My week in Manila:Dial M for Mayhem.

[mattd]

Dial M for Mayhem
Abduction,melodrama and murder: Just another week in "Arroyo's greater 
Manila".
Arrive at the Hyatt Regency in Manila and find a sign saying,"Absolutely no 
firearms permitted
in the hotel lobby."Cast your mind back to central America 15 years 
ago.Smell of desperation,
smell of fear,smell of desperate basket case.The start of a sobering week 
in depressionville.
It begins with the announcement in mondays papers that the communist new 
peoples armies killed
18 govt soldiers in an ambush.Next day,Nur misuari,the former Moro National 
Liberation Front
leader,has abandoned his commitment to a 1996 peace treaty and launched a 
military attack in
Mindanao in which 100 die.
These appalling headlines certainly make Manila an edgy place for the most 
heavily comped scribbler.
Its the madness and the melodrama inside city limits that tip the most 
phlegmatic over the edge.
The combination,spanish machismo and American gun culture gives new 
meanings to "scary","wild",
and "violent."Day 3 in Metro sees a senior official of Comelec the govt 
body that runs elections,
gunned down in her car in the middle of the downtown business 
district.Straightaway,and with
no worries about libel,rules of evidence or the presumption of 
innocence,the press IDs another
Comlec official with whom she was having a dispute as prime suspect.
The city was already hypnotised and agog with the court spectacle in the 
murder case of the
screen goddess,Nida Blanca.An alleged professional hitman confessed he had 
been hired to kill
Blanca by her husband.This took the form of a screaming,crying and fainting 
performance that
was then retracted,exonerating the husband,and going on to accuse the 
police of torture.
When the violencia is not so much melodramatic as just plain crazy-like the 
man who was killed
for an appalling Karaoke performance.The cities karaoke bars had been 
removing "My Way"from
the playlists as it provoked so many disputes.
Manila has been dubbed the kidnap capital of Asia.Trad targets are the 
children of chinese
businesspeople.The families normally pay a lot of money and dont expect 
much help from the
police.The trend is now beyond the chinese,this reflects hard economic 
times and a general
breakdown of law and order.Much kidnappings now widely believed involve 
serving or former
members of the military and police.Now even mestizo Filipinos of moderate 
wealth take armed
bodygaurds on their morning constitutionals in their walled and gated suburbs.
The subject is fascinating in that some kidnappers now 
sub-contract,snatching someone to resell
to a bigger outfit in order to mark up the ransom several orders of 
magnitude and muddy the trail.
While the philippines suffered the greatest thief in known human hirstory 
with ferdinand Marcos,
it recovered slowly up till fresh disaster struck in the form of hurricane 
Erap.The full catastrophe
once more until he was finally thrown out.The only irony of this plundering 
hack actors demise
is the realisation that the only thing he did moderately well was keep a 
lid on the Manila pressure
cooker.Conspiracy theorists,of which there are a superabundance,say Eraps 
'tough guy',police
chief,"Ping"Lascon,swapped bribes with the organized crimelords to 
accomplish just that.
Expanded graft opportunities arose for both in other parts of the 
economy.Its hard to convey
just how obssed Manila is with rumour.Everyone's constantly fiddling with 
their cellphones.
They send more and receive more text messages than anywhere else in the 
world.Mobs are rioting,
attacks on foreign enclaves are imminent,the next coups just begun,Ping 
will be dictator,any thing
and everything fuels the e-mail rumour mills.The 'end of hirstory'is not a 
concept expected to gain
much traction in this city that seems to be being imagined by a cyberpunk 
novelist.