The return of the US military to the Philippines
January 28, 2024 · By Fr. Shay Cullen
The return of the US military to the Philippines
Fr. Shay Cullen
27 January 2024
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.
One author described his experience on the streets of Olongapo in the gaudy days of sex slavery and drugs in “Sin City.” “The long street was lined with sex bars that began right outside the gate of the US Navy Base. The nightclub strip called Magsaysay Drive was blazing with neon lights. Loud bands were pounding out rock ‘n’ roll from bars and clubs on the strip. The Beatles hit Get Back was vying with The Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Woman and Judy in Disguise by the Playboy Band. The street was thronged with American sailors, all bar hopping, leading girls to a cheap hotel or carrying the small little ones in their arms like children. Many of the girls seemed to be no more than fifteen or sixteen.”
The sailors were tall, muscular and macho, dressed in bulging t-shirts and gym shorts. They walked about as if they owned the place, shouting obscenities to each other, waving beer bottles, and grabbing the girls who stood in the doorways of the sex bars and clubs. Welcome signs and banners greeted these high-paying customers: “Welcome USS Enterprise,” said one.
At the doors of the sex clubs, under the flickering neon lights, the older women disguised their hard life of exploitation and abuse behind masks of heavy make-up, artificial eyelashes, and mascara highlighted by red burnished cheeks. They lounged in sexually provocative poses. Beside them were their young trainees, these girls seemed as young as sixteen and on offer to the highest paying customer.
“Hi Joe, wanna good time, Joe, come on in, I give you a special job, Joe!” they called out. Every male foreigner was called Joe as in GI Joe. “You want a cherry girl”, that’s what they called a virgin. The customer would pay a very big price for a genuine cherry girl, most were underage girls.”
This author exposed the child sexual abuse by US Navy personnel and local Filipino pedophiles, the youngest victim was only nine years old, one of 18 children, and likely many more that were discovered suffering from venereal diseases. The expose started a campaign to close the Subic Bay military base and convert it into an economic zone. It was successful. The Philippine Senate voted to close Subic Naval Base, the last ship left in 1992.
Now after 32 years, the US bases are back. They are ensconced inside nine Philippine military bases. There is big trouble brewing in the South China Sea and the West Philippine Sea but it is all about money, power and pride over Taiwan. Trade is at the heart of the confrontation with China. In 2022, US trade with Asia totaled an estimated US$520 billion. The US exports to Asia totalled US$160 billion while the US imported from Asia a total of US$360 billion. So, South-East Asia has grown in greater importance in recent years.
That same year, US exports to Taiwan were 1.8 percent of all U.S. exports and 2.6 percent of US total imports came from Taiwan. The United States wants to keep Taiwan as a trading partner and prevent China from invading and capturing the production sites especially for electronics and chip manufacturing as it is threatening to do. Hence, the military build-up in the Philippines as a deterrent. If it comes to a missile war, the unfortunate Filipino civilians will be killed as the civilians are dying in Gaza. They will be expendable.
Will the evils of the sex industry re-appear around the new US bases inside the Philippine Army bases? If so, that will likely lead to moral outrage again and allow history to surely repeat itself.
