multinational responsibility to defend the region. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles emphasized that the Pact “is not directed against any people or any government,” but “is directed against an evil, the evil of aggression.” Lest the peoples of Southeast Asia suspect that the Manila Pact was a blueprint for some kind of neocolonial form of regional governance, the conference concluded with the signing of the Pacific Charter, which proclaimed the rights of peoples to self-determination, self-government, and independence.11
In contrast to the Geneva Accords, the Manila Pact provided justification for U.S. military intervention in Indochina in the name of countering communism. The Manila Pact also accomplished much more. Although the conference included delegates of “white” colonial powers with longstanding interests in the region, its ideological force derived from the idea that Asians were determining their political destiny in a democratic and postcolonial setting. The core of the agreement embodied an Asian regionalism that reflected the U.S. commitment to anticolonial self-determination.
The conference also signaled an emerging role in regional affairs for Philippine leaders. The Philippine Vice President and Secretary of Foreign Affairs Carlos P. Garcia affirmed that the formation of SEATO signified “the first big step” in facilitating closer ties between the Philippines and its neighboring countries, which previously had been foreclosed by “centuries of colonialism.”12 According to Garcia, “The measure of usefulness of the Asian participants to this conference will depend largely on the measure that we may win the confidence, the faith and the friendship of our neighbors and brothers of Southeast Asia.”13 The language of “friendship” and kinship that infused the conference proceedings solidified an imagined geography of “Southeast Asia,” one that subsumed ethnic, linguistic, religious, and other forms of difference to project the image of a united region.14 Philippine state leaders mobilized the language of kinship increasingly in the weeks and months after the Geneva Conference, particularly as they sought to formalize diplomatic relations with Vietnam.
The Junior Chamber of Commerce played an important part in this story. A civic organization founded during the U.S. Progressive Era, the Junior Chamber, or Jaycees, had transformed into a worldwide phenomenon with chapters in over fifty countries by the 1950s, represented by the international body Junior Chamber International (JCI). Organized around the tenets of “free enterprise” and “humanitarianism” that “transcends the sovereignty of nations,” JCI served as a quintessential organization to facilitate what one scholar called a “global imaginary of integration.”15 As the Philippine Congress engaged in unresolved debates over the question of extending diplomatic recognition to Vietnam, JCI was already mobilizing the Philippine public to action. In July 1954, the Manila chapter of the Jaycees voted to extend its support by providing medical aid and volunteers to help Vietnamese refugees who were migrating south of the seventeenth parallel. The Geneva Accords and its mandate of a three-hundred-day period of unrestricted travel across the two zones had resulted in a massive movement of refugees. Nearly nine hundred thousand people, mostly Catholic civilians from the northern region of Tonkin, took advantage of the opportunity to escape the Viet Minh and to seek better life chances in the south. In the summer of 1954, the Jaycees brought the first group of Filipino friends to South Vietnam to care for these refugees.
A year later, at the University of the Philippines convocation in July 1955, Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs Raul Manglapus reaffirmed the stakes of recognizing the sovereignty of South Vietnam, and evoked the Filipinos already there. First, he alluded to the specter of communism: “Our policy of strengthening our freedom impels us to do all we can to strengthen freedom around us…. [I]t is our duty, independent of altruistic considerations, to seek the strengthening of free states around us for our own sake.” Then he underscored that defending the Philippines from communist aggression demanded vigilance in the region, and emphasized that Vietnam and the Philippines shared a unique, natural bond. He continued, “The Philippines is not just any other State from the point of view of South Vietnam” but the “nearest overseas neighbors,” and stated that the Vietnamese “have learned to look to us for guidance in their efforts at liberty.” To substantiate this point, Manglapus recalled the “volunteer Filipinos” who, at that very moment, “are showing the Vietnamese the capacity of Asians for self-reliance.” These Filipinos told a self-evident story: “We are not just any other country to the Vietnamese. We are a country of fellow Asians, friends, helpers and inspirers.”16
On July 15, 1955, President Ramon Magsaysay formally extended diplomatic recognition to South Vietnam. While metaphors of racial and colonial intimacy had worked decidedly in favor of it, they also fueled the opposition. One week after, Senator Claro M. Recto assailed his colleagues on the Senate floor. Vietnam, Recto argued, did not have the “attributes of sovereignty” because it was “ruled by France and [the] United States.” The Philippine commitment to SEATO, which the senator had opposed from the beginning, did not include obligations to extend diplomatic relations, contrary to the claim of Manglapus and others. With no justifiable basis, the Philippine recognition of South Vietnam amounted to nothing short of “interference” in the country’s “internal affairs.”17 In voicing his opposition, Recto laid bare the colonial dynamics at the heart of the so-called “friendship” between the two countries.
Recto articulated a different kind of colonial intimacy, based not on anticommunist alliances and capitalist integration but on an emergent anticolonialism that was fanning across the region. He was inspired by the Afro-Asian Conference that had concluded recently in Bandung, Indonesia, where the leaders of twenty-nine newly independent nations in Asia and Africa met to proclaim their anticolonial solidarities and refusal to compromise their independence by submitting to the bipolar world order. This anticolonial spirit suffused his speech. He further lambasted the newly appointed South Vietnamese Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem as “a puppet of Colonel Lansdale,” doing the bidding of the United States. Recto declared, “Diem, although anti-French, is helping [to] implant in South Vietnam another form of Western colonialism.” This form of colonialism might be “more profitable for the colonials … because of prospects of better standards of living, civil liberties and political rights, but for that very same reason more dangerous.” He didn’t believe the term “democracy” should fool anyone. He clarified, “Diem made his choice not between nationalism and colonialism but between two forms of colonialism.” A few days before Recto spoke these words, Diem had announced South Vietnam would not participate in the 1956 election to unify Vietnam, a move that Recto feared would embroil Southeast Asia in future war. “Must our boys die on foreign soil and must our cities and countrysides by [sic] laid waste again, just because it occurred to Diem and his American backers to boycott the 1956 plebiscite?”18 His words of caution proved prescient in time. But at the moment, he made his point clear: the recognition of South Vietnam had made the Philippines complicit in another U.S. colonial project in Asia.
In this sense, diplomatic recognition was little more than a formality, for all was already set. The Manila Pact had outlined the regional framework for U.S. circumvention of the Geneva Accords, and the Philippines was already implicated in any future U.S. military intervention in South Vietnam. The formalization of diplomatic relations between the Philippines and South Vietnam only further entrenched this complicity. Amidst these events, the tensions captured by Recto’s trenchant remarks lingered unresolved. To the senator and other dissidents in his party, the events surrounding Indochina in 1954–55 were momentous not for what they purported to represent, but for what they concealed: that colonialism was being carried out in the name of democracy, and this meant dire consequences for the Philippines and its citizens.
THE DEPLOYMENT OF CARE
On October 14, 1954, three months after the Geneva Accords, Operation Brotherhood dispatched its first medical mission to Saigon. Headed by Antonio E.R. Velasco, a doctor and the Jaycee president of Southern Mindanao, the team of seven doctors and three nurses arrived to a spectacular welcome at Tan Sun Nhut Air Base. They arrived by way of Air America, a CIA-owned and -funded civilian airline that flew covert military missions throughout Southeast Asia in the 1950s; however, the U.S.
