Standing with the women of Olongapo

United Women in Faith accompanies women around U.S. military base in the Philippines

By Paul Jeffrey

Published in response magazine in May/June 2023

            Hannah Alarcon was just 15 years old in 2005 when her old sister invited her to take a one-hour bus ride from their home in a rural village to the big city of Olongapo, on the Philippines island of Luzon. Alarcon was told they were going to go swimming at the beach, but instead her sister took her to a hotel where two tourists had already paid to have sex with the teenager.

            For the next seven years, Alarcon worked as a prostitute. She says it was a way to help her parents, who otherwise survived on what her father could earn scavenging bottles in a local garbage dump. When Alarcon (whose name has been changed here for her safety) went home to visit her parents, she would work the dump with her father. In some ways, she says, sex work in Olongapo was easier.

            In 2012, however, Alarcon gave birth to a baby girl and decided it was time for a change.

            “I didn’t want to do the work I was doing, but it was the only way I had to earn money. People look down on us, though, and I didn’t want my daughter to grow up hearing that I was working the streets, to hear from other children that her mother was a pokpok,” she said, using a disparaging Tagalog word for prostitute.

“We were banding together”

            Alarcon’s decision to quit sex work was also encouraged by the women of Buklod, a drop-in center for women in prostitution. It was founded in the 1980s when the U.S. Navy ran a giant base in nearby Subic Bay and women from throughout the country came to Olongapo–and to neighboring Angeles City where the giant Clark Air Base was located–to sell their bodies to members of the U.S. military. According to one 1990 study, more than 50,000 women at a time provided sexual services at the two bases.

            Buklod got its start when women representing three church groups came to Olongapo in 1984 and started visiting the bars, intentionally listening to the women who worked there. One of the women they listened to was Alma Bulawan, a bar girl they first knew as Pearly Catolico, her working name.

            “Women have different reasons for working here, though I’ve yet to meet one who does the work because she likes it. Some came here because they’re poor and if they can meet and marry a U.S. serviceman they will be rich and able to support their family in the province. That’s why women in bars give fake names. They told their families they were working in a restaurant or hotel, not in a club. So they used a fake name. If they married an American, they would of course use their real name, but if the American’s relatives came around asking about her background, they’d never learn she had worked in a bar,” Bulawan said.

            Convinced by the church workers that things could change, Bulawan became the first working woman to start organizing her coworkers, an effort that eventually led to a formal network of women from ten different bars.

            “We decided to set up a drop-in center where women could share their problems, because otherwise women just went from home to the bars and back, and didn’t know much about what was happening in the country. It was a safe place where they could share and be heard. In 1987, we decided to name it the Buklod Center, using a Tagalog word that means ‘unite,’ or ‘band together.’ We were banding together, women from different bars, to address common problems,” she said.

            Bulawan recites a litany of factors that led women into prostitution, the most prominent being poverty.

            “Only five percent of the women working as prostitutes were from here. The rest all came from rural areas, especially the poorest provinces, including vulnerable regions like Bicol that are always hit by typhoons. They are trafficked by recruiters. Eighty percent of the women are victims of rape, including by uncles, stepfathers, and other family members. Many had children and were then abandoned by their husbands. Some worked first as maids somewhere, but they were abused and so came to Olongapo to work. Many didn’t go to school beyond first or second grade,” she said.

            Bulawan says they knew their little group couldn’t do away with the military bases or resolve the poverty that drove the women to sex work. What they could do was change women’s attitudes towards themselves.

            “Our goal wasn’t to stop the women from working in bars. Our focus was on empowering women, helping them know their rights. So we organized, hosted seminars, carried out health education. At the time there were a lot of women living with HIV, so we started an educational campaign focused on reproductive rights, on how to protect ourselves from infection. Most of the women were not using any form of contraception. No one from the government told us to use contraceptives. So in Buklod we learned. We talked about the rights of employees, helping women get at least the minimum they were entitled to as workers. For those who wanted to leave the bars behind, we helped them seek out other forms of livelihood,” she said.

            As the women talked about their situation, they began to communicate with women opposing militarism elsewhere in the world, particularly around U.S. bases in places like Guam, Okinawa, South Korea, Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Buklod joined the International Women’s Network Against Militarism.

            “People were afraid to talk about what Americans were doing to the women here and in other places. Many were battered by American soldiers, suffering all kinds of abuse, yet here in the Philippines women couldn’t talk about what the Americans did. They were scared. And too often, when someone got upset about abuse, the American would just pay them $100 and they would never talk,” Bulawan said.

            “One of my coworkers was raped by an American. She told no one but me. She was working in a bar, and she didn’t want to file a case because of the stigma. If you complained they would say, ‘You’re working in a club and you say you were raped? That’s your job! To have sex with the customer. So why are you complaining? Nobody believes that you were raped.’ Even if you weren’t working in a club, they’d dismiss you as a prostitute and not take you seriously.”

“Military bases need women to function”

            One of the church groups that helped birth Buklod was the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, where Emma Cantor worked in the women’s program. A United Methodist deaconess, Cantor came to Olongapo and visited the bars to listen to the women. She met Bulawan when she was still dancing nude on tables. She says Bulawan–whom Cantor to this day still calls “Pearly”–took her around to introduce her to other workers.

            “We went to the bars at night not to preach to the women, not to discourage them from working there, but to listen and understand their lives and struggles within that whole system of prostitution. We met them during the day to listen to their stories and dreams. That’s a slow process, but a necessary step in our mission to help women liberate themselves, to untangle themselves psychologically and emotionally from the systems that entrap them, to become leaders of their own movements toward wholeness,” said Cantor, who channeled support to Buklod from United Women in Faith, with whom she soon started working as regional missionary.

            By the early 1990s, pressure to oust the U.S. bases from the Philippines–spurred by repeated accounts of rape and abuse of women, as well as arguments over how much the U.S. should pay in rent and Washington’s refusal to state whether nuclear weapons were stored there–had become a groundswell. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo heavily damaged both bases and provided an excuse for the U.S. to close Clark Air Base. Negotiations over the future of the Naval Base Subic Bay bogged down, however, until the end of 1991 when a frustrated President Corazon Aquino gave the U.S. Navy one year to clear out.

            While some of the women working in the sex trade opposed the pull out, as that meant an end to their income stream, Cantor says church groups largely supported the ouster of the U.S. troops.

            “Militarization is a systemic force affecting the whole country, not just where the base is located. Military bases need women and girls to function. They’re drawn to the bases from poor areas in order to survive, but in doing so they’re degraded and dehumanized as persons. At the end of the day, the bases were destroying not just the lives of women, but the soul of the nation,” Cantor said.

            “Buklod joined in the effort to close the bases because it was the only way to stop the human rights violations of women. It was a women’s group organizing to stop violence against women.”

            As the Philippines took over the former base, it grappled with the environmental legacy of militarism, including massive contamination of the area by asbestos, PCBs and pesticides. It also faced the loss of income from the permanent use of the base. Transforming the sprawling former base into a tax-exempt free port wasn’t the miracle cure politicians hoped for, so in 1998 the government signed the Visiting Forces Agreement with the U.S., allowing U.S. ships to again visit the base, this time on a “semi-permanent” basis.

            The agreement also guaranteed that U.S. troops would enjoy immunity from the full consequences of their actions, a controversial provision that drew public criticism following the 2005 rape of a Filipina woman by a U.S. Marine whose ship was docked in Subic Bay. After being arrested for the crime, he was turned over to U.S. Embassy officials in Manila rather than suffer imprisonment in a Philippines jail. Even after his trial and conviction, he remained in the embassy, angering many in the country. In 2009, a court overturned his conviction after the victim suddenly recanted her testimony and emigrated to the United States.

            In 2014, as part of the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia, the U.S. signed an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with the Philippines, strengthening the Visiting Forces Agreement and allowing an increased U.S. military presence throughout the far-flung island nation. Yet later that year, underscoring the human cost of hosting foreign troops, a visiting U.S. Marine strangled to death a transgender woman he met in an Olongapo bar. After being tried and convicted, he served his sentence in a special air-conditioned cell on a Philippines military base, guarded by other U.S. military personnel. President Rodrigo Duterte pardoned him in 2020.

            In 2022, given rising concern about Chinese influence in the region and the election of a former dictator’s son as president of the Philippines, officials in Washington and Manila began negotiating a new agreement that would even further entrench U.S. military expansion in the region. The national pride and sovereignty displayed in forcing the 1992 base closure was now a distant memory.

“Like Uber for girls”

            Throughout the base closure, reconfiguration, and reopening, Olongapo continued being a magnet for poor women seeking income from sex work. Buklod transformed its outreach as conditions changed.

            “When the base closed, we stepped up our skills training. Friends in Okinawa gave us 100 sewing machines, so we trained women in sewing and gave them their own machines upon graduation. We taught food processing and cookie baking. We opened a laundry shop and provided free school supplies. We opened a drug store and made rugs for jeepneys,” Bulawan said, referring to the ubiquitous Filipino mass transit vehicles.

            When Mount Pinatubo erupted, the building housing Buklod’s office collapsed under the ash. Dozens of Buklod members were evacuated to Manila, where Cantor arranged housing for them in church facilities. Food donations for the women and their families came from a variety of church organizations, including United Women in Faith.

            Although foreign tourists picked up some of the slack in the sex business during the initial period after the base closure, the Visiting Forces Agreement meant the bars were soon once again open and thriving, as was prostitution. Yet the rape and murder cases–and the nationwide protests that followed them–changed the working environment, and U.S. officials eventually restricted their personnel to the base. Bulawan says that businesses adjusted quickly.

            “Since the Americans couldn’t go out, they would arrange with taxi drivers to pick up the women outside and bring them inside the base. They’d give the taxi driver a description of what they wanted, and the taxi driver would get a commission, usually one-third of what the woman earned. It was like Uber for girls. Taxi drivers became pimps,” she said.

            Cantor says the base closures only masked over deeper issues.

            “Closing the bases was a hollow victory. They’re still there, no matter what we do. They conspire with the government so that the system of poverty and trafficking is untouched. It’s hard to compete with the bars. Women don’t have other work to do, so they turn to prostitution to survive. And the shame they feel about their work only increases their sense of powerlessness,” Cantor said.

            “Buklod is a victory. It takes years to undo the trauma of sex work, but Buklod has been there since the eighties. They have an organization to be proud of. The organization cares for them whether they’re dancing or not. The women have a center of their own where they and their children are welcome and safe. We have sent a lot of their children to school. When the women don’t have money, they can borrow. Alma is creative, and has both a heart for the work as well as an ability to help the women discover a heart for themselves,” Cantor said.

            “The system is still there, however. Buklod has carved out a space for poor women to become empowered, but it’s a small and fragile space because we haven’t yet killed the system that exploits these women.”

“They helped me know my rights”

            Since Hannah Alarcon decided to leave prostitution behind, it hasn’t been easy, even with Buklod’s help.

            “Buklod helped me decide to leave the streets. They helped me know my rights. Because I’d come from the province and had no home, I slept in their office at times. They got me enrolled in an ALS program [alternative learning system–a high school equivalency program], gave me livelihood training, and finally gave me a small amount of capital to start a business,” said Alarcon.

            “I will do everything I can so that my daughter doesn’t end up working the streets like I did.”

            She opened a small store in the front of her home, and has managed her money well. Yet her husband, an out of work construction worker, demands she turn over all the profits to him. He owns the house they live in.  Fortunately, her sister, the one who first pimped her out as a teenager, sneaks her some money to spend on the children.

            “I feel like a second class citizen. I have no rights. I’m like a maid. My neighbors are mostly my husband’s relatives, and they say since I have no money I am useless. People think I am OK, but inside I hurt. I have no power, even over my own life,” she said.

            Bulawan says Alarcon’s situation underscores how prostitution is but one symptom of a system that discriminates–and does violence–against women. Simply banning prostitution, she argues, without addressing the other elements of poverty, will not change much. Yet she’s not in favor of legalizing the practice.

            “Although the clubs in Olongapo are registered, and the women who work in them have permits, prostitution itself remains illegal in the Philippines. We are lobbying to keep it that way. We don’t want our children seeing prostitution as a viable profession. It’s a business. A huge business. Some international women’s organizations are in favor of legalizing it, but we aren’t. So our funding proposals to them aren’t accepted. They call them sex workers, but we don’t like that term. We prefer women in prostitution, or prostituted women,” she said.

            Bulawan says the women are especially thankful for the accompaniment they’ve received from United Women in Faith, which has funded leadership development seminars among the women and educational support for their children, including during the Covid-19 pandemic when Olongapo shut down for several months. Its organizing and educational work continued online, with the group providing participants with funds to pay the extra data charges on their mobile phones.

            “United Women in Faith has supported us without telling us what to do. They’ve let us set our own agenda,” Bulawan said.

            According to Cantor, United Women in Faith will continue to financially support and accompany Buklod, where she now serves as president of the board of directors.

            “Alma and the other women in Buklod have been doing this for decades, yet as they help one woman–and her family–leave prostitution for a healthy life with dignity, another one is pushed by sexism and economic inequality to take her place. Nevertheless, they persist in listening to other women, accompanying other women, reaching out to other women with real hope,” Cantor said.

Sidebar: Amerasians a living legacy of U.S. bases

            A lingering legacy of the U.S. military presence in the Philippines are the children, now adults, who are the offspring of U.S. fathers and Filipina mothers. They were left behind when their fathers moved on. Often bullied by other children, they were called disparaging names like “half dollar,” “souvenir,” and Iniwan ng Barko–“left by the ship.”

            At least 50,000 Amerasians live in the Philippines today, though some estimates put the number much higher. Some 8,000 live in Olongapo alone, according to Alma Bulawan, head of Buklod, a rights group supported by United Women in Faith and run by women who worked as prostitutes at the former U.S. military base there.

            “There’s a lot of discrimination against Amerasians, especially if the father was African-American. Here in Olongapo it isn’t so bad, because there are so many Amerasians, but if they go to Manila or somewhere in the provinces, they get bullied. People will say they’re black like a monkey. When they apply for jobs, even if they have all the right education and experience, they’re unlikely to get it,” Bulawan said.

            “If their father was white, however, then it’s much easier. They’re accepted and even considered cute. I have a child whose American father was white, and when he was small and I carried him around, people wanted to hug him.”

            In 1982, the U.S. Congress passed the Amerasian Immigration Act, and in 1987 passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act. These granted preferential immigration status to the children of U.S. service members and Asian women in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and South Korea.

            Filipinos were excluded from the legislation, so in 1993 more than 8,000 abandoned Amerasian children in the Philippines filed suit in a U.S. court, asking for medical and educational costs. When that lawsuit failed, they backed a bill extending the earlier legislation to include Amerasian children born in the Philippines and Japan. That effort also failed.

            After years of frustration, the recent rise of DNA testing by people in the U.S. seeking information about their ancestry has sparked renewed hope in the Philippines.

            “DNA is a game changer,” said Bulawan, whose son discovered the identity of his U.S. father through DNA testing. Although the boy’s father has not been responsive–he’s reportedly suffering from mental health problems related to his military service–the man’s parents have stepped enthusiastically into their role as grandparents. They video chat with Bulawan’s son, send him money for his children’s education and other expenses, and are working with him to arrange a visit to the Philippines and then later take him to the U.S. for a visit.

            Bulawan says her son, who’s now 35, has been fortunate. “Many times at the end of the search they find the father has died, or he and his family simply aren’t interested. There’s one phone call and that’s it,” she said.

            Brenda Moreno is waiting her turn. Now 55, her mother abandoned her as an infant in Olongapo. She grew up with another family and went to elementary school, but at 10 years of age was sent to Manila to work as a maid.

            Because her father was likely African-American, Moreno–who has dark skin and curly hair–was bullied and called “Blackie” by other kids in Manila. By 16 she was pregnant, so she returned to Olongapo where she found employment in the same “girlie bars” where her mother had worked. She spoke no English, however, so had difficulty entertaining U.S. servicemen. After a few months she quit to work as a housekeeper, then later got a job sewing when the military pulled out and the former base was converted to a free trade zone with giant clothing assembly lines.

            She then joined Buklod, attending seminars, finally volunteering as an organizer to reach out to other women working in the bars. Buklod helped her train as a cosmetologist, and today that’s how she earns her living. She specializes in manicures, working both at a beauty salon and visiting clients in their homes.

            “I never met my mother, who as soon as we got out of the hospital handed me over to a woman who ran a small canteen where she ate. And I have no clue who my father might be,” Moreno said.

            “But now I’m in line to get a DNA test kit and get tested. Thank God for the DNA tests. I pray morning and night that I’ll be able to meet my father. It may be that he has died already, because he’d be old, but at least I could find out his name and what he looked like.”

Paul Jeffrey is a photojournalist who has covered the work of United Women in Faith for decades. He lives in Oregon.