Word: garcias
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like its Washington counterpart, Manila's annual National Press Club Gridiron show is enlivened by roasting the politicians in the audience. But never before had Manila's jesting correspondents gone so far in impertinence. The curtain rose on a scratching, underwear-clad figure representing President Carlos Garcia during last year's election campaign. A Chinese constituent, loaded down with pesos, came onstage and said he was "velly happy that good fliend Garcia running for Plesident." Garcia orotundly protested that he never took bribes. The Chinese was just about to leave in confusion when, from backstage, a figure...
Diplomats in the audience squirmed uncomfortably. When the skit was over, the real President Garcia tried to pass it off as a joke that proved nothing more than that the Philippine Republic has a truly free press. A free press the nation does have, with a heightened capacity for invective, and the air is usually filled with political cries that everything and everyone is for sale. Only during the three-year presidency of the late, dedicated Ramon Magsaysay was there a notable absence of charges of corruption at Malacanan Palace. Only a little more than a year since President Magsaysay...
While the nation's dollar reserves have plunged from $225 million to around $150 million, its trade deficit has soared to $186 million; its national debt is up to $800 million, and one-fourth of the labor force is out of work or underemployed. Garcia himself insists placidly, lighting a Chesterfield with a gold lighter, that "things are about back to normal...
Chits for Cash. While Magsaysay scrupulously refused to accept campaign contributions himself, Garcia let it be known that he would accept contributions personally-or they might be given to his wife, whose financial acumen and taste in jewelry are much admired in Manila. For a long while, permission to withdraw dollar reserves from the Central Bank was granted only when accompanied by chits initialed by Garcia. During his six-month campaign, the bank's dollar reserves dropped $90 million as a result of heavy but legal withdrawals...
...weeks after President Magsaysay's death, the new Garcia administration gave an organization called the Philippine Coconut Producers' Federation permission to barter copra for foreign goods. The federation, Senate investigators later learned, was merely a front for a naturalized Chinese operator who exported only a fraction of the copra he was supposed to, but managed to reap a tidy $600,000 profit by selling to Manila merchants his dollar import allocation...