Manila Tries to Shed Its Image as Sin City

Police have dubbed it Operation Sampaguita after the Philippines’ fragrant national flower, which is sold by bunches each night to foreigners doing business with the thousands of women of the evening in Manila’s jammed, honky-tonk district of Ermita.

The purpose of the two-week-long police operation is to shut down the district forever--flowers, women, bars and all--an unprecedented effort to destroy Manila’s international image as the “sin capital” of the Orient.

Every night since the beginning of Holy Week, a crusading police general, backed strongly by the Roman Catholic Church and President Corazon Aquino, has, for the first time in memory, ordered raids through a notorious three-block stretch of go-go establishments, nude bars and brothels known as “The Strip.”

Every night, police headquarters fills with as many as 1,000 frightened and weeping young women in skimpy bikinis, miniskirts or evening gowns, while their employers count their growing losses.

Stung by the determined attempt to shut down one of Asia’s oldest continuously operating red-light districts, the bar owners--most of them foreigners who operate through their Filipina wives--have begun to fight back. In recent meetings, the owners decided to launch a publicity campaign asserting that Gen. Alfredo Lim of the national police is destroying tourism in the already economically battered Philippines.

Threaten to Relocate

Most bar owners also assert that they have been paying off the police for decades for the freedom to operate unharassed. If the raids continue, they warn, they will relocate, cutting off millions of pesos they say they contribute annually to Manila’s economy and taking with them tens of thousands of tourists who they say are drawn here from Europe, Australia and America primarily by Manila’s flesh trade.

Lim’s answer to such threats: “If they all pack their bags and go, good riddance. We want family-oriented tourists--not these people who are coming here merely to have sex with our women. . . . It leaves a poor taste in your mouth if your country is known for prostitution.”

Lim also has the powerful public backing of the country’s Roman Catholic prelate, Cardinal Jaime Sin, and of President Aquino, who has earned an international reputation for her often-expressed moral principles and religious devotion.

With such support, political analysts speculate that it is only a matter of time before the long-tolerated prostitution zone here, which dates to the end of World War II, becomes just a memory.

“It is the end of an era,” said one madam as she sat beside the door to one of the area’s oldest brothels after a recent raid. “I’ve already told all my girls to go home and not come back. We’re just a piano bar now. . . .

“It’s the girls I feel sorry for. What will they do now? Thousands of girls unemployed, and there are no jobs for them anywhere.”

That type of reasoning kept the government from cracking down on the Ermita district earlier in Aquino’s two-year presidency. Under her predecessor, Ferdinand E. Marcos, the Ermita district grew to include hundreds of brothels and clubs and more than 5,000 licensed “bar hostesses,” “hospitality girls,” “dancers” and “entertainers.”

Lim’s critics argue that a crackdown on the red-light district will be counterproductive if the government fails to offer alternative employment for the women, most of whom are the principal wage-earners in large families. Lim agrees on the need for jobs, but, in a letter to Mayor Gemiliano Lopez proposing such a crackdown nearly two years ago, he insisted on the need “to preserve our heritage of decency and morality and put back the Filipina on her sacred pedestal of respect and dignity.”

As for those he termed “hard-core prostitutes who can do nothing else,” Lim said in his letter, “we’ll just send them all to Olongapo and Angeles City”--the cities where two large American military bases are located.

Since Lim’s letter to Mayor Lopez, little happened until last month, when reporters asked the mayor why prostitution continued to flourish in Ermita so long after Aquino came to power.

“Mayor Mel Lopez Hits Police Chief’s Inadequacies in Cleaning Up the Tourist Belt,” a morning newspaper headlined the mayor’s reply. The mayor also hinted that police inefficiency and longtime corruption were holding the police chief back.

“I can’t take that lying down because my silence might be construed to be an admission of laxity and inefficiency,” Lim said.

Rash of Bad Publicity

At the same time, Lim noted, there was a rash of newspaper, magazine and television exposes of The Strip in Europe and Australia, “depicting Manila as the . . . sin city of the Orient and pinpointing the tourist belt area as the breeding ground for prostitution.”

Finally, at a meeting of the Manila City Council, the city treasurer testified that all The Strip’s clubs combined contributed just $100,000 a year to the city in license fees, and the city health director said that at least 35% of the women employed there are infected with venereal diseases.

“That was the bombshell,” Lim said. “ ‘There is now cause for alarm,’ I said. We could not allow these girls to roam around having these contagious diseases.”

Conceding that his department lacks the resources to make proper prostitution arrests, Lim ordered the series of raids, filling scores of jeeps with women from the bars every night and occasionally arresting bystanders, waitresses, flower vendors and even the wives of legitimate tourists. Charges of such police abuses during the raids have proliferated.

Undaunted, however, Lim has sent a formal notice to the mayor’s office, recommending permanent closure of each bar found to have an unlicensed employee or one infected with a sexually transmittable disease. The list now exceeds 50 establishments and is growing nightly.

“It is now up to the mayor to do something,” Lim said.

Asked what he will do if the mayor, who has been vacationing in the United States since before the raids began, refuses to close the bars, Lim said: “We will keep raiding and raiding and raiding.

“Either they kick me out (of office) or close their bars. . . ,” Lim said. “It’s now a battle of will between the bar owners and the police.”

Such talk has angered many of the owners, who unanimously assert that Lim’s men are still taking bribes, even now, in spite of the raids.

Police ‘Like Vampires’

“They’re like vampires, trying to squeeze the last little bit of blood they can before their victim dies,” one nightclub manager in Ermita said of two police officers. He said they visited him two hours after a recent raid and demanded $350 a week to exempt his bar from the crackdown.

“You ask me, mate,” declared an Australian club owner, “Lim’s just trying to make points with God before he dies. What a hypocrite.”