Pubdate: Thu, 16 May 2002
Source: New York Times (NY)
Section: International
Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Keith Bradsher

DRUGS, TERROR AND TUNA: HOW GOALS CLASH

GENERAL SANTOS CITY, the Philippines - This industrial city on the southern 
coast of Mindanao Island illustrates how America's various strategic aims 
in the wars on drugs and terrorism can clash, alienating important allies 
engaged in battling terrorism.

Among leaders of the Philippines' important tuna industry here, resentment 
is running high over trade legislation now on the Senate floor in 
Washington. The bill includes a provision to eliminate steep import taxes 
on canned tuna from Andean nations while keeping taxes in place for other 
countries like the Philippines.

The provision has attracted Congressional support because it is seen as 
bolstering America's war on drugs. The idea is that the bill will help 
create well-paid jobs in Ecuador and Colombia as an alternative to the drug 
trade.

But in another war - the one against terrorism - the legislation is causing 
anger in a country that has become an important part of the 
administration's plans.

It comes at a time when 600 American soldiers are helping the Philippine 
Army track Abu Sayyaf Muslim insurgents in the southernmost Philippines, 
and President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has staked much political capital on 
helping the United States fight terrorism.

Virtually all of the tuna industry of the Philippines is located here and 
it employs thousands of migrant workers from small Muslim fishing 
communities that used to be bastions of various Muslim insurgencies. Local 
officials warn that the legislation could wipe out the tuna industry.

President Arroyo said that passage of the trade provision would deal a 
severe blow to the economy here while handing a propaganda victory to the 
Abu Sayyaf movement.

The combination would create heavy domestic pressure for the Philippines to 
retreat from its active support for the American war on terrorism, she 
warned in a telephone interview tonight.

"I will try very hard not to, but I will be under tremendous pressure," she 
said.

In much of the developing world, including Latin America and Africa, trade 
restrictions or tariffs on products ranging from steel to textiles are 
causing growing resentment toward the United States. The perception that 
the Bush administration is a protectionist one is growing.

President Arroyo argued that General Santos, the main city on the southern 
coast of Mindanao and home to most of the Philippines' tuna fishing fleet 
and canneries, was central both to the economic future of this region and 
to the fight against terrorism.

A powerful pipe bomb packed with nails exploded on a crowded sidewalk 
outside a supermarket here on April 21, killing 15 people and wounding 
dozens. A second pipe bomb was safely defused before it exploded at another 
supermarket the same day, and two shopping complexes have recently burned 
down here in the middle of the night in separate, unexplained incidents.

Police detectives here say that they are still unsure whether the attacks 
were terrorist incidents, criminal attempts at extortion or some 
combination of the two. But President Arroyo expresses no such doubts, 
saying tonight, "The Abu Sayyaf has been trying to get into General Santos 
and it has been very difficult for us to justify our support for the United 
States."

In a city where tunas festoon everything from billboards to restaurant 
signs, and where even the golf tournament is the Tuna Cup, the fishing 
industry's influence is impossible to miss.

Workers heave baskets of fish onto crude steel carts, which they then pull 
by hand over to a long open-sided shed. Women wash and sort the fish on 
long tables, the concrete floor beneath them dark and slippery with fish 
blood. A few larger tuna, some the size of a man, are carried individually 
to large, white boxes packed with half-melted ice, to be shipped directly 
to Japan to be turned into sashimi.

Renato Alonzo, 47, a fisherman in a ragged T-shirt and flip-flops whose 
boat had just docked after two weeks at sea, said that he had sold his tiny 
farm and joined a boat crew 10 years ago after learning he could nearly 
double his income, to roughly $4,000 a year. Now he can afford to send his 
two sons, aged 12 and 8, to school.

The bustling fishing port here and the nearby row of tuna canneries 
contrast sharply with most of Mindanao, where peasants still toil on 
subsistence farms or on large pineapple and coconut plantations. Years of 
drought, coupled with inadequate irrigation, have crippled agriculture 
while the global glut of low-priced steel has forced the closing of a big 
steel mill in northern Mindanao.

The tuna industry here barely existed until the late 1980's when the United 
States led Japan, Italy and other donor nations in an ambitious foreign aid 
program aimed at rebuilding the Philippines after the fall of Ferdinand Marcos.

A full-scale guerrilla war was being waged in Mindanao then, a far broader 
conflict than the handful of kidnappings and possibly bombings linked to 
Abu Sayyaf now. General Santos City was nearly surrounded by several very 
large insurgencies that attracted poor youths from the island's Muslim 
minority. The city had a small fishing fleet, but it mostly caught fish for 
local consumption.

But the world's richest tuna fishing grounds lay between here and 
Indonesia, although boats from Thailand mainly fished them then. Foreign 
donors built the fishing port here as well as a large cargo airport, a 
container port, extensive roads and a modern phone system, hiring security 
guards from rebel forces and buying sand, gravel and other construction 
materials from rebel leaders' businesses.

With ready transportation to foreign markets, six big canneries were built, 
each employing more than 1,000 workers. The only two other tuna canneries 
in the Philippines are in Zamboanga City in southwestern Mindanao, the 
staging area for American troops pursuing Abu Sayyaf. Some 30,000 fishermen 
now supply the canneries.

The tuna boom has helped persuade all of the rebel movements except the Abu 
Sayyaf splinter group to lay down their arms under armistices with the 
government. Many former rebel commanders and foot soldiers have taken jobs 
at the canneries, which have had no problem with the bombings that have 
afflicted shopping centers.

Abuhasan Jama is a former major in the Moro National Liberation Front who 
studied guerrilla warfare in Malaysia in 1979 and 1980 and then spent 13 
years fighting the Philippine government in the jungles of Mindanao.

Now he is the security chief at Ocean Canning here, his eldest daughter is 
in college and he has found jobs at the same cannery for three cousins who 
are also former guerrillas. "I like to work," said Mr. Jama, 41, recalling 
that in the jungle "sometimes you'd just eat leaves, the roots."

Mariano M. Fernandez, the general manager of Ocean Canning, said that he 
used to carry two Smith & Wesson handguns, one strapped on each hip. "It 
was like the Wild West here," he said, adding that he carries only a 
cellphone now.

Most of the tuna canned here is sold in the United States under less famous 
brands like Geisha and Dagim. Bumble Bee and Starkist used to buy large 
quantities of tuna here but have recently begun relying on Ecuador instead, 
allowing that country to edge past the Philippines last year to become the 
second-largest foreign supplier of tuna to the United States, after 
Thailand. Starkist in particular is now pushing for the elimination of 
import tariffs on canned tuna from Ecuador.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth