BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
THE MEMORIES of the past can come to us with feelings of foreboding, frustration and a desire for justice. So it was for me when huge US warships came steaming into Subic Bay last April and May this year 2023 after many years of absence.
Memories of the previous 50 years when the US Navy occupied the huge Subic Bay naval base and Olongapo City was then a US recreation sex land where women and child sexual exploitation was rampant. Sex bars and brothels proliferated. Then, the women and children were sold every day and night for sex for a handful of dollars to sex-starved drunken US sailors. The human trafficking of children for sexual abuse was authenticated and verified by US naval investigators.
HIV-AIDS, venereal disease and drug trafficking was commonplace. Then, the situation was thought of as just a thriving business as the US servicemen were warmly welcomed with young women and Mardi Gras street festivals and October Fests. The sex city as it was then known had dozens of city-approved licensed sex bars and clubs and hotels filled with bikini-clad young girls gyrating around poles and all available for sex. The bars were operated by many retired US sailors and others, even some owned by politicians with city government permits where the US servicemen could satisfy their sexual impulses and fantasies where nothing was held back. Even foreign pedophiles were accommodated.
Those days are long gone and a new generation of high-minded political leaders is striving to establish and maintain high moral standards in Olongapo City. Likewise in the former naval base, now converted and managed by the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA). It is headed by the new chairman and administrator, Jonathan Dy, a good leader that will surely never allow brothels or sex hotels inside the Subic Bay Freeport Zone.
The new generation of citizens and their good leaders will be vigilant that the bad old days will never return under their watch. Should we forget the evils of the past, for sure, they will visit us again. The expose I made in 1982 of 18 children, some as young as nine years old, that were confined in the Olongapo City hospital with venereal disease having been sexually abused by US servicemen and local officials, caused international revulsion and outcry.
The local authorities were so angry at my media expose in We Forum, under the name of Marcelo B. Soriano, documenting the widespread child sexual abuse and showing photographs of some of the abused children, with eyes covered to protect their identity. The administrators of the city in those days turned their followers against this writer and charged me for damaging the “good name” of Olongapo City and I was denounced as a persona non grata, and to be deported for exposing the sexual abuse of children. (To be continued)/PN
