Amazing extrapolation

Justice Undersecretary Jose Vicente Salazar has admitted that local law enforcement and other state agencies “do not have accurate statistics on sexual

tourism [in the Philippines] and related cases.” He made this admission in the wake of the furor caused by US Ambassador Harry Thomas’ claim before a judicial conference on human trafficking recently that “up to 40 percent of foreign men who come here come for sexual tourism.”

Forty percent, or two out of every five male foreign tourists. Last year’s tourism arrivals were at an all-time Philippine high of 3.52 million visitors. Assuming that half of that number—1.76 million— were male tourists and assuming further that Thomas was correct, some 700,000 of them were in this country primarily for commercial sex. But what was Thomas’ evidence? Not the cold numbers cited in any independently verifiable study or report, but the incontrovertible proof he sees with his own eyes. “We all know when we walk … on Roxas Boulevard, we will see these establishments. We all know who owns them, who benefits from them, who allows them to continue,” he said, referring to the string of clubs, bars and honky-tonks that line the avenue where his official residence is located, and from which he must have extrapolated his startling figures.

At this point, Thomas leaves no other option for his audience but to take him at his word. Because, to the utter frustration of anyone who wants to look deeper at the veracity of his charge, he didn’t bother to back it up with fact, beyond the anecdotal evidence outside the US Embassy gates that he cited. Perhaps his government is in possession of something more in-depth and substantial—say, a top-secret study that was able to track the habits and proclivities of every male foreign tourist that has gone through Philippine immigration? A debriefing summary, perhaps, where every Philippine visitor of the male variety was made to lay bare his recreational preferences, enough for Thomas to claim with bald self-confidence that up to 40 percent of them did fly into the country chiefly to partake of the charms of our women?

There is no use denying, of course, that prostitution is rampant in the Philippines. Or that it has thrived  because law-enforcement authorities either choose to look away, or are themselves engaged in the racket. The fact that the government doesn’t have the faintest idea how large the criminal enterprise has become can only mean the police remain hopelessly inept—or, they do know, since they are the ones running it or are in cahoots with the syndicates behind it, but must feign ignorance, scrambling any semblance of official monitoring, to cover up their collusion.

Police inutility is one thing; diplomatic garrulousness is another. What could have possessed Thomas to blurt out what he said in such stark terms? And what did he hope to accomplish with his brashness? Reading the reports, one even detects a hint of boastfulness in his remarks. The man apparently got carried away, even adding that he had also told President Aquino and Justice Secretary Leila de Lima that should an American be arrested for human trafficking, the US government would assist in prosecuting him. “Any of them who are engaged in things that violate the law—whether American or another foreigner—should be prosecuted.”

Really? Not too long ago, when the Philippines still hosted American military bases, who were the biggest customers of the strip joints in Clark and Olongapo? American servicemen on R&R, that’s who. Prostitution, then as now, was illegal in the country. But for that basic violation of the law, was any American GI ever haled to court for patronizing a bar girl, whether a minor or not? Did the US government ever issue a public directive prohibiting its military personnel from frequenting the girlie bars that ringed the periphery of their bases, and by extension sustaining the syndicates that ran them? Wasn’t the opposite, in fact, true: that the US government invariably cajoled and threatened and moved heaven and earth to spirit away any American serviceman that ran afoul of local laws?

Malacañang should take Thomas up on his bluff, and be ready to clap in jail and prosecute to the fullest extent any American it finds to have come to the Philippines solely for sex. Further, to remedy its criminal lack of numbers on the issue, the justice department should ask Thomas for a copy of the apparently very secret report that supports the statistics he cited. The nation is waiting with bated breath for it.