Subic Bay revisited

Senator Richard Gordon, former chairman of the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority, which now administers the port, said officials from around Europe and Asia had visited to study his model of base conversion, including the leaders of Panama, Vietnam and Lithuania and representatives from Guam and Okinawa, in Japan.

In an interview, Mr. Gordon seemed as astonished as anyone at his success; he is the grandson of an American serviceman and had been one of the foremost lobbyists for retention of the bases, arguing that few preparations had been made for their conversion.

Despite lobbying by him and by former President Corazon C. Aquino, the Philippine Senate, fired by a wave of nationalism, voted in 1991 not to extend the lease of the bases. It ended an American military presence in the Philippines that began with the withdrawal of the Spanish in 1898.

When the American flag was lowered at Subic on Nov. 24, 1992, predictions of economic ruin were almost universal. The former American Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, predicted that closing the bases would be ”a real tragedy for the Philippines.”

Together, the bases were the nation’s second-largest employer, after the Government itself, directly employing more than 68,000 Filipinos and contributing about $28 million a day to the local economy.

When they pulled out of Subic, the Americans left behind $8 billion in infrastructure, but took with them almost everything portable, including dozens of bowling lanes, the communications system and, most important, the floating dry docks that could have boosted Subic’s hopes to be a ship repair center for the region.

”A lot of people were apprehensive,” said Ferdinand Roaquin, a local resident who used to work in Mr. Gordon’s office. ”We grew up with the Americans. My mother was a little bit tear-jerk when they left.”

Predictions of disaster seemed at first to be confirmed when looters stripped the Clark base of everything from light fixtures to toilet bowls when the Americans abandoned it in 1991 after it was buried in volcanic ash by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo.

But at Subic, Mr. Gordon enlisted 8,000 unpaid volunteers to guard the empty base and maintain its buildings, power plant and storage tanks until new tenants could be attracted.

With the region’s economy growing then, it proved surprisingly easy to attract manufacturing and investment. Four years later, employment has actually risen, Mr. Gordon said, with 55,000 people working in the Subic port alone, mostly in foreign-operated factories.

Some of those are former workers on the American base. Some other craftsmen on the base found similar work in Guam or elsewhere overseas, many in Australia. But many – like the prostitutes in the now-darkened red-light district of the neighboring town of Olongapo – dispersed throughout the Philippines in search of other work.

Today more than 200 companies have invested $1.6 billion in Subic, and 150 companies have put $257 million into Clark, according to official figures.

At Subic, Japanese and Taiwanese industrial parks manufacture a variety of products, from computer motherboards to armored personnel carriers. Their total exports have risen every year, to $263 million in the first 10 months of this year, Mr. Gordon said.

In its biggest coup, Subic has become the regional hub for Federal Express, which has taken over former military warehouses and now makes an average of 67 landings a night on a newly reinforced runway, ferrying everything from Timex watches to fresh tuna around Asia.

The base has also developed a tourist industry that is attracting planeloads of visitors on charters from Hong Kong and Taiwan to take advantage of its beach front and woodlands as well as the tennis courts, stables, skeet range and yacht club left behind by the Navy.

Nowhere does the Philippines look as shipshape as on this former naval base, where the lawns are as trim, the grounds as clean and the traffic as orderly as they were under military command.

A secret of Mr. Gordon’s success seems to be the almost military discipline he has imposed. Security guards salute when he approaches and stand at attention to recite, at his command, a 12-point pledge of professionalism.

”It is the Lee Kuan Yew model,” Randy David, a leading sociologist, said, comparing Mr. Gordon’s methods to those of the autocratic leader of Singapore. ”In fact, we call him jokingly Dick Kuan Yew, and he loves it.

It is rumored that Senator Gordon has plans to run for president on 2010.