ANALYSIS
U.S.-Arroyo State
Terrorism and the Crisis
of Comprador-Oligarchic Governance
The impending
disintegration of the Arroyo regime is evidenced by its resort to
intimidation, bureaucratic repression, and death squads. It is bound to
implode in one big catastrophic upheaval that will unleash indiscriminate
violence and dehumanizing abuses symptomatic of the advanced decay of the
bankrupt neocolonial system.
By E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
Philippines Cultural Studies Center
Contributed to Bulatlat
Pressured by Amnesty
International (AI), the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Asian Human Rights
Commission, Reporters without Borders, and other international
organizations, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo shrewdly assembled a
group to look into the allegations of massive human rights violations -
over 745 victims of extrajudicial killings, and more than 180 enforced
“disappearances,” by the latest count—during her administration. The
spokesman of the National Democratic Front Philippines (NDFP), Fidel
Agcaoili, quickly dismissed the move as a scheme to hide the regime’s
complicity in Oplan Bantay Laya (OBL), the internal security program
designed to wipe out the 37-year old insurgency in two years.
Can the culprit
indict and condemn herself? How can Arroyo acquit herself when this
unprecedented “genocidal” campaign to suppress all dissent (as Agcaoili
and others claim) has been master-minded by her own Cabinet Oversight
Committee for Internal Security staffed by sycophantic bureaucrats and
military factotums? In 2001, the U.S. State Department averred that
“Members of the security services were responsible for extrajudicial
killings, disappearances, torture, and arbitrary arrest and detention” (Berrigan
2003).
Citing government
officials, Agcaoili said that the killings and abductions were meant to
strengthen the government’s negotiating position in its peace talks with
the NDFP. But, surely, this is not just a matter of scoring talking
points. It is not just an Arroyo public-relations maneuver to deflect
attention away from impeachment charges or any other urgent court
investigation.
At present, Arroyo
faces no challenge from the crony-filled Congress or from the ineffectual
Supreme Court. The supremacy of the executive branch over the judicial and
legislative in Philippine politics has a long history dating back to the
U.S. military and civil governors of colonial rule following the
Filipino-American War of 1899-1903. What triggered this sudden concern is
a convergence of events. The mass media joined the daily recital of
political killings with the suffering of Filipinos in war-torn Lebanon.
Combining the victims of repression at home with the impending deaths and
expulsion of Filipinos abroad (whose remittance of $10 billion or more
annually enables the stagnant, indebted economy to stay afloat) was an
explosive mix for the precarious, unstable ruling coalition.
What is at stake is
not the lives of citizens but their remittance capacity, the unpaid
surplus labor used for capital accumulation, profit for the privileged
few. Confronted by the plight of Filipino workers in Lebanon, inquiring
officials discovered that billions of pesos paid by these workers to help
them during emergencies abroad were not available because they were used
for other illegal purposes. Arroyo and her clique were revealed to be
clearly responsible for this anomaly. Charges of graft and corruption,
manipulation of public moneys, violation of enacted rules and public
norms, and so on, piled up amid political chicanery, mock prophecy
envisioning Filipina “Supermaids” flooding the world, and a bizarre mirage
of impending prosperity. The electoral and media influence of about nine
million Filipinos overseas could not be ignored.
But so, too, could
the voices of Amnesty International, the United Nations, Asia Human Rights
Commission (2006), KARAPATAN (Alliance for the Advancement of People’s
Rights, 2003), World Council of Churches, Bureau of Democracy, Human
Rights and Labor of the U.S. Congress (2005), and so on, not be allowed to
dominate the public arena. It was necessary to maintain acquiescent
normalcy and “business as usual.”
Intervention from international monitors
AI’s observations on
the Arroyo ethos of maintaining peace and order are instructive. The
politically-motivated pattern of killings, according to AI, can be
discerned from “the methodology of the attacks, including prior death
threats and patterns of surveillance by persons reportedly linked to the
security forces, the leftist profile of the victims and climate of
impunity which, in practice, shields the perpetrators from prosecution”
(2006). The phrase “climate of impunity” elegantly condemns Arroyo’s
insouciance. Such indifference is a ruse, a subterfuge. The February
declaration of a “State of Emergency,” “the arrest and threatened arrest
of leftist Congress representatives and others on charges of rebellion,
and intensifying counter-insurgency operations in the context of a
declaration by officials in June of ‘all-out-war’ against the New People’s
Army, …the parallel public labeling by officials of a broad range of legal
leftist groups as communist ‘front organizations’ directly linked to the
insurgency”—AI points out—“has created an environment in which there is
heightened concern that further political killings of civilians are likely
to take place” (2006).
While AI has
correctly situated the incidents of extrajudicial killings and abductions
in “the climate of impunity” enabled by autocratic-military rule, its
moralistic remedy accords with its conciliatory mission. AI calls on the
Arroyo-led state to “fulfill its obligation to protect the right to life
of every individual under its jurisdiction,” as required by the Philippine
Constitution and international human rights law. But how can the
mastermind (as AI implies) arrest, prosecute and convict her minions and
hirelings? Of the 114 killings recorded since 2001 by the government’s
Task Force Usig, the police have arrested suspects in just three cases,
without any convictions reported. AI calls on Arroyo to halt the
“corrosive impact [of military-instigated killings] on public confidence
in the administration of justice” by heeding its 14-Point Program for the
Prevention of Extrajudicial Executions, establish a Witness Protection
program, and invite the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial
Executions.” Well, thank you and good luck!
A discordance exists
between AI’s realistic diagnosis of the environment and “climate of
impunity” and its wish-fulfilling recommendations. Obviously, AI cannot
engage in a comprehensive, in-depth political analysis of the social
relations, ideology, economic factors, and political circumstances that
define the barbaric policies and acts of the Arroyo fraction of the
comprador-landlord class. Nor can it mention the long-lived complicity of
the U.S. government in supporting, abetting and rewarding those policies
and actions with military aid, logistics, U.S. Special Forces, training of
soldiers and officers, in the global war on terrorism—more specifically,
on the New People’s Army, the Communist Party of the Philippines, and
various Moro rebellious groups that the U.S. State Department labels
“terrorist.” Current attempts to impose a national identity card system,
screening of newspaper reporting, and curbs on other media of
communication, etc. are intended to follow the model of the USA Patriot
Act and the machinery of the Homeland Security State. But, of course, the
Philippines are only a peripheral instrument for the metropolitan behemoth
(Mahajan 2002).
The Arroyo regime’s
complete subservience to the Bush administration and its war-obsessed
scheme to repair its fragile white-supremacist hegemony underlies the
conduct of Arroyo’s cabinet officials and the officers of the Armed
Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in their demonization of Bayan Muna
activists as “communists” and stigmatization of all dissenters and critics
as “terrorists.” This kind of neofascist rule dispenses with Marcos’
“constitutional authoritarianism” by relying primarily on gangsterized
military and police elements, lacking any real mass support and
constrained by opposition from fractions of the ruling class (groups
around Cory Aquino, former president Estrada, and sections of the business
elite).
But can one analyze
this group behavior as simply a symptom of neocolonial mendacity and
servitude to wily American patrons? Is it an equal consortium of
criminals? Why does an administration claiming to be lawfully installed
(though majority are convinced that Arroyo is guilty of cheating) resort
to intimidation, coercion by brute force, warrantless arrests, torture,
and murder? And, despite its boasting of success in economic progress,
why does it ignore a public accounting of its record in respecting civil
liberties, promoting a culture of civic dignity and nationalist
independence, and a genuine process of participatory democracy? Why is its
authority imposed by violence and its legitimacy enforced by prohibitions
and military aggression, as exemplified by General Jovito Palparan’s
methods of pacifying ordinary civilians in Mindoro and Central Luzon?
Certainly, “winning hearts and minds” is far from the minds of the heirs
of Ramon Magsaysay and Col. Edward Lansdale of the CIA.
A review of the
Arroyo tenure so far may provide answers.
The
banality of the Trapos
Whoever expected
Arroyo to be an improvement over Estrada must be a self-deluded innocent
if not a Hobbesian fetishist. Since her access to government power through
the flawed 2004 voting exercise, Arroyo has turned out to be a huge
disappointment to those who supported her in EDSA II as an alternative to
the jueteng lord. Arroyo was definitely not a Cory Aquino with the
charisma of the martyred Ninoy. Arroyo’s experience in politics conformed
to the routine career of a member of local oligarchic dynasties; but her
clan grew rich primarily from bureaucratic and business manipulation,
secondarily through landlord exploitation.
Today, underworld
linkages (with U.S. connections) surround Arroyo’s clan and “tribal”
cronies. This is not unusual for a traditional politician reared in
clientelism (San Juan 2000). What is missing is any civic ambition or
project of constructing an ideological platform to articulate the
consensus of her followers, if not the organic teleology of her class
allies. She has to resign herself to hackneyed anticommunist slogans
refurbished for the militarist technocrats of neoliberal globalization.
Arroyo might appear for some benighted Makati aristocrats to resemble
Ferdinand Marcos—without the savvy and pretense to intellectual substance
of the latter. Despite U.S. tutelage, Arroyo’s managerial mode of crass
pragmatic opportunism demonstrates an essentially autocratic style of
governance appropriately synchronized with the dictates of the World Bank,
IMF, WTO, and the Washington Consensus.
Right from the
beginning, Arroyo’s ascendancy was characterized by rampant human rights
violations. Based on the reports of numerous fact-finding missions,
Arroyo has presided over an unprecedented series of harassment,
warrantless arrest, and assassination of journalists, lawyers, church
people, peasant leaders, legislators, doctors, women activists, youthful
students, indigenous leaders, and workers. The human rights watchdog
KARAPATAN has documented the brutalization of 169,530 individual victims,
18,515 families, 71 communities and 196 households. Arroyo has been
tellingly silent over the killing and abduction of countless members of
opposition parties and popular organizations. Most of those killed or
“disappeared” were peasant or worker activists belonging to progressive
groups such as Bayan Muna, Anakpawis, Gabriela, Anakbayan, Karapatan, KMU,
and others (Petras and Abaya 2006). They were protesting Arroyo’s
repressive taxation, collusion with foreign capital tied to oil and mining
companies that destroy people’s livelihood and environment, fraudulent use
of public funds, and other anti-people measures. Such groups and
individuals have been tagged as “communist fronts” by Arroyo’s National
Security Adviser, the military and police; the latter agencies have been
implicated in perpetrating or tolerating those ruthless atrocities.
Recently, General
Jovito Palparan of the Philippine Army’s 7th Infantry Division, reputedly
the most notorious instigator of these outrageous brutalities, has
fomented a climate of fear and impunity in Central Luzon. Sixty percent of
the killings this year have occurred in his domain. Civilians who are
unable to show cedulas or community tax certificates are humiliated,
jailed and tortured for being NPA members, or sympathizers. His army of
occupation has earned distinction as a worthy successor to the abusive
Japanese Kempetei, inflicting indignity, injury and death on terrorized
subjects (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 17 August 2006, A12).
National Emergency as state dogma
Relentless
corruption, cynical divide-and-rule manipulation, and the outright lack of
any concern for the people’s welfare have distinguished Arroyo’s
unconscionable rule from its inception. Faced with the loss of moral and
political legitimacy, Arroyo has institutionalized a pattern of terror
throughout the country since taking the reins of government. Particularly
with the 2001/2004 election of party-list representatives from Bayan Muna,
killings, abductions and outright harassment of anyone criticizing the
government have intensified. Despite having only three elected
representatives in Congress and a few allies, Bayan Muna is now considered
a serious threat that should be “neutralized” by police action. Without
any open proof or evidence, Bayan Muna is construed by Arroyo and the AFP
as a surrogate, a stand-in, for the NPA and the Communist Party of the
Philippines.
The Ecumenical
Movement for Justice and Peace (EMJP) has confirmed that the majority of
human rights violations have been committed by the AFP, the Philippine
National Police, and the CAFGU (Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Unit).
And this could not have occurred without the tacit or covert approval of
Arroyo and her advisers. As the Promotion of Church People’s Response put
it in their Feb. 24 Statement: “GMA cheated her way to victory in the May
2004 elections, using public funds to secure votes in her favor and rig
the election results….GMA’s record of political killings and violations of
civil liberties, especially with her Calibrated Preemptive Response
scheme, is now the worst since the downfall of Marcos… President Arroyo’s
Proclamation 1017 constitutes a flagrant violation of the Philippine
Constitution via the pretext of a “National Emergency.”
In truth, it is
Arroyo’s emergency. Arroyo’s suppression of civil liberties and
constitutional rights carried out by the military and police opens the way
to militarist brutal dictatorship reminiscent of Marcos’ authoritarian
rule. Unlike Marcos, however, Arroyo does not have the full support of the
comprador and landlord oligarchy; Ramos, Estrada, Aquino and other
factions of the ruling class that they represent have demanded her
resignation. Clearly these groups, with obvious support from the U.S.,
would prefer “business as usual”—a managed transition to a legitimate
administration elected by the majority, with a program of economic and
political reforms to solve rampant graft and corruption, endemic
unemployment, deepening poverty and hopelessness of the masses. Can such a
transition be peacefully administered by the traditional politicians (such
as De Venecia) with U.S. patronage?
Evidently, Arroyo’s
“National Emergency” decree arrogated to a clique or fraction of the
ruling class the use of the coercive State apparatus (courts, police,
jails, all public offices and funds) to promote the interest of a few
families and their extended retinues (see Sheila Coronel, Inside PCIJ,
Feb. 27, 2006). Some politicians asked Arroyo to explain her decree. Was
it meant to guarantee “peace for national development,” as OBL purports to
be? Since taking power in 2001, Arroyo has never explained the role of the
AFP and PNP (Philippine National Police) in the killing or brutalization
of thousands of peasants, workers, women, professionals, Moros, Lumads,
and youth. No explanation has been given for the lack of decent jobs for
thousands who leave everyday—over 100,000 nurses and doctors left in the
last decade. No explanation for the collapse of the nation’s health care
system. No explanation for the violence against women, for the pollution
of habitats, the neglect of OFWs raped and beaten and killed. No
explanation for the hunger, diseases, and misery afflicting millions of
Filipinos.
Devoid of any
“check-and-balance’ restraint from Congress or Court, Arroyo’s
administrative hubris has been unleashed chiefly on the progressive and
nationalist sectors of the citizenry. Should we expect a massacre of
Indonesian or Chilean proportions? Marcos tried to do it, but he had to
compromise in the end. Clearly, today, the hand of the U.S. and its agents
has been exposed in directing this selective dragnet, even as the U.S.
Embassy continues to assert sovereignty over four American soldiers
charged by the Philippine Court with rape. Meanwhile, thousands of U.S.
Special Forces and their mighty warships are standing by, just in case. A
recent news item about the U.S. holding secret negotiations (with the
approval of local officials) with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)
to establish a new military base in MILF-held territory in Mindanao
confirms the U.S. stranglehold on the Arroyo regime (Scarpello 2006).
The failure of the
inept, corrupt regimes of Ramos, Estrada and Arroyo is also evidenced by
the continuing Bangsa Moro insurgency led by militants of the Moro
National Liberation Front (MNLF). In this context, the breakdown of the
MNLF-Misuari accommodation also proves how fragile is the peace won by
Malacañang bribery, coercion, and promises. Hence the need of the U.S.
after the 9/11 attack to stigmatize the New People’s Army and the
Communist Party of the Philippines as terrorist organizations,
capitalizing on the repulsive acts of the Abu Sayyaf and the pervasive
climate of fear following the bombings in Bali, Indonesia, and elsewhere.
In this context, OBL serves as an instrument for advancing U.S. global
hegemony. This will not stop the disintegration of the neocolonial order
and the defeat of the U.S. salvaging of its Frankenstein monster.
United States patronage
One of the first
signs of the vulnerability of Arroyo’s position may be found in her
yielding to the massive popular demand for withdrawal of Filipino troops
in Iraq following the Angelo de la Cruz kidnapping. Of course, she tried
to exploit its “nationalist” potential. But her continuing servility to
Bush’s imperialist aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, together
with her obedience to the WTO neoliberal program of privatization and
deregulation, continues to reinforce her utter dependency on global forces
that only serve to undermine her presumptive authority, her claim to
represent the Filipino nation as President of the Republic.
After the 9/11
disaster, Arroyo was the first to embrace Bush’s pre-emptive war against
anti-imperialist forces. She invited thousands of U.S. Special Forces to
engage in police actions together with the AFP, thus violating an explicit
Constitutional provision against the intervention of foreign troops in
local affairs. She followed Fidel Ramos in implementing the Visiting
Forces Agreement, together with other onerous treaties, thus maintaining
U.S. control of the Philippine military via training of officers,
logistics, and dictation of punitive measures against the Moro insurgents
as well as the New People’s Army guerillas. The Philippines became the
“second front in the war on terror,” with Bush visiting the Philippines in
October 2003 and citing the neocolony as a model for the rebuilding of
devastated Iraq (for the character of the new U.S. imperialism, see Foster
and McChesney 2004).
National sovereignty
has been offered by Arroyo as a fungible commodity in the world market.
Between 2000 and 2003, U.S. military assistance to Arroyo jumped by an
impressive 1,776 percent. The Philippines is already number one in Asia
and fourth in the world as the largest beneficiary of US military aid.
From $65 million in 2004, U.S. military aid increased to $80 million
chiefly to serve counter-terrorism schemes like OBL (Philippine Aidwatch
Network 2005). Aside from the May 2006 agreement regularizing the annual
Joint U.S.-Philippines Special Operations Task Force military exercises
that extend to “non-traditional security concerns,” what is more alarming
is the thrust of the U.S. AID ‘s “2003 Conflict Vulnerability Assessment,”
its strategy for 2004-2009 which addresses “conflicts outside Mindanao
where poverty and social injustice can help to create fertile ground for
organized violence and terrorism” (Tuazon 2006). Shades of Magsaysay/Lansdale
clones engaged in counter-revolutionary plotting!
This repeatable
scenario is the profound legacy of the persisting colonial subjugation of
the Philippines and the instrumentalization of the local bureaucracy and
military to carry out the U.S. imperial strategy in the first half of the
twentieth-century up to the Cold War anti-communist policies and the
current racialized “war against global terrorism.” Without US support, the
Filipino elite cannot sustain the oppression and exploitation of millions
of propertyless workers, peasants, and middle strata now driven to flee
and settle in other lands.
As a token of
obedience to her U.S. sponsors, Arroyo has hired a U.S. lobbying firm,
Venable, for advice on national governance. The US firm will ostensibly
raise money for the modernization of the AFP. It will also propose crucial
amendments to the Constitution so as to allow foreign ownership of land,
public utilities, and the mass media. Charter change will be pushed
through to permit Arroyo to retain power even under a new parliamentary
set-up. To conciliate Washington, Arroyo is heeding the Bush
administration’s scheme of devising Anti-Terrorism Laws and National ID
Systems to suppress the articulation of grievances by the poor, deprived
majority (on U.S. state terrorism, see Ahmad 2001). Because of severe
unemployment, soaring prices of oil products and basic commodities, unjust
salaries and wages, increased tax burdens, chronic corruption in
government, insufficient and costly social services, lack of genuine land
reform, alarming proliferation of gambling, drugs, and State violence
against ordinary citizens, millions of Filipinos, including landed elite,
bishops, businessmen and professionals, have called for Arroyo’s
resignation (see March 2005 survey of Pulse Asia; Philippine Daily
Inquirer, May 4, 2005).
Intractable contradictions
Any president of the
Republic since nominal independence in 1946 is always a compromise post or
function negotiated among the class sectors (landlords, compradors,
bureaucrat capitalists) and the U.S. This time, however, the post has
become an arena of fierce internecine struggle. Since 2004, Arroyo’s
faction suffered a stunningly rapid erosion of support from the
traditional comprador and oligarchic segments of the ruling bloc. On one
hand, the ousted Estrada camp has really never reconciled itself to its
loss of power, given its populist tendencies and residual
social-democratic leaning. On the other hand, the Arroyo clique failed to
offer a viable opening to those excluded and marginalized, given its
dependence on bureaucratic corruption, extortions, raids on the public
treasury, and other criminal activities.
Arroyo usurped power
through EDSA II, a mass phenomenon taken over by the excluded fractions of
the elite. In that process, it was presumed that authority derived from
her charismatic figure, not from the rational-legal normative rules
attached to the office which were suspended, supplemented by the mystique
of tradition. Belief in her legitimacy collapsed with her election. So
Arroyo confused the right to act as President with the power of commanding
assent; belief in one’s authority became crucial (Scruton 1982). Power
customarily derived from the power-brokers, the AFP. While habit and
custom maintained routine patterns of obedience particularly from the
wealthy and middle class, ordinary citizen’s belief in Arroyo’s legitimacy
dissolved when the hugely popular Fernando Poe lost the election.
Eventually Arroyo’s legitimacy evaporated with the Garci revelations,
replaced with bureaucratic State power and its arbitrary, contingent
implementation.
How can one insure
belief in one’s legitimacy if such belief is based on coercion or
trickery? A national consensus resolving class antagonisms, the foundation
of oligarchic hegemony, has failed to materialize. The regime may be able
to maintain order in urban areas, but it has miserably failed to deliver
adequate government services and socially constructive, inspiring
directives to society at large.
Except for
maintaining the services of the police and military, Arroyo’s
administrative apparatus has been harnessed chiefly for regime survival.
Never really interested in generating mass consent or popular
mobilization, the Arroyo clique has relied on bribery and other insidious
machinations. It operates with a narrow circle of parasitic generals,
“trapos” (traditional politicians), and mediocre functionaries from the
mass media and the academy. Its popular base is non-existent. Its
influence on landed oligarchs, professional strata, and the
business/commercial elite has always been superficial and precarious,
mediated by brokers like Fidel Ramos, De Venecia, and assorted confidence
tricksters.
In addition,
religious fundamentalism reinforces the passivity and conservatism of the
middle elements who either play blind or tolerate repression for
short-term utilitarian expedience. In short, Arroyo’s mode of governance
(for as long as it succeeds) has always been essentially corporatist,
reactionary, opportunistic.
Cold War ghouls
In the past, the
neocolonial order survived popular insurrections through a combined
strategy of exacting consent and applying coercion. In the fifties of the
last century, Magsaysay’s strategy of “All-out Friendship or All-out
Force” mixed military suppression and economic-political reforms to
counter the Huks. W. Wertheim (1974) questions whether Magsaysay’s
strategy of joining “a right hand’ mailed-fist policy with a “left hand”
reformist one, is a genuine alternative to social revolution. The history
of the last fifty years demonstrates that such classic doctrine of U.S.
counterinsurgency may create temporary “breathing space” for the
exploiters (such as the “total war” policy of Corazon Aquino), but
ultimately perpetuates and even worsens the social conditions that
generate discontent, anarchy, and rebellion.
One should interject
here the socio-historical context of counterinsurgency politics. The
Philippine social formation is still basically tributary and
disarticulated, with non-class social alignments (status identity tied to
religion, gender, etc.) juxtaposed with primary class antagonisms. The
main contradiction is still between the popular-democratic classes
(peasants, workers and middle strata) and the
comprador/landlord/bureaucrat-capitalist bloc supported by the United
States (Sison and De Lima 1998). One consequence of the political economy
of underdevelopment of capitalist production relations and the persistence
of clientelist, quasi-feudal relations is the erasure of the value of
human rights, both individual and social.
Clive Thomas argues
that neocolonial underdevelopment in general restricts “the practice of
‘bourgeois’ ideas of legality and equality…among the population at large,
particularly since these are founded on the ‘equality’ of all individuals
in the marketplace” (1984, 85; compare the analysis of Macpherson 1962),
so that political and legal relations have not been democratically
transformed along bourgeois lines. This may apply to the large social
domain where patriarchal, quasi-feudal, clientelist relations still
prevail, including the authoritarian space of the military and
technocratic bureaucracy inhabited by the likes of Arroyo, General
Palparan, and their ilk. But surely not to the collective, dynamic spaces
of proletarian struggle, indigenous community actions, women’s
mobilization, artist’s nomadic organizations, civil society activism, and
the liberated guerilla zones (San Juan 2002).
U.S. imperialism then
fashioned the technocratic scheme of “low-intensity warfare” to deal with
upheavals in the post-Vietnam period. Its military field manuals endorsed
tactical tools of unconventional warfare: psychological warfare, forced
mass evacuations or “hamletting,” imprisonment of whole communities in
military garrisons, militarization of villages, selective assassinations,
disappearances, mass executions, etc. Tried in IndoChina, Korea, Central
America, it continues to be implemented in Colombia, Iraq, and the
Philippines. But contrary to Walden Bello’s (1989) view that U.S.
counterinsurgency doctrine relied chiefly on a political-ideological
offensive, the truth is the opposite. For example, Aquino’s “Yellow
Revolution” would not have survived without overt and covert U.S. military
support of the so-called “NAFP” (New Armed Forces of the Philippines)
against coup attempts and insurgent assaults, especially from intransigent
Moro partisans. With U.S. help, the AFP mobilized vigilante and
paramilitary death squads with license to kill revolutionary militants,
immune from prosecution. U.S. military force midwifed the restoration of
U.S.-backed oligarchic oppression of the Filipino masses. Even granting
its moral “high ground” over the Marcos dictatorship, the political
bankruptcy of the Aquino dispensation, including those of her successors
Ramos, Estrada, and Arroyo, cannot distract us from the barbarism of
neoliberal globalization in the “New World Order’ with which they connived
and in which they flourished (Falk 1993).
Beginning in 2002,
the Arroyo government and the AFP implemented OBL, an “end-game strategy”
to defeat the Communist Party and the NPA in two years. Arroyo even
boasted of her one-billion peso funding of the combined military-police
offensive against the NPA. Revised as the “Enhanced National Internal
Security Plan,” OBL combines elements of the U.S. doctrine of “low
intensity warfare” with more draconian tactics of the post-9/11“War
against Terrorism.” Apart from psywar black propaganda, OBL synthesizes
combat, intelligence and civil-military operations to attack the “critical
vulnerabilities” and “support systems” of the enemy. In this case, the
enemy refers to all progressive, nationalist Filipinos critical of Arroyo
and U.S. aggression. OBL has targeted legitimate political parties such as
Bayan Muna, whose representatives were elected to Congress, and other
cause-oriented groups. Its aim is to “neutralize” (that is, physically
eliminate) the “terrorists,” which includes not only the Abu Sayyaf, but
mainly the “communists” in alleged sectoral fronts of the Communist Party
of the Philippines.
A few provisional
observations so far may be made here. In effect, Arroyo state terrorism is
designed to 1) insure regime survival and reproduction of its personnel;
2) protect the privileges of the elite and the capital accumulation of a
class fraction of the ruling bloc; and 3) promote neoliberal/U.S.
hegemonic supremacy in Asia and the world, given its historic dependency
on the former colonizers. Specifically, state terrorism deployed by the
AFP attacks civilians to force them to abandon their support of the
revolutionary and progressive forces. It uses military-police violence and
its bureaucratic machinery to put the public in fear for specific
political ends, such as those listed above. In such a climate of
widespread fear, danger and dismay, in which violence strikes the hapless
victims as something arbitrary and random, the consequence of unleashing
methodical systematic force, namely, obedience to those wielding power and
monopolizing resources, seems assured. This appears to be the logic of the
Arroyo brand of state terrorism.
Homegrown fascism
This logic is in turn
rationalized with shoddy ideological platitudes. Since anti-communism has
always been conflated with anti-terrorism from the start, it is easy to
justify the killing of suspected terrorist “enemies of the state.” This
may explain why the AFP continues to pursue a fanatical anti-communist
program today even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
capitalist reversal in China and in Eastern Europe. Its Christian
chauvinist orientation militates against any pluralist outlook or even
multiculturalist sympathy for the plight of the Bangsa Moro people and
other indigenous communities (Igorots, Lumad) who have organized and armed
themselves to fight for justice and dignity, for regaining their ancestral
habitats.
But this AFP
subservience to Washington does not insure the absence of internal rifts
and breakdown of “professionalism” due to abuses and corruption of the
politicized officer ranks (McCoy 2000). This is a pattern which has almost
become institutionalized for lack of any genuine democratic, nationalist
ethos, given the function of this organ of government (established by the
U.S. colonial authority) to suppress the revolutionary forces of the first
Philippine Republic, the Moro Sultanate resistance, and numerous peasant
insurrections (including the Huk uprising) constantly reproduced by the
fierce class divisions in a semi-feudal and neocolonized formation. It is
doubtful if a Hugo Chavez, or even a middling clone, can germinate from
this Pentagon-supervised organ of repression.
We can thus
understand the “Hello Garci” episode, following the Oakwood “Mutiny,” as a
symptom of the internal divisions in the AFP and the loss of Arroyo’s full
control. Whatever sliver of moral legitimacy Arroyo’s administration
still possessed then, gradually dissolved in the AFP squabbles caused by
this exposure. Not even her successful attempt to stop impeachment
proceedings in Congress could really repair the rupture of political
legitimacy dating back to the May 2004 elections. The “Hello Garci”
scandal may be read as a symptom of the advanced disintegration of the
comprador-landlord hegemony eviscerated by the Marcos dictatorship,
temporarily revived by Cory Aquino, and given extension by Fidel Ramos’
mock-utopian resuscitation of Marcosian rhetoric.
Political economy of violence
Circumstance more
than personality functions as the key determinant in this political
conjuncture. Given the deterioration of infrastructure, lack of
substantive investments for industry and agriculture, and the reliance on
dollar remittance, this class compromise cannot endure for long. Resources
for the reproduction of the means of violence and its machinery are in
short supply. Resort to State violence cannot make up for the structural
problems of underdevelopment, permanent indebtedness, and subordination to
corporate global capital. Arroyo cannot rescue her coalition of
conflicting political allies because of lack of the abundant foreign
subsidies that Ferdinand Marcos then enjoyed, among other reasons. This is
worsened by the depletion of natural resources and educated social capital
(due to emigration, breakdown of schooling, etc.) and the strict limits of
local capital accumulation (no independent industrial ventures) due to the
pressures of globalization and the U.S. “war” to re-establish its global
hegemony by systematic torture and unrelenting bombing. In effect, the
systematic political killing and repression we are witnessing today may be
seen as the convulsive death-pangs of the Arroyo short-term compromise.
Arroyo has no other
way out. The Economic Crisis of 1997-1998 destroyed any illusions of the
Philippines becoming a new Asian Tiger. While Ramos and Estrada offered
concessions to the working people and the intelligentsia, they failed to
halt the advance of the armed struggle in the countryside and the
national-democratic social movements in the cities. Civil society
continues its resurgence despite State/military repression. With a
profit-centered neoliberal hegemony in control, the unimpeded
impoverishment of the countryside has resulted in the mass exodus to the
cities and outward, hence a million Filipinos leave every year for jobs
abroad. With competition from India, China, Vietnam and Indonesia, the
Philippines cannot solve unemployment, poverty, and popular discontent by
the regime-survival methods of arrests, abductions, and summary
executions.
Marcos’
institutionalization of “the warm body export” in 1974 to tax the poor and
relieve labor-peasant unrest has structured the economy to be wholly
dependent on regular remittances of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW), the
main source of dollar earnings required to pay the burgeoning foreign
debt. The remittance topped $18 billion last year, giving the impression
that the country was becoming prosperous and taking off. Arroyo
prematurely celebrated this index of an economic recovery entirely
contingent on the unpredictable fluctuation of the global labor market.
A scandal of historic
proportion, dwarfing the massive human-rights violations, is this infamous
“warm body export” that threatens to deterritorialize the nation-state. It
has led to nearly ten million Filipinos transported or displaced to 140
countries, chiefly as contract workers in poorly paid jobs (mainly as
domestics, caregivers, and semi-skilled labor), often victimized by
unscrupulous racist employers, abandoned by their own government to fend
for themselves—an average of five OCW corpses arrive each day at the Ninoy
Aquino International Airport. These “New Heroes” (“mga bagong bayani” to
Cory Aquino) are now clamoring for Arroyo’s ouster, despite her humorless
projection of Filipina “super-maids” as the solution to the misery and
poverty of the vast majority.
Meanwhile, structural
conditionalities continue to extract enormous debt payments to the World
Bank and other financial consortiums, draining two-thirds of the social
wealth of the Philippines and depriving education and other social
services of sorely needed funds. Neoliberalizing schemes enforced by
U.S.-dominated agencies (WTO, IMF) continue to inflict havoc and misery on
the majority of 86 million Filipinos. It has bred criminality, worsened
corruption, inflamed reactionary Christian fundamentalism, and exposed
everyone to the wrath of natural disasters (witness the Leyte flood, a
repeat of previous devastating calamities in Luzon and elsewhere). It has
contributed to the staging of the Wowowee tragedy, a glaring symptom of
how the iniquitous system gambles the dreams of the desperate millions.
Unrepeatable history lesson
What Arroyo and her
advisers are doing is neither original nor innovative, as the historical
survey I have sketched earlier clearly show. The resort to seemingly
uncontrolled political killings by para-military death squads in Central
and Latin America in the seventies and eighties was a tactic of U.S.
imperialist intervention to counteract popular, nationalist revolutions in
El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile and elsewhere. This is being
repeated in the Philippines, with a crucial difference: the Arroyo regime
is a fragile, incoherent product of a unique historical conjuncture in
Philippine history. Supported by the Bush administration, the Arroyo
regime is a vehicle of comprador/landlord/capitalist domination of the
working masses that has lost popular consent, dating back to the
martial-law despotism of Ferdinand Marcos to the back-room dealings of
Ramos and Estrada. With the dynamics of “People Power” exhausted, the
Arroyo class fraction is forced to resort to bribery, fraud, deception,
and state terrorism.
The Arroyo clique
deploys this mode of preserving its illegitimate rule in a time when the
local comprador-landlord oligarchy is split, the military bureaucracy is
riddled with dissension, and its neoliberal policies are challenged by
popular opposition
(including
significant sectors of church people, indigenous communities, and the
fractured Moro separatist movement). Extra-judicial murders of its legal
critics is a symptom of the regime’s structural weakness (failure of the
court system, the parliament, legal institutions, and other state
ideological apparatus); however, its persistence can demoralize the
democratic resistance and lead to a de jure consolidation of the most
rightist and reactionary elements of the system. Arroyo may aspire to a
compromise of ruling-class elements via a constitutional dictatorship
(mediated through charter change and repressive ordinances) but, given the
dependency of the State on remittances and the extremely unstable global
market, U.S. rightist militarism (now suffering intolerable defeats), and
the internal contradictions of the local elite also beleaguered by
grassroots refusals, she can only desperately cling to power by prolonging
the fragmentation of the resistance and the acquiescence of the venal,
corruptible parts of the bureaucratic-military apparatus.
The impending
disintegration of the Arroyo regime is evidenced by its resort to
intimidation, bureaucratic repression, and death squads. It is bound to
implode in one big catastrophic upheaval that will unleash indiscriminate
violence and dehumanizing abuses symptomatic of the advanced decay of the
bankrupt neocolonial system. Or it will exit peacefully if disciplined
mass mobilization in the MetroManila area and elsewhere can prevent the
regime’s deployment of whatever armed elements it can use to postpone its
ruin. To be sure, U.S. intervention—military and diplomatic—will try to
save its lackeys, or sacrifice them for a new set of servants who will do
Washington’s bidding, namely, U.S.-tutored military officers and
unscrupulous business technocrats tied to transnational
financial-corporate interests. Either way, there is no escape from the
intensifying crisis of a moribund clientelist system ridden with
irresolvable contradictions. In due time, this tactic of gangster rule
will implode and force the U.S. and its local agents to replace the Arroyo
clique with one that can command a plausible consensus without resort to
unmitigated criminal machinations. This moment will be determined by the
emergence of a new class realignment and, more importantly, by the
critical unity of the nationalist, democratic and progressive forces.
One anticipates in
the next few months the rapid mobilization of conscienticized Filipinos,
popular democratic formations, and vast sectors of civil society against
Arroyo’s tyranny. As I have suggested earlier, Arroyo’s isolation springs
from the confusion of authority with coercive force. This may be
categorized as a form of Bonapartism in the periphery when the old ruling
class had already lost but the masses have not yet acquired the ability to
govern (Poulantzas 1974). Exposed for cheating, lying, and stealing,
Arroyo’s autocratic rule can no longer claim even a semblance of
legitimacy. Nor can the State apparatus and agencies prostituted by Arroyo
claim the mandate that solely emanates from the Filipino people, assuming
that a constitutional democratic republic is still the framework of
governance.
The Arroyo regime’s
moral bankruptcy and political decay have precipitated its total
repudiation and condemnation by the Filipino masses (see, for example, the
sentiments voiced in the editorial of Daily Tribune Online, August 17,
2006). Civil liberties promulgated in the 1987 Constitution and by the
United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, however, can only
be guaranteed by organized public demonstrations, street rallies, strikes,
and other visible enactment or exercise of social and civic rights.
Revolution is precisely the concrete sequence of events, the process of
transformation of the system, in the totality of its sociohistorical
determinations (Therborn 1980). Progressive sectors must appeal to all
peoples around the world concerned with justice, democracy, and human
dignity to express solidarity with the Filipino people in overthrowing the
U.S.-backed Arroyo regime, releasing all political prisoners, and
restoring full and genuine sovereignty to the Filipino people. Posted
by Bulatlat
-----------------------------------------------------
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