revolution. The Philippine case is comparable to what happened in Greece except that the bases had been in existence for a much longer time and we took the Filipinos even more for granted than we did the Greeks. In 1946, at the same time that our government gave the Philippines their “independence,” it took measures to ensure that the islands remained indefinitely under our control. The Philippines were severely damaged during World War II and desperately in need of economic assistance; the new Philippine government had little choice but to accept the strings attached to the grant of independence. The resulting neocolonial system proved even more unfavorable to the Philippines than colonialism itself, crippling their capacity for democratic development for forty years—until the revolution of February 1986 drove Ferdinand Marcos from power and led to the closing of all U.S. military bases.
Three American initiatives in 1946 and 1947 rendered Philippine independence virtually meaningless. These were the Bell Act of 1946; the Military Bases Agreement of March 14, 1947; and the Military Assistance Pact of March 21, 1947. The Bell Act forced the Filipinos to modify their 1935 constitution, which stipulated that all corporations in the Philippines be 60 percent owned by Filipinos. It demanded “parity,” meaning that Americans would have the same rights and privileges as Filipinos to possess and exploit Philippine companies. It established “free trade” between the two countries for ten years, thereby eliminating the Philippines’ capacity to control American imports. It also allowed Americans to own and operate public utilities in the country. The effect was to tie the Philippines, in the words of journalist William J. Pomeroy, “to the old colonial trade pattern of being a supplier of raw agricultural products and mineral ores to the United States in exchange for U.S. manufactured goods.”29 The Bell Act effectively prevented industrialization in the islands despite abundant supplies of coal, iron ore, alloy metals, hydroelectric power, and a large labor force. To this day, the Philippines resemble Okinawa far more than they do Taiwan, which has become one of the richest and most industrialized nations in East Asia. Taiwan is an example of what Okinawa and the Philippines might have become had the United States not played a neocolonial role.
The United States made all payments to the Philippines for war damages dependent on the Filipinos’ acceptance of the Bell Act. A majority of the Philippine Congress deeply opposed a constitutional amendment granting parity, but the Americans and their local supporters worked behind the scenes to get eight representatives and three senators expelled for alleged fraud and terrorism, thereby achieving—by subtraction—the minimum number of votes needed to pass it.
Three days after amending the constitution, the Philippine government signed a military bases agreement giving the United States ninety-nine-year leases to twenty-three sites, sixteen active and seven held in reserve. The agreement authorized the United States to use these bases as it saw fit. Since Filipino public land laws specify that government leases cannot be longer than twenty-five years, the terms of the bases agreement immediately set off a popular protest movement. Successive American administrations stalled for nineteen years, until in 1966, the Johnson administration traded a new twenty-five-year lease agreement for Manila’s willingness to send a military contingent to Vietnam. The two most important installations were Clark Air Force Base, second in size only to Vandenberg in California, and Subic Bay, the Seventh Fleet’s main operational and repair facility in the western Pacific. Clark Field sprawled over ten thousand acres, larger than Singapore, and was enclosed by a twenty-two- mile security fence. The right to go through its garbage gave rise to two new villages, named appropriately after two Philippine presidents, Macapagal and Marcos. On June 15, 1991, Mount Pinatubo volcano, located ten miles away, erupted for the first time in six hundred years, covering the air field in ash and rendering it a total loss. Leases to the deep-water bay and drydock facilities at Subic Bay were thus the main points of contention in the final 1991 Philippine-American base negotiations.
A week after the original 1947 base agreement was signed, the Philippine government entered into still another treaty, the Military Assistance Pact, which established a Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group (JUSMAG) in Manila. This organization, composed of American military officers, was authorized “to assist and advise the Republic of the Philippines on military and naval matters,” including supplying the Philippine army with weapons and ammunition, and so essentially reestablished a military overlordship like that of the colonial era. On August 30, 1951, the United States and the Philippines signed a Mutual Defense Treaty (although there was nothing “mutual” about it), and on September 8, 1954, the United States, the Philippines, and other nations signed a treaty establishing the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). Both treaties turned effective control of the Philippine armed forces over to the United States via the JUSMAG, which with the CIA’s help handpicked a former army captain and ruling party congressman, Ramon Magsaysay, as a compliant secretary of national defense. In 1953, he became the third president of the Republic of the Philippines. With the United States now in control of the Philippine economy and military, and our own military properties secure, we were able to dictate huge military budgets that the Philippines could ill afford and to involve their armed forces in the Korean and Vietnamese Wars. The Philippine bases became critical staging areas for the American war in Vietnam, and the United States also used its installations on Luzon to carry out CIA plots against Indonesia in 1958 and 1965.
In November 1965, Ferdinand Marcos, a Manila trial lawyer, was elected president. At first, he seemed a dynamic leader devoted to public works and intent on moving the rigged Philippine economy toward greater development. In November 1969, he won a second four-year term, the first president to be reelected in the Philippines’ short democratic history. But Marcos was interested primarily in lining his own pockets—his biographers all point out that he is in
By 1972 the situation had so worsened that Marcos faked an assassination attempt against his defense minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, in order to have an excuse to declare martial law. He then arrested and detained opposition politicians (including his likely successor, Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino), reporters, students, and labor leaders. He closed newspapers and outlawed demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts. Assuming dictatorial powers, Marcos suspended the constitution, which permitted presidents only two terms, and in 1973, he introduced a new constitution that allowed him to stay in office indefinitely and to rule by decree. He made his wife, Imelda, governor of Manila and minister of “human settlements and ecology.”
None of this occurred in a vacuum. As Alva Bowen, a career U.S. naval officer and researcher for the Congressional Reference Service, has acknowledged, “By 1975 the United States had been kicked out of Vietnam, and all the countries of Southeast Asia were taking another look at their security arrangements. The Philippines was one of the first to ask for a review of the security treaties. In 1975, just a few months after the U.S. departure from Saigon, President Gerald Ford visited the Philippines and came to an agreement with President Ferdinand Marcos that the 1947 accord on the U.S. use of the Philippine military bases would be revised, this time with a clear recognition of Philippine sovereignty.”30
The Ford-Marcos agreement represented a slight improvement but the old problems still festered. Conditions around Clark Field and Subic Bay inflamed Filipino nationalism. The bases had given rise to a huge drug and sex industry employing thousands of poor Filipino women. Angeles City, home of Clark Field, was in the 1980s the most drug-afflicted city in the Philippines. Meanwhile, under martial law Marcos vastly expanded and politicized his own military establishment, appointing cronies who were personally loyal to him and giving the army unrestricted powers to arrest civilians. “Disappearances” and murders of anyone taking an interest in politics became common. Marcos also nationalized many manufacturing and business enterprises and gave them to his relatives. They proceeded to siphon off profits for their personal enrichment while the United States looked on with a blind eye.
