ENOUGH is enough. The 36-hour closure of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport last weekend — with that disaster, probably appropriately named — created a hell for air travelers who were looking forward to heavenly vacations or financially rewarding work abroad.

The horror stories on these were the hot topic all over Manila, what with over 100,000 travelers missing their flight since last Thursday. A nephew’s flight from Doha was diverted to Bangkok where he stayed overnight in a two-star hotel. He arrived in the country only through Clark airport, with his wife having to brave the torrential rains to drive four hours to and from Pampanga to fetch him. He lost three days out of his one-week vacation. My son, an international pilot, related to me the chain-effect of the closure on all airlines in the region, from higher fuel costs (for planes having to be diverted elsewhere), rescheduling of flights, to huge overtime pay for airline attendants and crew.

We need not belabor the point. Forget our dreams of our economy finally taking off to become at the very least another Malaysia in our lifetimes or becoming a top tourist spot if our main international airport — would you believe that? — has only one runway. Yes, just one which means our capital’s link to the world is closed by one airline stuck — as the Xiamen Airlines plane was on Sunday — on that single runway.

The richest cub tigers in Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Thailand, in fact had prioritized the building of new international airports, which were major factors for their rapid growth.

Malaysia started building its Kuala Lumpur International Airport 25 years ago in 1993, which opened in 1998.

The Thais bought land for its Suvarnabhumi Airport back in 1973. The project though was delayed by budget overruns, construction flaws, allegations of corruption, the 1997 financial crisis, and political turmoil. Sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? At one time, workers even refused to do their work after it was discovered that the airport was built on an old graveyard, with the laborers — of course — reporting to have seen angry ghosts.

Despite all its seemingly insurmountable difficulties, Suvarnabhumi Airport opened in 2006. It was my stopover airport during my trips as ambassador to Greece, which after landing at our airport, depressed me with the kind of feeling that Rizal described in his novel Noli Me Tangere as the “el demonio de las comparaciones.” (Greece a tiny country of 10 million people, contracted a private, mostly German-owned firm, to build and maintain its international airport, which took four years to build, and opened in 2001. It is located 20 miles from Athens, where the old airport was.)

Much earlier of course, Singapore opened in 1981 its now world-renowned Changi International Airport. That is one big factor for it becoming a financial hub, more perhaps than that “ease of doing business” so often attributed as the tiny country’s edge.

An efficient airport, and especially not one that would be closed when an airline is stuck on the tarmac on a rainy night, has especially become a very crucial element for an economy’s growth in this digital age of global online businesses.

And what have we been doing all this while? Building huge band-aids, Terminal 2 and then Terminal 3 — all to serve a single runway.  (more…)

I’M sure most of my readers will wonder at the title of this column, and see it as familiar and strange at the same time.

While he has been widely known as “Benigno S. Aquino, Jr.”, “Ninoy’s” official name, going by the Filipino convention, was Benigno Simeon Aquino Aquino. His middle name, or mother’s name, was also “Aquino” as his mother was Aurora L. Aquino, a third cousin of his father Benigno Simeon (“Igno”) Quiambao Aquino. The “S” was Ninoy’s second given name, Simeon.

Ninoy’s father had married into two rich clans. In 1916, he had married Maria Urquico, the youngest daughter of a prosperous rice merchant in Tarlac. Two years after Maria died in 1928, he married Ninoy’s mother Aurora, 16 years younger, and the youngest daughter of the related hacendero clan, the Aquinos of Concepcion, Tarlac.

“Igno” was a professional politician who rose to become a senator during the pre-war Commonwealth, and then especially since he was a high official of the pro-Japanese Kalibapi, Speaker of the Japan’s puppet government’s National Assembly during World War 2.

That is not his real name?

Ninoy’s son “Noynoy,” the inept President, followed his father’s practice and officially used Benigno S. Aquino 3rd. Although Philippine convention would have him named Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino, since his mother was Corazon Sumulong Cojuangco, scion of two powerful politico-economic clans. Noynoy technically cannot be the “3rd”, as his father’s name was different, Benigno Simeon Aquino Aquino, while his grandfather’s was Benigno Simeon Quiambao Aquino.  (more…)

CURIOUS about the front-page newspaper reports that President Duterte said that he was thinking of resigning, as he’s exhausted and tired from the “endless” fight against corruption, I read the transcript of his speech, and even watched a video of it. The speech was made at the launch ceremony for “Go Negosyo, Pilipinas Angat Program,” a program to help small entrepreneurs funded by the country’s tycoons (would you believe that?).

To say it was a strange speech is an understatement. But perhaps not really, given Duterte’s preference for extemporaneous, often rambling speeches which spill out the things that dominate his thoughts at that time. He set aside, even ridiculed, his prepared two-page speech which he said would just take two minutes to read. Instead he talked for nearly an hour and a half, discussing the state of the nation more than his official SONA did last July. (https://pcoo.gov.ph/presidential-speech/speech-of-president-rodrigo-roa-duterte-during-the-launching-of-the-go-negosyos-pilipinas-angat-lahat-program/)

After the perfunctory “congratulations at mabuhay kayong lahat,” he said: “Now, I’d like to talk also about my personal heartaches and all.” Before an audience of mostly big-business bigwigs and ambassadors — the kind of crowd wearing designer $1,000 suits and Patek Philippe wrist watches — Duterte related how the gutter of Philippine society looks — and his frustration of not being able to clean it up after two years of trying.

He described the things that have made him angry:  (more…)

A cautionary tale on PPP
WITH floods inundating Metropolitan Manila in recent weeks, can you think of anything worse than Benigno Aquino 3rd’s stupid move to cancel the major flood-control project involving Laguna Lake in 2011, simply because it was Gloria Arroyo’s?

Not just one but two things worse. First, P1.2 billion in taxpayers’ money went down the drain as a result of the Belgian contractor’s suit, in the form of a P700 million payment to it and over P500 million in legal fees. (How many new floodwater-pumping stations could that have constructed? At P10 million per plant, 125, enough to make at least Quezon City flood-free.)

And second, and probably much worse, the flood-control project Aquino boasted would replace Arroyo’s, never took off after five years of planning — because of his and his bureaucracy’s sheer incompetence.

Do you wonder now why in the past weeks, huge swathes of metropolitan Manila have been flooded despite the installation of over two dozen flood-pumping stations in the past two years?

Here is a brief narrative of this, another episode of the criminal incompetence of the Aquino regime.

Arroyo’s project
Just a few months after he assumed power, Aquino in November 2010 junked Arroyo’s Laguna Lake Rehabilitation Project, which would have dredged the lake of 4.6 million cubic meters of silt and waste so it could contain more floodwaters. The project would have involved the deepening of the critical 7-kilometer Napindan Channel in Taytay so that it could better and more quickly draw floodwaters away from the metropolis to the lake.

Costing P19 billion, the project was to be undertaken by the 150-year-old Belgian dredging firm Baagerwerken Decloedt En Zoon (BDZ) and financed by a loan from the BNP Paribas Fortis bank, with the Brussels government providing a P7-billion grant — the biggest ever financial aid it would have given the country.

However, Aquino claimed the project was ridden with corruption, and ordered it stopped in November 2010. I was told he even asked Sen. Franklin Drilon’s law firm to investigate it to the extent of even interviewing BDZ officials in Brussels. Six years after going through all the records, not a single hint of corruption was found.  (more…)

THE strongman Ferdinand Marcos ordered secret military operations in 1970 to 1971, and in 1978 to take over the entire now hotly disputed Spratly group of islands in the South China Sea.

Marcos apparently decided to undertake the military operations after being alerted of the area’s existence by fishing-industry businessman Tomas Cloma, a seafaring adventurer from Batangas. Cloma with his crew of over 40 men had wandered into the Spratly islands in 1956. He subsequently issued a “Proclamation to the Whole World” that announced the creation of a new state he called “The Free Territory of Freedomland,” made up of most of the island group.

Marines announcing our property in the Spratlys, circa 1970-1971. Photo by Capt. Tucay

The Philippine Navy and its marines though were thwarted from accomplishing fully the mission ordered by Marcos by South Vietnamese and Taiwanese ships, as they decided not to engage militarily what were, after all, forces from friendly nations.

First raising of the flag on Kalayaan island, circa 1970 -71. PHOTO BY CAPT. TUCAY.

Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio, who has made a second career of demonizing China as a bully in the South China Sea, demonstrated his intellectual dishonesty when in his 90,000-word e-book on the territorial dispute, he devotes just one sentence to explain this very audacious move of Marcos that got for us our properties in the South China Sea.

However, Marcos’ move to grab the Spratlys for us was far from being a staid issuance of a presidential decree.
I have stumbled in the world wide web on a narrative that reveals to us with some vivid detail Marcos’ secret operation starting in 1970 to take over all of the islands in the Spratlys.

The narrative is undoubtedly authentic as it was an interview—accompanied by photos—of Navy and Marine officers who actually undertook the operation, and who had migrated to the US. The account was in a 2012 posting in the blog bonginvirginia.blogspot.com of Filipino Americans living in Virginia.  (more…)

“MOCHA must go” was the title of this newspaper’s editorial the other day, with the obvious topic.

I had to check again that the editorial was really in this newspaper and not in the Yellow Philippine Daily Inquirer as that has been the Yellows’ fervent wish ever since President Duterte assumed power. That editorial would have followed up that paper’s recent story that there is an alleged “outrage” against her for her “pepedederalismo” episode.

Assistant Secretary Esther Margaux “Mocha” Uson has been the Yellows’ nightmare ever since she supported Duterte during the electoral campaign. Her role in forming public opinion has been tremendous, and growing.

Even if one considers that “pepedederalismo” thing as a huge gaffe, “debasing the federalism discourse,” as the editorial pompously put it, it certainly can’t ignore Uson’s huge role in rallying Filipinos —whether you like it or — in support of Duterte’s administration and its radical reform programs.

If you’ve been following Uson’s blog, it’s just been one of her many very educational postings on federalism. The sanctimonious outrage against that “pepedederalismo” and the demand for her to be fired is of the same genre as the Yellows’ paroxysms over Duterte’s “Stupid God” description of the biblical deity. Have some sense of humor, guys.

But we could debate until kingdom come on the propriety or vulgarity of that posting. However, to put things in perspective which could clarify our thinking, consider the following facts.  (more…)

Just go to court and pass EDCA, Americans responded
IF not for the US leaders’ pragmatism and cool-headedness, President Aquino 3rd and his foreign secretary Albert del Rosario could have dragged it into a war against China on the South China Sea, a conflict that could have even triggered a nuclear war between the two superpowers— just to cover up their bungling of the Scarborough Shoal crisis.

In April 2012, Chinese civilian-government and fishing vessels went to their fishermen’s succor at Scarborough Shoal (Bajo de Masinloc or Panatag Shoal) when the Philippine Coast Guard and Bureau of Aquatic Resources accosted them for alleged illegal fishing. Aquino ordered to the shoal the Navy’s biggest warship, acquired only a year earlier, the BRP Gregorio del Pilar to board the fishermen’s vessels to take them in.

That was a big boo-boo. China pounced on Aquino’s blunder by loudly protesting that the Philippines had “militarized” the dispute, and that “Philippine warships” were detaining its helpless fishermen.

Cleverly, China did not respond by sending its own warships, even as several of its modern frigates were on alert stand-by just over the horizon. It instead undertook a sea-borne version of people power by having over 60 Chinese fishermen’s vessels—escorted by some six civilian government vessels—to the shoal. The Chinese and Filipinos vessels were then locked in a stand-off that lasted for about six weeks from late April to May 2012, with each party aware that whoever blinks, or withdraws from the shoal, will lose it – forever, as it were.

Aquino’s June 8, 2012 meeting with Obama to beg for US intervention. The dour-faced Obama probably thought: ‘What part of ‘No’ doesn’t he understand?’

(more…)

THERE are very valid reasons to conclude so. Read on, you decide.

When Philippine and Chinese vessels in May 2012 were in a stand-off at Panatag Shoal, President Aquino’s foreign secretary Alberto del Rosario quite suddenly ordered the vessels of the Philippine Coast Guard and Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources to withdraw from the area. This is according to Sen. Antonio Trillanes 4th, an ardent supporter of Aquino at the time, who was his personal envoy to the Chinese to resolve the crisis.

The Philippine ships left June 3, but the Chinese vessels didn’t. Our vessels since then have been blocked from the area. That’s how we lost Panatag (also called Bajo de Masinloc and Scarborough Shoal).

Del Rosario’s own account of this episode, which he wrote in an article, is as follows: “We were approached by the US, an honest broker, for both China and the Philippines to agree to a simultaneous withdrawal of ships from the shoal. We therefore agreed. At the appointed time, we withdrew, whereas China did not — in violation of our agreement.”

Trillanes claimed that even Aquino himself was livid over del Rosario’s move. He wrote in his aide memoire, quoting Aquino: “Kaya nga sinabihan ko si Albert kung bakit niya pinalabas yung BFAR na hindi ko nalalaman.” (That’s why I asked Albert [del Rosario] why he ordered the BFAR vessels to leave without my permission.) Del Rosario has not disputed Trillanes’ claims, which I first wrote about in 2016 and repeated in several columns.  (more…)