US military presence

US military presence

Close to seventeen years ago, on September 16, 1991, the Philippine Senate terminated forty-four years of US military presence on Philippine soil by rejecting the renewal of the 1947 US Military Bases Agreement (MBA). The Senate pronounced the existence of foreign military installations to be inconsistent with the bases-free and nuclear weapons-free provisions of the 1987 Philippine Constitution. Thereby the era of US enclaves in Philippine territory, where the lone Superpower exercised extraterritorial rights and where Filipinos where on the receiving end of indignities and abuse, finally ended. The US military bases — a highly visible symbol of continuing domination by the former colonizer – had been kicked out.
(Read story here.)