A Legacy to a City Built by the US Navy
The Philippine Daily Inquirer
(February 22, 2000)
"The Navy Department is of the further opinion that the Manila-Subic Bay area is by far the best available location for a main outlying base. Every efton should be made in the negotiations with the Philippine government to hold it in perpetuity.
-- US Department of the, Navy Secretary. Claude A. Swanson to the US President, April 22, 1935.
VIVIAN has never heard of Swanson's agenda of perpetuity but she very well knew about its consequence. In the last 14 years, she has lived with Acquired immune Deficiency Syndrome and the horrors that came with it.
Between 1984 and 1986, each time the ship docked at the port of the former Subic Naval Base, an American serviceman singled her out among some 9,000 commercial sex workers in Olongapo City.
Vivian gave him the "good time," including sex, that he wanted. He gave her the dollars to feed her children from a previous marriage.
She served him; he left her with AIDS.
Sick and suicidal, she was spurned, too. Honestly telling her condition to another love-struck Navy man Vivian lost the prospect of another marriage.
Vivian knew death; it was at her doorstep daily.
She was among the first batch of 49 documented persons with AIDS in Olongapo from 1986 to 1992. Sixty AIDS victims were documented in Olongapo from 1986 to 1999.
Vivian has seen other victim losing, the battle one after the other. Two died two weeks ago. One, who returned to her province, was locked in a mausoleum in a cemetery until she died. But she was denied burial there.
Of the 16 whose lives were made bright and useful by the city government's help in integrating them into society's mainstream, only Vivian and another woman are still alive.
Sympathy did not come easy for Vivian. Her eldest child berated her and called her a "bad Woman."
Friends and neighbors avoided her like the plague. Beauty parlors turn her away, refusing to give her pedicure. An accidental wound might infect others, she was told.
Assisted by then Olongapo City Mayor Richard Gordon, she developed her fortitude, battled against discrimination and overcame her lack of education.
Vivian is still helping the city in its health education program. But the horror has not ended.
Her husband, who has reunited with her and their children some years ago, has become HIV positive as well.
They cry in silence about their plight yet love is not lost between them, Vivian told the INQUIRER last week.
Fate
On that agenda of perpetuity, the lives of Vivian and other Filipinos were intertwined.
It was not only large tracts of land and water areas in the United States held almost perpetuity at Subic but lives, too, and the economic and political destiny of the people.
The US developed 55,000 hectares of land and water areas in Bataan and Zambales into the Subic naval base, about 80 km northwest of Manila.
In the next decades, Subic, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies had put it, became the "largest and most comprehensive" support facility to the US Navy's activities in the South Pacific and Indian Oceans.
From 1904 to the early 1990s, the US government built a medical center,a naval ship repair facility,the Cubi Point naval air station and a naval magazine out of the bay and its surrounding forest areas.
Through these, Subic provided logistical, command and control, communications, training and meducal support to the US Seventh Fleet and its aircraft carriers.
As the largest naval supply depot in the world, it stored 180,000 item, ranging from -sea rations to fiveinch barrels, and handled one million barrels of fuel each month.
Its location near the demarcation line between the Indian and Pacific Oceans gave Subic the advantage for rapid projection of naval power and logistical support for all ships in the region, Prof. Roland Simbulan of the Nuclear-Free Philippines Coalition wrote in his book, "The Bases of Our Insecurity."
Together with the former Clark Air Base in nearby Pampanga, Simbulan said Subic formed an integrated air-sea base complex also as a "point of departure for combat missions" for the Korean and Vibtnam wars.
Built by the Navy
The base -- the installations there worth $271 million at 1970 estimates and its operating costs amounting to $86 million in 1977 -- tied a virtual umbilical cord to areas near it.
Olongapo, which in 1901 was a part of the military reservation evolved into a city. A 1966 Olongapo inaugural and souvenir program hailed it as "in fact, a community the (US) Navy built."
Smaller than the base at 18,000 hectares, Olongapo developed an economy that catered to the needs of 5,500 American dependents and an average of 9,000 sailors and Marines at Subic at any time.
And dollars flowed like honey to the city.
For example, in 1980, the salaries of Filipino employees in the base reached $47 million. Private expenditures of US citizens for hiring househelps, off-base house rentals and other utility jobs reached $4 million.
Military construction program amounted to $15 million; materials used in base, $8 million; painting of houses and contributions, $2 million; and local procurement of items, $21 million.
But dollars from the rest and recreation activities of the US servicemen came surprisingly high at $38 million.
The city had its downside.
About 9,000 women were pushed into prostitution. Her husband, who has reunited with her and half of them received treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and 49 ended up acquiring AIDS.
Some 1,000 Amerasian children were abandoned and hundreds more Filipino children were victimized by prostitution rings. In 1982 children as young as 9 years old were infected with syphilis and gonorrhea.
Some 60 Aeta families from communities in Boston, Kalayaan and Biniktikan were dispalced and ordered to live in the jungle area and not (to) be seen by the public walking on the roads on the golf course area."
About 19,000 direct-hired Filipino workers in Subic complained of disparities in wages and discrimination as Philippine labor laws were not recognized in the bases.
Subic's destiny of perpetuity ended in November 1992.
The US Seventh Fleet left almost a year after the Senate banned pemanent basing and presence of US troops by rejecting the 1947 Philippine-US military bases agreement.
Local authorities, particularly the Gordons, turned the twin tragedy of the pullout and the devastation of Mt. Pinatubo's eruption in 1991 into opportunities for rebuilding the city and Subic under the government's base conversion program.
With the servicemen out, money flowed this time from investors. Without the Americans, Olongapo residents have redesigned their fate.
To date, the life of less than 300,000 people in Olongapo continued to be linked to, if not decided, by Subic now an economic zone.
The Subic freeport is one of the country's biggest business zones with nearly $3 billion in investments.
Comeback
American troops started coming back to Subic in November last year for joint military exercises under the Visiting Forces Agreement being carried out along with the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty.
Vivian is greeting their return with hesitation. Her anxiety stems from the vulnerability of women to AIDS'ot STDS.
She is, however, confident that with the continuing AIDS surveillance and health education in the city, those in the rest and recreation industry "could manage without harm."
Officially, the return of US soldiers is met with"qualified support and concern."
Such is the position of the VFA Commission local monitoring council of Olongapo City in a resolution on Feb. 14.
It said that "while Olongapo played such an important role in the past, it traditionally has not had a voice in the policies governing the affairs of these foreign forces. This has resulted in many undesirable and deplorable social and political ills that plagued the city for many decades."
In March last year, the city council also expressed its "qualified support for the affirmation of the VFA with a strong note.
The city government did not want a "reversion to any of the old economic and social ills that were associated with the naval base," saying Olongapo has risen from its old image as a "Sin City."
Instead, it wanted "economic and developmental benefits for the community and the country as a result of the conduct of (the) exercises this time around."
Vivian captured the Filipinos' dilemma in this closer defense cooperation with the US.
Kung makakatulong sa atin nang malaki bakit hindi? Masyado naman tayong ipokrita kahit naghihirap na tayo hindi natin matatanggap na ganoon (if it will help us greatly, why not? We may be hypocrites because we cannot accept that while we are suffering from poverty) " she said. "Basta mag-ingat lang tayo (We just have to be careful)."
Felicito Payumo, chair of the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority that oversees the development of the base, said the troops were welcome to use the port and the recreation facilities within the ecozone.
But others see the VFA as part of the agenda of perpetuity. They want an end to the renewed military presence in the Philippines.
Buklod Center, a self-help institution of former prostituted women and mothers left with Amerasian children, said the "mere visits" of US servicemen would enliven prostitution in former basetowns.
"The closure of Subic and Clark has paved the way for viable alternatives to prostituted women. They learned that they can live on their own sweat without selling their flesh. The mere return of these troops and their promise of green bucks but enforce the attractiveness of prostitution as an option out of poverty," said Buklod's Alma Bulawen.
From 500 in the 1980s, bars now number less than a 100 and mostly-found in Barangay Barreto in Subic, Zainbales.
Fr. Shay Cullen of the People's Recovery, Empowerment and Development Assistance Foundation. regards the VFA as the "provocative factor" in the operation of prostitution syndicates long preying on children.
Unclassified documents form the US Naval Investigagive Service showed that childrn as young as 4 years old were offered to servicemen, Cullen said.
The colonial legacy included "the conditioning of some of our people into an unreflective aceptance and imitation of the behavior of the visiting forces of the past, he said.
TONETTE OREJAS,
Olongapo City
