An embryo nation?

A senator called for a ceasefire because Mindanao is suffering. That’s basic politics for you. Mindanao will remember who moved heaven and Earth to help in its time of need, and who didn’t. But what if it doesn’t? What if it no longer cares to be courted, because it believes one of two things: it is time to go it alone, or it can force everyone else to go in the direction it wants. There are two reasons why we should consider these possibilities. The first involves money, the second, identity.

First, money. A great story goes like this. When then President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was preparing to call a snap election, the question of who his running mate should be came up. Mohammad Ali Dimaporo, the feared Lanao warlord, wanted to be on the ticket. When Marcos announced that he would lead an all-Luzon ticket with Arturo Tolentino instead, Dimaporo reportedly told Marcos, “I promise you, Mr. President, that there will be fair and honest elections in Mindanao!” Of course, this was the last thing Marcos wanted.

A generation separated the rejection of Dimaporo in 1985 from the defeat of Emmanuel Pelaez as the Nacionalista Party candidate for president in 1965. Four years earlier, he’d become the first Mindanao-born vice president. At the time Pelaez was rising to possible presidential status, Mindanao was coming into its own, but just as he reached as high as he would ever go, Mindanao had started its spiral into conflict. By the time Dimaporo made his threat, Mindanao was a place of death, fear, and seemingly unbridgeable divides. Pelaez himself had come to represent this when he was gunned down after resisting Marcos’ schemes for the sugar industry: “What is happening to the country?” he asked, as they rushed him to the hospital.

Another generation separates Dimaporo from former President Rodrigo Duterte being elected president. The election of Duterte accomplished the greatest transfer of wealth, regionally speaking, in our modern political history, and this includes the Marcos dictatorship. Evidence can only be anecdotal: Filipino collectors of Ferraris in Metro Manila complained that the sports cars were unavailable for love or money because all available vehicles were being bought up by buyers in Mindanao. This is as remarkable as it is unique. A tidal wave of money went into the pockets of the planters and millers of Panay, but little of it stayed, and what little did, did not create a large middle class: it was only in the early 2000s onward, long after the demise of the sugar barons as a political and social force, that the Visayas as a whole experienced consistent and wide enough growth, so tangible it frustrated middle and upper class Filipinos in Metro Manila who began to bewail the shortage of Visayan helpers, who didn’t have to travel far anymore, finding work at home, though even there, fewer and fewer did with so many other avenues for gainful employment opening up.

To be sure, then as now, new money wants the trappings of the old. The closing years of the Duterte administration saw a noticeable increase, because a large influx of the newly prosperous to the international schools favored by the wealthy in Metro Manila. Here, the new money of the era of the Great Eagle Father was no different from that of previous dispensations: it all ends up in Metro Manila, which still confers respectability or social cachet. Still, there is far more money now in Mindanao than there’s ever been, and so Mindanao can do more for itself than was ever possible before.

Now, as to identity. The historian Patricio Abinales recently went around his old haunts in Mindanao and discovered something new: “a newfound self-confidence replacing the old ethno-social insecurities arising from living in the frontier, being Moro, and promdi (hayseed).” Cotabato, General Santos City, and Davao City are linked by a four-lane highway where a new urbanized identity has been formed, that of being Mindanawon: “The ‘us’ here is not anymore ethno-linguistic nor religious–the usual bases of distinctions and, often, violent differences … In an island with a large part belonging to the informal sector … the overlap between the illicit and the licit makes bosom buddies out of corporate executives, distributors of smuggled goods, coordinators of food stalls and ukay-ukay, and managers of local cooperatives.”

An identity dismissive of the decrepit, disorganized, disunited rest of the country. As Abinales puts it, “This sense of being aggrieved is wide-ranging … I never sensed this unanimity before, [and, in a workshop, the participants] were unanimous that Mindanao’s peoples be treated as one.”

This isn’t the first time that what Abinales has had to say has threatened to shake up preconceived notions, even among those who consider themselves enlightened thinkers. To cite one of the most thought-provoking: it was a massive plague of rats in Cotabato and other parts of Mindanao in the 1950s, which was the genesis of the conflict in Mindanao from the ‘60s to the ‘90s.