Gates of Hell

In the newsroom we discussed which gate in Manila’s Port Area or Tondo district might have inspired comparisons, in bestselling novelist Dan Brown’s mind, with the Gates of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.

Obviously Brown wasn’t making a literal reference to gates, but we settled on the entrance to the harbor in Vitas, Tondo, where the road is lined with shanties along the banks of the Pasig River all the way to the point where it empties into Manila Bay.

The shanty community is Sitio Damayan. It’s also called Ulingan, for one of two main sources of livelihood in the community: charcoal making. The other source is scavenging at a nearby dump.

Making charcoal leaves a black patina over everything. Combined with smoke wafting from the shanties plus the stench from the dump, made worse recently by the putrid stink of an impounded shipment of frozen poultry from China, a visitor might actually wonder if he has wandered into Hell.

Perhaps Dan Brown visited Manila and took a “Smokey tour” – not a hotdog tasting spree, but a tour of the former site of Manila’s mountain of garbage we called Smokey Mountain. The area includes Sitio Damayan. Yes, such offbeat tourism packages exist.

Or maybe he got stuck in horrid traffic from the NAIA, had an asthma attack from air pollution, or lost his cell phone to snatchers on motorcycles.

Smokey Mountain was razed during the Ramos administration, but the place still serves as the city dump. And the densely populated slum communities of Tondo have survived, providing a mother lode of votes for populist local politicians, and of believers for various religious groups.

Or perhaps Dan Brown, whose novels I enjoy, visited the slums of Pasay City, which are visible from the air around the NAIA. Several of the alleys in those warrens of multistory, condominium-type shanties are so narrow a broad-shouldered man of heavy build can enter only by walking sideways. But the Pasay slums are not sooty and smoky like those in Tondo. The poverty in Pasay is palpable but the surroundings don’t evoke images of eternal damnation in Dante’s Inferno.

So we’re guessing that Ulingan will be among the sites of the cleanup that the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) reportedly plans to undertake this week.

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It must be pointed out that like most megalopolises especially in Asia, Metro Manila has its Gates of Hell but also vast tracts of developed areas, plus those exclusive enclaves reserved for the uber-wealthy .05 of the teeming population.

What may be particularly striking in Metro Manila is the yawning income disparity when you juxtapose Sitio Damayan with the gated villages of the rich. But the disparity is not rare in developing countries. Even in booming Shanghai, beggars abound in the streets. A short walk from the Bund, the dark alleys behind modern, brightly lit shopping malls are lined with tiny one-room dwellings and festooned with laundry hanging out to dry. But the smell of humanity packed in cramped surroundings is tempered by the aroma of noodles, succulent dim sum and incense so it doesn’t quite evoke Hell.

And unlike some of our officials, Chinese authorities admit that poverty remains a major challenge in their country. Ambassador Ma Keqing has pointed out to me several times that their government remains focused on poverty alleviation and making their masses enjoy the benefits of being the world’s second largest economy.

She tells me this to emphasize that her country has prospered for three decades in a peaceful region and a world without a global war, so it would be counterproductive for China to foment armed conflict particularly in its own backyard. (More on China’s foreign policy in my next column.)

Neither Dan Brown nor MMDA Chairman Francis Tolentino painted a complete picture of Metro Manila. But Brown, who earlier raised hackles in the Vatican for his engrossing “The Da Vinci Code” and follow-up novels set in Rome, has artistic license to use hyperbole. The MMDA chief, being a public official, has no license to be onion-skinned.

The MMDA nevertheless is embarking on a cleanup in Hell. We were told that among the target areas is Manila’s Baywalk, currently serving as the communal bedroom for the city’s homeless.

Similar campaigns have been undertaken in the past, with informal settlers returning as soon as authorities look the other way. Manila’s homeless used to sleep behind the Quirino Grandstand in Rizal Park, but they were driven away following its commercial development. From Baywalk, the homeless might relocate to the bushes along Roxas Boulevard. Someone even put up a sort of tree house at Anda Circle, near one of the gates to the Manila International Container Port.

Fires, floods and a freak storm surge in Manila Bay have destroyed squatter settlements in the city’s coastal area, but the dwellers begin putting up their shanties even before the smoke has dissipated or the flooding has subsided.

People squat in the city and endure hellish circumstances for the same reason that nearly 10 million Filipinos have left the country: to find better livelihood opportunities. Filipinos with marketable skills go overseas; those lacking the requirements settle in slums, hoping to land even contractual work in the cities.

Unless the government can provide livelihood alternatives for squatters to be relocated, they will soon be back in informal urban settlements.

For the desperately poor, life even in Hell is their only hope for survival.

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HOW THE VOTE WAS WON? There’s a video going around, showing how vote results on optical scan machines may be manipulated. The system isn’t Smartmatic’s but similar. Techies might want to check it out, at https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=367581783346545.