Philippines Follow

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From the moment I was elected president of the union in 1994, I knew it would be a time of harsh struggle. The Philippines is at the cutting edge of imperialism and globalisation.

The Philippines archipelago, made up of over 7,000 islands, was "discovered" by the West in 1521 by the Spanish naval adventurer Ferdinand Magellan.

The crisis in the Philippines has fuelled pressure to make its workers go abroad to find a better life. Nearly 10 percent of Filipinos—eight million people—are now working abroad.

In 1986 tens of thousands of Filipinos demonstrated on a busy thoroughfare in the Philippine capital of Manila, in an event that soon became known as the "people power revolution". The mass protests ended over 20 years of corrupt and brutal dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos, restoring liberal democracy to the country.

The Philippine ruling class is facing a very real problem. Every section of it is hungry for the implementation of savage neo-liberal measures — but nobody is at all sure who can get away with forcing them through.

The last few years have seen a very large number of diverse groups and organisations coming together in spite of their differences to confront neo-liberal globalisation. However, we are deeply concerned that there are still some groups in the world today that attempt to deal with political differences using physical attacks and death threats. A recent example of this is the situation which has emerged in the Philippines where a number of individual intellectuals, activists (Walden Bello and Lidy Nacpil) and organisations engaged in various forms of struggle against militarism and globalised capitalism have been listed by the international department of the Communist Party of the Philippin

THE KILLING of 14 people on a picket line at a sugar plantation in the Philippines has shocked the country. The family of former president Cory Aquino, who own the plantation, have been implicated in the killings.

FAR FROM being a drain on the economy, workers from abroad keep key industries and services in Britain going. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) showed last week how some parts of the NHS would "cease to function" without nurses from South Africa and the Philippines. Guardian journalist Felicity Lawrence has uncovered how "in food processing there is a hidden army of labour on whom we all depend".

"TROOPS IN the Philippines have rescued a kidnapped Italian priest who had been held on the southern island of Mindanao for six months. He was kidnapped in October by a gang of bandits called the Pentagon Gang. The military says the group is mainly made up of former members of the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Philippine President Arroyo said Father Pierantoni's rescue was a big step towards achieving peace in the troubled southern Philippines. " 'Give them no quarter. Annihilate these criminal gangs. I appeal to the people, to our Muslim brothers, to help us end this scourge of kidnapping,' she said."

POLICE IN the Philippines violently broke up protests against the government on Monday 22 July. Over 5,000 demonstrators took to the streets of Manila. They surrounded the government's legislature building as the president, Gloria Arroyo, was due to give a state of the nation address outlining her government's agenda. Protesters denounced US troops being deployed in the Philippines and training the army.

Mass demonstrations forced the resignation of the president of the Philippines, Joseph Estrada, on Friday of last week. Over 200,000 people took to the streets of the capital, Manila, for several days last week after court proceedings against Estrada over corruption effectively collapsed.