From the foundation he runs near the city of Olongapo, Fr Shay Cullen can look down on the scene of perhaps his greatest triumph. Wrapped in the lush tropical green of the Filipino countryside, the city below rolls gently toward Subic Bay, once home to the mightiest US navy base in the Pacific.
At its peak, ships from the US Seventh Fleet disgorged more than three million military personnel a year, fuelling the city¹s only major industry: sex. The casualties pregnant teenagers, HIV-infected children and the abandoned offspring of Afmerican sailors washed up at the doors of Preda, (People’s Recovery, Empowerment and Development Assistance), the foundation Fr Cullen co-founded in 1974. Local newspapers dubbed Olongapo the Sodom and Gomorrah of south-east Asia.
“The base had to go,” he says today, recalling the horrors he witnessed when he came here first from his home in Glasthule, Co Dublin, in the late 1960s. There was poverty on an epic scale, which tossed thousands of children literally on to rubbish tips or into the arms of paedophiles and traffickers.
“There were four-year-olds pimped out to prostitution rings,” he recalls. “Abuse of every kind.” The shock and anger he felt at this human neglect and degradation “³changed my life”.
Today, the Subic Bay base and most other US military installations in the Philippines are gone, thanks to a remarkable political campaign by Cullen and his colleagues. In the sunshine years following the fall of dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, they demanded that the once meek political establishment do the unthinkable: evict their American paymasters. Incredibly, they did.
In his book, Passion and Power, Cullen recalls the laughter at his “audacity and wild idealism” for even proposing such a thing. The US military had been dug into the Philippines for a century, bringing $100 million ($72 million) every year to the country and, by Cullen¹s estimate, $32 million ($23 million) to Olongapo’s local economy.
Challenging this Goliath-like opponent was dangerous and, for some, fatal. Cullen was stoned, threatened with deportation and dubbed a “communist” after taking the fight to the city’s corrupt mayor; other activists were tortured and murdered.
But Cullen and his supporters successfully argued that the military installations were rotting the heart of their host Filipino cities, and proposed a business plan to convert them to productive use. Fierce lobbying secured the support of the Philippine senate, which refused to extend the lease on the US bases.
The US flag was lowered in Subic Bay in 1992, and a new industrial park now occupies its place, a couple of kilometres below the Preda Foundation.
“We were lucky,” Cullen says. “Our timing was good and we got lucky.”
Not that he has time to gloat. The malignant influence of the bases lingers on in the vast sex industry they spawned, and the estimated 60,000 Filipino children it employs. Shocking poverty adds to the human misery. Preda is home to about 100 children, rescued from jails, abusive families or commercial exploitation, many of them so damaged that they need years of counselling. Visitors to the centre are sometimes shown to a soundproof room on the top floor where kids scream, kick and punch holes in the wall.
“We try to develop their self-confidence and dignity,” explains Cullen, dressed casually in Khakis in his Preda office. “We¹re about empowerment, making them strong, getting rid of that deferential attitude, especially toward the foreigner.”
But he admits that the foundation only deals with the tip of the iceberg. “Every day you see something awful. I feel so frustrated and angry. What keeps me going is challenging the system.”
Cullen’s challenges are the stuff of legend and have given him a reputation as a sort of clerical Ricky Balboa, always ready to step into the metaphorical ring for a scrap with a stronger opponent. Preda has filed class-action suits against the US military for abandoning 10,000 children, repeatedly fought the Philippine government over its incarceration of minors in rancid prisons, and, perhaps most famously, rescued hundreds of kids from sex bars and traffickers, earning him death threats and the tabloid moniker ‘paedophile-buster’.
He is now embroiled in a battle with the right-wing mayor of the southern city of Davao, home to death squads who have murdered dozens of street children over the last decade.
David McNeill is a journalist with The Irish Times
