Manila
IT IS MORNING and the sun is like a burning branch, but not here. Just as night consumes winter days in the far northern hemisphere, so dusk is permanent here. Silhouettes drift up the main street, through the smoke and haze. The ashen rain, like the stench, is constant; it stiffens your hair; your eyes weep with it and your throat is coated with it. There are two dominant sounds: the thud-thud of the dump trucks, and coughing. The children hack and spit as they descend on the trucks like crows waiting for the clod to turn.
Much of the road is the texture of bracken. It is the same on the embankments, where fire crackles. There is a shop with a fire smouldering next to it; the people in it are unconcerned; they are from Hogarth’s London. A truck from the markets arrives. ‘This stuff won’t sell,’ says Eddie. ‘They’ll keep it and eat it.’ Each dragging a hessian bag and an iron hook, the children haul away their rotting catch. They are beaming.
This is Smoky Mountain, a massive rubbish tip that rises out of Manila Bay above the slum at Tonda. Eddie, Teresita and their four surviving children live in the barrio at the foot of Smoky Mountain. Eddie was a fisherman on one of the Philippines’ southern islands until cash cropping, most of it prawns for restaurant tables in America and Europe, forced him to take his chance in Manila.
Teresita was a ‘domestic’ who, unable to feed herself, began scavenging on Smoky Mountain on her twentieth birthday, eleven years ago. ‘We are here’, she says, ‘because every day we can get money; this is work and life.’ Only Eddie is working now, as Teresita has been told she has heart disease. From collecting pieces of glass, tin and plastic for six hours, he makes fifty pesos, the equivalent of £1.10: just enough to supply the next meal. They live from meal to meal with only a breakfast of leftover rice assured. ‘I used to like scavenging,’ says Teresita, ‘because you had to concentrate on the search, and you forgot about eating.’
Their shack is made from plywood, which is as precious here as pesos; it is the currency of barter and increases in value. In order to pay a midwife to deliver baby Mary Grace two weeks ago, Eddie borrowed half from a neighbour and paid her the rest in plywood. They so treasure the wood that none of it is spared for the roof over their second room, which is open to the ash. When the monsoon rain comes, the six of them huddle in a corner two feet by two feet beneath the only piece of corrugated iron.
There is no running water. Water is paid for and carried in. There is no sewer, of course; they wrap their waste in plastic and take it up to Smoky Mountain. Almost every child is sickening; a strain of dengue fever is the latest. Yet the children stepping over stagnant pools on their way to school wear clothes that are neat and scrubbed, white collars for the boys and big bows in the girls’ hair, exercise books under their arms, encased in plastic wallets. If the treatment of and affection for children indicates the degree of civilisation, this is a profoundly civilised place. Not once did they or their parents ask me for anything. That people here are frustrated in their attempts to extend survival to the pursuit of a decent life says much about the nature of the forces ranged against them.
The people of Smoky Mountain are the face workers of modern poverty. Their lives are a metaphor for the condition of most of humanity, whose accelerating impoverishment in the 1990s is allowed only fleeting intrusion upon Western consciousness. Seventy per cent of the population of the Philippines, or about forty-five million people, live in a poverty that has been defined here as ‘that income level below which people cannot buy for their families recommended nutrient requirements, cannot provide two changes of garments, cannot permit grade-six schooling for their children, cannot cover minimal costs of medical care and cannot pay for fuel and rent’.11
There are numerous, complex factors causing this, all of them overshadowed and compounded by debt and its silent war. It is a war whose jargon speaks of ‘low level violence’: that is, of children dying often unseen and slowly.12 According to UNICEF, it causes the deaths of 650,000 children every year.13 ‘In the Philippines’, says John Cavanagh, of the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington, ‘we have calculated that one child dies every hour because debt repayments consume vital services like health care.’14
It is, however, a cost-effective war: indeed the profits to date have surpassed all expectations. In the period 1983–90, the poor countries paid £98,000 million to the rich countries. That’s a net figure, after taking into account new loans and all aid. It works out at about £1.4 million per hour. Put another way: by the end of Red Nose Day this year the equivalent of all the money that Comic Relief raised in Britain – about £12 million – had come back to the rich countries in interest payments on loans that most people in poor countries never knew existed.15 British high-street banks have done nicely, having collected more than £1 billion in tax relief on loans that are still current.16
Perhaps this will surprise those who have been long persuaded that we ‘haves’ have given limitless ‘aid’ to the ‘have-nots’. Capitalism is even said to be suffering from ‘compassion fatigue’! Such a perspective may now be changing as well-informed dissident groups, notably the World Development Movement and Christian Aid, force a public debate. The oldest human rights organisation in the world, the Anti-Slavery Society, is in no doubt: debt is ‘contemporary slavery’ and interest payments a form of ‘national bondage’.17 In the twenty-first century, debt and so-called ‘free trade’ will discipline the ‘new world order’. Britain, says Douglas Hurd, will not give ‘aid’ to any country unless ‘the market’ dominates its economy.18 Recolonisation has begun: official.
Since 1972, the Philippines’ national debt has risen from $2.7 billion to $29 billion. Much of this is the result of secret and often fraudulent deals by the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund quietly approved of Marcos and worked to keep him in power. According to internal World Bank documents, the martial law imposed by Marcos in 1972 made possible the ‘economic reforms’ that ‘opened up the economy to the inflow of foreign capital’.19 Within two years, during which the country’s democratic institutions were muzzled, World Bank loans to the Philippines had increased fivefold. After more than a century of debilitating struggle for their independence, Filipinos were watching their sovereignty again slip away.
The centrepiece of World Bank strategy – formulated within an institution based in Washington, headed by an American and funded principally by the United States and its allies – was Rural Development, known as ‘RD’. ‘Rural Development’, wrote the Filipino economist Walden Bello and his colleagues in their exposé of the World Bank, ‘was counter-insurgency. And its targets were obvious: the independent peasant movements and armed rural-based revolutionary forces like the New People’s Army.’ As in its other client states, the World Bank set out to undermine an economy that had the capacity to feed the population. The instrument was a strategy called ‘export-led industrialisation’, which was ideologically based and of minimal economic worth. This, wrote Bello, ‘virtually abandoned the domestic market as the basis for industrial advance and tied the fate of economic growth almost completely to favourable external factors . . .’20
Since 1972, the World Bank has poured more than $7.5 billion into the Philippines.21 During that time the growth rate has fallen and poverty has risen by a third; and rural people – like Eddie – have been dispossessed by an economy addicted to earning more and more foreign exchange to pay off the interest on foreign loans.22
The feudal oligarchies – from which Cory Aquino comes – have done well; and those who played golf with Ferdinand Marcos at Manila’s Wack Wack Country Club have done wonderfully. Marcos is now believed to have looted some $15 billion. In 1981, Vice-president George Bush raised his glass to Marcos and said, ‘We love you, sir . . . we love your adherence to democratic principles and democratic processes.’23
Filipinos threw out Marcos in 1986. The heroine of the moment, Cory Aquino, was handed an opportunity unparalleled in recent colonial history. She could have demanded that the debts incurred by Marcos be wiped out so as to allow her people to benefit from the deeds of their civilised uprising. Instead, she pledged to ‘vigorously seek to renegotiate the terms of our foreign debt’.24 She did nothing of the kind and is now often reminded of her earlier description of the Philippines as ‘a land of broken promises’.25
‘People power,’ as Manila’s lively columnists write, was really ‘some people power’. Aquino has given priority to paying back every dollar and cent. She has held on to several of Marcos’s decrees, including the notorious Presidential Decree 1177, which appropriates whatever funds are necessary from the budget to meet debt repayments. This violates the post-Marcos constitution guaranteeing that education must command the highest proportion of the national budget.26 Education is currently 15 per cent of the budget; ‘debt service’ accounts for 44 per cent.27
None of this will be on the agenda of the annual binge of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Bangkok. To the IMF, the Philippines has been ‘structurally adjusted’. This has meant the establishment of ‘Export Processing Zones’ in areas where food was once grown in abundance. It has meant that almost all the forests will be lost by the end of the century. It has meant that those Filipino workers who go abroad to work, and who provide the main source of foreign exchange, must compete for fewer low-paid jobs in the recession-hit developed world. I once interviewed a married couple in London, he a hospital porter and she a child-minder. They had not seen their own children for four years and worked solely to keep them going. They tried to put aside enough for a phone call home every month.
The current demands of the IMF are for further reductions in public spending, a freeze on wages and new taxes. The Philippines’ National Economic Development Authority estimates that, as a result of IMF policies, 500,000 workers will lose their jobs this year.28 According to an internal voluntary agency memorandum, ‘an increase in child labour is anticipated as opportunities for adult labour contract and children are forced to contribute to the family income’. In 1989, the Department of Health said that IMF demands would mean that 399,000 children would be denied milk and vitamins, and 103,000 tuberculosis sufferers medical treatment.29 The implication is clear: tens of thousands of children will die ‘silently’ and unnecessarily.30
Elizabeth, aged three, and Lito, aged two, were two of these children. Eddie took Elizabeth to the local hospital when her diarrhoea ‘would not stop’. The hospital said they would take the child, but Eddie would have to buy the medicines in the market. Health care accounts for 3 per cent of the national budget.
The cheapest he could find cost forty pesos. So he scavenged for a day and got it. But Elizabeth was now seriously ill; and so, too, was Lito whose stomach had distended in a matter of days. Teresita told me how she watched horrified as worms emerged from the mouth of her skeletal child. On the day they buried Elizabeth, in a cemetery occupied mostly by the unmarked graves of children, Lito died too.
October 18, 1991