THE PHILIPPINES AND THE FUTURE BATTLE AT THE FRONTLINES OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND GLOBAL PACIFICATION
She’s been betrayed time and time again, invaded, plundered, raped, and pillaged, colonized for nearly four hundred years by Spain and fifty years by the United States, brutally occupied from 1942 to 1945 by the Japanese army, bombed and pretty much decimated by Japanese and U.S. forces during an epic, month-long battle in 1945. In spite, or because of this bloody history, Manileños (her wild and wayward children) have managed to adapt, survive, and even thrive. Their ability to bounce back—whether from the latest round of catastrophic flooding, the ashes of a twenty-year dictatorship, or horrific world war—never ceases to amaze.
—Jessica Hagedorn1
It is not easy to plan for your own death, but that is what A.G. Saño is doing. The roof over his head is only barely there. It has been partially ripped from the hotel. The wind is so loud that it hisses and whistles like a howling monster through every hole and crack in the old hotel, located only a block away from the bay in Tacloban, Philippines. Water is cascading into his room. The old bones of the hotel are shaking. It feels as if “the monster can grab you and take you away.” The water is rapidly rising. It is the worst windstorm ever recorded in the history of the Earth.
When I ask him to reconstruct that day, he tells me he can’t. He tells me it would take eight full hours, because he remembers “every single horrific second.”
He thinks of his family and friends nearby, the structure of the houses, and calculates how long they might be able to withstand the storm. He wonders how long it might take this shaking building to finally collapse. If he perishes, he hopes that his family will be able to find his body. He imagines in what pile of rubble his remains might end up. Saño, an artist, thinks about the hundreds of murals he’s painted in this country of 7,000 islands. Saño’s work has always had a focus on ecological stewardship. He has painted more than 23,000 dolphins on walls across the Philippines to pay them tribute. He was also the lead painter for the world’s largest peace mural—3,700 meters long—on the wall surrounding Camp Aguinaldo, a military base built for U.S. forces in 1936 in Quezon City. In the mural, Saño wanted to depict a type of peace that was the accumulation of every single person doing small acts, for the benefit of all, on a daily basis. For him peace was not passive, but active. It was not simply the absence of war, but a state in which people bring their best to the table and find meaning in mutual assistance and solidarity.
When Saño went to bed on November 6, 2013, he knew the storm was coming. That day, the sky was blue and the sea was calm. And that night Saño saw his good friend Agit Sustento, and that would be the last time the two would ever talk. The storm would claim the lives of his entire family, his little boy, wife, mom, and dad. With a force never witnessed before in human history, the “Category 6” typhoon would lift ships the size of small buildings and toss them onto the land. This is the exact type of violent superstorm that climate scientist James Hansen, with his report “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms,” predicts for the future.
Tacloban is in the Cancobato Bay, on a strait that divides the islands of Leyte and Samar. The broiling town of approximately 200,000 people was a base for the U.S. military during that country’s over 40-year occupation in the early 20th century. It is the place where General Douglas MacArthur came ashore during World War II. Tacloban is home of the former first lady Imelda Marcos, famous not only for the endless closets of shoes, but also the repressive martial law wielded during the dictatorship of her husband, Ferdinand Marcos’s (his presidency from 1965 to 1986), that imprisoned 70,000 people, tortured 35,000, and committed 3,257 “extrajudicial” killings—2,520 of whom were “salvaged,” that is, according to Chris Pforr, tortured, mutilated, and dumped on the roadside for public display. Saño’s parents were among those imprisoned during the dictatorship.
As he watches water cascade down the side of the hotel walls, A.G. Saño knows that the storm will slaughter thousands. He is located in the region of Eastern Visayas, a place that sociologist Dakila Kim P. Yee calls an area marked by “extreme poverty and political exclusion.”2 What Yee calls a “catastrophic consequence of an exclusionary political economy,” is unfolding outside Saño’s room in ways that are difficult to imagine. Waves the size of two-story buildings are slamming into the neighborhoods of the poor. Homes made of wood planks are collapsing; their galvanized metal roofs sail off in the ferocious wind.
This is happening mere days before the Warsaw Climate Summit, where A.G.’s brother, Yeb Saño, will speak in his role as the chief climate negotiator for the Philippines. When he does speak, Yeb’s words are heavy with the tragic news of Tacloban. It seems that he is talking beyond himself, beyond his delegation, beyond even the Filipino people. He says,“To those who continue to deny [climate change], I dare them to get out of their ivory towers and go the islands of the Pacific and the Caribbean, the mountain regions of the Himalayas and the Andes, to the Arctic where communities grapple with fast-dwindling sea ice sheets.” He invites people to see the Ganges, the Amazon, and the Nile, “where lives and livelihoods are drowned.” He asks people to go to the hills of Central America, a region that faces “similar monstrous hurricanes,” to the vast savannah of Africa, where, as devastating droughts persist, climate change has become “a matter of life and death.”3
A.G., still in that room in the old hotel, doesn’t know what to do. He thinks he’s the only one left in the building. It’s a stark moment, one of isolation, one of “helplessness and hopelessness,” he says. He thinks he has to face his death alone. He races down the stairs. He has absolutely no idea what to expect at the bottom.
Haiyan’s winds are still coming through every crack and crevice with a high-pitched whistle. If it had been the first or even second floor, it would have been the rising water, flooded rooms, people dying. It sounds like a war outside. It sounds like a 260-kilometer-wide tornado. The heating planet is creating murderous storms. Storms that were not happening even 10 years ago, anywhere.
On the third floor a minor miracle happens. There are 60 or so frightened people crowded into the hallways and the rooms. First, it’s just that there are other people who are alive. Then, A.G. recognizes one of the people in the group. He knows her from when he was little. As the storm howls outside and the water below continues to rise, this woman talks as if it were nothing. She was at his First Communion. She reminisces. What happens next is similar to a Buddhist death process meditation. A person embracing their own death simultaneously embraces a fuller appreciation of their life. The meditation, says scholar Arthur C. Brooks, is not as morbid as it might seem. It is “intended as a key to better living. . . . In other words, it makes one ask, ‘Am I making the right use of my scarce and precious life?’”4
The woman is serene through the howling winds and shaking walls, and her serenity spreads to him. From that moment forward, A.G. follows his own core philosophical belief: small acts for the benefit of all.
Maybe that’s why he stays in Tacloban after he survives and leaves the hotel. He first tries to get to his family’s house, but the streets are flooded and the roads are blockaded. Bodies of people and animals are strewn everywhere, some in piles, some mixed together. On his way to city hall, where he walks to try to see what he can do to help, he sees six firemen collecting the bodies. He immediately volunteers to help. Even though he has a ride out of town, he decides to stay. Carrying the remains of 78 people changes his life forever. He will now dedicate his life to sound the alarm about climate change.
HOMELAND PACIFICATION
While A.G. was gathering bodies, the U.S. Marines were beginning a massive deployment to Leyte. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel issued a directive to U.S. Pacific Command to deploy rescue teams, helicopters to be used for airlifts, and cargo planes. They came, “at the request of Philippine armed forces, with P-3 Orion surveillance planes to help,” they said, to “calculate the destruction and look for survivors.” KC-130 cargo planes came from Japan, as did MV-22 Osprey aircraft, shaped like a cargo plane but with propellers, half-helicopter, half-plane. Assessment teams from USAID were issuing reports indicating that 90 percent of the housing was gone in some locations, and the cities of Tacloban and Ormoc were “wiped out.”5 President Obama said that he knew the “incredible resiliency of the Philippine people,” adding, “I am confident that the spirit of the bayanihan will see you through this tragedy.”6 Bayanihan is a Filipino word that refers to the spirit of communal unity, work, and cooperation to achieve a particular goal. Maybe Obama didn’t see it, but he should have. The bayanihan—in terms of grassroots assistance and organizing—was going to be met with surveillance and military force.
Regarding the military operation, a U.S. embassy official later told me at a Manila restaurant, “There is no organization better able to deliver relief than the U.S. armed forces.” There is nobody, he said, “quicker and better.”
“Let’s face it,” the official told me in a moment of startling frankness, trying to explain that murky intersection where climate crises, militarization, and humanitarian missions become one, “soldiers landing on the beach do humanitarian missions the same way as soldiers landing on the beach to kill people.”
As is well known, the U.S. military has a long relationship of colonial subjugation with the region, since the Philippine-American war in the late 19th century, a slaughter with a death toll between 250,000 and a million people. In some places U.S. soldiers set up “reconcentration areas,” where the soldiers corralled members of the civilian population into “villages” surrounded by wire fences to prevent the Filipino soldiers from getting support. An estimated 100,000 people died in the camps. Outside these areas, the U.S. Army hunted down and killed Filipino guerrillas. U.S. General Douglas MacArthur called Filipinos an “inferior race.”7
Less known is what historian Alfred McCoy reveals in his book Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State; that the backbone of today’s U.S. homeland security state was first tested, perfected, and exported from the Philippines. At the beginning of the book, McCoy describes the “15-year pacification campaign” that the U.S. waged in the Philippines, during which time “its colonial security agencies fused domestic data management with foreign police techniques to forge a new weapon—a powerful intelligence apparatus that first contained and then crushed Filipino resistance. In the aftermath of this successful pacification, some of these clandestine innovations migrated homeward, silently and invisibly, to change the face of American internal security.”8
To explain how this worked, McCoy correlates the U.S. invasion of the Philippines in 1899 with that of Iraq in 2003. A photograph published in April 2007 showed U.S. soldiers scanning the retina of an Iraqi that turned out to be one part of a massive Pentagon operation that collected iris scans and over one million Iraqi fingerprints in preparation for the deployment of “collapsible labs,” which would then be linked by satellite to a biometric database in West Virginia. McCoy quoted the inventor of this “lab,” who said: “A war fighter needs to know one of three things. Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?”9
Such eye and fingerprint biometric technology is currently in use at airports in New York City and Washington, D.C., and at the Otay Mesa, California, border crossing. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security plans to expand the program to 20 of the busiest airports in the country. It is also used for outbound pedestrian traffic.
In Policing America’s Empire, McCoy quotes political theorist Max Weber, who famously said that a nation state is “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”10 But McCoy made a crucial observation regarding one of the important foundations of the modern homeland security state: “By emphasizing physical force, admittedly an important attribute, [Weber] overlooked a subtle yet significant facet of political power—the modern state’s use of coercion not to enforce brute compliance but to extract information for heightened levels of social control.”
At the lethal front lines of global warming, the now well-developed homeland security apparatus has come around again to the Philippines. The country has become a kind of proving ground for dealing with a world fraught with ecological disaster, a sort-of laboratory of “social control.” Here the world can see the military-homeland security apparatus fire up in the aftermath of a superstorm using the rhetoric of aid and assistance, and then point its pacification arsenal at movements from below that challenge the status quo, that are trying to create a new world under new rules.
GRASSROOTS ORGANIZING AT THE CLIMATE FRONTLINES
Alfred Posadas stood on the mass grave next to the church to reenact what happened the morning of November 7, 2013, in Bislig, a community located on the Pacific coast just south of Tacloban. The night before, people gathered in the open-air church with a white tile floor to pray that the typhoon would change course. As Posadas talked, the murmur of waves a quarter mile away sounded like the rhythmic breathing of the planet. However, when he described the morning of the typhoon, Posadas spoke of waves so massive that they almost defied my capacity to imagine them, as if they could only be drawn by an artist or caricatured.
Posadas, who wore a black jacket with a Tasmanian devil ironed onto the back, depicted the day in vivid detail. He described how at one point people cowered in the church as the sound of rumbling outside kept getting louder, like an approaching freight train. “If you dared to look up, you could see the swirling, violent winds ripping up everything in their way.” A tornado, he thought. “All you can do is close your eyes,” he said in Tagalog. One man, he described, was sucked into the sky. “The wind,” he said, “carried him away.” But that was not the most horrific moment. Nor was it the moment when family members of a Philippine American woman tied her with thick rope to an iron post so she wouldn’t be swept away, or when sharp-edged sheets of metal roofing began flying through the air. One man, Posadas said, had his head sliced open so “you can see his brain through the wound.” Listening to Posadas talk was the first time I connected the raw, brutal violence of war directly with climate change.
Another man was trying to run to the church from the school, which was designated an evacuation site even though it was practically on the coast and now was completely blown apart and inundated with floodwater. He didn’t see the metal sheet coming. It was flying through the air like shrapnel from artillery fire. The storm drove the metal into his thigh like a knife. “It went right through the bone,” Posadas said. That man died later that day. But even that wasn’t the most horrific thing, Posadas explained, now swept up in the descriptions, and still situated on the mass graves outside the church.
The most horrific part, he said, was the aftermath. When the sun came back out it revealed a level of decimation only comparable to a scene from a war zone. Houses crushed, mere splinters flattened to the earth in a landscape of headless, bent palm trees. The devastation was worse than if a hydrogen bomb had been dropped. There was no food. There was no water. Contaminated water submerged the rice supplies with debris and soil and sand. Survivors found a broken pipe that was leaking yellow, brownish water that they boiled to drink. It was like the fetid black, bacteria-infested water that people sometimes drink out of desperation in the desert while attempting to furtively enter the United States. No food, water, or assistance arrived in Bislig for at least a week.
And so, as in most disaster scenarios across the globe, people organized. They cleaned the sludge off the rice as best they could and boiled it in the filthy yellow water. They ate this gross, pasty, tasteless stuff for five full days. People did not fight with each other. They did not struggle over resources. They searched for sustenance in the homes and stores that were not completely obliterated. Everything they found that was edible was cooked and shared. No one was hoarding, as the security projections insinuated that the poor would do. Posadas and others in the community began to organize a group that would walk toward Tacloban, where the warehouses were, to search for food, rice, and sardines. They knew the military would be deployed to prevent “looting.” One of the first locations where the military set up, for example, was Robinson’s Place, a huge air-conditioned mall in the center of town, with hip department stores like Oxygen, SwissTech, and Surfer’s Paradise. The storms of climate change, as always, revealed priorities, the wounded world of acute inequalities, through its militarized internal borders.
The prevalent rumor in Bislig was that the soldiers would arrive with shoot-to-kill orders, as had happened many times in the past. Media reports had hyperbolic and unsubstantiated accounts of famished, armed people filling the streets and stopping aid trucks at gunpoint. Schoolteacher Andrew Pomada told Agence France Presse, “Tacloban is totally destroyed. Some people are losing their minds from hunger or from losing their families. People are becoming violent. They are looting business establishments, the malls, just to find food, rice and milk. . . . I am afraid that in one week, people will be killing from hunger.”11
For Bislig, however, and many other communities, organizing searches for food were appropriate emergency responses. A small group of survivors walked toward Tacloban, where, Posadas told me, they began to see the dead. I asked Posadas how many bodies he saw with his own eyes. He paused. “Too many,” he said in Tagalog. “Too much,” he repeated, shaking his head as if trying to shake the image from his brain. He looked to his father, also in T-shirt and shorts, who crouched beside him on the grassy graves of the 26 who died in Bislig. “Too much,” he said again, and then, he said, maybe they saw 200 bodies along the road on their way to the warehouse. There were bodies floating in the water. “You had no choice but to step on dead bodies,” Posadas said. As they walked they kept hearing the stories of death. They passed a place named San Joaquin where the typhoon killed 300 children. In another place, the storm claimed the lives of 27 people from the same family. After time in the water, sun, and elements, the skin would slip off the bodies when survivors attempted to move them. It was like “lechon,” Posadas said, regretting the metaphor of a roasted suckling pig, but that was all he could come up with.
Despite all the horror, the group successfully returned with rice, water, and sardines for the traumatized community. Indeed, like most communities, they turned to the bayanihan—first locally, and then with a broader movement of survivors called People Surge. As we shall see, this sort of organizing for justice would concern the State more than looting.
At the same time, back in Tacloban, A.G. Saño continued to help the group of firemen recover people’s remains. There were bodies everywhere, and as happened in Bislig, dogs began feeding on many of them. Bodies that were recovered went to mass graves. As A.G. worked, he communicated to his brother, Yeb, who was in Warsaw at the UN Climate Summit, that he was okay. A.G. still hadn’t yet heard from his other family members.
Yeb Saño said that it felt as though something took him over as he spoke in the crowded hall, with hundreds of delegates sitting in long rows behind laptop computers.
“Now I wish to speak on a more personal note. Super-typhoon Haiyan made landfall in my own family’s hometown. And the devastation is staggering. I struggle to even find words to describe the images we see on the news coverage. And I struggle to find words to describe how I feel about losses. Up to this point I anguish as I wait for words from my very own relatives. What gives me great strength and great relief is that my own brother indicated to us that he had survived the onslaught. In the last few days he has been gathering bodies of the dead with his own two hands. He is very hungry and weary as supplies find it difficult to arrive in the hardest-hit area.”12
The official death count was 6,300, but many believe it was closer to 10,000, if not more. The lethal scope of the typhoon’s impact probably wasn’t known as Saño spoke: 4 million people displaced from their homes, and 14 to 16 million people impacted in some way.
Even when Saño was on script, his voice lost any semblance of the dispassionate tone so common as such gatherings, and sounded instead as if he were having a painful epiphany. In the video of his presentation, you can see people gabbing at the start, but as Saño’s emotional momentum increased, he had command of the room’s attention. There was no way you could listen to him and not feel the immediate urgency of how the climate crisis is impacting lives, families, communities, and the world.
“What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness. The climate crisis is madness. We. Can. Stop. This. Madness.”13
Up to that point, there had been 18 summits, but humans and their institutions and corporations continued to increase the amount of greenhouse pollution they dumped into the atmosphere. Maybe Saño was mustering inspiration from the Australian group he told me about from a past summit that showed up to a closed-door negotiation in shorts and T-shirts with jokes, making a mockery of the negotiations themselves. Or indignation from all the times the United States had to make “another phone call” but was simply stalling, as it had for each of the 18 summits. But mainly Saño was thinking about the suffering of the people in Tacloban, the people in Bislig trekking through the devastation in search of food, his brother piling up black body bags in mass graves.
“I speak for my delegation. But more than that, I speak for the countless people who will no longer be able to speak for themselves after perishing from the storm. I also speak for those who have been orphaned by this tragedy. I also speak for the people now racing against time to save survivors and alleviate the suffering of the people affected by the disaster.”14
Yeb Saño was not planning to improvise or make any big declaration, nor was he planning to announce his fast. In fact, the night before he had gone to the grocery store and stocked up on two weeks of food. “There are moments when I feel like I should rally behind climate advocates who peacefully confront those historically responsible for the current state of our climate. These selfless people who fight coal, expose themselves to freezing temperatures, or block oil pipelines. . . . I’m in solidarity with my countrymen who are struggling to find food back home, and with my brother, who has not had food for the last three days.” Yeb declared that he would fast for the climate, for the entire summit, “until a meaningful outcome is in sight.”15
When he finished speaking he lowered his head and began to weep. A rousing standing ovation quickly crescendoed as people stood up, one by one, and clapped. It was as if in a heartbeat Saño had moved his faith from professional negotiators to ordinary people who were putting their bodies were on the line. It mattered little to him if by making the case for a more urgent environmental activism, he might lose his job as climate negotiator (and he would). After all, according to a report by the organization Global Witness, “the environment is emerging as a new battleground for human rights.”16 There was a divide between official reform that left the polluting system intact, and the transformation to something new. There and then, Yeb Saño seemed to cross that turbulent border to where the real climate battle lay.
Perhaps this divide was best summed up in Bislig on the same day that Albert Posadas described the horrific scene at the church. I was on the beach talking with local farmer Marissa Cabaljao, the secretary general of People Surge, next to a large, splintered fishing boat that Haiyan had heaved onto the beach in 2013. I had met with Cabaljao the day before in the small office of People Surge in Tacloban, and she arranged the trip to Bislig. I wanted to know what Cabaljao thought about the aid that came into the region after Haiyan. The countries providing assistance since the typhoon—mainly European countries and the United States—weren’t shy about putting up signs giving themselves credit. I wanted to know what she thought, since these same countries were both historic high-level greenhouse polluters and current lavish spenders on militarizing their borders.
There were examples of such signs right where we were in Bislig. As we walked around witnessing the devastation that was still evident, there were two small, green stores that stood out, with a sturdy architectural style distinct from all the others. Both stores had the same exact self-congratulatory signs. Though in two distinct locations, both stores had signs reading: THIS SARI-SARI STORE WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THROUGH THE UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (USAID) IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PROCTER & GAMBLE AND COCA-COLA AND IN COORDINATION WITH THE TANAUAN MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT.
Marissa Cabaljao cut straight to the chase, not stalling at the usual, almost cliché response of pundits and presidents that you can’t attribute any one storm such as Yolanda—the local name for Haiyan—to climate change. Her answer was direct: “Yolanda happened because of the big industrialized countries. We at People Surge didn’t say thank you for this. Because you have to pay. . . . You are the reason—big industrialized countries—why Yolanda came to the Philippines.”
THE PEOPLE ARE SURGING
Jefferson Custodio had a way of driving to the basket. The thin, dark-haired farmer, 25 years old, played and practiced in the barangay hall—a neighborhood center and town hall—in the community of Carigara. His team won the regional championship in 2014, the year after Typhoon Haiyan. The wind pummeled and collapsed the house where he lived with his mother, father, and sister. They evacuated. Even though they were several miles away from the coast, the rising water almost reached their home, devouring everything in its way. It destroyed crops. It destroyed the coconut palms that take 5 to 10 years to produce their first harvest. The wind knocked them all down, scattering them on the ground like headless corpses. It destroyed the livelihoods of a place where over 80 percent of the population were either fisher folk or farmers.
It was a struggle before Haiyan, but at least people could get food. After the storm, all across the region there was nothing. No food, no electricity. This propelled Jefferson to join the People Surge network of Typhoon Haiyan survivors who provided humanitarian aid and political action around climate change. Every day, Custodio traveled the countryside distributing farm tools, seeds, and seedlings throughout district eight, a verdant, hilly region on the west side of Leyte Island. Custodio was dedicated. Sometimes he was gone for several days.
In May of 2014, the Philippine military, 19th Infantry Battalion, began to camp at the barangay hall where Jefferson played basketball. At that point, they were fanning out, camping at a number of barangays throughout the region filled with farmers known for their history of organizing. “Our mission in the barangays,” a representative from the 19th Infantry Battalion told my colleague Alex Devoid and me in an email, “is to facilitate delivery of basic services in partnership with the Local Government and other stakeholders.”
One day after playing basketball, some soldiers approached Custodio and tried to recruit him. They asked why he was doing work for free, when he could be with them and earn a salary. According to Custodio’s family, he rejected the offer. The military took a picture of him from the front and from the side, “as if he were wanted,” a friend and fellow member of People Surge, Dolly (not her real name) told me. Custodio had been entered into the short list.
Soldiers from the battalion followed Custodio to his house. They began to monitor his movements. At this point, the military was moving around the community and doing interrogations in households, “as if they were census takers,” Rodolfo Custodio, Jefferson’s father, sadly joked. They were roaming through the countryside, “making it difficult for us to get to some of our farmland.” On the roads, the military set up checkpoints to stop vehicles and interrogate drivers and passengers, all while cradling high-powered rifles in their hands, much as in a border zone.
But Jefferson never saw it coming. According to Dolly, “He has too much of a pure heart.” Besides, she said, he had no enemies in the region. Why would it even occur to him that his life was in danger?
Perhaps the real issue was the grassroots organizing that he was a part of. The People Surge had showed their power in January when 12,000 members and supporters marched through Tacloban.
Climate change exposed a world of vast inequalities that had long been reality: a world where the rich—who easily cross borders—sail on yachts and refugees drown in rickety boats, a world of vast mansions and clapboard houses, worlds where CEOs make 400 times more than their companies’ workers, and pollute more than anyone else. Worlds that were completely unacceptable to people such as Jefferson Custodio and Marissa Cabaljio, like many in the People Surge, whose homes and livelihoods were drowned in the intensifying hurricanes. The People Surge’s critique began with an analysis of the official disaster relief effort, then deepened into the intersecting issues of economics, colonialism, and militarism.
From a global perspective, the People Surge is one example of many. Across the world, at any given time, there are thousands of groups, organizations, and individual people putting forth proposals and working toward a new world that challenges this lethal status quo, one that promotes a discourse of “security” yet protects only a chosen few, and in this case, the polluters of the highest magnitude. These grassroots activist groups, community organizations, indigenous groups, social movements, scholars, and artists propose a wide range of tactics, from applying pressure on elected officials to nonviolent civil disobedience, to armed revolt. It is that “power from below” that, as disaster scholar Kathleen Tierney puts it, makes the elite fear the “disruption of the social order, challenges to their legitimacy.” Thus, the cultivation and perpetuation of the “panic myth” that people freak out during disasters, when the real fear is of a true shift in this political, economic, and social order.17
As Rutgers sociologist Lee Clarke writes of Tierney’s work: “Disaster myths are not politically neutral, but rather work systematically to the advantage of the elites. Elites cling to the panic myth because to acknowledge the truth of the situation would lead to very different policy prescriptions. . . . The chief prescription is, she notes, that the best way to prepare for disasters is by following the command and control model, the embodiment of which [in the United States] is the federal Department of Homeland Security.”18
A provocative framing for the emerging climate conflict comes from sociologist Alf Gunvald Nilsen, who describes a sort of “battle” between two camps: the “social movements from below” and the “social movements from above.” The social movements from below serve to remove “constraints” on human needs and capacities—by methods ranging from campaigns to curtail obstructions to basic services such as housing, health, or education, to the kind of grassroots survival organizing seen in the wake of disaster situations such as Haiyan.
The social movement from above “aims at the maintenance or modification of a dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities in ways that reproduce and/or extend the power of those groups and its hegemonic position within a given social formation.”19
Hence, emerging climate battles are being waged not just in the Philippines, but everywhere. Lines are being drawn between homeland security apparatuses and the people they protect; between social movements from above, including the very corporations most responsible for vast greenhouse pollution, and those from below that defy them, like the grassroots organizing of the People Surge, the “looting” expeditions of Posadas et al. in Bislig, or the countless millions who travel across lines of division without authorization, including climate refugees.
In other words, whether in the post-typhoon Philippines or on the U.S.-Mexico border, homeland security enforcement keeps these two groups apart. And if you dare defy these sanctimonious divisions, if you dare storm the wall, as Custodio was to find out, you may be putting your life in danger.
THE DISPLACEMENT PROVING GROUND
When the People Surge formed, a group of Typhoon Haiyan survivors traveled to Manila to ask for 40,000 Philippine pesos (a little less than $1,000 USD) for relief. President Benigno Aquino questioned why they came to the capital looking for money “instead of tending to their families in Eastern Visayas.” Rehabilitation czar Panfil Lacson accused them of “being used by communists to destabilize the government.” Marissa Cabaljao told me that they accused the movement of typhoon survivors of being affiliated with the New People’s Army, a serious accusation since the government has been in an armed conflict with the insurgent group since the 1970s. Such accusations justified violence. Cabaljao told me that she, like Jefferson Custodio, was followed and monitored by the military.
“Do you ever fear for your life?” I asked her.
“No. If I’m going to die helping the survivors, I’m okay dying like that.”
One of People Surge’s founders, Dr. Elfleda Bautista, explained to the Philippine Inquirer, in response to the governmental accusations, that People Surge started in Tacloban and then the “movement spread to other municipalities, villages and even provinces.”20 Bautista explained that it was an alliance of farmers and ordinary people, including people from universities and religious organizations. Jefferson, a farmer from an outside province, showed just how far and wide the movement had spread.
The first demand of People Surge was the meager 40,000 pesos, Bautista said, because “the government assistance has not reached us.” They needed resources to send children to school. They needed resources for seeds on the farms. They needed resources because food prices had inflated 50 to 100 percent. They were the million displaced, who wanted to build their homes back up again. They did not want to migrate elsewhere.
Instead of offering meaningful aid, as Rodolfo Custodio, Jefferson’s father, put it, “We got the military.”
When we talked at the restaurant in Manila, the U.S. Embassy official told me that a “security situation” could arise from anything, especially a natural disaster. If there were a sudden disaster, he told me, it could result in “confusion and unrest.” He said there were forces that might want to take advantage of the situation, and that in Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, there were “Islamic groups, indigenous groups.” A group, he said, might move its agenda forward in a climate situation. The People’s Army was an example of such a group. And this military wing of the communist party, deemed a terrorist group since the Cold War, was one of two groups specifically emphasized by U.S. Special Forces for counterinsurgency trainings with the Philippine army. The other was the Moro separatists, a secessionist movement in Mindanao.
These trainings in the Philippine proving ground—a powerful glimpse into how “the social movement from above” worked in a climate disaster scenario—were part of an upsurge of U.S. military aid to the Philippines following 9/11, after the George W. Bush administration called the country the “second front” of the global terror wars.21 The over $500 million of aid between 2001 and 2010 included helicopters, ships, and communications gear, much of it U.S. military surplus.
After that there was the “Asia Pivot.” In 2011 President Obama told the Australian Parliament that “the United States is a Pacific power.”22 It was a move to make the region a top geopolitical priority, and would involve transferring military presence into the region from the Middle East. “We are here to stay,” Obama said. The United States has enormous resources dedicated to the region, tens of thousands of troops, huge aircraft carrier groups, and mutual military treaties with South Korea and Japan. In the Philippines, the military budget went from $10 million to $30 million to $50 million from 2011 to 2013, following Obama’s announcement and before Haiyan struck.
In a way, this was just a continuation of what had been true the entire 20th century. After World War II and the occupation, the United States operated 23 military bases in the Philippines. One was the Subic Bay Naval Base, which during the Vietnam War became one of the most important U.S. logistics bases in the world. Another prominent site was Clark Air Base, which, during its peak in the 1970s, had a population of 15,000.
But times have changed: in 2012, the same year the United States killed 15 people with a drone strike on the island of Jolo in Mindanao, and that Typhoon Bopha hit that southern state hard, U.S. Pacific Command ran a joint exercise with the Philippine military focusing specifically on disaster response. Commander Samuel Locklear said in a later interview that in the Asian Pacific a significant upheaval as result of a warming planet “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen,” more than the feared Chinese or North Korean nuclear threats. Only months before Haiyan hit, the four-star general said, “You have the real potential here in the not-too-distant future of nations displaced by rising sea-level, [and] weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past.” Locklear warned that if it all goes badly “you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.”23
The joint Philippine-U.S. exercise in Zambales looked like an act of preparation for what Locklear was alluding to—not a humanitarian mission, but a war scene straight from military crisis projections, and the description of the U.S. Embassy official in Manila. The idea was to create “interoperability” between the two forces “in the event of a disaster.” However, U.S. Marines and their Filipino counterparts, wearing combat helmets and with their faces covered in green and brown war paint, stormed a “hostile shore.” It was a disaster exercise, but they stormed the shore as if the climate-displaced people were not a population in need of assistance, but a mortal threat. It was these people, like the victims of Typhoon Haiyan and members of the People Surge, who would be desperate, hungry, dangerous, and eager to change the very polluting system these joint militaries, their commanders, and the political and economic elite who controlled them wanted to protect. It was an awesome and raw pacification exercise and a prelude to 8,000 U.S. troops landing on Philippine shores in the wake of Haiyan, opening the door to even greater U.S. influence in the region.
But the team presence was already felt. In just 2006, under a U.S.-instigated post-9/11 counterinsurgency strategy, the Philippine government killed one activist every 36 hours. The Melo Commission, the Philippine government’s investigative task force, noted that victims were generally unarmed, alone or in small groups, and gunned down by two or more masked forces on motorcycles.
And in 2014 the People Surge did not get the 40,000 pesos it asked for.
“DO I LET HIM GO? KEEP HIM? OR SHOOT HIM ON THE SPOT?”
Jefferson Custodio never saw it coming. Maybe he should have known. A human rights organization known as Karatapan accused the Philippine government of waging war against a country of typhoon survivors, and especially those doing grassroots organizing. The first killing in 2014 was of Marcelo Monterona, a survivor of Typhoon Bopha in 2012. He and his community had begun to do rehabilitation projects. Using .45 caliber weapons, gunmen shot Monterona through the left side of his mouth. Monterona tried to escape from his vehicle, but the assailants shot him several more times before he could get to safety.
In August 2014, the same month Custodio found himself surrounded by masked men on motorcycles, seven other activists were targeted and killed in the Philippines. Gildegardo Hernandez, a leader of a farmer’s organization who was doing relief work after Typhoon Glenda, was shot dead by assailants on motorcycles on August 7, 2014. On August 14, indigenous activist and leader Marcel Lambon was shot and killed. Like Jefferson, he was under close government surveillance and had been interrogated by the military. He was also branded as a supporter of the New People’s Army. According to Karapatan, who documented 229 such extrajudicial killings between 2010 and 2014, when small farmers organized their own relief efforts, they were often accused of association with the New People’s Army.
The Philippines is just one example of a locale where the environment has become the new human rights battleground. According to Global Witness, an organization that campaigns to expose “the hidden links between demand for natural resources, corruption, armed conflict and environmental destruction,” in 2015 alone, 185 environmental organizers were killed by the state, corporate security forces, or contract killers in places like Brazil and Colombia, DR Congo and India. “For every killing we document, many others go unreported,” campaigner Billy Kyte told Reuters.24
The people are indeed surging, storming the wall. Not only in the Philippines, in every corner of the globe. There are countless examples of community efforts resisting environmentally harmful projects, including big-business gas pipelines, mines, and dams. In 2016, one of the most prominent cases was that of renowned environmental activist and Goldman Prize winner Berta Cáceres, gunned down in her home in Honduras by assailants with potential connections to U.S.-trained Honduran special forces, after leading the fight in her community against a dam project. In 2015, more environmentalists were killed in her home country than in any other country in the world. And in January 2017, Global Witness published a report showing that Honduras was the “deadliest country per capita for land and environmental defenders.”25
Like Honduras, the Philippines is also “one of the most dangerous places in the world to be an environmental or land defender.”26 This was the case both before and after Haiyan, and all signs show that this will continue to be the case under the President Duterte, who, as reported by Ana B. Santos, “once bragged that he was committed to killing 100,000 criminals and dumping so many of their corpses into the Manila Bay that the fishes would ‘grow fat’ feeding on them.”27 Indeed, the same military that had Jefferson Custodio under intense surveillance, continues to this day to monitor Eastern Visayas, under Duterte’s orders.
“President Duterte, your military troops are illegally occupying our villages, harassing and vilifying our fellow survivors, and disrupting our still struggling livliehoods,”28 the People Surge’s Elfleda Bautista stated. The concern is valid: in the first five months of the Duterte presidency in 2016, more than 4,500 people were killed by his administration in what can only be termed a drug war rampage. This won praise from U.S. president Donald Trump, who said the Filipino strongman was conducting his drug war the “right way.”29
On August 24, 2014, Custodio was going to the warehouse to pick up supplies. He parked his vehicle and was walking across the narrow paved street to the gate when first heard the buzz of the motorcycle. His other companion was already inside the warehouse. The motorcycle stopped. It had no license plate. The driver was masked. Remember, Jefferson was a committed activist, a humanitarian, and a happy-go-lucky man. Despite the military surveillance, he didn’t think there was a high risk of being assassinated. And remember what a war fighter “needs to know,” as the inventor of collapsible biometric labs used in Iraq told author Alfred McCoy in his book Policing America’s Empire: “Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?” The driver raised his arm and pointed his gun. He shot Jefferson three times. With the bullets lodged in his body, Jefferson ran through the outside gate into the warehouse area. He fell onto a soft grassy patch, where he lay bleeding to death. Behind him was a palm tree, its leaves drooping down.
REMOVE THE PRESENCE OF THE MILITARY
I went to Carigara, Leyte, to talk with Jefferson’s father Rodolfo and other family members. Getting there, I traversed a landscape that was still suffering. On Roxas Boulevard, which ran along the bay in Tacloban, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people lined up to get a 100-pound bag of rice donated by a Buddhist church in Taiwan. You could see people’s muscles strain as they struggled to lift the large white bags and carry them off on their backs. Across the street, other people gathered in front of the semi-destroyed auditorium known as the “Astrodome.” A group of women waiting in the grass for their numbers to be called told me that the storm had left them homeless. The government was granting 30,000 Philippine pesos (about US$600) to those who had “complete damage,” but up to this point, after a full year of waiting, the women had not received a single penny.
As I entered the countryside outside of Tacloban on a small bus, I could see more destroyed houses and war-like destruction. At one bus stop, written on the concrete post was the message sos we need food. It was evidently written at the height of the disaster, and remained at the bus stop carrying the same sense of urgency as if the typhoon had just happened, testament to an aftermath that wouldn’t be going away for a long time.
I traveled to Ormoc City, where I met Dolly from the People Surge. Three of us, including documentary filmmaker and journalist Alex Devoid, piled behind a driver on a single motorcycle, the preferred taxi in the area, and rode down narrow two-lane roads crowded with bikes transporting people in sidecars. We passed the warehouse where Jefferson was shot, and the grassy patch where he took his last breath. We walked through a verdant landscape of hills and homes until arriving at the compound of small houses where Jefferson lived. His parents and grandmother greeted us at a long picnic table. From the first question, I could see that they were still deep in the process of grieving.
“Jefferson is a good boy, he was my only son,” his father Rodolfo said right off the bat.
I had come here following a story about climate change and militarization, but I don’t think I knew entirely what this meant, knew it with my body and my bones, until this interview with Rodolfo, father of an assassinated activist. The interview was difficult from the start, it was obvious that they were sharing painful memories with me. Our talk was filled with many long silences and awkward pauses that at first I tried to fill with questions, but then I stopped, and gave them the space they needed, gave them the space for their grief. Rodolfo wore a purple shirt and cut-off jeans. Rodolfo’s mother, wearing a white flowered dress, with short gray hair, hovered about, as did a slew of little kids who would lean against the wooden table and quietly listen to the sad sounds of Rodolfo mourning.
At one point the assassinated man’s father asked: “This interview, how can it help me?” He held my gaze across the table for a long time after he asked the question, his eyes brimming with tears. Behind him I could see the hills rolling all the way to the west coast of Leyte, and the distant ocean. It was down there, after the crops were ravaged, that he and his family—including Jefferson—were forced to forage for food, mainly root vegetables and snails. It was that same beautiful landscape where, he told us, the military had been roaming since they came into the region, patrolling, making it impossible to get out to some of the planted crops. They were roaming and interrogating, holding their high-powered rifles, “as if we were in a war.”
Finally, he asked me, “Can I question you? Will there be justice for my Jefferson?” Tears began streaming down his cheeks.
“I am a poor man,” he said. He told me that he didn’t have the funds needed to pursue the case. The cost of transportation alone was creating a burden on the family. He knew that the murder, like so many others, wouldn’t be solved. He said he didn’t know what to do. I asked him what form of justice he’d like to see.
“Remove the presence of the military so there are no additional incidents.”
This raw grief and pain was all I needed to know, in that moment, about climate and militarization. At that moment, the mourning came from Rodolfo, but it could have been from any one of the people that gathered around us as we talked. He took out a picture of his son, who was slightly crouched and kneeling, with a slight, possibly mischievous, smile on his face. You could tell by the way Rodolfo placed the picture on the wooden table that this was a father who loved his child and missed him profoundly.
I remembered the Tzotzil Maya community of Acteal that I had just visited a month before in Chiapas, Mexico. There I met a man named Juan Carlos who lost eight members of his family, including his parents, in the 1997 massacre. He told me a story of his mother falling to the ground in a rain of bullets, and his father diving to hug her. When he hugged her, he realized that his beloved had died in his arms. He rose to his feet and said, “Forgive them for they do not know what they are doing,” and pointed to the masked men with the guns, who shot him dead. When Juan Carlos stopped, I didn’t know what to say, except that I was swept with emotion.
When Rodolfo stopped, silence fell between us. I thought about my pregnant wife on the other side of the globe, and that I was about to become a father. I didn’t know what to say. But I did know that climate change would never be theoretical or abstract to me again. It would never be a term filled only with reports and statistics, however important they may be. From that moment on, before all else, the human face of climate change would be that of a father mourning the tragic assassination of his son, tears silently streaking down his cheeks, on a beautiful Philippine afternoon.