Corruption and army abuses breed resentment against martial law
In Negros Occidental province of the southern Philippines, children with flowers carried a small white coffin along a country road leading through sugar-cane fields. The casket contained the body of Juan Latorgo. His grieving mother, Estrellita Latorgo, 21, says that she took her son first to the local hospital and then to a witch doctor. Neither could arrest the symptoms of malnutrition that killed Juan, at the age of seven months.
In Zamboanga City, a building contractor complains that the illicit kickbacks he is forced to pay to obtain government contracts have jumped to 20%. Nowadays, he adds, even "someone from the Government Auditor's Department [supposedly an anticorruption watchdog agency] comes along and demands his own payoff to keep quiet."
In Quezon City outside Manila, a middle-aged nun speaks passionately of working with and for "the poorest of the poor." Approvingly, she describes surrounding rural areas as having been "liberated" by Communist insurgents. Why? "I am a Catholic," she explains, "and I try not to think about blood when I think of my hatred of Marcos. But if not a knife or a bullet for him, I wish for one small cancer cell to do what needs to be done."
From the rice fields of northern Luzon to the coconut groves of southern Mindanao, anger and rebellion are rising in the Philippines, a country that threatens to become a powder keg in the Pacific region. The resentment is directed primarily at the corruption-tinged, autocratic regime of President Ferdinand Marcos, who seven years ago imposed martial law on the 7,000 islands of the Philippine archipelago. Today he rules as both President and Prime Minister over a dangerously deteriorating society. Despite statistically impressive increases in his country's per capita income, poverty and hunger affect most of the Philippines' 46.5 million people, a population that faces increasing suffering as the country totters toward economic crisis. Violent crime is soaring so rapidly that even some government officials have recommended the easy licensing of firearms for self-protection. Abuse of power by the military, which has long been a coddled prop of the Marcos regime, has alienated millions of Filipinos from the government. Above all, there is a widespread sense that Marcos himself, a charismatic popular hero when he was elected President 14 years ago, has become the symbol of a plutocracy characterized by cronyism and corruption.