The World

By Victor Mallet, Madrid bureau chief
The Philippines has had a reputation as a violent archipelago ever since Ferdinand Magellan failed to circumnavigate the globe (though some of his sailors did make it all the way round and thus immortalised his name) because he was killed on a beach on the island of Mactan near Cebu in 1521.

Yet the massacre of 46 people on Monday in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao in the southern Philippines plumbs new depths of violence and cruelty. It appears that gunmen loyal to a local politician attacked a convoy of his opponents and slaughtered them, as well as 12 accompanying journalists, with M-16 rifles and machetes.

Lapu-Lapu, the chieftain responsible for Magellan’s death, is hailed as an anti-colonial hero in the Philippines. But the unfortunate truth is that Magellan, who went around trying to convert the locals to Christianity, became embroiled in clan rivalries of the sort that persist to this day in Philippine politics and was the victim of his own belligerence and folly.

If it were not for decades of violence, Mindanao’s climate and scenery could make it as popular a tourist destination as Thailand, Bali or Malaysia (or the Philippine island of Boracay).

I once attended a family wedding on an idyllic island off Davao and later climbed with my wife through tropical forest to the frosty summit of Mount Apo, the dormant Mindanao volcano that is country’s highest peak. We were the only visitors at the time to this extraordinarily beautiful place. Perhaps the fact that our guide stumbled into a New People’s Army (communist) guerrilla on the path ahead of us explained the lack of fellow-tourists.

The problems facing Mindanao are reasonably well known – corruption, overpopulation, bad government and separatism fuelled by religious extremism – but the solutions are far from obvious.

On Tuesday, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo responded to this week’s atrocity by declaring a state of emergency in parts of the island, but since neither national nor regional governments have proved capable of enforcing the law, it was probably no more than a necessary political gesture. The politics of Mindanao remain as challenging for Philippine leaders today as those of Cebu and Mactan were for Magellan nearly half a millennium ago.