Just met with Joel Virador, an ex-congressman now running for city council in Davao. While a congressman, he was charged with participating in the armed struggle, which was kind of crazy given that he was in Congress when the supposed acts occurred. This is a recent tactic of the AFP; charging leftist activists and politicians (I’ve met 3 that are on the run from the army here in Mindanao) with “frustrated murder” and participation in the NPA, a designated “communist-terrorist” organization. Once so charged, they become subject to Oplan Bantay Laya 2, a counterinsurgency program explicitly modeled on the Phoenix Program used by the United States in South Vietnam between 1967 and 1972.
Oplan Bantay Laya 2 divides military operations into four stages: military operations to “clear” the area of insurgents, “hold” the area by forming paramilitary groups and an intelligence network; “consolidate” the area through civic action operations such as medical and dental missions; and “develop” the area by introducing livelihood and development projects.
The difficulty of reconciling the first two phases of the counterinsurgency plan with electoral democracy is obvious. As the counterinsurgency program gets more muscle, the left takes a beating. In Negros, the results have been horrifying. It is notable that, at least of the admittedly select folks I’ve met, none have repudiated the NPA or condemn them. Despite the personal (one guy is dealing with a slew of health problems) and political costs these courageous people have borne by being tarred with the “insurgent” label, they refuse to condemn the NPA or sanction government counterinsurgency programs.
The problems of Philippine democracy, though, go beyond military abuses. Discussing politics with Jose has been confirming my working mental model of the effects of persistent inequality, probably mathed up best by Acemoglu and Robinson. (My co-blogger has written a little about similar models, although mostly in non-democratic contexts.) It postulates a clientelism trap, where elites control votes via their control over key economic assets, and then use that vote bank to stymie any (political or economic) redistribution that would threaten the value of those assets. Land reform, foreign debt repudiation, tax enforcement, and urban infrastructure development all fail in the Philippines because Congress is filled with the rich, who realize most of these programs will eat the flow of rents they enjoy from their assets. It’s simple, pessimistic, and maybe a bit left-wing, but that does not mean it is wrong.
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