I visited one pretty rough place myself. It was occupied almost entirely by gang members, teenage boys with giant tattoos over their arms, legs, backs, and I don’t know where else. The gangs have names like Sigue-Sigue Sputnik and Bahala Na Gang. (Sigue-sigue means “go-go”; bahala na means “I don’t care.”) Members slash themselves on the chest to make ritual scars, one for every person they’ve killed. Each gang’s turf is blocked off, with one or more kids guarding the entrance with clubs.
Actually, things were pretty clean around there. Nice vivid religious murals had been painted on the walls. Fishponds had been dug and vegetable gardens planted for the residents.
What I’m describing, however, is the Manila city jail. It’s a relaxed place where friends and family come and visit all day. There are no cells, just long barracks where prisoners sleep on low wooden platforms. If they like, they can build their own tiny huts.
Hard to know what to say about a country where the only decent low-income housing is in the hoosegow.
The warden, a cheerful stomachy man, greeted me in his office while he pulled on his Adidas sweatpants. He was the only solid Marcos supporter I met. “What an open, free society to have such democratic debate,” said the warden about the elections. I complimented him on his jail. He bought me a Sprite.
The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I’ve seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts—squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this.
The world’s a shocking poor place and probably always has been. I think I’m no hairless innocent about this. But the Philippines is an English-speaking nation with an 89 percent literacy rate. It has land, resources, and an educated middle class. It has excellent access to American markets, and it’s smack on the Pacific Rim, the only economic boom region in the world right now. It used to have one of the highest standards of living in Asia. There can’t be any excuse for this.
And when you think you may actually get sick from what you’ve seen, you come to Smoky Mountain.
This is the main Manila trash dump, a vast fifty-foot hill of smoldering garbage, and in that garbage people are living—old people, pregnant women, little babies. There is a whole village of dirty hovels, of lean-tos and pieces of sheltering junk planted in the excrement and muck. These loathsome homes are so thickly placed I could barely make my way between them. The path in some places was not a foot wide, and I sank to my ankles in the filth.
People are eating the offal from this dung heap, drinking and washing in the rivulets of water that run through it. There are children with oozing sores, old people with ulcer-eaten eyes, crippled men lying in the waste. They live worse than carrion birds, pulling together bits of old plastic to sell. There’s not much else of value in the rubbish. Not even the good garbage gets to these people.
In Smoky Mountain you don’t feel disgust or nausea, just cold shock. I looked up and saw an immense whirlwind of detritus spiraling away from the dump’s crest, something that would take a malnourished Dorothy off to the Dirt Oz.
I went back to the hotel and put on a pair of Bass Weejuns. I’d been told that Imelda wouldn’t let anyone into the presidential palace in rubber-soled shoes. She is reputedly as crazy as a rat in a coffee can, and the statuary on the palace grounds bore that out. It looked like she had broken into a Mexican birdbath factory.
You got a whiff around Malacanang Palace that you were dealing with people a few bricks shy of a load. At the gate, there was intense inspection of footwear and pocket tape recorders. I had a borrowed press ID with Tony’s Suau’s picture on it hanging around my neck. Tony and I look about as much alike as Moe and Curly, but this bothered the guards not at all.
The reception hall had obviously been decorated by a Las Vegas interior designer forced to lower his standards of taste at gunpoint. I mean, it had a parquet ceiling. There were red plush curtains and a red plush carpet and red plush upholstery on gold-leaf fake-bamboo chairs. The chandeliers were the size of parade floats, all wood, hand-carved, and badly too. And the air conditioning wasn’t working.
It was the day after the election, and President Marcos was holding a press conference. It was completely uninteresting to see him in person. His puffy face was opaque. There was something of Nixon to his look, but not quite as nervous, and something of Mao, but not quite as dead. Marcos predicted how much he’d win by, which turned out to be how much he won by after his KBL-dominated legislature tallied the count. He blandly lied away, accusing the press of making things up and the other side of threats and cheating. One member of the press asked him about threats and cheating of his own. Said Marcos, “Why hasn’t the opposition brought this to the attention of the authorities?” (Which were him.)