In the Slums of Manila: Can the Poor Find Their Voices?
Packer, George
On my third day in Manila I saw a woman weeding her temporary patch of the park along the bay. One wall of her house, a squatter's plastic-sacking and drift-plywood hovel, consisted of a...
...I hadn't expected euphoria—it was much too late for that...
...His group quickly grew to twenty-five thousand members...
...To Modesto, this is real democracy, whose absence keeps the vast majority of Filipinos without hope or safe water...
...As for the poor, they were everywhere...
...A few women cursed the police and wrestled timber from them...
...Every day a coup rumor plagued the city...
...As the detainees were being herded onto buses back to jail, plainclothes police seized a relative who had not yet been accused, shoved the terrified woman into an unmarked car and roared away...
...It starts from a practical stance toward the Aquino government...
...It was spectacularly beautiful this evening and for half an hour we watched and didn't take much notice of each other and shared the beach as if, absurdly, we all had a right to it...
...The order to demolish these particular hovels had come down because Manila would shortly host a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN...
...With one ear...
...She owned nothing more than her rags and salvaged scraps...
...and when I asked what she thought of the Communists, she said: "This is not the human-rights worker talking...
...Has anything...
...The military would be brutal and the Communist Party is still far off—and under its present composition, it might be as authoritarian as the previous regime...
...I don't know," he admitted...
...In 1985 he became chairman of Umalun (an acronym for Alliance of the Urban Poor), under Bandila, the umbrella organization of the Social Democrats in the anti-Marcos campaign...
...Their poverty is the biggest obstacle," said Sister Christine Tan, a nun of elite origins and former friend of Cory Aquino, who now lives and works in a slum...
...Squatter colonies emerged like snails after a rainstorm...
...It gibes with his passionately held idea of his own role in his group...
...It is hard to say exactly why this scene typified my whole experience in the Philippines, but I am quite sure it could have happened in no other country in the world...
...When the 1987 constitution came before the voters, rather than opposing it on principle like the mainstream left, Bisig supported Aquino as it had done in her 1986 campaign, sensing the people were with her: "And if the people in such large numbers want this, who's to say they are wrong...
...she wanted to participate if she could...
...When it reached two or three a day, the police rounded up hundreds of slumdwellers as suspected Communists and set up armed vigilante groups...
...Her work was useful in undermining the Aquino government's claims to liberalism, but it was not based on principle...
...Some carried signs in Filipino...
...Across a mud road from Parola, wedged in along the river where it emptied into the bay, lived a few dozen families in shacks...
...That, Amelita Villan explained, is the Philippine rich, crushing the poor...
...The great appeal of Bisig is its pragmatism...
...Manuel Villaserior, the head of a grassroots organization called Kasama ("Comrade"), but obviously no squatter himself, agreed to take me to their neighborhood the next morning...
...In mid-1986 Umalun put itself in a loose alliance with a new group of independent socialist intellectuals, Bisig ("Elbow"), affiliated with the Socialist International and chaired by Francisco Nemenzo...
...We can use these people for our own purposes," the governor finally told Villaserior, "as long as we have these petitions...
...The palakasan system, to this Filipino, was "the past...
...But it was no miracle that, for the first time since they threw out the Spanish, common Filipinos turned the old patronage politics upside down, took power into their hands, and changed their country's history...
...A man named Veloria had promised them permanent houses across the avenue of mud in Parola for a $50 fee, which Villaserior claimed he had then pocketed...
...EDSA lingers—as myth, propaganda, source of pride, and also disillusion...
...he also controlled the shell-selling business...
...He pulled a few strings and halted it...
...A rain ended today's demolition, dousing the fires and the women's curses, driving the cops into their vans and the squatters under pieces of plastic...
...With one ear...
...They now deride the climactic events as a sentimental "picnic" of the bourgeoisie that has changed nothing...
...A well-dressed man came out and spoke through a bullhorn...
...Outside the nightclubs half-mad mothers held out half-perished babies for pity and coins...
...But this alliance has held and is growing, as disillusioned leftists— both "SocDems" and "NatDems" —have split from their groups and begun to join...
...And yet, like most clichés, it basically describes the truth...
...This is the tourist belt...
...and measured by safe water, the Philippine brand of democracy has so far produced very little...
...Trucks dumped mounds of city refuse at its entrance, which was the great fortune of its residents, for those not lucky enough to get jobs as laborers with the Philippine Port Authority (PPA) sifted garbage every day for bits of broken glass...
...Just before the program began, Mike told a television journalist that he planned to enjoy all the speeches...
...No, she told me in fine English, they were holding up three fingers, not two: the index was "For God," the middle "For Humanism," the fourth "For Country...
...She hesitated...
...Manuel Villaserior, my guide through this landscape of mud, fog, and glass, had once been an organizer for the PDP-Laban, in its early days of reform...
...They looked too cheerful for a crowd of leftists...
...How likely is the Philippines to escape the cycle of violence and authoritarianism of its traditional elite and its Communist insurgents— to realize something like the democratic, egalitarian aspirations of Modesto, Nemenzo, and others like them...
...Umalun members hadn't forgotten their experience of benign neglect from middle-class allies...
...Veloria was a backer of Kasama's rival group...
...Then I learned that Kasama was competing for members in Parola with a rival group...
...The woman secretary of the new group said, "We are equally poor...
...An agreement gave the "NatDems" 35 percent of Bayan's votes and required a 75 percent majority to pass any motion, so that the "NatDems" could neither dominate nor be overruled...
...One such moment revealed a reason for the left's failures...
...The essence of democracy is to get sick and not die...
...But numbers of people spoke of EDSA with deep regret as a golden age lasting four days, when the country's best qualities, so little in evidence now—unity, restraint, mercy, and generosity—magically flowered...
...It is probably foolish to be anything but pessimistic...
...But it shows what seemed increasingly true as I got to know the mainstream left: that freedom and democracy are more often rhetorical weapons against the status quo than ideas to work for and live by...
...I went to the Philippines late last year to see for myself what the "democratic revolution" of February 1986 meant to the great mass of poor Filipinos...
...They only see the washing—nothing beyond it...
...Like goldpanners, men and women were combing through muddy garbage with a specialized piece of metal and throwing their catch against homemade screens to sift out glass...
...I caught two English words: "Mission accomplished...
...FALL • 1988 • 423 Slums of Manila "It's okay," Elizabeth Juntilla said, huddling under her husband's banca with one of her children, and laughing the way Filipinos often laugh when things get unbearable...
...I asked whether their disappointment wouldn't simply settle back into the old passivity...
...Eleanor Holmes Norton described him as a "piece of America's soul...
...His plainclothesmen were busy demolishing the row of shacks on the sand, setting fire to the squatters' flotsam...
...He expects to be killed for his work and has already taken one bullet in the neck from unknown foes...
...How can you know what will happen to you if you haven't known what it is to have one meal only...
...and from Mike to the audience, once again, words of encouragement and inspiration...
...And Ami replied, "They and us love each other...
...some of the men wore headrags and no shoes...
...Ruth Messinger called Mike "the man who shaped my political consciousness...
...Ted Kennedy claimed he was a saint and a scholar...
...Unlike Villasefior, Bert Modesto comes from the lower class...
...I was grateful for her candor...
...Clans of the rich slipped out of private clubs into waiting Mercedes...
...In the middle of the road they put up a statue of the Virgin Mary...
...Safe water is not what the State Department has in mind when it congratulates itself on the democratic revolution in the Third World...
...Surprisingly, she turned our talk to the revolution...
...Stick-thin cigarette vendors hobbled through traffic clacking their wooden boxes like bones...
...This is not building democracy," Francisco Nemenzo observed when the carnival was over...
...For housing rights...
...But repression is not the main reason the left has failed to respond to the huge opportunity presented by the EDSA revolution...
...Struggling in Hope On Roxas Boulevard, from a well-spoken, jobless young woman, I first heard the word palakasan...
...They are the only ones who can still talk credibly about "genuine" democracy, since they alone haven't yet had the chance to fail at delivering it...
...Manila lives with its squatters like a homeowner with a plague of roaches, or a dog with fleas—enduring and resenting them, occasionally trying to wipe them out and finding it can never get rid of them...
...The idea of a free and equal Philippines now seems a dream...
...In the same crucial period Modesto encountered manipulation by the pro-Communist left...
...But we are living here in the Philippines, so we must have hope...
...Palakasan is the path of least resistance in Philippine politics...
...Their children cried in terror or played in the filthy tide...
...Still isolated, still painfully slow, this awakening challenges the basic assumption of Philippine politics that the weak will bow to the strong...
...And yet these rivals over a patch of Manila rubbish held no bitterness toward each other...
...And yet they are plainly losing...
...Revolution, corruption, coups, typhoons— but at least San Miguel was winning the basketball championships...
...We were squatters under Marcos," Ami said bitterly...
...If the Communists won, I asked, would her human-rights group continue to exist...
...his boyfriend belonged to the other group...
...Modesto went as a representative of the "SocDems...
...Ami and the rest of the crowd lived in an area called Parola, a spit off the vast Tondo slum on the bay bordered by a highway, the miry, putrid Pasig River, and the Manila port...
...In the meantime, he asked, "What is the alternative to Cory...
...Ami, herself a glass-gatherer, told me they made two cents a kilo from a middleman who doubled that when he resold to the factory...
...What petition...
...These were shell-gatherers who combed this strip of foul beach for ornamentals sold in the tourist belt and crushed shell used in chicken feed and lime preparation...
...There were unionists, feminists, civil rights leaders, community organizers, older socialists, middle-aged New Leftists, campus activists, and radicals from abroad...
...An assistant to Aquino's governor of Metro Manila, he had received a letter from the Parola squatters—people who had come back to Manila from resettlement areas like Las Piflas in which there was fresh air but no garbage, no glass, no work— asking him to intercede against a scheduled demolition...
...The people have not been the ones to lose the energy from EDSA, it is Cory's government that has wasted the energy...
...Francisco Nemenzo, a professor at the University of the Philippines, an exCommunist and now a highly respected figure in the independent left, believes that is its real meaning...
...Most Filipinos seem unimaginably poor and powerless...
...Her house, though overcrowded, seemed luxurious after the beach hovels, with sofas, a fan, even a television...
...Villaserior founded Kasama with the belief that nothing from inside the system was going to change it...
...this is me talking...
...All were chanting...
...But even the best urban arrangements have a downside, and Parola's was the PPA, which owned this land and frequently tried to evict the residents in order to create more rental space for a storage contractor's holding cars...
...More than one reminded me of her campaign promise to lower 422 • DISSENT Slums of Manila the price of a certain widely eaten fish from a dollar...
...What, then, has February 1986 achieved...
...Demonstrations and general strikes win less and less support...
...He soon discovered that the middle-class leadership of Bandila valued his group's numbers at rallies but had no interest in education...
...Several leftist leaders were killed or wounded, possibly by military death squads...
...she laughed indignantly...
...It was a small hint of the "People Power" revolt a few months later (at which Elizabeth was present, feeling, for the first and last time, a "sister" of Manila's rich...
...over the course of a year not one seminar was held...
...I don't want to be followed...
...The travail of one urban organizer I knew shows how these betrayals have brought many of the poor to a point where they feel they must count only on themselves...
...I saw enough terror and heard of enough 426 • DISSENT Slums of Manila violence, especially in the countryside, to know that, with or without analogies to Marcos, repression is bad and getting worse...
...the present drift at any rate will mean more bloodshed and injustice...
...The legal left in Manila will repeat it ad nauseam until you want to believe them wrong...
...When three trucks arrived people had gathered in the rain to block the way...
...The crowd let out a wild cheer and began to disperse...
...Help Only from Below Enough stories of manipulation of popular groups by the mainstream left exist to form a pattern that mimics the co-option of the same groups by the political elite...
...To be poor in the Philippines means to be caught in new webs of dependency even if you are being radicalized...
...The Bisig line appealed to Modesto and his group: critical support of Aquino...
...If the decisions do not come from them, I don't think socialism can survive...
...And habeas corpus...
...On return visits to Parola, I learned that Villaseiior had accepted money for Kasama from candidates in the upcoming local elections, including ones from Marcos's old party...
...FALL • 1988 • 425 Slums of Manila The shell-gatherers, sitting outside their houses on fifty-kilo sacks of shells, and the glass-gatherers, standing in their rubber slippers in the mud, debated who had conned whom, who had a right to live in Parola, whose leader was truly for the poor...
...At a poignant New Year's Eve mass, a vigil for peace, a religious parade in a poor quarter, I thought I glimpsed traces of EDSA, and the people around me seemed aware of it too...
...Only the president of their organization don't like our aims...
...Lenny was a member of Kasama...
...Nemenzo told me: "We would like to propagate socialism so the basic masses can have their own organizations, pursue their class interests, without manipulation...
...It was, I realized, possibly the reason why the crowd outside the senate building had been holding "Canonigo Resign" signs...
...For the poor, to the myths of salvation by emigration and salvation by Communist violence, EDSA has added the myth of selfsalvation...
...My first thought was that they were Marcos loyalists, for they seemed to be giving his V-for-Victory salute...
...He said that with twelve trustworthy leaders he could organize all of Metro Manila's poor in two more years...
...In fact, it distrusts them deeply unless it can manipulate them...
...Of course, countries aren't restructured by miracles that make private virtues into public qualities...
...In the midst of this tension, squalor, and violence, it seemed bizarre that the city was going about its normal business...
...On a good day the glass-gatherers netted $1.50...
...The coalition between Marxist university professors and Christian Socialists from the slums came after months of difficult negotiations...
...Neither side admits that the truth might lie in the gray area, where neutrality is impossible, that settles over a country at war with itself...
...Sure, it will die...
...Whitney Houston and stonewashed jeans were all the rage...
...Who knows how many thousands of Filipinos have come to this judgment in the two years since...
...Next time they will burn the boat—this time is the warning...
...And so the evening came to a close—words of celebration spoken to Mike...
...At that moment, two transvestites appeared out on the road and tiptoed through the mud to join the groups...
...It was over in seconds, but I'd been in the right place at the right time to see how the cops lived up to their claim of abiding by the new constitution...
...They tell me at first to be more forceful—that they don't know what to do themselves...
...Vast slums spilled from the waterfront deep into the countryside...
...and then petitions poured in from other squatter areas...
...A few families still clung to the spot where the police had torn down their hovels...
...We are squatters under Aquino...
...Liberal American activists and journalists swallow this whole, return home, and repeat it solemnly on university panels and in left-wing magazines...
...not the workers...
...In May of 1985 a broad range of legal leftists tried to create a united front of all the anti-Marcos forces, to be called Bayan...
...Obviously this doesn't mean that most legal leftists are secretly using their position to help the Communists...
...Parola was built partly on garbage...
...an emphasis on organizing and educating the poor as against ritual denunciations of imperialism and fascism...
...But they will come back," the cop said, without exasperation or pity, but with a touch of irony...
...The events of February 1986 (known to Filipinos as the EDSA Revolution, named after Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, the Manila highway where soldiers and thousands of Filipinos rebelled against Marcos) have not disappeared from memory...
...But to understand all this, one must enter at least briefly the life of the poor — Manila's slumdwellers...
...In the military version, these were Communist supporters wanted for violent crimes in Leyte and acting as urban guerrillas in Manila...
...But how can you stop being poor if you are not free...
...Will the senators listen to you...
...Elizabeth's home was a fishing town an hour south of Manila called Las Pirias, where I found her two weeks later...
...One, in a flowery frock and running shoes, demurely fanning himself, was introduced as Lenny...
...I've put all my faith in them...
...He couldn't have been disappointed...
...Unshaven white men, here for one thing, wandered downtown with lovely brown girls on their arm...
...A man rescuing a pile of clothes from the rain wasn't so resigned: "Who is the squatter, a foreigner or a Filipino...
...It now seems needless to untangle this knot of turf battles, charges, and countercharges...
...I arrived in the aftermath of a general strike that was dying, but continued to twitch in small demonstrations and work stoppages...
...Throughout the tumultuous years since Benigno Aquino was murdered, the Communists and their supporters have missed the moment again and again because demonstrations, elections, uprisings were not dictated by them...
...Nemenzo, with a lot of anarchism in his thought, may place an exaggerated faith in the readiness of average Filipinos to rise up again when they see the government has ceased to respond to them...
...They are an eyesore," the Manila cop told me, and gestured toward the forty-seven families living on the beach of Manila Bay, across Roxas Boulevard from the squatter woman and her sign...
...Then they think in their mind: a new way...
...These he referred to his superiors, but after a month nothing had been done about them...
...The hopes raised by EDSA and the disillusionment among the poor with the Aquino administration, if not yet with Aquino herself, should benefit the left...
...He began by insisting that the evening could be a success only if a celebration of his past led to a celebration of the future...
...We should help each other...
...I was curious, and then electrified...
...and the children who walked barefoot seemed to have adapted miraculously to their environment...
...the other factions were Liberal Democrats, independents, and, most powerfully, National Democrats, representing the underground National Democratic Front of the Communist Party...
...but it exists in the minds of Filipinos...
...We are poor, we are weaker than them...
...The first time I met him he said to me: "The urban poor is the only sector knows what the urban poor problem is...
...a few women stood under umbrellas...
...and he ended by inviting everyone in the room to join in the creation of that future...
...They were dark-skinned and therefore almost certainly poor...
...a democratic structure...
...One wall of her house, a squatter's plastic-sacking and drift-plywood hovel, consisted of a hand-painted sign...
...On my last day he asked me: "What freedom is there if you are poor...
...Elizabeth could count at least six demolition attempts, the most recent on the eve of the Aquino-Marcos snap election in 1986...
...Yet she had bothered, amid housekeeping and watching out for the police, to put up a pathetic, defiant sign...
...This was resold to the San Miguel Beer bottling factory in whose shadow Parola had risen up...
...To the "yellow" crowd—Aquino' s strongest, middle-class supporters—it was a real revolution that has become a comforting memory, its anniversary celebrated with fireworks and disco dancing...
...But I found aimlessness and anxiety in Manila's streets, where garbage had gone uncollected for weeks...
...it describes the relation between Manuel Villasefior and his followers...
...Then I went to lunch with a young human-rights worker active on behalf of the detainees...
...q A Celebration of the Future Manhattan's old Roseland Ballroom had never housed a crowd quite like the 500 agitators and rebels who gathered on June 30 to celebrate Michael Harrington...
...If it would serve the need of the proletariat...
...She has failed on many counts, the "democratic space" is closing, but it exists and should be used...
...There were no issues, only powerbrokers and alliances of opportunity...
...The whole community was paved with broken glass...
...For the urban rich," the woman, missing some front teeth, said...
...The people of Parola were up against powerful interests...
...Three women were waiting under an umbrella for a jeepney home...
...Later still, a member of Canonigo's PCUP told me that Villaseiior was under investigation for extorting thousands of dollars from his followers in exchange for phony deeds to their lots...
...If someone tells me the urban poor don't know what is their problem," he laughed, "I'm not sure I'm not going to box him...
...This is legitimizing oligarchy...
...He spoke of immediate political tasks, such as the 1988 election campaign, and a global perspective in which the fate of all peoples are linked...
...The squatters called him "our leader" and referred my questions to him, since a former government official knew the problems of the urban poor better than they...
...He acknowledged that people might accuse him of being co-opted, but he saw no alternative if the group was to survive...
...When he used words like "mastering millions," I began to wonder what Manuel Villaserior was really after...
...F. Sionil José, a leading novelist and social critic, asked me, "What kind of democracy is possible in a country where 60 percent of the people don't even have safe water...
...and her position there on Roxas Boulevard near downtown was extremely precarious...
...In the Slums "It is order of the President...
...My last evening in Manila found me back on Roxas Boulevard...
...In Manila a thick fog rises out of the chasm between stated opinion and reality...
...Few could speak of any improvement in their lives under Aquino...
...She expected the war to be decided in Manila within two years...
...But education, the long-term empowerment of the poor, was Modesto's whole purpose...
...What has changed...
...But on the day of choosing delegates, the "NatDem" bloc, prompted by hardline Communists, tried to pull off a putsch for a greater share of votes...
...They were also members of the rival group...
...Their cause, it seems to me, is the one just cause...
...The common explanation on the left is simply repression, worse than under Marcos—the "U.S.-sponsored low intensity conflict...
...but it did not console her much...
...Parola is worth describing for what it says about the relation of the poor to power...
...The audience cheered all those words, for the speakers articulated what everyone there wanted to express...
...Yet this activist was saying that she didn't believe in her work, in the hearing we'd come from, in any principled objection to the behavior of the cops...
...This has been said by socialists before, but 428 • DISSENT Slums of Manila for now Bert Modesto is prepared to believe...
...Hit squads of the Communist New People's Army (NPA) were shooting soldiers and policemen in Manila almost daily...
...I don't know...
...and if you come to know them they are in some ways even more miserable than they look...
...Because of its famous bamboo organ church and its white sand beaches, the spot had potential as a resort...
...Soon after Aquino came to power, Umalun split off from Bandila—most of whose leaders, like Canonigo of the PCUP, have left the parliament of the streets to join traditional parties and work in the government...
...Its goal may be a socialism based on democratic principles, but it has no illusions about how distant that is...
...Most of them were in the minority when the vast majority of Filipinos voted for a liberal constitution in early 1987...
...And the demolition crew abandoned the job...
...No government is perfect, but they will be almost perfect, and human rights will not be a problem...
...The Aquino government wasn't more than three months old when Villasefior resigned, realizing that it was replacing the defunct Marcos patronage system with a more benign one of its own...
...The other groups walked out, the united front collapsed, and Bayan became all but a Communist front organization, which has followed the party's line on all the major issues of the past three years, including the disastrous election boycott...
...But the end of the program—Mike's own speech—held the most satisfying message...
...Even her foothold in Las Pirias was tenuous...
...I had just come out of the Supreme Court building where a hearing had been held for the release of several dozen detainees from the island of Leyte...
...The change has taken place not in living conditions or election results but in the way the poor think about power...
...Their men sullenly packed what they had rescued into their bancas —narrow skiffs that earned these families a living from catch the women sold downtown, and from ferrying prostitutes to the freighters offshore...
...The idea has been with Modesto since he FALL • 1988 • 427 Shuns of Manila organized aborigines in the Sierra Madre mountains as a teenage lay worker...
...Governments give nothing without pressure from below," he told me, "so it is always the people who must educate, pressure, speak, demand...
...if possible, or at least to the American naval base at Olongapo, with its limitless demand for bargirls...
...he recalled the individuals and images that had shaped his vision—Dorothy Day, Norman Thomas, the workers in Nairobi who carved napkin rings for export and lived in cardboard cartons on the street...
...Senator Mercado has agreed to receive our petition," the man told me...
...The reason she preferred near-exposure on a squalid beach was money, pure and simple: here she could do nothing but sell cartons of water from a pushcart for about 50 cents a day, work that shamed her husband...
...And to round it out, he was an officer of the Presidential Commission for the Urban Poor (PCUP), a colleague of Canonigo, the commission chairman whose resignation the squatters of Parola had demanded the night I met them in the rain...
...Amelita Villan and her neighbors not only saw themselves as oppressed but took decisive action to unite against a government whose claims to being reformist they no longer believed...
...it now costs $1.50...
...The struggle for tomorrow's meal preoccupied her far more than any political cause...
...They are the only ones who talk about equality at all...
...So it becomes an accepted truth...
...In the human-rights version, they were innocent refugees from vigilante attacks who had been illegally arrested...
...During a long conversation, Nemenzo, who has spent time in Marcos's jails, discussed what Bisig is trying to do...
...a readiness to talk about socialism (rather than what the Communists somewhat disingenuously call the "national democratic revolution...
...One rainy evening on the steps of the senate building I ran into a crowd that had been waiting at least three hours...
...Newspapers were beginning to report that the PPA had come under the corrupting influence of Jose Cojuangco, the president's brother and head of the ruling coalition party, the PDPLaban...
...To the Communists and their allies in the legal left, who were nowhere near EDSA, it was not a revolution at all...
...Hold up these fingers: your thumb presses down on your little finger...
...On my first morning the newspaper headlines declared that the vice president was willing to take power if President Aquino were overthrown...
...I will go home, I will not come back...
...And that is how you change...
...I want to execute their decisions—I am the messenger...
...Their faces are too much in the laundry tub...
...One carried a sign that said: "Canonigo Resign...
...I didn't doubt his desire to help the urban poor, but even if the charges against him were untrue, he and the Parola squatters couldn't escape the net of patronage—monopolized by Marcos, modified by Aquino...
...Mariano Canonigo was the presidential commissioner for the urban poor...
...Now that the ASEAN summit had ended, a weathered old woman said, they might try to rebuild...
...After a hundred days in the country I believe that something has happened...
...It means roughly "through a strong person," and I encountered it countless times, in various forms: to get anywhere in this society you need a powerful backer...
...In exchange for his money or protection, you owe him eternal loyalty...
...Her principle was a Communist victory...
...Not Cory...
...A number of people were gathering to watch the sun go down scarlet behind the freighters out on Manila Bay: squatters, white tourists, prostitutes back from the ships being carried piggyback off the fishermen's bancas through the filthy tide, a few well-off Filipino couples...
...But what about the V sign...
...At the same time, sectors of the left have failed to respond to it or even have tried to thwart it...
...We are the squatters, the urban poor...
...It said, "10-PESO ACROSS THE BORD WAGE INCRESE...
...Bisig's work now is to educate...
...Yet the road to self-liberation has led them into new hierarchies and divisions...
...They had boycotted the election and never trusted the unorganized uprisings of the mid1980s anyway...
...Missed Opportunities for the Left By now it is a sodden cliché that President Aquino has betrayed the masses whose support brought her to power...
...Seven thousand families were packed into this stretch of land, about 200 meters by 600, turned by the previous night's rain into deep mud...
...424 • DISSENT Slums of Manila "And Cory...
...And the urban poor is the only sector knows the solution...
...Joanne Barkan q FALL • 1988 • 429...
...What she still wanted was to get out of Las Pirias—to the U.S...
...We need more People Power...
...For an American raised on sporadic protests by a comfortable middle-class against events happening five or ten thousand miles away, that sign came as something like a revelation...
...But every now and then a stroke of luck, a sudden confidence, momentarily brings daylight...
...Leaders' voices in Manila sound increasingly isolated...
...And we will take them down again...
...Their totals in the last two, relatively honest elections were abysmal...
...The local election campaign, which I saw in a number of communities, including Aquino's province, again and again pitted old elites that have been revived now that the dominance of Marcos cronies has ended...
...Refugees from the war in the countryside had begun to appear in Manila...
...It is because its most powerful sector—the "mainstream left," made up of the underground Communist movement and its "natural allies" on the legal front—is not particularly interested in the kind of independent, self-initiating, bottom-up groups that have emerged among the poor...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
