PRIF-Reports No. 93 Philippine Governance: Merging Politics and Crime Peter Kreuzer I would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for the generous grant provided for the project “Genesis, Structure and Workings of Coercive Systems of Social Control”. Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) 2009 Correspondence to: PRIF Baseler Straße 27-31 60329 Frankfurt am Main Germany Telephone: +49(0)69 95 91 04-0 Fax: +49(0)69 55 84 81 E-Mail:
[email protected] Internet: www.prif.org ISBN: 978-3-942532-03-7 Euro 10.- Summary The Philippines are a “gambling republic” in which politicians hold “power without virtue”, dominating by means of “capital, coercion and crime”. Individual power holders are “bosses”, acting in a “mafia-style” and employing “guns, goons and gold” in order to gain, uphold or enhance their power positions. Whereas the politicians at times make use of vigilantes, private armies, death squads and hired contract-killers, the state itself resorts to “state terror” to counter the leftist threat posed by the Communist New People’s Army and its various offshoots, as a sideline killing hundreds of people in extralegal executions. Local power remains “in the family”, and national power is diffused in an “anarchy of families”. All of these characterizations of Philippine politics put in quotation marks are taken out of scientific books, articles and statements of Philippine state officials and politicians. While Philippine politics certainly is much more than captured in these characterizations, this report takes them as a starting point to analyze Philippine politics as if it was crime, or as “criminalized governance” (Briscoe 2008: 4), arguing that criminal activities do not only connect to politics in an erratic and unsystematic way, but seem to be a durable and integral part of politics from the local to the national levels.