Pacific Panopticon

A Movement of Movements?—8 walden bello PACIFIC PANOPTICON Could you tell us about your education and family background? was born in Manila, in 1945. My father was in the movie business in the Philippines, and involved in advertising and Ientertainment. My mother was a singer and composer—both of them were interested in the arts. My father read widely. The story goes that he was immersed in Thoreau when I was born, and decided to name me Walden; though I have two or three Spanish names as well. My parents were both Spanish-speakers, but they didn’t transmit it to us—English was more or less the first language in our household when I was growing up. I had two other Philippine languages, but just spoken ones, not written. I was taught by Jesuits, from first grade through to college graduation, and my initial radicalization was a reaction against that conservative educational system—the Jesuit schools in the Philippines essentially catered for the children of the elite. I wasn’t from that background, and was instinctively opposed to their strict class bias, in a pre-political way. This was prior to the development of liberation theology? There were only a handful of people from the university who took up radical positions in the early part of the Marcos period. For the most part, the Jesuit system has been a fairly efficient producer of ruling-class minds. As in Latin America, a layer of Christians with a national- liberation perspective did emerge from some of the religious orders, especially the relatively newer ones, such as the Redemptorists. But that never predominated among the Jesuits. I knew them all, and very few of 68 new left review 16 july aug 2002 bello: Interview 69 them—maybe eight or ten—ever embraced a progressive politics. The Jesuits always had a liberal façade; but in terms of their education and the people they produced, they were really quite conservative. What did you do after graduation? Upper-class education in the Philippines led automatically either to a corporate career with the multinationals, or into law and government. I didn’t want to be trapped in either—at least, not so soon. So I went down to Sulu and taught in a college in Jolo for about a year. There I got involved in discussions with Muslim intellectuals—people who would go on to form the Mindanao National Liberation Front, in which a number of my students later became active too. I was in sympathy with their analysis of a systematic discrimination against Muslims in the Philippines, although I might not have supported outright secession. After that I worked for a few years as publications director of the Institute of Philippine Culture, which had been set up by anthropologists from the University of Chicago. Their approach was highly empirical but their ideas about Filipino social structure and behavioural patterns still had a lot of influence. They were closely linked to the US Agency for International Development. At that time, a huge proportion of American funding for social-science research came from the military. People would go to the Philippines—to places like the IPC—on US naval-research grants. This was in the second half of the sixties, at the height of the war against Vietnam—but the social scientists there still claimed their research had no military application. It was a highly politicizing moment for me, in understanding how the system worked: that there was no dis- tinction at all between this sort of funding and academic research. Was this the time of Marcos’s re-election? I left for post-graduate studies at Princeton just before the elections in 69—it was a vicious campaign. These were momentous times. In 1970 there was the so-called First Quarter Storm in the Philippines, with the rise of the student movement. But it was the American student strug- gle against the war in Vietnam that really politicized me, in the United States itself. My next important experience was going down to Chile for my doctoral research in 1972. I was attracted by Allende’s constitu- tional road to socialism, and wanted to study political mobilization in 70 nlr 16 the shanty towns. I spent a couple of months working with Communists organizing in the local communities, but as soon as I arrived I realized that the correlation of forces had already shifted: it was now the counter- revolution that was in the ascendant. So I ended up re-focusing both my academic work and political interests on the emergence of the reaction in Chile. Coming from the Third World, this wasn’t easy to do. If you weren’t Chilean, and were brown-skinned, you tended to be marked down as a Cuban agent. That got me into trouble a number of times. The dissertation developed into a comparative study of counter-revolution in Germany, Italy and Chile. It acknowledged the role of the CIA, but put equal, if not greater, weight on domestic class forces in explaining the consolidation of the anti-Allende bloc. The experience gave me a healthy scepticism—running clean against much standard American political science on developing countries—about the democratic role of the middle class. I could see that this was a very ambivalent layer. By the time I got back to the US to defend my thesis in early 73, Marcos had declared martial law, and the Filipino community in the States was in uproar. It was then that I first became active in exile Filipino politics. Various groups were forming. There was a Movement for a Free Philippines, associated with Senator Raúl Manglapus, one of the stalwarts of the elite opposition to Marcos who had fled to the US straight after the declaration of martial law. A number of Americans, some of them specialists in the area, set up a group called the Friends of the Filipino People; among them was Daniel Schirmer from Boston, who had just written Republic or Empire. I gravitated towards the Union of Democratic Filipinos—the Katipunan ng Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP)—which was allied to the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army. Given the direct relationship between the US and the martial-law regime, which you analysed at the time in Logistics of Repression,1 how far did the broad Left in the Philippines see its fight as a national liberation movement, rather than simply opposition to military rule? Marcos, of course, claimed that the rising revolutionary movement was his central reason for declaring martial law, saying it demanded a 1The Logistics of Repression: the Role of US Aid in Consolidating the Martial Law Regime in the Philippines, Washington, DC 1977. bello: Interview 71 tough centralized response. His other pretext was what he called the ‘democratic stalemate’—a stand-off between the traditional elite and the Left, which he maintained hampered development. The Communist Party of the Philippines had been refounded in 1968—the ‘old’ CP was regarded as hopelessly compromised and pro-Soviet—and in March 1969 formed the New People’s Army, based essentially in central and northeastern Luzon. Its strategy was classically Maoist: create liberated areas in the countryside, treating the towns as a secondary front, mainly important for recruiting people to the NPA. So when Marcos imposed martial law, there was already a very active, revived Philippine Left. Could you go back to the Philippines after 72? No—when I tried to renew my passport in 74 or 75, it was confiscated without explanation. So I was effectively stateless for the next several years. The KDP was now the central focus of my life. I taught at the City College in San Francisco, the State University of New York, and at Berkeley for about four years— not in order to pursue an academic career, but to survive. I joined the CPP and ended up wherever they sent me: New York, San Francisco, Washington. But I was also developing an area of analysis and writing that didn’t automatically reflect the party’s priorities, but that I felt was important for understanding what was really going on. Most of the Left weren’t very interested in the World Bank at the time, but I had a sense that, for a variety of strategic rea- sons, it was absolutely critical. One of the biggest development projects in the Philippines was a nuclear-power plant; that got me interested in energy issues more generally. In 1979 Peter Hayes, an Australian, Lyuba Zarskey and I set up the Nautilus Institute, to research the intersections between energy and politics. It still exists today, but I was mainly associated with it in the eighties, when we produced documentation on the nuclear plant in the Philippines, and then went on to look at US deploy- ments and military structure in the Pacific.2 It was when we were researching the question of US bilateral aid to Marcos that we realized how much of it was being channelled through the World Bank. The role of multilateral institutions—and the Bank 2 See ‘Marcos and the World Bank’, Pacific Research, vol. 7, no. 6, 1976; Development Debacle: the World Bank in the Philippines, San Francisco 1982; American Lake: Perils of the Nuclear Pacific, London 1987. 72 nlr 16 in particular—in the Philippines dwarfed direct American support. That’s where my own interest began. I had no formal background in economics; it was all on-the-job training. Figuring out the contours of this comprehensive development strategy became a passionate, all- consuming task, that eventually led to a book, Development Debacle.

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