PHL communist insurgency, ‘the most brutal in the world’

By Cecilio Arillo, Businessmirror, Aug 27, 2018

Part Three

Corruption abounds in the Aquino government

WHILE the insurgency situation worsened in 1988, “corruption abounds” in the Aquino government. Joaquin “Chino” Roces, publisher and one of the owners of The Manila Times, in the course of receiving an honor award from Mrs. Aquino, said:

“It was not rice, roads, bridges, water, electricity and other mandated things that people expected of us, but rather a moral order best seen in the government’s response to graft and corruption in public service.”

Roces went further and dejectedly said, “we cannot afford a government of thieves unless we can tolerate a nation of highway men.”

Foreigners are sometimes shocked at the depth of corruption in Philippine society. It has become endemic in a country where teachers must struggle to educate children without classrooms or books and where judges get paid a little to make decisions that promise to bring death threats from communist guerillas or goons, wrote Joseph Reaves of the Chicago Tribune.

Amid that controversy, 13 of the 15 Philippine Supreme Court justices have been accused of graft and corruption, and the Anti-Graft League of the Philippines attempted to impeach them.

In Honolulu, Hawaii, a Filipino leader, Jose Lazo, wrote a letter to the Honolulu Advertiser to react to their editorials insinuating that “Aquino is not personally involved in graft and other misdeeds.” Lazo’s letter read in part: “The statement that Mrs. Aquino is not personally involved is not quite true. There are evidences that she is deep into it. One of those is the check from Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp.—the corporation in charge of Philippine casino operations—amounting to P2.8 million issued under her name.”

The Philippine Commission on Audit, Lazo continued, in its report said that “casino profits (amounting to P3 billion annually) were under Mrs. Aquino’s personal control without audit and supervision. This was resorted to in total disregard of the law under the guise of the need for an expeditious distribution of funds. A rather lame excuse, lamented Roces, newspaper publisher and one of the most ardent supporters and sponsor of Mrs. Aquino, now turned critic.”

Lazo further wrote: “The side remark of corruption under the Marcos administration carries with it the pervasive effort to convict him by publicity.” He added that, “in various occasions, the governments of the United States of America, Japan, and the Philippines had cleared President Marcos of various charges of corruption.”

US Military Facilities in the Philippines

Under the military bases agreement and two other subsidiary treaties signed between the Philippines and the United States, the latter was allowed to maintain 23 bases and reservations in the archipelago after independence. Some of these bases dated back to colonial times.

For instance, Clark Air Base in Pampanga province, 82 kilometers north of Manila, was Fort American Horse Cavalry; Subic Naval Base in Zambales province on the China Sea coast northwest of Manila, a Spanish naval station in the 19th century, is an old anchorage for the Asiatic Fleet; and generations of the American military had spent their leave at Camp John Hay in Baguio City, in the highlands of Northern Luzon. Other bases were set up for the Allied counteroffensive against the Japanese during World War II, while still others are navigational stations for the American air-defense network set up all over the Western Pacific during the Cold War.

The Clark Air Force base is the center of logistic and combat support for the operation of the US air forces in the Southeast Asian region. On the other hand, the Subic Naval Base has the primary mission of supporting the operating units of the 7th fleet. The base is composed of eight major commands and 40 smaller units and detachments. Clark and Subic are the largest US air and naval installations in Asia.

For the first time since the end of the Second World War, the US found itself facing a credible naval challenge in East Asia. Soviet maritime forces have access in four naval bases in Vietnam and Kampuchea. Soviet submarines, missile capable battle cruisers and light aircraft carriers have used these port facilities, and 20 Soviet naval combat and support vessels regularly use Camranh Bay. These maritime forces are supported by seven major airfields in Laos and Vietnam. Soviet aircraft make reconnaissance sweeps over the South China Sea east of Philippine airspace. At the same time, growing Soviet contacts with Kiribati, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea—and the recent events in Fiji—all suggest that the strategic balance in the South Pacific is under considerable pressure.

To offset this soviet presence and maintain a deterrent balance in the region, the US must have access to local onshore support facilities. For that purpose, the Philippine bases have always been critical. Because the United States lost access to the facilities in the Philippines, it moved its forces to the east and north, and to Tinian, Palau and Saipan, places with some considerable distance from the critical ship passages of the South China Sea and where facilities were constructed while labor and supplies have to be imported at very high cost, compared with those already available at Subic and Clark in the Philippines.

To be continued