, in some measure, relative to our praxis, contributing to its realization. Inscribed within the framework of historical materialism, the notion of the Actual merges into the theory of praxis (as in Lenin’s and Georg Lukacs’ thought), the unity of subject and object, in the dialectics of revolutionary transformation.

This is not to discount or ignore current praxis, diverse forms of collective and personal resistance to the Arroyo regime and its US patrons. Resistance to the present can be provided by the Actual, which can be enacted and performed through living from within the “life of Maria Lorena Barros,” which equals its truth. Translated into Filipino: “Nagkakaroon ng katotohanan at nabibigyan-saysay ang kasaysayan ng buhay ni Maria Lorena Barros.” Note that “saysay” is embedded in “kasaysayan.”

The three poems below which I wrote in three periods, the first one in this new millennium, the second in the Nineties, and the third before the Feb 1986 insurrection (when I was involved in the anti-martial law movement in the U.S.), are attempts to actualize the historical event called “the life of Maria Lorena Barros.” The historical contexts are important, grounding the act of writing; but beyond that, the “Actual” is contained within the experience of determining what Lorena means or signifies, from the viewpoint of the speaker or personae speaking in or within the poem. What various readers will experience in reading, is altogether a different matter and needs to be explored.

It is my hope that resistance to U.S. imperialist domination in the Philippines and global capitalism (for at least 9 million OFWs spread around the planet) can encounter a power of resistance from the becomings-other of those immersed in the actuality of the event the life of Maria Lorena Barros. Even for those who are not women, either biologically or socially constructed. And even for those who are not Filipinos or people of color, indeed, for all those who seek to be human in ways not definable or conceivable now, attainable only when (to quote Marx and Engels) we have moved finally from the domain of prehistory, alienated labor, and necessity. Mabuhay ang mga Lorena! --E. SAN JUAN, Jr.


MARIA LORENA BARROS, PUMUPUTOL SA ALAMBRE’T REHAS (2009)

…With the same intense purity and fragrance, we are learning to overcome.

--Maria Lorena Barros


Kahit pumalaot na, lumalatay pa rin sa gunita:
24 Marso 1976 nang dakpin ng mga sundalo ng diktaduryang U.S.-Marcos.

Nang di mapiga ang tugon—walang tainga ang baril--pinaputukan ang ulo
bago sumubsob sa pampang ng “lupa ng araw, ng luwalhati’t pagsinta.”
Pahabol ng mga kaibigan: “Mababasag na ang bungo subalit hindi siya sumuko.”

Naakit ngunit ipinagkait. Kung maari, kahit di akalain, marahil.

Ano pa ang maidadagdag sa talang naibigay ni Maita Gomez?
Mahapdi ang dagok— Iadya mo, Birheng nagpupumipiglas mapanghas--
Sukat nang hagkan ang barbed wire na pumulupot sa katawan.
Di lamang tumalon ang babae (sabi ni Joi Barrios) sa “alambreng nakasabit…”

Isaisip ang nangyari kay Expedito Albarillo, saksi ang anak na si Adel—
dinurog ang katawan—di raw sinasadya--walang patawad ang mga hayup, di biro.

Sa gubat ng Mindoro, maamo ang lobong gutom. Bagamat di bawal.

Naakit ngunit ipinagkait. Kung maari, kahit di akalain, marahil.
Subsob na’t nakalupasay, iuumang pa ang dibdib sa bayoneta ng tadhana.

Mayuming gunita, sumakandungan ang armas mo. Iadya mo kami.

Mapagkandiling diwa, itayo ang katawang nalugmok.
Inang sumabog, nadurog.

Nakalatay sa budhi: ang ating kaligtasan ay nasa ating pagkilos.

Marsong walang katapusan, Abril, Mayo…
Kinalawang na alambreng putol.
Bakit di maari? Sa bawat hakbang natin nayayari ang landas
kung saan bumabagtas
at sumasalubong
ang nakabukang bisig ni Lori.

__________________________

ADIK SA ‘YO? Pag-ulit sa pag-iiba-iba ng talinghaga’t haraya (1994)

(In Memoriam: Maria Lorena Barros )

“Ano ang isang ina? Mayamang hapag ng gutom na sanggol. Kumot sa gabing maginaw. Matamis sa uyayi. Tubig sa naghahapding sugat…Ngunit ano ang isang makabayang ina? Maapoy na tanglaw tungo sa liwayway. Sandigang bato. Lupang bukal ng lakas sa digma. Katabi sa laba’t alalay sa tagumpay ang ina ko.”


Di ko na hahanap-hanapin pa, Kasama Lory,
buhat nang matagpuan ang duguang katawan mo sa Isabela--
Di na adik ngunit sabik
malaman kung anong umakit sa iyong ihandog ang buhay
nang walang pakundangan

Mahigit 800 ang nalunod paglubog ng MV Princess of the Stars--
Sobra na tama na, adios Manny Pacquiao!
Bawat pagpihit ng tadhana, ilang buhay ang lumilipas
ngunit sa anong dahilan o anong layon?
Adik pa ba? Sabik na madukot ka?
Sa telesineng terorista nina Glorya at mga berdugong heneral
walang bida kundi ang uring imperyalista’t alipuris--
Adik sa kalupitan at kasamaan....

Sabik sa inyo-- Shirley Cadapan Karen Empeno Sabik akong matagpuan
sina Jonas Burgos Nilo Arado Luisa Posa Dominado
Sa umaga’t sa gabi ng galit at pighati sa pagitan ng pagpatay
kina Mario Auxilio sa Bohol at Celso Pojas sa Davao
hinahanap-hanap kita,
O armadong anghel ng katarungan--

Di na adik ngunit sabik--
Noon, sa pagitan ng bawat bugbog kay Nena Fajardo at bigwas kay Nelia Sancho
natagpuan kitang naghihintay....
Mahigit 4000 taong nalunod paglubog ng MV Dona Paz noong panahon ni Cory--
ilang libong namatay sa lahar, sa baha, sa bagyo, sa terorismo ng AFP...
Adik ka pa ba? Hahanap-hanapin pa ba?

Adios, Gretchen at Regine at Rufa at Susmaryosep-- Lani Misalucha!
Magwala man ang militar, di na mawawala
ang pag-asang inaruga mo, Ka Lory, istratehiyang pinakasasabikan--
Magkasalubong tayo sa bawat daluyong ng pakikibaka
sa bawat yapos, sa bawat labing humahalik....

_____________

ANG TAGUMPAY NI MARIA LORENA BARROS (1983)

Punglong sumabog--
Simbuyo ng paghihimagsik!
Ipinagkaloob mo ang iyong metalikong kaluluwa
sa dapog ng Rebolusyon.

Di kailangan ang uling ng pagdadalamhati
Di dapat mamighati

Tilamsik ng dugo!
Sa sugatang himaymay ng iyong dibdib umapoy, sumigid
Ang umaasong adhika:
Kaluluwa mo'y masong dudurog sa tanikala ng kadiliman.

Sumagitsit, napugnaw--
Sa lagim ng iyong pagkatupok, titis ng hininga mo'y
Di tumirik, di nagsaabo....
Ang pasiya mong lumaban
Ay nagbagang tinggang umagnas, lumusaw sa anumang balakid.

Kailangang magpatigas,
Dapat maging bakal--
Hindi ginto o pilak--
Ang kaluluwa upang sa sumusugbang lagablab
ng pag-usig sa kabuktutan


Pandayin ang katawan ng ating pagnanais
Pandayin ang pinakamimithing kalayaan
Pandayin ang liwanag ng kinabukasan.