Accents
Maguindanao Massacre (4)
Arroyo Regime in the Philippines Crowns Its Rule of State Terror with Barbaric Show
The people are once again entertained by the vaudeville of Philippine politics. In the run-up to the 2010 elections, the campaign thickens. Candidates exchange charges and countercharges—now hitting, sometimes missing the bull’s eye—all the time providing mass entertainment. Great diversion! Thus, the most gruesome election-related violence ever perpetrated in the history of nations, the Maguindanao massacre, fade from memory. Meanwhile, families of the 57 brutally killed continue to mourn the loss of their loved ones as they wait for justice to prevail.
Lest elections hullaballoo lull us into forgetting, here is a treatise on the Maguindanao massacre by famed intellectual Epifanio San Juan, Jr. (Scroll down to the bottom for his bio.) It appeared Dec. 3, 2009 in Countercurrents.org, an alternative webjournal of worldwide circulation. San Juan places Arroyo’s “Rule of State Terror” in the global context. Read on:
After the feasting, the bloodletting. Only a few months has passed since de facto president of the Philippines Gloria Arroyo was publicly criticized for wanton spending of thousands of dollars in her dinners in New York City and Washington DC when another political “scandal” explodes, this time a political mass slaughter of defenseless Filipino civilians.
At least 57 victims of a hideous massacre last Nov. 23 were dug from shallow graves. Reporter Carlos H. Conde (New York Times 27 Nov 2009) reported that among the slain were 22 women, 30 journalists, 2 lawyers, and dozens of supporters of Esmael Mangudadatu, a local politician who is challenging the quasi-feudal control of Maguindanao province by the Amapatuan clan. Early forensic analysis indicates that the women were molested or raped, their private parts mutilated, with vehicles and other accessory evidence buried in pits dug by government backhoes (Agence France-Press, “Mayor Charged with Horrific Massacre,” The Nation, 28 Nov 2009, 6A).
Everything now appears to have been premeditated. On that fateful day, with national elections looming, Esmael Mangudadatu, a local politician, dispatched a convoy to the provincial capital Shariff Aguak to file papers to challenge Andal Ampatuan Jr. for the governorship now occupied by Ampatuan Senior. This sizeable convoy included his wife Genalyn, two of his sisters, lawyers and media workers, and their associates. They were stopped in broad daylight in a major highway by police officers and militiamen loyal to the Ampatuans, dragged from their cars and summarily executed, as Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor (Nov. 23) reports. About 15 motorists passing by were also killed, all buried in mass graves dug before the assault.
Who done it?—as the cliché puts it. Three journalists who survived the massacre as well as police officials and civilians directly involved have pointed to the entire Ampatuan clan as the responsible party. Not just one son. This clan rose to power by affiliating with the ruling class of landlords, compradors and bureaucrat-capitalists dominating this U.S. neocolony. Allied with the bloody Marcos dictatorship and active in the anti-communist campaigns of the Aquino, Ramos and Estrada administrations, Ampatuan Senior worked as a paramilitary leader with the Philippine Army’s 6th Infantry Division. In the 1990s he hunted down local militants, both linked with the communist New People’s Army (NPA) as well as with two Muslim insurgent groups: the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
With his close ties to the military, Andal Senior served in the Philippine Congress and later as governor of Maguindanao province in 2001 “handpicked” by the military—a “military-sponsored warlord” (Murphy’s term). He delivered millions of votes to Arroyo in the 2004 elections, giving her a large margin over popular movie star Fernando Poe Jr. Arroyo admitted this in the infamous “Hello Garci” congressional investigations. In return the Ampatuans received money, guns, and all the apparatus of coercive and consensual rule.
In 2005 Ampatuan’s son Zaldy became governor of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARRM), a political rubric created ostensibly to give the local population more say over their own affairs and thus neutralize the political appeals of the MILF and the NPA. The Ampatuans guaranteed the elections of Arroyo’s candidates in the 2007 election. After that election, local school administrator Musa Dimasidsing exposed ballot stuffing, for which he was shot in the head. In an area where police and military, and all local officials, serve the Ampatuan clan, no wonder Dimasidsing’s murder hitherto remains unsolved. Alfredo Cayton, the commanding general of the 6th Infantry Division covering the area of the massacre, even assured the Manila paper The Manila Bulletin that it’s safe for the fate convoy to travel (Asian Human Rights Commission Urgent Appeal Case 165, 30 Nov 2009).
How to explain (especially to State Secretary Hillary Clinton, visiting the islands soon) this Ampatuan fiefdom, a relic of the U.S.’s model “showcase of democracy in Asia” during the Cold War? Just a humdrum clan feud among traditional Moro warlords?
Long before the terrorist group Abu Sayyaf came into the scene to justify the hundreds of U.S. Special Forces now operating in thinly disguised bases in the southern Philippines, political feudal fragmentation/clientelism has been perpetuated by U.S. colonial rule. The patronage system is alive and well in elite democracy. After various treaties ending Moro resistance in 1913, the U.S. allowed local chieftains from entrenched tributary clans to exercise its political and economic ascendancy. They worked with the predominantly Christian Manila-based ruling cliques, with the National Police (PNP) and Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), to maintain the poverty and subordination of millions of Moro peasants, fishermen, workers, women, youth, including other non-Muslim tribal groups called “Lumads.” No wonder Maguindanao and the Sulu Islands remain the poorest in a country where the majority of 90 million citizens live on less than $2 a day.
To continue the exploitation and oppression of the majority, the Washington-supervised AFP lacks manpower and logistics to defeat the organized insurgents. But to squelch any political resistance, the AFP employed the U.S.-recommended strategy of paramilitary groups (the CAFGUs, or Civilian Armed Forces Geographical Units; and CVOs, or Civilian Volunteer Organizations), similar to the U.S.-sponsored paramilitary formations in Colombia, Central America, and elsewhere. (To be continued)
E. SAN JUAN, Jr. was recently a Fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. He was previously a Fulbright Professor of American Studies in Leuven University, Belgium, and visiting professor of literature at National Tsing Hua University and Tamkang University, Republic of China. He served also as a Fellow of the Center for the Humanities and visiting Professor of English, Wesleyan University; professor and chair of the Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University (1998-2001); an honorary fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, Scotland; and visiting professor at the Universita degli di studi Trento, Italy. His book Racial Formations/Critical Transformations (Humanity Books) won awards from the Association for Asian American Studies and the Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights. His collected poems in Filipino (1960-90) are found in Alay sa Paglikha ng Bukang-liwayway (Ateneo de Manila University Press). Several collections of new poems followed: Sapagkat Iniibig Kita (University of the Philippines Press), Salud Algabre at iba pang tula (University of San Agustin Publishing House, Iloilo City, Philippines); Balikbayang Mahal: Passages from Exile (LuLu.com), Bukas, May-Nilad! and Panambitan at Parangal Kay Cherith (Philippines Cultural Studies Center).
(Email: E. San Juan, Jr. < philcsc@gmail.com)
