GENERAL SANTOS CITY, Philippines ? Welcome to the Tuna Capital of the Philippines. This hot, sticky, dusty and bustling city of a half-million people in southern Mindanao island, in the province of South Cotabato, also is the childhood home of Manny Pacquiao. It is the place where the most famous boxer in the world — arguably, the world’s most famous athlete — grew up in extreme poverty as a youngster.
That heritage gives Pacquiao, 31, a link to the daily destitute people who arrive at his gated home and compound in the local barangay (neighborhood) of Lagao, seeking handouts from a sports hero whose worth is estimated at upwards of $50 million.
The conflict between his vast wealth and the third-world conditions that plague many of his countrymen in the Philippines also is what has driven Pacquiao, the reigning pound-for-pound king, from the boxing ring into the political arena for a second time in three years.
In 2007, Pacquiao failed to win a seat in the House of Representatives representing South Cotabato. Now he is running for Congress representing the Sarangani province on the southern shores of Mindanao, 90 miles south of his mini-empire of homes, stores and nightclubs he has built here in General Santos City.
Why Sarangani? It is the birthplace of his wife, Jinky, the mother of his four children. Pacquiao also spent a portion of his impoverished childhood in the Sarangani village of Kiamba trying to support his mother and five younger siblings as they scratched out an existence as the poorest of the poor.
To convince locals that he is an actual resident and to appease election officials who might have questioned his residency, Pacquiao built a multi-million dollar (in Philippine pesos) home in Sarangani (pop. 411,713).
********** We’re here in southern Mindanao to follow Pacquiao and travel with his campaign convoy in the final days before the May 10 national elections in the Philippines, and it’s already proved daunting.
Pacquiao, the candidate and hopeful public servant, is committed to bringing fresh water, jobs, tuna boats for the fishermen and improved living conditions to his people.
“PACMAN: Clean And Affordable Water” one campaign poster pledges.
Pacman the local superstar operates on his own schedule.
His campaign trips, convoys that may travel several hundred miles a day through the steamy villages and towns dotting Sarangani, are huge affairs with vast security surrounding Pacquiao’s bulletproof Chevy Tahoe. Political violence and corruption are omnipresent in the Philippines’ democratic elections, and armed convoys are a necessity even for a national sporting treasure.
But nothing begins until Pacman awakens. And that is anyone’s guess.
“Sir Manny” as his staff calls him, maintains a nocturnal schedule: He goes to bed at dawn and may sleep well past noon. Then he will quickly summon the campaign team to fire up the convoy. The schedules change minute-by-minute, at Manny’s whim.
Once the day’s campaigning is over, Pacman the celebrity then enjoys rounds of billiards at the General Santos City nightclub he owns, Club JMix, high-stakes games that often extend into the wee hours of the morning.
A Wednesday stop by Pacquiao’s Gensan compound to confirm his schedule proved frustrating. After negotiating through the poor lined up outside and armed guards protecting the huge gate to his home, a visit with his young secretary produced a shrug.
“Sir Manny knows you are here. But I cannot tell you when they will leave,” says Chris, the secretary, who smiled and apologized profusely
She promised to call when the convoy would depart. Hours later, as darkness settled over General Santos, a call finally came.
“Sir Manny did not campaign today. He is leaving General Santos tonight for Sarangani, and you can join him if you’d like.”
That is not a good idea.
Journalists, particularly foreigners, are easy targets for violence and kidnappings in a region where clan-on-clan warfare rules and Muslim separatist groups — specifically, the MILF (Muslim Islamic Liberation Front), flex local muscle and try to convince the mostly Roman Catholic populace to follow them out of poverty.
Filipinos are shamed by the horrific “Maguindanao Massacre” last November 23 on this island, a mass murder that claimed the lives of 57 unarmed civilians, some of them female family members of a candidate challenging the powerful Muslim political clan, the Ampatuan family.
The convoy was driving through a rural banana grove to file vice-governor election paperwork for Buluan vice-mayor Esmael Mangudadatu when reports say at least 100 gunmen ambushed the group. Herded to what was clearly a prepared death site, 57 people — 27 of them Philippine journalists — were raped, gunned down or had their throats slashed by machetes. The bodies, some reportedly destroyed by chainsaws, were dumped into a mass grave and discovered shortly thereafter.
The main suspect: an Ampatuan family member.
This atrocity hangs like the heavy, humid air over all of Mindanao. Twelve of the journalists are buried together, in a makeshift memorial site, at the Forest Lake cemetery in General Santos City.
The journalists’ bodies lay at rest (right) five minutes from Pacquiao’s main compound.
To that end, my advisor, well-known Manila-based sports journalist Chino Trinidad, warns me not to venture to Sarangani at night. “Too dangerous. There is no hotel there,” he said, which leaves me and my capable driver and bodyguard, Rudy Cabral, at great risk.
Trinidad’s advice is to stay within the Pacquiao convoy at all times; if we left this evening to follow him alone on the road to Sarangani, we would be subject to multiple checkpoints along the dark highway — Philippine military, the MILF, perhaps even a stop from another Muslim splinter group.
We opt instead to try again on Thursday, to join up with Pacquiao’s powerful boxing promoter, Bob Arum, after he arrives in General Santos to make his heavily guarded trek to Sarangani.
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Just one day in General Santos City, the fourth largest city in Mindanao, and you can see the Pacman’s presence everywhere in this place where the occasional modern office building appears completely alien surrounded by open sewers, crumbling edifices and families huddled beneath tarp roofs held up by scraps of wood. Children bathe in open manholes. A local establishment offers cockfighting for sport and gambling.
Pacquiao’s face is everywhere — on billboards, juice bottles, a large advertisement for a motorcycle company.
The area is plagued by “brownouts” — daily interruptions in power that shuts off all electricity day and night. Mindanao’s overstressed power grid relies heavily on hydro-electric power, which is drained because of dry conditions in the region.
Pacquiao’s properties are blessed with powerful generators to guard against brownouts. But there is no doubt he feels the suffering of his people.
“We were so poor I tried to sleep outside in a cardboard box when I was 10 years old,” Pacquaio has explained. “And some days, I didn’t eat. I feel what the people feel right now because I have been there. We need a leader who has experienced this and who will never forget it.”
Like many athletes who pursue political seats, Pacquiao appears to be in the fight of his life. Pundits don’t question his sincerity; they doubt his qualifications. A boxer who left school at 13 and passed a high school equivalency exam in 2007 is running against a powerful political foe, Roy Chiongbian, 61, a local icon seeking to succeed his older brother Erwin who is stepping down due to term limits.
While Pacquiao may have claimed seven world boxing titles and recently pocketed $12 million when he retained his WBO welterweight crown against Joshua Clottey in March, he’s now the underdog against Chiongbian, whose entrenched family runs the local port and built a sturdy paved highway linking the seven provincial towns here.
Chiongbian’s mother is a former governor; his nephew is the current vice governor. He hopes his political savvy will trump Pacquiao’s celebrity.
“If a person looks at him as a world boxing champion, then I don’t have any problem,” Chiongbian told The Associated Press. “But if a person looks at him as a politician, then I do have a problem.”
And so the campaign continues. In these final days (the election is next Monday, May 10), it’s up to the people whether they view Manny Pacquiao as their political savior or their beloved boxing champion. We are here, to watch the high political drama unfold.
