Issue Analysis No. 11
September 25, 2005

The United States’ role in the Political Crisis
A Neocolony, Not a Sovereign State

Two major, recent developments reveal, more than anything else, who and what are the real powers in this country. No, they are not Arroyo, her family, cronies and friends; and no, they are not bureaucrats like Norberto Gonzales.

The first event is the confirmation that the United States is closely monitoring political events in the Philippines. The second is the Arroyo government’s entering into a contract with the U.S. lobby group Venable for it to raise money for the Armed Forces of the Philippines modernization and the constitutional amendments to which Arroyo and company are, mostly for political convenience, committed.

Every country with the means to do so spies on others, including its own allies. But U.S. spying on the Philippines is qualitatively different. It is first of all being done by this country’s former and continuing colonizer, whose influence remains deeply rooted in vast sections of the population especially among this country’s current political leadership.

But the United States looms large in the Philippine political equation not only because its interests-- and therefore its premises, values, ideas and sentiments-- are regarded among much of the Philippine population as its own. It is also because U.S. power has always been a critical factor in determining the outcome of major political events, among them the elections in which the U.S. has meddled for decades, as well as EDSAs 1 and 2.

Implicit in U.S. analyses of the current crisis in the Philippines, for example, is the assumption of U.S. involvement in determining its outcome. When the U.S. describes Noli de Castro as unfit for the Presidency, for example, it is also saying that it will not support de Castro’s ascension to the Presidency. This is a preference already evident in the explicit support that former U.S. Embassy Charges d’Affaires Joseph Mussomeli gave to Mrs. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in July, and in the Embassy’s continuous harping on “the constitutional process” (i.e., Arroyo’s impeachment) as the solution to the crisis.

Unlike those of other countries, U.S. analyses are the bases not solely for interpreting the meaning of political events in the Philippines. They are also the bases for managing them.

The Arroyo government contract with the U.S. law firm Venable, on the other hand (a contract Mrs. Arroyo said she has rescinded but which in the same breath she said the government would “go back to” later), demonstrates that it takes two to run and keep a neocolony. These two are (1) the imperial power, and (2) its willing lackeys in the neocolonial state.

In the minds of these lackeys U.S. interests are the same as the country’s. This explains why they’re more than willing to accept money from the U.S. government on a critical matter like amending the country’s basic law despite the distinct possibility that whatever support the U.S. gives will be premised on the Constitution’s being amended to, among others, allow foreign ownership of land, public utilities, and the mass media.

Beyond this puerile assumption, however, is also these lackeys’s looking after nothing more than self-interest. For them the country’s future and its people’s interests are less than secondary; they are concerned with neither people nor country, but with themselves, whose prosperity depends on, among other factors, how well they serve US power through the neocolonial state.

If these two events reveal how sadly accurate is the description of the Philippines as a neocolony rather than a sovereign state, they also reveal how this country’s so-called leadership works hand in glove with the United States in keeping the country that less than independent and sovereign, as well as poor, undeveloped and weak, and as no more than an appendage of another state.

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