I TOOK THE CALL
from the antique dilapidation of the San Tango Hotel in the bohemian San Telmo neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. It was a bizarre moment—at that precise instant, I was dressed only in a bath towel and was struggling to adjust a head torch while navigating a staircase in the dark. The San Tango ‘bohemian boutique’, as it had advertised itself, was based in the self-professed artistic and musical heart of Buenos Aires, the home of the tango. There was a decaying grandeur to the place—both San Telmo and Buenos Aires. Vast boulevards named after triumphant generals intersected Parisian architecture that outclassed even the sumptuous haute-bourgeois imperial aspirations of Haussmann’s Paris itself. This New World arrivisme along the Avenida Belgrano was crowned by a disturbingly phallic obelisk celebrating a military victory, no less, which cast an ominous shadow of nationalistic virility over the traffic jam below.
San Telmo was the opposite extreme to the pride, power and hubristic architecture of the centre. Narrow streets slowly revealed small squares filled with cafes and restaurants, each with its own professional tango couple—dancing for hours in a mesmerising swirl of 1940s glamour: heels, brilliantine, satin and pinstripe, enmeshed in a dance that fused the nocturnal passion of a sultry evening with the kinetic control and precision of the professional athlete. And for all the tango’s famed eroticism, there was something professionally clinical about the street dancers. The tango itself was born in the brothels of nineteenth-century Buenos Aires and became popularised through its distinctive music and the haunting songs of its leading exponent, Carlos Gardel, whose Brylcreem-ed hair and dark 1940s suits remain the businessman–brothel-goer image of the tango dancer today. Despite its passion and great wallowing in the mourning and heartbreak of love and loss contained in its songs, the tango retains an element of detachment, an erotic reverie lined with remorse and the cold glint of cash. In ‘Mi Buenos Aires querido’ (My beloved Buenos Aires), Gardel sings of both the city and the girl with the melancholia typical of the tango:
The tiny windows of my streets of Arrabal,
Where a young girl gives a smile;
I want to stare once again
At those eyes that fondle with a look.
In the toughest back alley, a song
Says its prayer of courage and of passion; A promise
And a sigh
Wiped away a tear of sadness, that singing.
But what passed for bohemian in Buenos Aires was essentially the profound malaise of economic collapse in a place that was—within recent memory—strikingly successful. In the ‘tough back alleys’, dancers strutted for endless hours in front of occasional tourists, and from somewhere within the grot and decay was the ever present dank sweetness of the evening’s weed. The San Tango Hotel was itself once a sturdy bourgeois home with elegant balconies and high ceilings. But gradually these pleasures wore thin—first the external window blind collapsed, leaving the room in pitch blackness. Then the electricity and the water went out simultaneously. I stumbled around trying to find my head torch in order to get dressed, and managed to feel my way downstairs in search of the owner. But she had left, locking the front door behind her, and I realised that I was trapped. There was no other way out and after I’d spent several hours sitting, waiting in the darkness, my phone rang.
‘Greetings from Geneva,’ said a friendly voice at the other end. ‘There’s been a typhoon in the Philippines—do you want to go to Mindanao?’
The magic word had been said. Of course I wanted to go to Mindanao—in my mind a complex and dangerous place and one interlinked with my earliest exhilarating exposure to Islamic civilisation. For many years while I was growing up in the Phillipines, my family home had been filled with furniture, lamps, tables and chairs whose unmistakable arabesque decoration hailed from Mindanao. Pictures on the walls showed Spanish Philippine life in the 1890s, especially ‘postprandial scenes in Manila’—exhausted Peninsulares smoking great cigars and being waited on by attentive liveried servants in the heavy tropical heat of the night. The sofa had an elevated section under which visitors could keep their fighting cocks cordially separated while being entertained with tea and polite conversation. A colourful woven Philippine cloth was used for picnics, and our unsuspecting guests suffered in uncomfortable silence when they were told mid-canapé that it was, in fact, a shroud. As a child, I had even turned up at a birthday party in aviator glasses and a leather jacket posing as a bonsai General Douglas MacArthur—a midget American Caesar and Liberator of the Philippines (as MacArthur styled himself) appearing before a group of unsuspecting infants.
Mindanao was, in the late 1970s, off-limits—home to a deadly conflict between communist insurgents, Muslim separatists who had never quite succumbed to Spanish or American rule, and the stupendous smarminess and corruption of the Marcos regime. It was a brutal anti-communist US satellite state that, in a postcolonial twist, ensured its support from the former colonial master by substantially funding US Republicans—the despotic trunk wagging the elephant of the Grand Old Party.
It was a relationship of mutual reliance and admiration tinged with an almost postcolonial regret. Massive US bases in Subic Bay outside Manila were deemed strategically vital during the Cold War while successive Philippine regimes, not least that of Marcos, relied on American support and funding for legitimacy. But there was a legacy of direct American rule too, on which US claims to be a liberal progressive force for newly independent countries largely rested—a claim that the Philippines had been created, to quote the journalist Stanley Kurnow, ‘in our own image’, and that the country was the product of benign US tutelage. This mutually reinforcing self-regard filled the Reagan–Marcos relationship; as one State Department official later mused, the American president regarded Marcos like ‘a hero from a bubble gum card he had collected as a kid’.
When my parents expressed their disapproval of the crew-cut conservatism of the regime and its US backers to an English colleague, she replied that they should simply ignore the ‘depredations of the Hottentot’. Hers was the aloof response of the older empire to the apparent crassness of the new. Ironically, her early career in colonial Africa had been cut short when her husband was eaten by a crocodile while serving as a British district commissioner.
In the toxic dictatorial days of anti-communism and Marcos, my parents’ liberalism was seen as an almost incendiary provocation. Accused of being pinkos and commies, over an unwise attempt to introduce Dostoevsky into the curriculum of the international school at which they taught, they became embroiled in a series of confrontations with rabidly anti-Russian, anti-communist authorities. This eventually culminated in a potentially dangerous altercation with the Philippines Long Distance Telephone Company over non-payment of an astronomical and largely fictitious bill. As the dispute escalated, threats were made to have the family’s passports confiscated and visas revoked, and suggestions of implication in some communist plot were fabricated. An influential member of the Manila elite came to the rescue. In exchange for safe passage out of the country, my father would preside over the Philippines Long Distance Telephone Company Junior Executive Public Speaking Competition. This was a fate compounded by the fact that all the junior executives on the make were required to memorise and perform the same speech—José Rizal’s speech supporting the independence of the Philippines, which begins with the faux-rhetorical question: ‘What is a man?’
My unexpected return to the Philippines thirty years later found an altogether different country and circumstance. Typhoon Bopha, known locally as Typhoon Pablo, had smashed through the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, causing massive devastation. More than six million people had been affected, nearly one million left without homes, as the typhoon made landfall in Mindanao with wind speeds of up to 260 kilometres per hour. Driving through the wreckage when I arrived on the island, I saw palm trees that had been splintered like giant toothpicks, forests scattered across farms, fields and waterways, leaving roads blocked, gardens torn to shreds and houses smashed. In one area, Andaap, severe flooding caused giant boulders to wash downstream, diverting the local river—sweeping away entire villages in its path. Two thousand people died in the fast-moving river of rock. As the waters receded, they left a moonscape scar ripped through the farms and forests of Mindanao.
I arrived on the second rotation, replacing a colleague who had been there when the typhoon hit, as an emergency coordinator. The response had been going for a month but, as my predecessor said as we parted at the airport: ‘Good luck—it’s like swimming in treacle.’ And he was exactly right—the humanitarian response that we were attempting to coordinate had all but stalled. Despite the endless hours I spent in meetings, listening to overawed government representatives and pushing donors, interest in the Philippines had largely tailed off. Nobody was interested in funding the response; international NGOs sat ready and waiting to gear up but had to make do with the pathetic resources that were slowly trickling in.
Major international organisations and their leading responders had circled for a brief moment after the typhoon, but the old hands had seen the writing on the wall early on and returned quickly to their strategic locales in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and New York. I found a note in a pile of old documents calling for the exalted names of international disaster response, O’Boosie and Panico. Representing major UN and NGO institutions, they were considered the only men capable of handling such a large-scale operation. But by the time I arrived, the heady days of the O’Boosie–Panico disaster response dream team in the Philippines were a distant memory and the long slog of another underfunded and half-forgotten response was left to lesser mortals.
‘I know you’ve lost your house, but have a laminated sack,’ mocked one of my colleagues in frustration at the deeply substandard relief supplies his agency was forced to distribute. The typhoon had occurred at exactly the wrong time—in early December, just as government, media, civil society and international donors were beginning to wind things up for the year. A CNN reporter arrived in Mindanao for just two days before being dispatched back to Bangkok, while several NGOs pooled funds to fly in the BBC, which didn’t even have the budget to cover the event itself. Christmas in the irredeemably Catholic Philippines combined with the seasonal media black hole effectively blocked out any immediate coverage of the typhoon, after which it had become old news. Donors, already disengaged, had even less incentive to respond, even as heavy post-typhoon rains continued to cause widespread flooding—leading to the further displacement of 40,000 already homeless people. They camped by roadsides, saving basic possessions and tethering their prized fighting cocks to the barriers that lined the roads and highways, or took refuge in ‘bunkhouses’—shabby plywood constructions unconnected to water, sanitation or drainage, which housed ten people to a room.
Trying to raise funds, I returned to Manila to meet with donors and to try to impress upon them the clear and immediate needs that still existed. From the wrecked coconut plantations and apocalyptic rockscape of Andaap, I was plunged into the heart of the Manila business district—a mini Singapore surrounded by high security, clusters of grey skyscrapers separated by unending, immobile lines of traffic. Through the barbed wire and concrete walls lining the freeway on the way in from the airport, glamorous half-European models looked out at the passing traffic advertising Pizza Hut or the latest kitchen range from enormous billboards bolted onto the roofs of the city’s vast slums. At one particularly intractable intersection dominated by a tangle of telephone wires and yet more concrete flyovers, a grim billboard dominated the surroundings.
WE STRONGLY SUPPORT LETHAL INJECTION
It was advertising an insecticide. Further on, celebrating the overthrow of the Marcos regime by Corazon Aquino’s People Power Movement, another banner read:
THE FILIPINO IS WORTH DYING FOR
The legend was written in the hand of Aquino’s assassinated father, who had returned to the Philippines from exile in the US to campaign against the authoritarian corruption and cronyism of the Marcos regime. All over the city, neon signs on the tops of buildings flashed with the self-promoting religiosity of the American bank note:
In God We Trust
. Along the Manila’s once stunning palm-fringed bay stood Asia’s largest shopping mall. The enormous icerink at its centre cooled the boutiques for miles around as the middle classes learned the delicate arts of figure skating and ice-ballet. Located near some of Manila’s extensive slums, this was—in the disturbingly euphemistic words of Imelda Marcos, who still wields influence from her seat in the Philippine senate—‘a challenging transition from a traditional order to a progressive humanist society.’
While ‘the Filipino’ may have been worth dying for, they were certainly not, according to the donors I met, worth funding. Racing between offices in the small thicket of plateglass towers housing embassies and United Nations offices in the heart of Manila’s financial district, I found virtually identical unphased and unresponsive reactions to my pleas for assistance. Hermetically sealed behind bomb-proof doors, metal detectors and armed guards, diplomats and donors looked down on the humid, smog-filled city below. They were even further removed from it by the intense cold and thin air of viciously air-conditioned offices—a bloodless arctic stillness in the middle of South-East Asia.
‘Shouldn’t we see Typhoon Bopha as an opportunity?’ I was asked in one office. The destruction of farms, houses and livelihoods along the Mindanao coast had swept away the potentially annoying ‘human element’ in future plans for beach resorts and mass tourism. Another international donor went into paroxysms of pleasure when I showed a handout which, quite by accident, had a picture with their logo on it. We should be promoting the private sector, someone else told me, instead of seeking aid ‘handouts’, while a man from Iowa instructed me about how he spent his holidays out on his farm with a chainsaw in hand and there was ‘nothing to it’. What this meant I never really learned—after a long discussion about the virtues of self-reliance, I was told the US didn’t fund United Nations humanitarian funding appeals anyway. Bush-era prejudices clearly survived in the lower reaches of the American administration. Crestfallen, I declined the offer of a frozen burrito and made my way out.