Pemberton (19) had arrived two weeks earlier as crew on the USS Peleliu, which was visiting to hold a series of live fire and “humanitarian” exercises with the Philippines navy and army.

Along with another vessel, the USS Germantown, the ship had docked at the Subic Bay Freeport, one of the country’s numerous free economic zones.

The long-running exercises aimed to enhance the “interoperability” of the US and Philippine armed forces. But they were also part of the US’s increasingly aggressive China posture, following former president Barack Obama’s “Asian pivot” two years earlier.

“If anybody were to challenge the sovereignty of [the Philippines], their best friends within this region would respond within a matter of hours,” US Marine Brigadier General Paul J Kennedy said at the opening ceremony for the exercises, clearly looking to Beijing.

“I assure you that this is not a hollow promise.”

On recreational leave following the exercises, Pemberton, an anti-tank missileman, visited the Ambyanz Disco Bar at around 10:30 on the night of October 11.

There, he met 26-year-old Jennifer Laude and her friend Barbie. About 30 minutes later, they left for the Celzone Lodge.

Jennifer (a transgender woman) and the crew-cut Pemberton went to Room 1. Barbie and her companion took another room.

Pemberton left the motel a short time later.

*

I arrived in the Philippines last July. After months of stacking boxes in a Te Puke kiwifruit packhouse (following an 18-month stint in Ukraine and Moldova), it was nice to get out of New Zealand again.

The packhouse was much the same as when I worked there during the 2021 harvest. A mixed stacking crew: Latinos, French, Cook Islanders, RSE workers from Fiji, and local Māori.

But automation was being rolled out more noticeably. The robotics on one grader were processing more fruit than the other two human-staffed graders combined.

One week, I got only one 10-hour shift, as fruit was syphoned off to the mechanised arms that could place a pallet layer of 10 boxes, or around 100kgs, in one robotic sweep — so-called “palletisation”.

Fortunately, I had a little nest egg, enough for a few months.

Leaving the airport in Manila, tropical cyclone Carina was making landfall, the first fat drops of rain breaking on asphalt.

Local media would go on to report 39 fatalities, while video shared on TikTok showed barges being swept down the normally docile Pasig River that wends its way through Manila, barreling into bridges and disintegrating.

As the taxi made its way through the city, it was apparent how poor the Philippines was.

In 2019, I worked with a Turkish film crew who were making a documentary about a Manila neighbourhood for Turkey’s state streaming service. But I was still shocked at how severe it was. It reminded me of my first visit to Yemen in 2010, where I saw real, overwhelming poverty for the first time.

According to the Philippines Statistics Authority, in 2023, three million Filipino families lived below the poverty threshold — the equivalent of NZ$400 per month for a family of five. But that doesn’t capture how dire the problem is.

I arrived at the apartment complex, picked up the keys, caught the elevator up to the 26th floor, found my studio and headed inside. Then I went out to the balcony to take in the view.

Manila’s skyline represented the deep, historic abuse this nation has endured.

The distant towers of the financial district, Makati, wrapped in reflective glass, symbols of wealth extraction, neoliberalism and hyper-globalisation, rose up from the deprivation below.

The Philippines has been a colonial possession, in one way or another, for almost five centuries.

I spent a week in Manila before heading to the mountain town of Baguio. Then, up the western coast and across to Cagayan province at the northernmost point of the Philippines, a region at the forefront of the US’s campaign to maintain global primacy.

Poised for conflict

In Santa Ana, a tiny town at the northernmost point of Luzon in the Cagayan province, children with their little school bags scamper down a dusty lane passing around a worn soccer ball. There are stores selling jandals, swimming trunks and knock-off Nike or Adidas hats for the few tourists that visit this region. Chickens crow. Local fishermen, their craft moored, lay about in the shade.

A few hundred metres away at the Camilo Osias Naval Base, preparations are underway for upgrading the facility, just 400 kilometres from Taiwan, with a refurbished airstrip and expanded port facilities.

“It is good for our security. China is a very big country and has many weapons, many missiles,” said Angel Nogueras, who heads the local tourism agency in Santa Ana. “The Philippines must be able to defend itself.”

The US gained access to the site, along with three others, in April 2023, under an expanded Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA).

“These new locations will strengthen the interoperability of the US and Philippine Armed Forces and allow us to respond more seamlessly together,” the US Department of Defense said in a statement, “to address . . . shared challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, including natural and humanitarian disasters.”

Washington already had access to five other facilities under the original 2014 agreement, all of which have received significant upgrades over the years.

Officials in both the Philippines and the US emphasise the humanitarian and supposed economic benefits of EDCA, a message that has been drummed into Filipinos.

As Nogueras told me, the EDCA “might stimulate local companies, improve infrastructure and create jobs.”

However, given the spread and strategic positioning of the nine EDCA locations, it’s clear that the US is preparing the Philippines as the vanguard for conflict with China, along with other regional allies such as Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.

It’s part of a three-theatre approach (the others are in Eastern Europe and the Middle East) to maintain US global hegemony.

The US’s reliance on proxies came in response to its deeply unpopular Middle Eastern campaigns, particularly its illegal, unprovoked war on Iraq from 2003, which it justified by claiming Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction”. (It didn’t, as we all now know.)

Since the initial five EDCA sites were confirmed in 2016, ammunition storage facilities, fuel depots and command and control centres have been constructed. Runways were repaved and extended, and training facilities and hangars were erected.

The Philippines has hosted the US’s Typhon missile system in Luzon’s north since the staging of large military exercises in April 2024, which included French and Australian troops, and saw the South China Sea as its focus. Washington and Manila claimed the exercises, which included the mock sinking of an unnamed enemy vessel, didn’t target any country — a risible proposition.

The Typhon system can fire Tomahawk missiles with a 1,600-kilometre range. This gives the US a range of strike options over mainland China. Despite US claims that the system would be removed following the exercises, it remains in the Philippines, with Manila now exploring buying the system.

Similarly, NATO has claimed a role for itself in the Asia-Pacific. And at the end of September — as part of its ill-considered shift away from a supposedly independent foreign policy — New Zealand’s HMNZS Aotearoa conducted a joint patrol with Australian, Japanese, Philippine and US warships in the South China Sea.

The coming war looks very much like the settler-colonial, imperialist nations of the “collective west” against the rest. Having failed to learn the lessons of Ukraine, Washington’s antagonistic behaviour is certain to draw increasingly forceful responses from Beijing.

Recently, outgoing US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revealed the existence of a joint US-Philippine taskforce, named “Ayungin”, based at a “Command and Control Fusion Center” on the island of Palawan. The taskforce’s focus is on real-time intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

As the Philippines and Southeast Asia historian Joseph Scalice tweeted:

“Through taskforce Ayungin, the US is overseeing and directing confrontations with China. The collisions and brinkmanship in the [South China Sea] over the past several years originated in the Philippines and were instigated by Washington. They are poised for escalation.”

Indeed, as a June Reuters investigation found, concern about positive sentiment developing towards China saw the Pentagon go as far as spreading disinformation to Filipinos at the peak of the Covid pandemic “to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that China was supplying.”

A colonial possession

US control over the Philippines began in 1898, following the Spanish-American War, and the US’s rapid defeat of the Spanish Pacific fleet in Manila Bay. The Spaniards, who had colonised the islands in 1565, were facing an uprising led by the exiled revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo, to whom Washington had promised sovereignty.

The US, of course, reneged.

Under the Treaty of Paris, it purchased the Philippines (and Cuba) from Spain. Advocates for imperialism in the Senate perceived the Philippines as presenting an opportunity to establish a commercial and military footprint in Asia, which it would ruthlessly exploit in its later war on Vietnam.

In the resulting Philippine-American War — instigated by factions in the US to force the Senate’s hand in ratifying the Paris treaty, amid debate about whether Washington should engage in imperialism — the US military conducted a most vicious campaign. Burning crops and villages, constructing concentration camps, executing prisoners and even ordering troops to kill any Filipino older than 10 years old. Up to one million Filipinos were slaughtered between 1899 and 1902.

The message was clear: The Philippines belonged to Washington.

The opening battle of the war “indicated to the Filipinos that they were faced with a foe which gave no quarter and which was prepared to disregard the fundamental rules of warfare,” wrote the Filipino historian Luzviminda Francisco in her 1973 paper, The First Vietnam: The U.S.-Philippine War of 1899.

“The Americans were contemptuous of Filipinos generally and they had little respect for the fighting ability of the Philippine Army. They referred to the Filipinos as ‘niggers,’ ‘barbarians,’ and ‘savages,’ reflecting both the racist and imperialist attitudes of American society at large.”

The Americans would ultimately colonise the islands, despite a fierce Philippine guerilla campaign.

“One prize of victory,” wrote Francisco, “is that the winners get to write the history books. This was never so true as it has been about the Philippine-American War, and this fact has denied to Filipinos all but the merest scraps of distorted information about one of the most heroic struggles waged in modern times . . . against implacable odds and at terrible cost.”

In 1946, the US granted the Philippines independence. But Washington deployed the tools of neocolonialism to ensure its dominance, most notably through the Bell Trade Act of 1946, which granted “parity” to US citizens and companies — giving them the same rights as Filipinos to the Philippines’ natural resources.

A western-educated Filipino elite was fostered, and a colonial education system, expanding on the Spaniards’ educational infrastructure, was implemented. Filipinos were also conditioned to accept a uniform, artificial nationalism, at odds with the archipelago’s varied ethnolinguistic make-up.

This all imposed a potent psychic schism in Filipino understandings of self. The English language and American militarism would become associated with economic prosperity and development, while local languages would be reserved for the home, with Tagalog becoming the lingua franca.

Deeply embedded within this project was the notion that Filipinos were a product whose services were to be sold.

*

Shortly after Pemberton walked out of the Celzone Lodge to make his way back to the USS Peleliu, the motel’s clerk went to check Room 1.

In the bathroom, he discovered Laude’s body, partially covered with a blanket from the waist down. Black marks across her neck. Her head against the toilet bowl.

The clerk called the police.

Pemberton’s DNA was on one of three used condoms in Room 1, his fingerprints on a torn wrapper.

However, under the 1999 Philippines–United States Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), the US could maintain custody of service members accused of committing serious crimes.

It was the second time the US used the “agreement” to protect its soldiers. The first was the so-called Subic Bay Rape Case involving four servicemen eight years earlier.

*

Red-tagging: Silencing dissent in the Philippines

On January 10, 2023, workers’ rights activist Armand Dayoha and his partner Dyan Gumanao, a development worker, were returning by ferry to Cebu City on the island of Visayas. They had spent the Christmas and New Year break with Gumanao’s family on the island of Mindanao.

On berthing in Cebu, the couple waited for the crowds to clear, before disembarking. As they walked towards the exit, they heard their names being called. Four masked men in baseball caps and ripped jeans approached them.

“We were shoved into a car,” said Armand. “It just so happened that I was the first one being shoved inside, so I was able to resist for a minute. We were blindfolded, zip-tied and told to ‘shut up’.”

A random ferry passenger recorded it on video: Armand resists as the men attempt to force him into a silver van parked at an area of the port where civilian vehicles are not permitted. People can be heard crying “help them”, as port workers, security and passengers look on.

It was the beginning of a six-day ordeal for the couple.

“We were driven around Cebu. Because we are familiar with the roads and highways, we believe we were taken into the mountains in Cebu, then driven back,” said Armand. “[We were taken to] a ‘safe house’, loud music was blasting, and we were separated. I was kept outside, still blindfolded, while my partner was taken inside, which was what we believe was some kind of conference centre.”

The then 28-year-old Armand was made to wait hours before his interrogations began.

In the Philippines, the practice of enforced disappearance by the security services is widespread. Human rights and union organisers, women’s and Indigenous activists, land advocates and critical journalists are all at risk. The disappearances are often preceded by a campaign of “red-tagging”, where people are publicly labelled as communist militants and terrorists, posters bearing their photographs are hung up in communities, and they become the targets of media campaigns.

The goal is to silence dissent and preserve the economic-military-political nexus that governs the Philippines.

Red-tagging has been around for decades but was put on steroids by former president Rodrigo Duterte, who created the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) — now maintained by the US-backed incumbent, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

The establishment of Duterte’s taskforce coincided with a sharpening campaign of red-tagging, harassment, threats and murders. Duterte simultaneously launched an ultra-violent “war on drugs” in which thousands of Filipinos were summarily executed, a flagrant example of a class war waged against the country’s poorest and most vulnerable.

According to the Global Freedom of Expression initiative at Columbia University, in 2018, three human rights defenders and a city councillor were red-tagged and murdered. Soon after, Indigenous rights activist Honey Mae Suazo disappeared. The next year, in 2020, a land rights activist, a human rights lawyer and a political “peace” consultant were shot dead by an unknown assailant.

Between 2016 and 2022, 23 journalists were red-tagged and murdered. Following an unlawful police raid on Tumandok Indigenous leaders in December 2020, a key witness, Julie Catamin, was shot dead.

The list goes on.

Militarisation and the price of rice

I met Armand in the office of the Visayas Institute for Human Development Advocacy (VIHDA) in Cebu City.

I’d spent a week in Cagayan Province (Aparri, Camalaniugan, Santa Ana, Tuguegarao) gauging public opinion about increasing militarisation in the Philippines. While it’s true that many Filipinos supported the US, many more were far more concerned with everyday problems: low wages, school and medical bills, the price of rice, corruption.

“Yesterday, I realised that I have been working for eight years, and I have nothing,” said Jon Jon, a 33-year-old welder. “I recently had to ask my father for rice. I don’t want to be dependent.”

There was also noticeable concern about militarisation.

A retired teacher, Arturo (62), in Tuguegarao, told me: “In the event of war, these [EDCA] bases will be the first things to go boom. Many Filipinos do not support this. But what can we do? These are political decisions.”

Often, people were unaware that the US military was ramping up its presence. Sitting at her rudimentary food stall in Lal-lo, Maria (37) said: “I have no opinion on this matter. I don’t follow the news.”

I travelled back to Manila and went out to talk to scavengers.

Glass towers shimmered above, all light and glistening glass, while wraiths sifted through the detritus below: rubbish bags, bins of food scraps, reeking dumpsters.

“I’m hungry,” said Mary, rail-thin, who looked to be in her 50s (she didn’t know her real age).

She’d been out gathering cardboard, searching behind restaurants and other businesses. Flattening it out. Running it back down an alley. Stacking it up over the day, next to the piece of tarpaulin extended over the curb where she lays her head.

A middleman will collect her haul. She may get 100 pesos for the cardboard, for her day of work.

“Please help me,” she said. “I have no money.”

Nearby, Jose (35) and his wife, barefoot and toothless, sort through rubbish bags. Cars and jeepneys roar past, emitting their clouds of exhaust. She is breastfeeding their two-month-old baby. As with Mary, a tarpaulin is the roof over their heads and cardboard their bed.

Jose has been scavenging since the beginning of the Covid epidemic, unable to find labouring work.

“I scavenge bottles, plastic. It’s 10 pesos for one kg. I can make 150 pesos a day,” he said. “There is no support for us. No one cares.”

No one really knows how many scavengers eke out an existence in Manila, let alone nationally. Yet, many industries are dependent on recycled raw materials.

“Formalization has to be pursued among the informal workers and settlers whose subsistence depends on local waste management operations,” a 2021 Philippine Institute for Development Studies discussion paper argued. “These scavengers and waste pickers could be utilized as partners in . . . recycling activities.”

Most everything can be reused. Paper. Glass. Plastic. Metals. Food.

Known locally as “pagpag”, scavengers gather scraps — chicken, fish, pork — from dumpsters. They sell it to street vendors who clean and refry it. Pagpag is a daily lifeline for the nation’s poor.

‘We fight for survival every day. We don’t need missiles’

I caught the ferry, a 23-hour trip, to Cebu City on one of the Visayas islands.

In the afternoon heat, the vessel slid through Manila Bay and then swung south a few hours later. The sunset was such that it was hard to differentiate sea from sky. A congregated dusk. Night overtook day. Constellations milled above.

I met Eduard (36), an engineer on cargo ships. He explained a little about shipping routes and the sheer volume of goods that crisscrossed the oceans. I asked him what he thought about militarisation in the Philippines.

“We are very close to America. And as Filipinos, we always like to smile. But, if we have a war with China, then [whistles],” he said. “America is a very wise man. He knows to push others into war first.”

After reaching Cebu, I travelled to the neighbouring Mactan Island, past slums and gaudy development projects, and checked in to my accommodation near another of the EDCA sites — the Mactan–Benito Ebuen Air Base in Lapu-Lapu City, where the US has constructed a massive fuel storage facility.

After swimming at a beach one afternoon, I met Michael. He hustled to make a living, driving a tricycle or taking tourists out on his bangka and fishing to feed his family. If he’s lucky, he might make 1,000 pesos (NZ$28) in a day. A quarter of that will go on fuel. With his second child due, the 46-year-old wonders how he’ll make ends meet.

“We Filipinos fight for survival every day. We don’t need missiles,” he said. “They [US] make trouble in every country, like they are doing with China now. The soldiers get drunk and cause quarrels. This is not viewed kindly here.”

I spent the next few days exploring the area around the base and the Mactan Economic Processing Zone (MEPZ), where tens of thousands of workers are employed, producing clothing, car parts, semiconductors, and jewellery. Foreign companies receive significant incentives to invest in such zones — there are close to 400 in the Philippines — not least because the minimum daily wage on Visayas is 450 pesos (NZ$12).

The MEPZ, with its factories clustered together, is located at the northern and southern ends of the air base. The public is not permitted entry.

Building a massive military fuel storage facility in such a location struck me as akin to the US using these workers, and the urban poor who are crammed into the area, as human shields.

It’s yet another illustration of the symbiosis between militarism and resource extraction.

‘Filipinos are the very product that is being sold’

“We call it ‘the fortress’,” said Armand. We’re at the Visayas Institute for Human Development Advocacy. There’s Indigenous art on the walls, books about Mao, Supreme Court rulings, and volumes from conferences against the IMF and World Bank.

“It is not possible for us [workers’ rights activists] to enter the MEPZ.”

He talks about the various methods international companies employ to maximise profits. For example, outsourcing to human resources firms that hire workers on six-month contracts, then release them to avoid moving them to a regular contract.

“Essentially, the workers are not hired by the companies, who don’t want to pay [after six months] their social security benefits,” said Armand. “With that contractor status, they are prone to being overworked, paid less than regular employees, but their tasks are virtually the same.”

There are also the so-called ghost hours, where workers can’t meet daily production quotas and work unpaid overtime rather than risk incurring the ire of their managers. The missing wages and safety standard breaches. The mass layoffs and worker deaths. An unspoken rule that workers will not join unions.

And there is the exploitation of the country’s five-year tax holiday for foreign investors.

“Coca-Cola shifts franchise owners every five years [to maintain its tax-free status],” said Armand, who helped organise a protest against the company in Cebu. “So, when the bosses from the HQ were here, that’s when the workers did a camp-out — and were violently dispersed.”

The government’s anti-communist task force (the NTF-ELCAC) keeps a close eye on communities reliant on the special economic zones to ensure that progressive voices are quickly suppressed. Red-tagging is a key tool.

“They are applying the tools from the ‘war on terror’ in the Philippines. If you read the Anti-Terror Act of 2020, there is no distinction between an armed combatant and somebody who is just holding a placard,” Armand said.

“The Philippines is very rich in natural resources: gold, nickel, copper and other essential minerals. Because of that, foreign companies invade with extractive practices. We have many plantations owned by transnational companies — pineapple, banana plantations.”

Land reform is a flashpoint. Peasants, who work the land for the titleholders, seek fairer conditions and a path to ownership (70 percent of farmers don’t own the land they tend). Similarly, Indigenous communities on mineralised land are in constant threat of forced eviction.

Sites like the Mactan Economic Processing Zone, where workers both process national wealth and represent it, are a function of the colonial education system.

“The Philippines doesn’t have an industry for processing raw materials because that’s always been extracted by foreign companies. Instead of producing tangible products, what we produce are human resources,” said Armand.

“We, as Filipinos, are the very product that is being sold. This is embedded in our education: we have a curriculum that is geared towards producing students who are employable.”

That means getting on the line to manufacture clothes, car parts and components for the IT sector. Or going abroad to earn remittances.

As Adrianne Francisco wrote in her 2015 dissertation exploring early colonial education in the Philippines:

In your primers you read about coconuts, bamboo, and hemp and the numerous products that can be made out of them. These selections complement your other classwork. Starting in Grade I, all Filipino boys and girls learn how to make handicrafts, garden, cook, or sew. Of the five hours you spend in school each day, you devote the most time to making things with your hands (one hour and forty minutes) and to learning English (one hour). That you go to school to weave hats and baskets puzzles your parents, who think going to school means burrowing in books. However, the Americans believe that a hardy work ethic is important, and that one way for young Filipinos to learn this ethic is by making boxes, fans, and small baskets.

‘Worse than being found dead, is not being found at all’

Armand and his partner were released after six days of being blindfolded, zip-tied and repeatedly interrogated. They were dropped outside a resort and instructed to take a selfie and tell friends and family that they had absconded to work on their relationship. They were also forced to sign documents declaring that they had left the communist insurgency and were swearing allegiance to the government.

The video of their abduction had put their captors in an uncomfortable situation.

“While we were in captivity, our families and colleagues were going from one police station to another,” he said. “All of [the police] were saying maybe we were not abducted but had just eloped — the exact same narrative the abductors presented.”

One of his colleagues, Vicente Pepito, showed me a list of names of abductees under the current Marcos Jr administration. He pointed to asterisks: “Those are the ones who’ve been killed.”

A few days after I visited the VIHDA office, two young peasant organisers in Cagayan disappeared.

“Worse than being found dead,” Armand said, “is not being found at all.”

As I prepared to leave the office, Vicente gifted me a hand-rendered drawing of a clenched, blood-red fist. Armand gave me a colouring book for children titled Lumad. It’s part of a project that aims to engage youth with Mindanao Indigenous culture: clothing and jewellery, culture and lore, tools and art.

*

It took only a few days for the Philippine National Police (PNP) and US Navy investigators to identify Pemberton, who was onboard the USS Peleliu.

Protesters gathered, demanding the scrapping of the VFA and calling for Filipino sovereignty.

The Philippines, which had jurisdiction, wanted the US to hand Pemberton over. The US retained custody and two weeks later transported the marine by helicopter to the Joint United States Military Advisory Group inside the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ headquarters at Camp Aguinaldo in Metro Manila.

An autopsy revealed that Jennifer died of “asphyxia due to drowning”. Pemberton had beaten, likely used a chokehold learned in the army, and then finished her off in the toilet bowl.

He would base his defence on the argument that he became enraged when he discovered that Jennifer had male genitalia. He claimed that he had felt like a victim of sexual violence.

*

Preserving Indigenous spaces

Her hair is swept back, with hints of grey. She’s dressed in red, legs folded. Holding a rose. Her eyes are in a state of trance. Roots, branches and trees stem from her body.

The painting, entitled The Philomene, by artist Elizabeth Aquino (21), was on display last August as part of the Sagwan (meaning paddle) exhibition in the mountaintop city of Baguio, in Luzon’s Cordillera region.

The exhibition, to give artists the space to explore crucial questions of identity, was held at the Tam-Awan Village high above central Baguio — ravines running through mountainsides, swaying pine and bamboo trees, and strawberry patches layered into the terrain.

“This exhibition seeks not only to display art but to spark a conversation on sustaining culture in a globalised context,” said Aquino. “Each piece is crafted to reflect the nuances of cultural identity and its continuous dialogue with the forces of globalisation.”

The village, established in the late 1990s, is a showcase of local Ifugao culture. Paths run through the rainforest, linking a series of salvaged Cordilleran huts, each with a different function. One hut, constructed in 1937, is referred to as a “fertility hut”, where a couple would stay for a month if they’d been unable to conceive a child within a year.

“Many Filipinos cannot afford to travel to the [Indigenous] villages,” said one staff member, Nicky. “Here they can come and learn a little about our heritage.”

In one hut, a portrait of the region’s famous 100-year-old tattoo artist, Whang Od, sits beside another of a man in traditional clothes, his face wrinkled, a spear in one hand and a smartphone in the other, a vape between his lips.

“Indigenous movements in contemporary Philippines . . . play essential roles in preserving and revitalising Indigenous cultures, languages and tradition amidst increasing global uniformity,” said Aquino.

“They advocate for the rights and recognition of Indigenous peoples, including land rights, self-determination and social justice. By sharing their unique perspectives and practices, they enrich global cultural diversity and contribute to discussions on identity and heritage.”

Preserving Indigenous spaces in this environment is of critical importance.

“Art helps in decolonisation by allowing people to express their own culture and history, which was often suppressed by colonial powers,” said Aquino. “For Filipinos, art can reclaim and celebrate their heritage, challenge colonial influences and shape a future true to their identity.”

In another room, paintings by five-year-old Ayonna Cawang are on display. They have titles such as “Ayona and Marvin Playing Scooter” and “Television and Happy Birthday Man.”

There are an estimated 17 million Indigenous people in the Philippines, spread across more than 100 ethnolinguistic groups, mostly in Cordillera and the southern island of Mindanao.

With their isolated communities and lands potentially atop vast mineral wealth (gold, nickel, chromite), Indigenous peoples represent a hurdle to the forces of capital.

‘The plunder of Indigenous lands is bound to worsen’

At the start of 2023, President Marcos Jr issued Executive Order No.18, instructing government departments to speed up the issuing of licenses for mining and energy projects.

“Following the lifting of the moratorium on new mining agreements and of the ban on open pit mining in 2021, the Marcos administration is aggressively pursuing the revitalization of the mining industry and opening the country up to more foreign mining investments,” wrote the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs in its 2024 Philippines report.

“It will mean, however, that the plunder and destruction of Indigenous lands and resources is bound to worsen.”

According to a 2023 Global Witness report, at least 281 Indigenous rights and environmental defenders were killed in the Philippines between 2012 and 2022. Global Witness was unable to directly link the killings to agribusiness or mining operators.

Red-tagging is a key weapon. For example, in a February 2023 Facebook post, the Police Community Affairs and Development Group labelled Indigenous Peoples rights defenders and activists “communist terrorist group surrenderees”, according to Amnesty International.

“We say the Philippines is a neo-colony,” said Jaime Paglinawan (64), a rights defender of more than 40 years and an advocate for national industrialisation. The Philippines, he said, is controlled by the US and foreign capital. “They control our economy, they control our politics, they control our military and also our culture.”

Paglinawan was red-tagged in a 2019 Facebook post, where he was accused of being “the root cause of violence in our society”. He, along with three other rights defenders, received death threats via text message and had posters denouncing them as terrorists hung up in communities in Cebu City, where I met him.

The Department of Justice Task Force on Anti-Terrorism (DOJ-TAFT) and the Central Command of the Armed Forces of the Philippines accused him of “terrorist financing”.

“Many different types of oppression are implemented for the interests of our foreign ‘partners’. The US imperialists and other imperialist countries . . . collaborate with big landlords so that our lands, our natural resources, our haciendas, serve their interests,” said Paglinawan.

“When you run for president, you need six billion pesos. So where do you get the money? You get it from business, from big landlords, foreign and local.”

*

Jennifer was laid to rest at an Olongapo cemetery on October 24, 2014.

Local media reported that her relatives became overwhelmed with grief while sprinkling holy water on her coffin.

Pemberton, still aboard the USS Peleliu, ignored a subpoena delivered to the US Embassy in Manila, failing to show up for a preliminary hearing with Olongapo prosecutors three days before Jennifer’s burial.

Over the ensuing months, Pemberton’s lawyers dragged out the process by filing numerous petitions and motions.

Pemberton did not enter a plea at his arraignment in February 2015 and was reportedly driven straight back to his detention facility by US officials.

The trial began on March 23, 2015. Media were barred from the proceedings.

Five months later, Pemberton took the witness stand, and admitted to choking Jennifer. He claimed that he had dragged her to the bathroom in an attempt to revive her with water.

Pemberton was found guilty of homicide, not the higher charge of murder, on December 1, 2015, and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Two weeks later, his lawyers requested he be granted bail.

He would remain in an air-conditioned, private cell at Camp Aguinaldo (the US never relinquished custody) until his 2020 pardon by Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, following a period of apparent legal and diplomatic chicanery.

On September 13, 2020, diplomatic staff accompanied him to a waiting military plane which whisked him back to the US.

He had served just over five years of his sentence.

*

Life at the cemetery: ‘The dead can’t hurt us’

The engraver chisels away at a headstone. Etching in the basic details of a life. A little bit of ornamentation, a crucifix and blossom, and he’s done.

The engraver, Santy (26), lives in Manila North Cemetery, which houses around a million of the departed, including former presidents, movie stars and literary icons. It also provides shelter for thousands of the poor in one of the world’s most notoriously overcrowded cities.

Death is their livelihood.

“This one is 600 pesos,” he told me. “I learned to do this by watching others while growing up.”

Like the others who call the cemetery home, he sleeps on top of a tomb, blankets spread, a length of cloth strung up for privacy. A few possessions.

“We survive day by day,” said Santy. “I was born here. I’ll die here.”

I’d caught the ferry back to Manila a few days earlier. My cabin roommate for 23 hours was Louis from the Netherlands.

His hair was slicked back into a ponytail, belly bloated. Camo cargo shorts and a basketball singlet. There were a noticeable number of scabs on his arms and legs. Within a few minutes, he was showing me how he could send money to his “girlfriends” using the local GCash mobile wallet.

I excused myself to go to the cafeteria where lunch was being served, and he came along. The waiter asked for our tickets and if we were together.

“We are, but not like that,” said Louis, laughing. “We’re together, but not like lovers.”

We were seated at a table with three young Filipino men. A waiter served our food, telling one of the men that he would bring his meal shortly. “I wonder why you haven’t been served yet,” said Louis. “You must have been a bad boy.”

I finished my food, left and asked the ferry staff to change my cabin.

After berthing, I made my way to Chinatown. Then, to the cemetery where the Turkish film crew I worked for had shot a documentary five years earlier. It was my final day in the country.

At the cemetery, children with aged badminton rackets were hitting a shuttlecock over an imaginary net. One little girl moonwalked across the narrow lanes hemmed in by tombs. Women sat with flowers and candles for sale.

With space at a premium, the authorities long ago took to stacking the tombs on top of each other: high-rises for the dead. Thousands and thousands of cadavers crammed together, separated by a few inches of concrete. Families usually lease these tombs for five-year periods. If they can’t continue paying, the tomb will be cracked open, and the remains exhumed.

At her makeshift stall, Jade (33) says that few of the people raised here will escape a life of poverty.

“Life is really hard here, but we just know it’s better to be happy, work hard and survive,” she said.

“I haven’t once seen a ghost in my 33 years living here. The dead can’t touch us — they are at rest. It is the living who we should fear.”

A few months later, 800 sacks of human remains were exhumed from another Manila cemetery. Local media published photos of the unclaimed remains.

Filthy bags, tied off at the top. Numbered. Stacked amid the tombs.