The first lesson was driven home to me by a fellow from Colombia I met at a recent conference who had been following events here. But you know, we still are luckier than you Filipinos. The great German sociologist Max Weber once defined the state as the institution that has a legitimate monopoly over the use of force. In the Philippines, on the other hand, organized crime external to the government apparatus has been rare. Of course, small-time crooks and gangsters have always existed outside officialdom.
Syndicates are, however, another thing.
The loss of competitive politics at the national, regional, and local levels led to the erosion of the already inadequate checks that the government machinery posed to regional and local political clans bent on expanding their access to the social surplus via criminal methods. Marcos-linked political clans were able to bring to a new level the provincial and in some cases the regional the organization and control of activities like jueteng, prostitution, and drugs. With the traditional elite s maintaining its tight control over land and the private sector, the state became the choice arena for entrepreneurship by restive and ambitious elements from the more modest classes. Sindicatos flourished not only in the traditional cesspools of corruption like the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Department of Public Works and Highways but emerged as well in other agencies such as those on top of agrarian reform, energy, education, and natural resources. The economic crisis that brought economic activity to a virtual standstill from 1983 to 1993 made government position even more attractive as a site of private capital accumulation despite the personal probity of the top people in government like Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos.