Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (20 page)

Then Franco began poking around in a big stew pot. He asked
the girl something in Tagalog, and she said, "Aso."

"Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Oh, you should have some of this
already," said Franco, jabbing me in the ribs and barely able to
contain himself.

However, aso happens to be one of the few words I understand
in Tagalog. "You have some," I said.

"Oh, no, no, no," said Franco, taking another bite of duck
down. "I'm from Manila. I am a city man, you know. Ha, ha, ha.
You have some."

I gathered dog was a strictly rural delicacy. The pretty girl was
looking expectant, however. And I'd already underwritten a political assassination that day, indulged in the vice of gambling and
committed adultery in my heart.

It's dark meat, in case you were wondering, and on the fatty
side. Considering what a hot, wet dog smells like, dog stew has a
surprisingly savory odor. To tell the truth, it tastes pretty good, like
oxtail. To be perfectly honest, it's delicious. (Anything about this to
my golden retriever, and I'll punch your lights out.)

"It's supposed to be very warming," said Franco. "Good for
love. Ha, ha, ha."

Maybe. But I wasn't going to be allowed to gold-brick in
Manila and find out. A whole pile of angry telexes from Rolling
Stone were stuffed under my hotel-room door. It seemed I'd been in
the Philippines for two weeks and hardly anybody was dead. There
hadn't even been a coup attempt-practically the only two weeks in
the Cory regime without one.

Tina suggested I do a story about vigilantes. A lot of people
with guns were running around unsupervised in the Philippines.
And not all of them were opposed to the government. Armed anticommunist citizen posses were the latest fad. It seemed the NPA
was not as welcome everywhere as it was in Marlita.

The largest of these vigilante groups was called Alsa Masa,
which translates as "Masses Arise" or "Giddyup Masses," depending on your translator's sense of humor. Alsa Masa was based in
Davao City on the southern island of Mindanao. So I bestirred
myself again and flew down there the next day with Kathleen
Barnes, an ABC radio reporter.

Mindanao is an historical skunk nest of Moslem, communist
and other insurrections. The colonial Spaniards failed to subdue
Mindanao, so did the Americans and ditto the Japanese and
Ferdinand Marcos.

Vast, impoverished Davao City was the NPA's first urban target. Until a few months ago they held the place hostage, the only
Philippine city they'd ever penetrated in force. But, after the Cory
election, the Davao slum-dwellers went fickle on the communists.
Now there are about a thousand Alsa Masa gunmen running the
city, all of them claiming to be former members in good standing of
the NPA.

Kathleen wanted to interview Colonel Calida, "The Cowboy
Colonel," commanding officer of the Philippine Constabulary in
Davao. The Philippine Constabulary is a national military police
force with the same equipment and training, or lack thereof, as the
regular armed forces. Colonel Calida, Kathleen said, had been
acting as the ninog, or godfather, to the Alsa Masa vigilantes,
letting them keep some of their NPA arms and giving them a semiofficial status patrolling the city's toughest districts.

Camp Leonor, Calida's HQ, occupied about ten square blocks
in downtown Davao. It was all peeling paint and sprung screen
doors, like the YMCA camps I used to be shipped to in the Fifties.
Security was everywhere, much of it asleep. Soldiers on duty
wandered around in their undershirts, and groups of civilians
loitered on the parade ground. A sign in the hall outside Calida's
office read FIREARMS IS NOT THE ANSWER SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE
IS.

The colonel was powerful-looking in a short, compressed way,
like an attack hamster. He told us that three thousand NPA members had surrendered to him personally, so far.

Calida's office floor was littered with NPA weapons, the worstlooking arms cache I'd ever seen. There were battered Korean
War-era Garand rifles, dozens of ancient gangster-style Thompson
submachine guns, Philippine-built "short arms" with single-shot
rifle barrels mounted on zip-gun-type pistol grips, a World War II
paratrooper's grease gun, a British hand grenade, a USAF smoke
bomb and a rust-crummied model 1894 Winchester lever action
30/30 left over from American occupation in President McKinley's
time. It was death's flea market. Without a Cuba or any other Soviet
butt boy to funnel in commie largess, the NPA are worse armed
than an Oklahoma volunteer fire brigade.

"Isn't Alsa Masa just going to oppress the masses even worse
than the NPA did?" said Kathleen, who didn't hit it off with the
colonel.

"Neat guns," I said. The colonel and I got along fine.

I asked him what had made Alsa Masa such a pop sensation,
besides, that is, his small but august self. Calida told me the NPA
had grown paranoid and had begun to purge its own ranks. It was
"a tactical error," as the colonel put it. Comrades began turning
uncommunist quick. The former guerrillas had led Calida to the
bodies of seventeen purge victims. He hoped there might be one
hundred.

The colonel took us outside to see burlap bags full of dead
people. An enlisted man dumped them on the parade ground. Dirty
bones, with that particular smell of human morbidity, clunked
dully on the ill-kempt lawn. A skull rolled across the grass and
came to rest with its idiot eye holes pointed at the sky. "Later I will
get coffins," said the colonel. "I will give them decent burial. This
is propaganda."

Kathleen said, "I have reports that the Alsa Masa has been
extorting money to support itself, intimidating certain groups,
especially Chinese businessmen."

"No!" said the colonel. "That is black propaganda. We have
intelligence officers, and we would know. But some Alsa Masa
might ask some concerned groups to help. I do not call that
extortion."

"What concerned groups?" asked Kathleen.

"Oh," said the colonel, "Chinese businessmen."

Calida leaned over and spoke confidentially to me. "We will
disarm the Alsa Masa. But I have not told them yet. The government will have to give them livelihoods."

Which was, after all, what Commander Melody had said. The
poor Cory government is going to have to get itself a tall stack of
livelihoods from the World Bank or wherever they keep those
things.

I told Calida about my visit with the NPA, Kathleen gasping at
my indiscretion. "A scruffy bunch," I said. "But they seemed like
pretty good guys. I gave them money." Which didn't bother Colonel
Calida. He nodded in agreement. That was the decent thing to do.

"Three things that are their motives," he said. "First, the
importance. Then the power of the gun. And only a tiny bit of
politics. Just the leaders have the politics." He told me how he had
the NPA leaders radio frequencies. Sometimes he talks to them in the hills. "I told them, `Why don't you come down?"' Calida said.
"`There are some beautiful girls in the city.' But it is against their
principles."

The colonel ordered a police officer to take me to see Alsa
Masa at work. The cop, Nick, was the largest Filipino I'd ever
seen-a sort of kitchenette-size Refrigerator Perry. He and I and a
very fat driver got in a battered Japanese micro taxi and drove off,
with chassis scraping the mud streets. Nick was thirty-four. He'd
been a policeman since he was sixteen. In a year and a half he'd be
eligible for his pension. His dream was to go to L.A. and be a
security guard.

All cities have slums but Davao is slums-filthy, jumbled
hovels spread like an architectural carcinoma along the mud flats of
the Davao River. The place grew up during Mindanao's ten-minute
logging and copra boom. The poor were drawn from all the dinky,
ungroceried hill towns. Then the jobs and money went away, but
the poor remained.

Nick took me to a squatter patch called Agdau. It used to be
known as "Nicaragdau," partly because the NPA ran it and partly
because Filipinos love any bad pun. Agdau was built right in the
water with splintered packing-crate catwalks from one stilt shanty
to the next. The Davao River-sewer, sink and the garbage collection service combined-flowed by underneath. On one bit of dry
land was Agdau's only solid structure, a tin roof covering a basketball half court. I was promptly beaten in a game of H-O-R-S-E.
The tall kids in these precincts of malnutrition are four feet eleven
inches but do lay-ups like Air Jordan. If the NBA ever raises hoops
to twenty feet, the Chicago Bulls are going to have to take up field
hockey.

Nick summoned Pepe, who had been a member of an NPA
"Sparrow Squad" assassination team and was now an Alsa Masa
leader. Pepe was twenty-three but looked sixteen. Two of his boys
stood by with Thompsons. They looked twelve.

Nick hovered over Pepe like a large, blowzy, slightly dim
guardian angel. Pepe was smiling, cool and self-possessed. Nick
told me Pepe had joined the NPA at seventeen and worked his way
up from gofer to hatchet man to community organizer, the NPA
equivalent of Eagle Scout.

I asked Pepe why he'd turned against the NPA, and Nick
translated a pat little rap about Cory, democracy, reconciliation and
the rights of the people being violated.

"Tell him to get real," I said to Nick. Nick gave Pepe a smirk
and a nudge.

"No drinking. No going to movies. No girlfriend," said Pepe.
"No church," he added as an afterthought.

"I've lived here. I was a target of the Sparrows," Nick proudly
interjected. "I survived by being security conscious and not committing crimes' (a rare thing for a Filipino policeman).

"Ask Pepe," I said, "if he ever tried to kill you when he was a
Sparrow."

Pepe and the guys with the guns laughed and began talking,
all three at once. Nick, a little abashed, translated: "We didn't try
to kill him. We liked him. When he had money, he would buy
drinks."

"Pepe," I said, "did the NPA really purge people, kill them
because they thought they were spies?"

"Yes. Six in the sitio. One woman, five men." (A sitio is about
equivalent to a city block.)

"Why?" I asked.

"A little intrigue only."

By now about fifty adults and every kid in running distance
had gathered around us. I addressed the crowd, not hard to do
since being a normal-sized American is like standing on a soapbox.
"Alsa Masa okay?"

"Yes! Yes!" Lots of enthusiastic nods.

"The masses having fear of Alsa Masa?" I said in pidgin with
charades.

Much laughter. "No! No! No, no, no." The little kids pressed
in to touch the submachine guns.

I asked Pepe what the NPA leadership was like. He said,
"Politics, lawyers, people who get orders from higher up." They
seemed a vague bunch to him. Had he ever met any? "No." Was
there ever any contact with NPA groups from other areas? "Only by
higher up."

"When Pepe was a Sparrow," bragged Nick, "he killed twenty,
maybe more-eight military and twelve others, civilian robbers."

"Jeeze," I said to Pepe. "Doesn't your conscience bother you?

"The conscience bothered him before," said Nick, "but not
since Alsa Masa."

"Pepe," I said, "have you gone to church?" He nodded. "Have
you gone to confession?" He nodded. "Well, what in the hell kind
of penance do you get for killing twenty people?!"

"The priest said I must be very sorry and say many Hail
Marys."

Back in the only hotel in Davao with running water, Kathleen
was taping an interview with a homely, skinny left-wing nun. The
nun posssessed that bottomless indignation endemic to ideologues
and had worked herself into a real bother about Alsa Masa. "Small
kids are given already Armalites, and the grenades are like apples." She was writing a letter to Cory that would expose these
things. I decided to hit the bar. Some people are worried about the
difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.

Holding forth in the hotel's dank but flashy cocktail lounge
was Nonoy Garcia, once the top Marcos henchman in Davao and
still the very picture of a corrupt pol. He was a barrel-chested,
barrel-stomached guy with big gestures but the ability to order
drinks all around with one tiny motion of a finger. "Come," said
Nonoy, spotting me for some kind of journalist. "Sit down. Join us."
He and his cronies were discussing bodyguards. In Davao it's
fashionable to have former Sparrows for personal protection. These
kids, none of them twenty-one, sat in the background, tiny and shy.

"My boy's only nineteen, and he killed ten people," said one
of the cronies.

"Mine's eighteen," said another, "and killed a dozen." (That
is, the man was saying, a dozen of his own friends and political
allies.) The more people your Sparrow killed, the cooler it is.

When I told Nonoy my father had been a CB, he insisted I
have dinner with him. The CBs are revered in the Philippines. In
more than four hundred years of foreign and domestic mismanagement, the CBs seem to have been the only people who ever made
anything work. Nonoy took me to a surprisingly clean Japanese
restaurant, a sort of miniature Benihana's, as out of place in Davao
as a kosher deli in Aman. Four very beautiful young women were waiting for us at the table. We talked about Cory a bit. Nonoy
wasn't bitter. But from his own professional point of view she wasn't
much good as a dictator. He thought she should have started some
big, symbolic public-works projects and made other grand flourishes to get things hopping. "She has lost the momentum," he said.

Unfortunately, Nonoy probably had a point. What Cory had
done so far in the Phillipines was magic, but a very mild kind of
magic, like pulling a rabbit out of a rabbit hutch. However, a man
must be made of sterner stuff than I am to meditate upon the fate of
nations with so many pleasures of the flesh at hand. We ate about
ten courses, drank enormously and went to Davao's only discotheque and danced with the young ladies until an hour that would
make the IMF shudder about productivity in the Pacific Rim
nations.