Change Affects Few : Philippines: A Better Life Still Awaited

CATARMAN, Philippines —  Four years ago, thousands of new power poles, 300 miles of electrical cable and hundreds of modern transformers arrived in this isolated provincial capital 475 miles southeast of Manila.

With the help of foreign aid, the local power company had been given not just one but two complete electrical systems--one financed by the World Bank and the other paid for by the Australian government, which did not know the power company had also secured the World Bank loan.

The Australian system ultimately was stolen. For personal profit, local power company officials chopped 150 miles of electrical cable into three-foot strips and sold them to electric-frying pan manufacturers in Manila.

Impressive Network

The first system was installed in the province of Northern Samar--an impressive network of poles and power lines stretching across some the Philippines’ most impoverished and neglected towns and villages. The network slices through jungles. It climbs over mountains. It spans gaping tidal rivers.

But there’s just one problem. There is still no electricity in Northern Samar outside the capital, where a private generator operates a handful of lights for four hours every night. The government of President Corazon Aquino has not managed to maintain the main trunk line to the geothermal power plant in neighboring Leyte province. Without a power source, the entire system still stands idle.

And so today, despite the expenditure of millions of dollars in foreign aid, the 420,000 Northern Samarenos still cook with firewood and eat dinner in the dark.

Diseases of Poverty

Their problems do not stop there. More than half of the people in this province live below the poverty line of $75 a month. The leading killers here are stomach disorders, influenza, tuberculosis and pneumonia, the diseases of poverty. Few villages have clean drinking water. Most can be reached only by foot or canoe. There are fewer than 600 telephones and only 60 cars.

And more than 70% of the Samarenos who answered a recent survey said their biggest problem is not roads, it is not bridges, it is not even electricity. It is the lack of food, shelter and clothing.

The only semblance of government aid here in the last two decades has been a development project financed and distributed by the Australian government. And now, even that project is threatened because political forces within the new Aquino government are tearing it apart.

“You ask if things are better here now under this new government,” said one Filipino aid worker in Catarman last week, “Well, I ask you, what government?”

In short, nearly a year after Aquino rose to power on the crest of a “people power revolution” that promised the 54 million Filipinos a better life, Northern Samar stands as a stark example of the Philippine government’s continuing inability to touch, let alone improve, the lives of its people.

In interviews with hundreds of farmers, fishermen, aid workers, economists, local politicians, soldiers and government officials in more than a dozen Philippine provinces in the 10 months since Aquino took power, the answer has been the same: The life of the average Filipino is no better and, in some cases worse, than it was under deposed dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Most of those interviewed, however, said they still admire and support Aquino personally. The overwhelming majority said they are still convinced of her sincerity and remain hopeful about the nation’s future. They said Aquino inherited an administrative nightmare from the Marcos regime, and she needs far more time to turn her impoverished nation around.

‘Graft and Corruption’

“Dismantling an infinitely complex network of people who lived off graft and corruption in the past--well, you don’t just wipe them out overnight,” said Father James Reuter, a Catholic priest who has been a close adviser and supporter of the president since her presidential election campaign last year.

Aquino has been too preoccupied with solving political crises, averting coups and purging her government of bad advisers to launch substantive development projects, others said.

“The president has been so distracted by the task of stabilizing her government that she hasn’t had time to get down to the business of economic recovery,” said Teodoro Benigno, Aquino’s press secretary.

Aquino, in most of her speeches, stresses her concern for the poor. And it is clear she is aware of the enormous problem of crushing poverty in the nation’s countryside.

‘We Will Work’

In a recent interview with The Times, Aquino said, “I guess what is primary in the minds of a lot of the Filipino people is just give us a chance to earn a livelihood, and we will work and we will live in peace.”

But Aquino, the product of a wealthy, prominent family, rarely leaves the capital, and she has not visited a rural village since she came to power. In addition, she has twice declined to see the leaders of peasant protest rallies who marched to her presidential palace to make their concerns known.

Many Filipinos doubt that Aquino will ever initiate genuine land reform in a long-feudal society. And they express concern that, in the words of Bert Listana, a leftist leader in the Bicol region south of Manila, “By the time they are in power, they are all the same.”

There has been a change, however, in the atmosphere. “Last year at this time, we seemed to be dealing in an atmosphere of certainty,” said U.S. Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, who has served in the Philippines for nearly three years. “Things were bad, and it seemed certain that they were going to get worse.

Prospect for Improvement

“Now we are dealing in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Things are still not good, but they are getting somewhat better, and there is the prospect that they are going to get better still.”

Military leaders, opposition politicians and the nation’s highest religious prelate, Cardinal Jaime Sin, have recently condemned the evidence of some graft and corruption in the new government. Already, Aquino, whose personal integrity has never been questioned, has been pushed into firing two of her Cabinet ministers under the cloud of official corruption.

As the deputy military chief of staff, Gen. Eduardo Ermita, said: “We are battling against our culture. A minister is approached by a relative or a friend, and they ask for a job or a favor. If you don’t produce one, they say, ‘You don’t know utang na loob-- you don’t know how to pay your debts.’ And you are an outcast, maybe even in your own family.”

The president has tried to dismantle Marcos’ largely corrupt, national political machine--men and women like those responsible for the theft of Northern Samar’s power cables--by firing most of the nation’s 1,600 elected town mayors and 73 provincial governors.

New Faces, Same Backgrounds

But, following the advice of her family and political advisers, Aquino then installed through presidential fiat new officials who, in many cases, have the same political backgrounds as their predecessors. And, without a popular mandate, many of those new leaders have been unable to govern at all.

Clearly it will take years for Aquino to dismantle what critics have called a cult of corruption instilled in an entire generation of Filipinos under Marcos.

Until the Feb. 22 coup that ushered in Aquino, it could be said that more than half of all Filipinos alive knew no leader other than Marcos, who ruled the Philippines for 20 years, nine of them under strict martial law. And they knew of no political system other than the one he created, a system that government lawyers contend stole more than $2 billion in cash from the national treasury and squandered billions more on worthless projects.

“Her (Aquino’s) catch-all government is made of pre-martial-law leaders, the majority of whom come from the same attitudinal background as Marcos, and most of whom are large landowners,” John Boyd Turner, an Australian political and economic analyst, said in a report to the Australian Parliament earlier this year.

‘Aspects of Cronyism’

“There is a fair probability that the Aquino government will continue many of the Marcos policies--minus, one hopes, the blatant aspects of cronyism and corruption.”

“Almost one half of all Filipino families live in destitution, below a meager poverty line,” Turner said. “A small proportion are excessively rich, including many in the Aquino government. Between them is a small middle class, mainly in Manila, precariously hanging onto their somewhat better than average standard of living.

“One or more decades of accelerated development are required before the Filipinos have a dignified standard of living,” he added.

At the heart of the economic and political dilemma facing Aquino is what one senior western diplomat in Manila called “a statistical time bomb.”

Every day, more than 3,000 babies are born in the Philippines--a birthrate that adds more than one million people to the population each year in a land area smaller than Spain.

Employment Problems

Even now, nearly half the population is below the age of 19, and more than 600,000 workers are added every year to a labor force of 21.4 million in which more than one-quarter are already unemployed or underemployed.

Fewer than 6,000 of the country’s 41,700 villages have health-care centers. There are 30,000 lawyers in the country, yet just 5,000 doctors. The most common causes of death nationwide are pneumonia and tuberculosis, both the direct result of malnutrition, and poverty is blamed for thousands more deaths each year.

Yet, in the face of such problems, the government’s machinery is so disorganized on the local level that, for example, officials say they cannot even tell who owns the cars, trucks and buses on the road because 950 license plates are stolen every month.

Compounding the problem is the nation’s peculiar geography and culture. Aquino inherited a nation of 7,100 islands with a total coastline of 21,591 miles--four times the entire coast of the continental United States. Fewer than 150 of those islands are considered inhabited, but on them are people who speak more than 80 different languages and dialects.

‘Minority Groups’

Nearly five million people are considered “minority groups,” natives of the islands before the Malay and Chinese immigrants took control centuries ago. And an additional three million are Muslims, thousands of them heavily armed, in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation.

“No wonder we’re always fighting,” one middle-class Manila resident said when faced with the statistics on language and culture. “We can’t even talk to each other.”

Nearly two-thirds of all Filipinos live in rural regions, many of them accessible only by foot. American aid analysts have described the Philippine road system as “grossly inadequate.” There are 10,000 miles of road. But little of the road system is paved, and most of it washes out during typhoon season every year. Virtually none of it reaches into remote villages, so farmers cannot market their produce.

In provinces like Northern Samar, though, it hardly matters. Reflecting a national trend, more than 70% of families here live at the subsistence level, consuming every bit they can produce, and, even then, falling short.

‘Many Remote Areas’

In discussing why the nation’s Communist insurgency has grown so much in those areas in recent years, Aquino’s armed forces chief of staff, Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, said last week: “The problem of government is the configuration of our country. Unfortunately, there are many, many remote areas in the mountain areas and the jungle areas where government cannot be all the time.”

And in the absence of government, Ramos cited another, potentially more threatening, problem Aquino inherited from her predecessor--that of the thousands of “loose firearms” scattered across the country.

Military officials say there are 11,300 high-powered firearms once owned by the government but now unaccounted for in private hands. That is in addition to the weaponry of an estimated 23,200 armed Communist insurgents, who virtually control large areas of the country, collecting tens of millions of pesos in “revolutionary taxes” each year and moving at will where the government does not.

Without naming the country he had in mind, Ramos suggested that the country easily could become another Lebanon if nothing is done to control or license the arms.

‘Collapse in Chaos’

“If this country is really to prosper in the long run,” he said, “we must come to an agreement about firearms control. Otherwise, we will end up like one of these countries in the Middle East . . . where there are 10 or 12 armed factions . . . and we will collapse in the same chaos.”

Most Aquino administration officials blame the country’s enduring problems on the economic and political chaos she inherited from Marcos. Aquino has likened the country’s plight to that at the end of World War II, after the Americans and Japanese had bombed and burned most of the nation’s cities and towns.

Documents obtained by The Times from former Marcos officials indicate the former president and his so-called cronies wasted or stole more than $7 billion in funds aimed specifically at rural or industrial development through 50 major industrial ventures that failed.

In an interview earlier this year, Marcos’ former prime minister, Cesar Virata, cited one such project--a massive multi-billion dollar scheme by former First Lady Imelda Marcos to use international development-aid money to construct film and cultural centers that are now either unfinished or unused. To build them, the government used imported oil to power machines that filled in dozens of acres of Manila Bay.

Failed Enterprises

“The Arabs turned sand into oil, and we’re the only country in history that turned oil back into sand,” Virata said.

Through such misuse and abuse, the Philippine countryside is now strewn with failed cellophane plants, copper mines, pulp and paper factories and rural banks--all tombstones to the Marcos regime’s failed attempts to create an industrial base.

What is worse, Marcos-era politicians routinely used their development budgets to buy votes. And, when they did build roads, it was largely as favors to wealthy, landed families or to facilitate military deployment against the insurgents.

Of all the roads in the country, 11.3% are in a single region, Ilocos Norte, Marcos’ home region in northern Luzon Island.

According to several key figures in Philippine society, Marcos left behind a legacy of graft and abuse of power that will take several years, at least, to reform.

“Twenty years of Marcosian misrule made us materialistic--money became the only important thing,” Cardinal Sin said in a speech earlier this year. “In our obsession to learn the price of everything, we forgot the meaning of everything, and corruption became endemic. We must purge ourselves of materialistic values.”

‘Year of the Eucharist’

Beginning this month, Sin is leading a yearlong, church-sponsored “value-reformation” movement called “The Year of the Eucharist,” in which the nation’s parish priests--whose reach into rural areas is greater than the government’s--will try to reeducate the Philippine masses.

It is the only way, Sin said, to avert either an eventual Communist takeover or yet another round of exploitation of the peasants and laborers by what the cardinal calls “liberal capitalism.”

As Ramos put it earlier this year, “We are trying to unscramble a scrambled mess that took 20 years to scramble. It will take some time.”

In impoverished Samar, most residents are even less optimistic. Although extreme, the province stands as a living laboratory of the problems facing Aquino.

Jaime and Prudencia Uy, village elders in Samar’s tiny, remote barrio of Washington, D.C., laughed last week when they were asked whether they knew who their president was.

“Of course, it’s Cory,” Prudencia answered, using Aquino’s familiar nickname.

“What do the people of Washington think of Cory?” a visiting reporter asked.

“We don’t know her here. She is not felt here. She is the president in Manila.”

It’s understandable.

Long-Forgotten American

The 800 families in Washington, D.C.--the D.C. stands for District of Catarman, and the name Washington was given the town by some long-forgotten American when the Philippines was a U.S. colony--have never felt the effects of government. They have no electricity, no water, no roads, no police, no courts and barely enough food.

Jaime Uy is the barangay (village) captain, the most basic level of public official in the country, and he owns the only business in town. It’s a tiny, bamboo shack that serves as a coconut trading house. His profit margin is 10 centavos (one penny) per two-pound load.

“Most of us are farmers, but we have no level land. So we survive by growing potatoes and other root crops in the hills,” Uy, 62, said through a translator as he swatted away flies. “We eat half of what we grow and sell the other half for rice and other things we cannot grow.”

It’s called subsistence farming and, according to Pax Maghacot, the manager of an Australian aid project in Northern Samar, it is the lot of more than two-thirds of the residents of the province.

“In Northern Samar, the people need food--plain and simple,” Maghacot said. “If the people are still in a subsistence economy, you can have any president you want, and it won’t matter. You must get them food.”

‘Working in Manila’

The poverty has led to deep social problems through the province. Church officials and social workers in Manila say Northern Samar has become the principal source for the tens of thousands of prostitutes now working in the nation’s capital. Indeed, most of the families interviewed said they had at least one daughter “working somewhere in Manila” and sending them money.

The provincial schools often cannot afford to pay teachers, crime is high, and, even at the tiny public library in Catarman, chief librarian Olivia Moreno said they no longer have books on the province’s history because they were stolen along with many others.

“Did the government give a damn about the whole island of Samar for the last 400 years?” Maghacot asked. “I would say no.”

A senior American aid official in Manila said, “Everyone thinks Negros is the poorest island because of all the publicity. The world now knows children are starving to death there. But children are dying all over the Philippines. This is a food-deficit country because the people don’t have the money to buy the food. . . . (But) if you were to ask me what is the poorest place in the Philippine, I’d have to say Samar.”

Everyone interviewed in Samar agreed that the principal reason for their neglect is their relatively small population--their voting population.

‘Development Is Politics’

“I would have to say it’s because we don’t have enough votes here to matter,” said Tony Ty, a local aid worker on the Australian project. “Too often, development is politics in this country.”

The Australian project, titled the Northern Samar Integrated Rural Development Project, is now one of the best aid projects in the Philippines. It is aimed at the poorest of the poor on the grass roots level. It is also the only semblance of government in the province.

When the $30-million project began in 1979, it, too, concentrated on infrastructure development--roads and bridges. After spending tens of millions of dollars, though, project officials surveyed the province’s fishermen and farmers on their needs. Roads and bridges were at the bottom of the list. Food and water were first.

“We changed the entire direction of the project,” Maghacot said. He and his development staff, most of them Samarenos and most of them former leftists, began organizing grass-roots farmers associations, food and marketing cooperatives and constructing sophisticated fresh-water wells.

Maghacot said: “We teach the farmers three things: awareness of their problems; the ability to articulate them to the right authorities and assertiveness, the power of collective action.”

Expression of Gratitude

“We’re very much grateful,” said Jovencio Muncada, a farmer in the remote village of Oleres, a hidden, riverfront barrio where the project installed a water reservoir and 14 modern standpipes two months ago. “This is the first time we’ve seen anything of government in 23 years.”

In 1963, the year before Marcos came to power, Muncada said, the government built cement foot paths through the village, which has been accessible only by an hourlong boat ride up the Catubig River ever since a nearby road bridge washed out seven years ago. But the walkways are all now crumbled ruins.

Under a World Bank project 15 years later, the government installed an artesian well, but, like most of the hundreds of wells that project installed throughout Samar, the government put it in the wrong place. The water was saline. Until October, the 250 impoverished farming families had to walk more than a mile for fresh water and carry it back on their heads.

Now, however, the farmers of Oleres believe it will all change. A senior official in Aquino’s government, the National Food Authority director, Emiliano Ong, is a native of a nearby municipality.

“We are expecting that since Emil is already in the position, we will get the projects now--if ever there are projects,” Muncada said through a translator. “That is how it works here.”

Project Is Threatened

Rather than facilitating traditional Philippine pork-barreling, though, the province’s native ties to key members of the new government is actually threatening the only aid the residents are now receiving--the Australian project.

Ong and Raul Daza, another native Samareno and a member of Aquino’s powerful Presidential Commission on Good Government, already have divided up the newly appointed local government positions on the island. Both men have political ambitions, and Aquino allowed them to name local officials loyal to them in their home province.

Not all the decisions were wise ones. For example, in the town of Selvina Lobos, a two-day walk from the province’s main road, the Aquino administration reappointed a former mayor who had been put on “trial” by the Communist New People’s Army in front of his people, who voted unanimously that he be banished from the town six years ago for “crimes against the people.” Now Henero Yamamoto is mayor of a town he cannot visit.

“What is worse is that this politicking in Manila is now threatening to destroy the entire aid project from within, as well,” said aid worker Ty. He and several other senior staff members said that Ong and Daza are both trying to take operational control of the Australian project.

“It is a powerful political tool,” said Diomedes Lelis, another senior aid worker. “It’s the resources of the project and the impact of its success. It’s transport, mobility, logistics--and votes. We have the only modern jeeps in the province, 11 of them. There are 9,000 votes involved, and, yes, we are the only game in town.”

Three-Day Strike

The staff members formed an association and went on a three-day strike last month. They’re now threatening to repeat it if Ong makes good on his plan to fire many of the aid workers and replace them with his own men.

“Already, it has caused confusion and demoralization--our performance just goes low,” Lelis said. “We’re behind on so many projects because the people just don’t know what’s going to happen next.

“All I can say is that if the government of President Aquino follows the mistakes of the previous administration, the corruption, the abuses of power, the political power games, the same thing will happen to this administration,” Lelis said.

Such games are far removed from a place like Washington, District of Catarman. They haven’t gotten anything from any government, they say, so they have nothing to lose.

Indeed, the highlight of the hourlong session outside Jaime Uy’s coconut trading hut last week was when a village girl brought a new 1987 calendar from the capital city 10 miles away. It had large, color pictures of Switzerland, Hawaii and Australia, and the group of villagers gathered outside to study each one in detail.

“We like the view,” Prudencia Uy said.

“Yes, you see,” said aid-project manager Maghacot, who was translating for the villagers. “It is the dream--the escape. They dream of better places, places they don’t know. For, no place, they believe, could be as bad as where they are right now.”