City of Soul, Sin : Manila--A Challenge in Contrasts

MANILA —  A recent weather report in one of the dozens of newspapers hawked each day on the street corners of this delightfully bizarre city sounded more like the police blotter than the daily report from the national weather service--which, by the way, is officially called Pagasa, the Filipino word for hope.

“For those who have already received their pay and bonuses today,” the report began, “try to hold onto your money a bit tightly, because Metro Manila will have mostly cloudy skies with brief rain showers.

“Why is this?” the report continued. “Well, public conveyances will be filled to the rafters with people running from the rain--pickpocket heaven, if you know what I mean.

“And beware of sleazy characters, especially after sunset at 5:29 p.m.”

It was one of those not-so-rare moments that blend the darkest and lightest sides of this, one of the world’s most unusual capital cities.

This is a city of hundreds of thousands of unlicensed firearms, from pistols to Uzi submachine-guns; of street crime and street gangs that rank among Asia’s worst; of Chicago-style mafias that hark back to the 1920s; of more than 7 million people crammed so closely together that one Manila sociologist recently noted, “For the Filipino here, privacy means turning your back.” Yet none of them has forgotten how to laugh.

And, since President Corazon Aquino ushered in a new era of democracy two years ago after nearly two decades of dictatorship under Ferdinand E. Marcos, there is perhaps no other city in the world as free, or as undisciplined, as this sprawling metropolis.

There is probably no other city in the world that has as many brothels as churches, as many beauty queens as bar girls, as many millionaires’ subdivisions as squatters’ colonies or as many hit men as politicians. As a city of contrasts, Manila stands alone.

Slums Neighbors of Mansions

A squatters’ slum where tens of thousands of scavengers live in plywood shacks atop a smoldering garbage dump and make their living by scrambling barefoot through flies and human waste for shreds of scrap plastic and broken bottles is just 15 minutes by car from a suburban village of mansions where few families make less than $500,000 a year and everyone has at least three maids.

Just five minutes’ drive from the dump is one of the most predictably spectacular sunsets in the world on the shores of Manila Bay, in a bay-front park that seems light years away from the squalor.

In the last year alone, Communist urban hit squads have killed more than 200 policemen, soldiers and politicians in broad daylight here; yet the city’s crime rate is lower than New York City’s. No Manilans are seriously afraid to move about the city, day or night, and the capital remains a safe haven for tourists, most of whom discover, to their surprise, one of the world’s most fascinating and hedonistic cities.

More than 2 million Manilans live in largely unseen squatters’ shanties and many go hungry. But the wealthy dine on fine French cuisine at luncheon fashion shows in Manila’s 11 five-star hotels. The Manila Polo Club remains a plush bastion of the elite in the city’s business district of Makati, while 43% of the city’s population have no steady jobs and live below a poverty line of $50 a month per family of six.

As a city crumbling, and strangling in its own excess, Manila may also be unrivaled.

The national economic crisis and a general survival mentality have left the city so badly deteriorated that its air and its inner-city canals now rank among the world’s dirtiest. Electricity and phones often fail. And until a recent pothole-filling campaign repaired more than 20,000 holes in just a few weeks, the streets looked much as they did 43 years ago this month after the Americans bombed out the Japanese occupation army during World War II.

Each day, the city produces 3,400 tons of garbage, nearly one pound per resident, and, until President Corazon Aquino personally ordered a recent cleanup campaign, much of it festered on street corners for days on end.

‘Only Brave Dare to Drive’

Then, there’s the traffic, an incessant game of urban “chicken” on narrow, choked streets, with high-powered cars battling smoke-belching buses and 35,000 passenger jeepneys, most of them World War II-vintage jeeps stripped down to basics, then rebuilt, rebuilt and rebuilt again. The jeepneys are distinguished by their garish paint jobs, religious icons on the dashboard, loud horns and blaring disco speakers.

“In Manila,” the city’s largest-circulation newspaper, the Manila Bulletin, concluded recently, “only the brave dare to drive. . . . Are we Manilenos possessed by some demon of self-destruction?”

At the same time, though, Manila also boasts unparalleled variety.

All 80 of the country’s different languages and dialects, all three of its major religions and all 73 of its rural provinces are represented here in force. Metropolitan Manila has 91 colleges and universities, 89 libraries and a literacy rate that still ranks among Asia’s highest. And it not only continues to survive from day to day, it does so with a zest and elan that often resembles a perpetual Mardi Gras.

“Even though you have this deteriorating city on the outside, it adds all the more to the fantasy going on within,” said Jose Javier Reyes, a noted Manila writer and director of two of the city’s most popular television sitcoms. “It’s a crazy city, no doubt. It’s Sin City. It’s the Las Vegas of Asia, the disco capital of the Southeast Asian region, but it is a city with a soul and a city of love.”

Discos Opening, Closing

There are, in fact, thousands of discotheques in Manila. No one knows exactly how many, because young entrepreneurs are opening new ones, many of them investing half a million dollars each, and closing old ones every month.

There are tens of thousands of beauty parlors, street-corner billiard halls and tiny cafes where T-shirted men down beers and laugh over spirited discussions about sex and politics. Sometimes the drinking sessions get out of hand. Then the patrons kill each other in fits of rage, and each incident is dutifully reported the next day in the city’s four racy tabloids.

There are 156--usually jammed--first-run movie theaters in the city showing both American and Filipino films, of which at least 100 are made locally each year. There are five commercial television stations, each of which broadcasts for about 15 hours a day. And there are 35 weekly comic books, most of which tell stories of suffering women--”The Joan of Arc romantic agony of the urban Filipina,” said director Reyes.

Nowhere is the new era of democratic freedom restored under President Aquino clearer than in the capital city.

At Least 28 Daily Papers

More than 28 daily newspapers appear on the newsstands each day, from esoteric business publications to racy tabloids whose huge, bright red headlines would make Rupert Murdoch envious.

Within the past few months, “People’s Tonight,” the raciest of all, has bannered such front-page headlines as, “Addict Kills, Eats Farmer” and “Even Dead Babies Cry”--the first a story about cannibalism in the suburbs, the second an account of an infant corpse weeping when its funeral was attacked by the same gang that killed the child.

“I’ve lived in Manila all of my life, and I really believe all of this is more of a superficial violence,” said Reyes. “On the surface, you can really get intimidated by all of it. But in all my time here I’ve only been held up once and it was really my fault.

“What you’re seeing here is the whole macho complex of the Filipinos. It’s a matriarchal culture, and we men have to assert our macho image to survive. But basically, we’re a nice people, a gentle people. Even the most barbaric-looking goon you see on Manila’s streets has a gentle heart.”

Elfren Cruz is the man who has the dubious distinction of administering this city. A professional corporate manager, Cruz was handpicked by Aquino to be the acting governor of metropolitan Manila late last year when she realized just how badly the city was deteriorating.

In trying to describe the diversity of his city and the task at hand, Cruz said, “It’s like if you put New York City, Washington, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles all together in one city--then you’ve got Manila today.”

Services, Not Image

Cruz, who also serves as the head of Aquino’s presidential management staff, must coordinate urban services for the 13 individual towns and four cities that make up what is officially known as Metro Manila. And, unlike some hangers-on in the Aquino government, Cruz worries far less about the city’s image in the international press than he does about quietly delivering the basic services of government to the people.

In a city where he lists the biggest problems as garbage, traffic and flooding, that isn’t easy.

“When you look at the problems in Metro Manila, though, we share the same problems as the rest of the country,” Cruz said. “It is because Manila is the media center that it all gets more exaggerated here.”

Still, Cruz says that “the only real solution to all of our problems is to improve the economy. When we solve the unemployment problem in the rural areas, we’ll solve the problems in Metro Manila.”

Most of the squatters now living in riverside squalor or, quite literally, on top of the railroad tracks and side roads that snake through the city, had fled rural poverty or droughts in the hopes of finding work in the capital. By attracting foreign, job-intensive investment in the rural areas, the Aquino administration hopes to draw the squatters back to their home provinces.

‘Back to the Basics’

Meanwhile, though, Cruz concedes that he is facing a problem so huge that “the only way to approach it is to get back to the basics.”

Under Cruz, the city has drafted a plan to phase out the garbage dumps, create landfills and provide vocational training to the professional scavengers now living in them.

Flooding, which transforms parts of Manila into an Asian Venice and submerges tens of thousands of urban huts when the typhoon season arrives in July, may well be a thing of the past after public works crews constructed two major spillways outside the city. But Cruz remains skeptical.

“We’ll see when the rains come,” he said. “At least we’ve consolidated all of the responsibility into one agency, so now, for the first time, we know who to blame if the floods do come.”

As for the traffic, Cruz disagrees with sociologists who have said that the mobile mayhem on Manila’s roads is simply a reflection of basic, anarchistic tendencies inherent in Filipinos.

“I just don’t buy that,” he said. “Our basic problem is we don’t have, and we’ve never had, an honest-to-goodness mass transit system, and for a city this size, that’s inexcusable.

Traffic Troubles Explained

“The traffic problem here has nothing to do with the Filipino culture. Why is traffic bad? Just look how the average resident here has to go to work. According to our studies, he or she takes a tricycle, a jeepney, a bus and maybe another jeepney. Aren’t you going to start pushing people around if you have to go through that every day? . . . It’s not culture; it’s just livelihood. Put anybody here, any foreigner from any country, and I’ll bet they’ll behave the same way on the roads.”

Asked about the sight that probably ranks as Manila’s most painful and apparently inhumane, the 20,000 scavengers who work, sleep and eat for less than $5 a day in the putrid municipal garbage dump known as Smokey Mountain, Cruz bristled.

“I went to Smokey Mountain last month, and the people there told me, ‘But sir, isn’t this better than being a thief or a prostitute?’

“People tell me we should be ashamed that Filipinos are living in garbage dumps, but I say I think we should be more ashamed of . . . child prostitutes. Foreign journalists come in here and write about the horrors of Smokey Mountain and then they go down to the red light district that same night. Now, you tell me which is worse?”

Prostitutes Need Jobs

Asked what he intends to do about the city’s now almost-legendary prostitution trade, a business that fuels thousands of nightclubs and brings in a lucrative stream of tourist dollars, Cruz replied, “Again we need an alternative livelihood program. We’re going to start training them (prostitutes) to work in garment factories, but again, for the moment, all we’re trying to do here is to improve the basic services for our people.”

Cruz, like director Reyes and dozens of other Manilans interviewed, concluded that most of the city’s residents are proud of Manila, despite its surface grit, and that image is in the eye of its beholder.

“I don’t care about the image of the city,” Cruz said. “I’ll leave that to the Department of Tourism. I care about the basics, and targeting quality of life is not something sensational. Our problem sometimes is we’re trying to use high-tech solutions where they’re not applicable.”

For Cruz and the others, though, the Aquino government has already achieved one crucial step forward in the capital.

“What we’ve been able to do is reduce the climate of fear here,” Cruz said. “Under Marcos, no one felt free to speak, to walk freely, to shout, to laugh, to live.

“We may have our problems, but no one can say we are not free.”