Part Five of Book II: A People Caught in Its Own Dung

By Ado Paglinawan

G eronimo Velasco died of heart attack in San Francisco, California, last July 2007 at the age of 80.

This was almost twenty-one years after the Philippines received the final approval from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to turn on the fully completed nuclear power plant in Bataan, which was to provide 16% of the energy needed at that time in the island of Luzon, including Metropolitan Manila the power-hungry capital of the Philippines.

Velasco was the father of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, the first commercial nuclear-power plant in the whole of Southeast Asia, representing the scientific and industrial coming of age of the Philippines in its post-colonial era.

The plant was never opened.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos was deposed through a military rebellion, under the local moniker of a “peaceful revolution”, and Velasco, then Minister of Energy and CEO of the Philippines National Oil Company (PNOC) from 1972 to February 1986, was also removed.

Eliminated along with Marcos and Velasco were the nuclear-power plant, the government control of the oil-and-energy utilities, and the 11 major industrial projects that were to be fueled by these national energy programs.

Velasco, however, finally wrote his memoirs. The book is entitled Trailblazing: The Quest for Energy and Self-Reliance (Anvil Publishing, 2006).

“It took all this time because all our papers, official and personal, that were found in our office, were garnished by the agency created by Cory Aquino to go after Marcos and his people. I have sought release of those documents, but I was never granted access,” he explained.

Geronimo Velasco recognized that this was a ruse because in fact ‘the Americans had already lost faith in President Marcos, and they could not trust him to have such a powerful weapon (the Bataan nuclear-power plant) in his hands.’

In the opinion of Mike Billington, a Washington-DC-based economic intelligence analyst who reviewed his book, “the hysteria induced in the population at that time against the Marcos regime was to no small extent the result of an international campaign by synarchist banking circles in the West against nuclear power, aimed at undermining the energy independence of sovereign nations.”

Synarchism is a term which generally refers to a conservative political philosophy focused on solving economic, political, and social problems that are perceived to be precipitating anarchy.

Synarchists are also now known as the neo conservatives or neo-cons.

Some conspiracy theorists use the word "synarchy" to describe a shadow government, a form of government where political power effectively rests with a secret elite, in contrast to an "oligarchy" where the elite is or could be known by the public.

But in the case of the Philippines seemed to have happened was that the synarchists pushed their agenda even if it would mean the return of the oligarchs, in the achievement of their common objectives.

In Billington’s private discussions with Velasco, he observed that the author demonstrated a clear understanding of the evil character of that attack on the Philippines by the Anglo-American financial and oil interests, even if he was not always clear on the reason for such subversion.

The fact that it took 20 years to write this book reflects the fact that only now is there an audience for the truth. As Velasco told the analyst, “We did not have the political space until now. Anything we said during or after the 1980s, we were just dismissed as ‘Marcos’s boys.’ It took us all of these years in order to get the space for the public to even listen, to hear and appreciate.”

As the claims of the greenies and the neo-cons against the use of nuclear energy are finally being challenged, both scientifically and politically, Velasco’s book demonstrates that he was still capable and willing to contribute to the renaissance of nuclear energy, and also to debunking the fraud of “privatization” and “deregulation” of utilities as a cover for the foreign control of sovereign nations.

Dillington accounts two causal factors in the destruction of the use of nuclear power in the Philippines (as also worldwide) in the 1980s, but both can be traceable to the same source.

First, he said that the 1986 coup that removed and vilified Velasco and President Marcos was controlled by then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz and his Assistant Secretary for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, Paul D. Wolfowitz, who used the Philippines as one of their first experiment in neo-conservative subversion in the name of “democracy.”

Achieving a “regime change” in favor of Cory Aquino who remained acquiescent to the International Monetary Fund and the London/New York banking houses, Billington pointed to General Fidel V. Ramos as “the native military manager of the regime change who was then and is still today a wholly owned ‘asset’ of this synarchist banking cabal.”

He said the U.S. participants in this treachery do not hide their role, only their purpose.

Just as in the many “Yellow or Orange Revolutions” of today in Asia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere, including overtly military cases such as Iraq, Shultz, Wolfowitz and their gang, brag of their intention to make the United States the “only superpower” on Earth, or its super-policemen while hiding behind the banner of “democracy.”

Speaking before the Heritage Foundation last September 29, 2000 on Asian Democracy and American Interests, then Ambassador Paul Wolfowitz said “I remember going to the Hill on a regular basis, along with some of you in this room, to be beaten up for our alleged support for the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. I was asked, ‘Why don’t we just cut off all military assistance to the Philippines; why doesn’t President Reagan just call up his friend Ferdinand Marcos and tell him to step down and give up power?’”

Wolfowitz continued, “It’s not that we didn’t, ourselves, share enormous criticisms of Marcos. Indeed, we began increasingly a policy of private and public pressure on Marcos to reform, and I do believe that that policy—and I think it’s an important lesson for the U.S. government—contributed in no small measure to emboldening the Philippine people to take their fate in their own hands and to produce what eventually became the first great democratic transformation in Asia in the 1980s.”

“President Reagan didn’t get much credit for that,” he quipped.

Professor Theodore Friend, a U.S. academic who writes on the Philippines, told a conference in Washington three years ago that Wolfowitz had called him and a few other Asia hands to his office at the State Department in 1983, and tasked them with overthrowing Marcos.

Friend declared “We concluded that Marcos was vulnerable. We didn’t use the term ‘regime change’ at that time, but we decided that if we unleashed indigenous forces, Marcos could be brought down, and we pointed ourselves in that direction. With George Shultz as Secretary of State, we did it just right, timing the intervention so as to make things happen.”

The things that these “tyrants” made happen are described in gruesome detail in Velasco’s book.

The Anti-nuclear Lies and Propaganda

B illington tags the second causal factor in the destruction of the Philippines nuclear program as the fear fostered in the population through a campaign of anti-nuclear lies and propaganda.

While this anti-nuclear campaign is generally associated with the radical left environmentalist movement, the Washington, DC, publication Economic Intelligence Review has demonstrated in its March 24, 2006, issue that the driving force behind these lies were the same neo-cons covertly in the role of political subversives.

Paul Wolfowitz and his mentor at the University of Chicago, Albert Wohlstetter, while leading the charge in favor of the use of nuclear weapons in preventive wars, even against non-nuclear nations, argued in the 1970s that nuclear power must not be allowed to be used for energy generation, especially in the Third World.

Wohlstetter wrote that “every time a new country obtains a nuclear power reactor, it is moving significantly closer to a nuclear weapon development capability,” adding the lie that “nuclear power promises very limited economic benefits to less developed countries.”

In other words, Billington said, the political and scientific subversion were two aspects of the same policy, as espoused by the synarchist banking circles—the end of the sovereign nation-state, fostering a global empire under the control of international financial institutions based on “globalized” control of intentionally restricted energy resources.

Under Velasco’s direction, Napocor, which had been founded in the 1930s under the guidance of Gen. Douglas MacArthur with the help of Col. Lucius Clay, launched an aggressive program of hydroelectric and geothermal development, while working with the IAEA to contract for a 620-megawatt nuclear plant, to be built by Westinghouse in Bataan.

Velasco, a prominent businessman in the post-war Philippines, was chosen by President Marcos to run the Philippine National Oil Corporation in 1973. Marcos later created a Department of Energy and made Velasco’s its Minister, to act concurrently as Chairman of the National Power Company (Napocor). In those capacities, Velasco steered the Philippines towards independence from international energy cartels.

As CEO of PNOC, Velasco initiated negotiating state-to-state oil contracts with oil-producing nations, to avoid the “free markets” which Marcos knew to be controlled by the energy cartels. While Velasco succeeded in signing such contracts with Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and others, it soon became apparent that actual energy independence depended on drastically reducing the nation’s dependence on imported oil altogether.

Under Velasco’s direction, Napocor, which had been founded in the 1930s under the guidance of Gen. Douglas MacArthur with the help of Col. Lucius Clay, launched an aggressive program of hydroelectric and geothermal development, while working with the IAEA to contract for a 620-megawatt nuclear plant, to be built by Westinghouse in Bataan.

“When I started with PNOC, the Philippines was 96% dependent on oil while the rest was basically hydro,” he said. “By 1986, the national program not only succeeded in providing electricity to all provinces, we had reduced oil importation by 46%, enabling 50% energy independence.”

Considering that the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant was envisioned to supply 16% of the power requirement of Luzon, the Philippines’ biggest island, had it been turned on when it was completed in December 1985, the country’s level of energy independence would have definitely exceeded the halfway mark and the goal of the Marcos plan to fuel 11 great industrial projects would have been fully met.

Velasco clarified that every single step of the process in building the nuclear facility depended on approval from the U.S. government, and “yet when it was completed and ready to be activated, U.S. Ambassador Stephen Bosworth suddenly called on me and requested that the U.S. government be allowed to send a team that would help us evaluate the plant’s readiness for operation.”

The resulting evaluation, Velasco noted, had nothing to do with the functioning or safety of the plant, but rather stated that the plant should not be opened because of a lack of escape routes and hospital beds in the vicinity. Velasco recognized that this was a ruse because in fact “the Americans had already lost faith in President Marcos, and they could not trust him to have such a powerful weapon in his hands.”

“When I started with PNOC, the Philippines was 96% dependent on oil while the rest was basically hydro,” Mr. Velasco said. “By 1986, the national program not only succeeded in providing electricity to all provinces, we had reduced oil importation by 46%, enabling 50% energy independence.”

T his is only partially true, as evidenced by the fact that the first act of the Aquino government that replaced Marcos in February 1986 was to shut down the nuclear power plant, that is in effect signalling, no government, no matter how subservient to U.S. demands, was to be allowed to have nuclear power.

In the August 16, 1985 issue of the Economic Intelligence Review, six months before the February 1986 coup against Marcos, the magazine warned that Ambassador Bosworth, on behalf of Secretary of State Shultz, was meeting “up to two hours everyday with Marcos’ Acting Chief of Staff, then Lt. Gen. Fidel Ramos, a West Point graduate whom the United States is attempting to groom as a leader of a new civilian military junta.”

In their discussion, Velasco asked Billington, “if Washington had no intention of allowing the plant to function in the first place, why did they grant us a permit to construct the nuclear plant?”

The author had deep regard for the United States where he took his masteral course in business administration, specifically the Wharton Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania and developed his business skills as a young man at Murray Manufacturing in Kentucky.

Before his death, Velasco was able to share with Billington his sadness to see the destruction of the machine-tool capacity now taking place in the United States.

The former Philippine Minister of Energy said “the strength of America was its capacity to manufacture. Nobody else could manufacture with the strength of the market it has, with the quality that it could achieve and in the capability that its people has.”

But this seems to be disappearing, he added. # # #

Editor’s Note: To read the various chapters of Book Two, please click on these hyperlinks:

The Renaissance of Nuclear-Power Plants in the World (Part IV)

The Genesis of a Nuclear Philippines (Part III)

Protocols on Nuclear Security, Safety and Technology Transfer (Part II)

After the Deluge, Soon the Return of Massive Brownouts? (Part I of Book II)