The American factor / Puno a lost soul - HERE'S THE SCORE by Teodoro C. Benigno

If the US government can have its way, the next president of the Philippines should and must be Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. There’s no doubt the Americans want her to get into Malacañang soonest. And there’s also no doubt that Washington is fed up with President Joseph Estrada – and want him out. This is information we have from very reliable American sources. But a fine distinction has to be made. America no longer has the power it used to have in the Philippines when her largest overseas military bases – Subic and Clark – spread-eagled virtually the whole of Asia. With the US Seventh Fleet riding nuclear and naval shotgun.

When the Philippine Senate booted those bases out in 1991, our nation’s priority standing in America’s geopolitically strategy fell – I am told – from No. 4 to No. 45 in the Asia-Pacific theatre. The Americans had pie in their faces, a humiliation just about as stinging as their defeat in Vietnam. For a long time, they were our lord and master. The Americans were Edgar Bergen to our Charlie McCarthy. This was a role they relished and acted out mightily since the palmiest days of the American governors-general.

But we were appreciative puppets nonetheless. The "American way of life" – its liberal culture, its language, its democracy, all the stirring symbols of the Statue of Liberty – easily slammed into our fragile Malayo-Polynesian civilization. From Spain, the Yankee took custody of us. This legacy is manifest in the fact that the Filipino-American community in the US, about two million, is the fastest growing minority in the North American continent.

But the question persist: Is there an American hand, an invisible one of course, in the now massive protest movement in the streets against President Estrada?

Yes, there may be. But it is still a weak and faltering hand, unlike the days in 1989 when fighter planes streaking from aircraft carriers of the US Seventh Fleet crisscrossed and dove low in the skies of Metro Manila. When they saw those planes, Col. Gringo Honasan and his rightwing rebel RAM military rebels lost heart. Their mutiny collapsed. They had thus far launched their most powerful coup against President Corazon Aquino and were on the verge of whisking her away bodily from Malacañang.

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Those days are no more. The US still possesses ways and means of exerting pressure on the Estrada government like freezing IMF or World Bank loans, just recently in the amount of about $500 million. But these days, American is caught up in the crazy-quilt of the US presidential elections – really crazy, hairy and wild – that there is little official interest in what is happening in the Philippines today. Who cares? A senior American observer-analyst once told me. "American Congress yawns when you mention the Philippines; you Filipinos don’t count anymore."

I, of course, disagreed. I countered that Washington had placed their eggs in the presidential basket of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. She was educated in America, was a former classmate of Bill Clinton, could be trusted to toe the American line. They needed her, especially if a military dictatorship would loom. I further countered that the US and the Philippines had forged the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA). This was proof the Philippines was back – however creakily – in the geopolitical strategy of the US in the Pacific. He did not disagree.

His prominent companion – who must remain nameless – volunteered a piece of information that landed on our conversation like a bomb. Especially in retrospect for that was several months ago. He said the US was worried about the substantial increase in the drug or narcotics traffic in the Philippines. Washington was worried even more that Philippine police and military authorities seemed to be sleeping on the job. He mentioned the name of a general.

The Philippines is now a major transit point for drugs, particularly shabu, destined for the US West Coast. If there is anything that gives American authorities the screaming meemies, it is drugs manufactured abroad and illegally slipped across US borders. My fear then as we discussed the subject – a grater fear now – was that the Philippines was on the road to being another Colombia. There the drug trade – and, of course, the drug lords – have pulled out the moral intestines of the government.

There filthy drug money by the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, has corrupted almost everything it touches. Crusading journalists, judges and honest politicians have been killed by the baker’s dozen. So rich have the drug lords become they had even the temerity and ingenuity to build a submarine atop a mountain for the transport of narcotics.

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Will the same thing happen here? I now know that quite a number of upscale Makati and Parañaque residential villages have been clandestinely penetrated by drug lords – most of them overseas Chinese, at times Burmese. They pay high rentals, disguise themselves as legitimate businessmen, are well armed, scoot out without serving their landlords notice, scoot in again for there are many innocent households to be had, and they have the money – spot cash. In the dead of the night, they bring in shabu and all the paraphernalia that goes with the drug.

No wonder. Almost suddenly, the Chinese population in the Philippines has precipitately increased. And they cannot even speak Tagalog or English. Contraband is everywhere, especially shabu. And they enter by the boatload through the North and such provinces as Quezon and Batangas. The whole thing makes you shiver. Yes, there could be an American factor. Mainland America is diseased with drugs. And a sizeable portion comes from the Philippines. Is the Philippine government blind to the whole thing?

Yes, the US is certainly monitoring this drug traffic. And will move.

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I knew Ricardo (Dong) Puno when he was a talk-show host. Contemporaries we were at GMA-7 where I piloted Firing Line. I had a lot of respect for the guy who also wrote a column beside mine in The Philippine STAR. Eventually Dong Puno walked over to ABS-CBN where his decibels rose as he pastured Dong Puno Live to high- audience ratings. Ever since he left ABS-CBN to become the press secretary-spokesman of President Joseph Estrada, he moulted into a different person.

Today, each time he spouts propaganda for the Estrada government, the world of intelligence shrinks or takes a dive. And he does it with a straight face. Let’s take the latest. Dong Puno denies today that Erap Estrada sometime ago was fomenting a "class war". The hell the president was instigating a class war! Erap said in no uncertain terms the rich and the affluent were out to get his scalp and he would fight back and organize the ranks of the poor. So startled was former President Fidel Ramos that he said this was "class war" which had no place in our society.

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Regarding Wednesday’s lunch-in in Makati where the businessmen of Makati, the urban and peasant poor including the middle class were bunched together, Puno had this to say: "If they want to have these lunches together, they are welcome to it. Anyway, when we go to Pangasinan tomorrow, we’ll probably do the same thing – a lunch between the rich and the poor."

I don’t think Puno is stupid, but he has completely overlooked the historic significance of Wednesday’s outdoor lunch. This was the first time the walls melted between social classes from one extreme to the other. Names formerly sacrosanct, captains of industry from Makati and elsewhere, socialites, and persons of high prominence joined the "wretched of the earth" to eat with bare hands. And celebrate the gift of life. This unity was possible because it was driven by a strong and unprecedented social force – the across-the-board opposition to President Joseph Estrada.

No longer can the president say his only enemies are the rich of Makati. There you saw it, graphically, dramatically, like great cinema taking shape. The poor, the workers, peasants, the urban poor, slum dwellers were now balling their fists at the president. And demanding that he resign. They did not join the demonstrations because they were paid, because they were bused in. In fact many of them walked long distances in their bare feet. One of them, an intrepid woman, who insisted on continuing the march despite pains in her chest, died of a heart attack. She was a heroine.

If Puno cannot understand this, if the president cannot, if his cabinet members cannot, then they live in a Lotus Land infested with land mines. And these will explode. We are told the president and his men also decided to have their lunch with the poor yesterday in San Carlos City, Pangasinan. This is old hat, déjà vu, a pathetic scrap of the same old thing – Estrada eating with the poor. Anybody can do that. Any president can do that. Particularly when the TV cameras are around.

But the whole thing is derelict, a blind man walking on crutches. Pie in the sky. Can the president really make the nation forget that once upon a time, he fired the slogan Erap para sa mahirap, fired it with the booster strength of rockets reaching for the moon? Well? That was a dud. The poor are now in the streets demonstrating.

Gahd, are they blind? Well, Mr. Puno?