Hothouse for Rebellion

Poverty is providing the fuel for unrest.
by Sheila S. Coronel

RICARDO 'Boy' Awid, a migrant from Tanay, Rizal who heads the Payatas Scavengers Association, can laugh about it now. Not long ago, he says, his association sent six youths to Tiaong, Quezon to study how to make handmade paper. They returned to Payatas with great enthusiasm. With funds provided by a religious order, residents churned out stacks of paper, which was soon coming out of their ears because there were no buyers for it. No one had factored a marketing plan into his calculations.

Payatas is the sprawling shantytown that hosts Metro Manila's garbage dump. It lies on the eastern fringe of Quezon City, not far from the House of Representatives and the social welfare department. But this might well be the land at the edge of hope.

If there is anything to be learned from this place, it is that poverty is intractable. There are no quick fixes for the problems of the poor, no immediate prospect for the fulfillment of their most modest aspirations. The demography of poverty is daunting. In 2000, four of every 10 Filipinos — over 30 million people — lived below the poverty threshold, compared to only three in every 10 before the East Asian economic crisis hit in 1997. Government planners expect the number to increase this year because of the continued economic slump.

They say some 70,000 families live in Payatas, trying to survive on the meager income they earn from scavenging through other people's trash or by hiring themselves out as drivers, carpenters or anything else that brings in cash. Half of the adults don't have jobs and those who do barely get by. Life is so precarious that some months ago, when the government threatened to close the dump in the wake of a disaster that killed over 100 people after one side of the mountain of garbage collapsed, residents picketed city hall, demanding that the site be reopened so they could pick through the city's trash.

That is the kind of dead end Payatas is — a wasteland where the destitute fight for the right to survive on the refuse of the rich.

Awid has lived here since 1985 and seen it all: a constant stream of ideologues, opportunists and genuine do-gooders who come to Payatas armed with theories, cash, self-help programs and their own ideas of what the poor need. Through the years, he says, the city government put up cooperatives and microfinance projects and doled out money for residents to raise hogs, process food, recycle fabric scraps. All these projects folded up within six months, Awid recounts, the money going down the drain without anyone being the better for it.

Metro Manila's vast shantytowns, home to some four million people, provide the starkest evidence of the magnitude of poverty and the kind of vision, resources and political will needed if the poor are to have immediate relief. Awid says it is plain enough what the urban poor need: land on which to build their homes, jobs for those able to work, schooling for their children and affordable health care for their sick.

We don't aspire to live like the rich, says Noli Pacquiao, an electrician and Payatas resident who heads the Homeless Federation of the Philippines, we just want a sense of security. To be poor, he says, is to live in constant fear — of losing your home, your job, your family. The menfolk, for example, are wary about taking jobs in construction sites that require them to leave home for long periods because they are afraid that while they are away, their shanties would be demolished and their families, left to fend for themselves, would disappear into the bowels of the city.

The problem is that giving the poor a sense of security by generating jobs and providing housing and other services require stable economic growth and a redistribution of public resources. It is hard to see how a high-impact anti-poverty program would be immediately possible given the current economic downturn, a nearly bankrupt treasury and a bureaucracy that has to be overhauled if it is to deliver services to the needy.

IN THE MEANTIME, the wretchedness and uncertainty of life in places like Payatas provide fecund ground for the kind of extremist politics that would have a tough time surviving in say, North Greenhills, the tony neighborhood in San Juan where Joseph Estrada insists he should stay even after being charged with plunder. Payatas is a hothouse. When thousands of poor folk massed on Edsa to protest the Estrada's arrest, Payatas residents were there in full force, including the likes of Awid and Pacquiao.

"Pag mahirap ka, mababaw lang ang kaligayan mo (If you are poor, it takes so little to make you happy)," explains Pacquiao. "Asiong Salonga pa lang, mahal na ng tao si Erap. Tingin nila kahit angat siya sa buhay, malapit siya sa iskwater. (Ever since he played Asiong Salonga, the people already loved Erap. They think that even if he is well off, he is close to squatters.)"

In the May 14 elections, these sentiments were translated into votes, with the opposition Puwersa ng Masa (PnM) making a sweep in Payatas. Estrada has, perhaps largely unwittingly, tapped into a mother lode of anger and resentment. When pro-Erap protesters started gathering at Edsa, thousands of poor people joined them, not so much because they believed in Estrada or were protesting his innocence, but because they were poor. This was their Edsa. Says Pacquiao, who spent three steamy days and nights in April keeping vigil at the Edsa shrine: "Gusto naming iparamdam sa gubyerno na talagang kami'y nagigipit na (We wanted the government to know that we are at the end of our tether).

"Those who went to Edsa had different motivations," says Joel Bernardo, the 32-year old parish priest of the Ina ng Lupang Pangako parish in Payatas. "There were some sympathizers, some who were bused to Edsa, others who just went along for the ride, there were also some real diehards. But they went there primarily to be heard. They didn't have to speak, just getting together was a statement. They were just presenting their plight."

The Edsa protest and its aftermath, the bloody May 1 clash near the gates of Malacañang Palace, shocked many Filipinos because they had never seen class antagonisms expressed in this fashion. Contemporary Philippine history has its share of poor people's revolts, but these have mainly taken the form either of millenarian peasant movements like the Lapiang Malaya, whose members, oblivious to bullets, were mowed down by the Philippine Constabulary right on Taft Avenue in 1967, or the Marxist-influenced but still peasant-based rebellions led by the Huk in the 1940s and '50s and the Maoist New People's Army in the 1970s and '80s.

In 1987, the police fired at communist-led farmers who trooped to Malacañang demanding land reform. For the most part, however, the major protest actions that have taken place in the city in recent memory were organized either by Left-wing workers and students or middle-class protesters taking part in movements against dictatorship as in the 1980s, or against corruption, as in Edsa 2.

In hindsight, an uprising of the poor should have come as no surprise. The depths of urban misery, especially in the teeming slums of Metro Manila, combined with the politicization of the capital, the site of two largely middle-class "people power" revolts, provided the ingredients for the sort of spontaneous combustion that took place on May 1.

Moreover, the collapse of ideology — preaching class war was up to the 1980s the monopoly of the now eviscerated Left — resulted in a vacuum that was filled by Estrada, who packaged himself as champion of the poor. What was unleashed on May 1 was a political action where Marxism and millenarianism morphed into something that can be described as Pinoy populist or, as sociologist Walden Bello only half-jokingly put it, "lumpen-millenarian," with Erap as the icon of a kind of cargo cult, promising without actually delivering, the goods to hopeful followers.

Like in other mass movements, the mobilization for the pro-Erap, anti-rich protest tapped existing networks, ranging from those associated with the different churches (Roman Catholic, Iglesia ni Kristo and El Shaddai) to the political machines of politicians and even some grassroots-based groups linked to various Left political formations.

Estrada himself has a grassroots machine. The Philippine Movement against Poverty (PMAP) led by activist Ronald Lumbao mobilized its numbers for pro-Erap rallies when the former president was under siege during the impeachment trial. During the Estrada presidency, PMAP benefited from government largesse and sought to give credence to Erap's pro-poor rhetoric by producing made-to-order crowds of poor folk in support of the president.

The Estrada machine — and government patronage in the form of a P15-million livelihood fund given after last year's dumpsite disaster — have made inroads into Payatas, Fr. Joel says. The Estrada network has contacts among some of local community leaders. Thus, when pro-Erap organizers sent jeeps to ferry people to Edsa in the last week of April, these leaders assembled their followers and brought them along.

The INK and El Shaddai, churches that were sympathetic to Estrada, encouraged their grassroots members to go to Edsa as well. But so did those from more progressive-minded groups. Community leaders Awid and Pacquiao, who have a long history of activist, grassroots political involvement felt they, too, had to be at Edsa. Pacquiao, who likes to say he was at "Edsa 1, Edsa 2 and Edsa 3," went because "gusto ko ng pagbabago (I want change)."

Fr. Joel adds that those active in church-supported self-help programs in his parish also joined, even if they are cynical of the manipulation of the poor by politicians. "Ang tingin nila, yung mga maka-maralita, dapat nasa Edsa (They think that those who are pro-poor should be at Edsa)."


SYMPATHETIC ANALYSTS say that the rage of the poor is real and their taking to the streets was justified, even if their sympathies were misplaced. Estrada is a hedonist who enriched himself in public office without making a dent on poverty. He is no Mother Teresa. And yet, the poor look upon him with an adulation that verges on the fanatical. They were enraged by the sight of him being arrested, photographed and fingerprinted like an ordinary criminal.

"Parang binaboy si Erap (It was like Erap was degraded),"says Awid. Pacquiao says "they treated Erap like a rat." For sure, there was a very strong emotional element in the crowd that gathered at Edsa. The participants in the mass action identified with Estrada, revealing the vast gap in perception that divides the poor and the middle class, which remains contemptuous of the former president.

Many analysts say that the poor were naïve in their perception of Estrada. In fact, the sympathy for the ousted president stems not from naïveté but a deep-seated cynicism about politics and politicians. Those from Payatas who joined the protest do not insist that Erap was innocent, only that others similarly guilty got away with their thievery.

Payatas, like other urban poor communities in Metro Manila, is a Petri dish for politics of every stripe. That is why residents here display unusual political savvy and also a certain world-weariness. Nearly every political group has tried to organize here. During elections, politicos pour in money and mobilize community networks for their campaign machines. All the churches are represented in Payatas, and so are the various Left groups — Bayan Muna, Sanlakas and Akbayan. Not too long ago, the Marcos loyalists were strong here, too.

It is not surprising that populism of the Estrada variety would take root here as well, especially at a time when the squeeze is being put on the poor: Unemployment is at a record high, the buying power of the peso is only a fraction of what it used to be, and the shantytowns are bursting with the homeless and powerless. The truth is that the income gap yawns more widely now than ever: In 1997, the richest 20 percent of the population accounted for 52 percent of the national income, while the poorest 20 percent had just five percent. If there is such great disparity in the distribution of the nation's wealth, can the gap in perception be far behind?

"Erapismo," if it can be called that, is attractive because it points an accusing finger at the class enemy — the rich — and it says to hell with everything else. There is a certain in-your-faceness about the Estrada brand of populism that is attractive to a section of the population that has, in a manner of speaking, been there and done that.

In that sense what happened suddenly this summer was not a surprising uprising. The wonder is that something like this did not happen sooner.

"Class-oriented politics has finally come to this country," Walden Bello wrote last May in the Focus on the Global South newsletter, "but it has done so with a vengeance, in a way that the classic parties of the Left never anticipated: as an alliance among the urban and rural poor, party bosses with a strong grip on the electoral machinery, and a charismatic personality to whom populist rhetoric and the populist style is second nature."



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