BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
AS SOON AS China became the second biggest economy in the world after the United States, it was inevitable that China would assert its power and challenge Western trade interests in Southeast Asia.
When nations become rich, they tend to become arrogant, dominating, and greedy. So it was with the nations of the northern hemisphere. They became colonizers. They used military power to overwhelm, dominate, and exploit other poorer nations.
In 1946, the Philippines, a war-devastated impoverished county, was turned over by the United States to the subservient rich, land-owning families. It was a semblance of independence and democracy. Economic power lay with the American corporations that demanded and got “parity rights.”
US companies and US citizens had equal rights as Filipinos to exploit the natural resources so the nation was not set free. The rich families were compliant and obedient to the US interests and gave the US politicians and corporations whatever they demanded provided their families were allowed to rule indefinitely. They continue to rule to this day.
The US corporations and their wealthy Filipino collaborators had become corrupt Filipino politicians. They plundered the minerals and forests of the Philippines to grow rich in rebuilding Japan and Europe after World War II. The United States also demanded vast areas of the Philippine land and forest for military bases. Their demands were approved. Subic Bay at Olongapo and Clark Air Base in Pampanga were the prizes the US cherished so much.
Subic Bay and Clark were lost and the Philippine government did not exercise full sovereignty. They were used to wage wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Persian Gulf. A population of 28,000 US servicemen and women were stationed at Subic Bay Naval Station and created employment for 23,000 Filipinos who worked on the base from domestic servants to engineers.
The sexual and drug demands of the US sailors were satisfied by 15,000 Filipina women and children working in possibly over a hundred officially licensed and permitted sex bars and more unofficial sex and drug dens offering every kind of perversion.
The sexual exploitation of women and underaged girls was ignored as social wrong-doing and even deemed socially acceptable by some of the population at that time. The sex bars and hotels were given business licenses and permits by the local government. It was a city of entertainment with sex as it was described by the mayor who introduced street parties, parades of semi-naked women during Mardigras and October drinking fests in the streets to generate more money for the elites.
All of this and local businesses with the bases generated an estimated US$ 220 million a year. The social costs were high. Filipino spiritual values were sacrificed on the altars of vice. Broken homes, failed marriages and venereal disease were rampant. Violence, drug use, social problems, poverty, crimes, murders and more killing by death squads could not quell this wild setup to please and satisfy the lust and immoral behavior of some of the military personnel of the United States.
Besides this, there were hundreds of abandoned Filipino-American children running on the streets begging to stay alive and other children some as young as nine years old raped and sexually abused and infected with venereal diseases by US servicemen and local paedophiles at will. This evil was finally exposed and led to moral outrage by millions of good-loving Christian Filipinos around the nation. They had rediscovered their national pride and dignity and the moral values espoused by the election of Corazon “Cory” Aquino in 1986 after the murder of her husband and the ignominious fall of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. (To be continued)/PN
