Notes from a Blockade Runner

Posted May 25, 2009

Another week, another scandal. While living in the Philippines, it’s easy to become inured to them. The scandals follow in bold headlines in the national newspapers: The Euro Generals! The Alabang Boys! The Broadband Scandal! No wonder many, if not most, Filipinos—from cab drivers to the elite of Forbes Park—shrug when another scandal comes along.

The latest scandal, “The Great Book Blockade of 2009,” deals with the flagrant violation of an international treaty by the Department of Customs, known to Filipinos nationwide as one of the most corrupt departments in the country. For me, this scandal is atypical in several ways.

In February, I was told by a local book industry professional in Manila of an “injustice” involving the importation of books into the Philippines. Apparently, a customs official had stopped a shipment of the international bestselling book “Twilight” by Sephanie Meyer in January and had demanded that the importer pay duty. This duty goes against an international treaty, the Florence Agreement that the Philippines signed in 1952, which states unequivocally that ideas should know no borders and that books, as purveyors of ideas, should not have duty imposed upon them. The hapless importer did what thousands of Filipinos do when faced with the unreasonable demand of a government official: He paid up to avoid a hassle.

But the hassle had just begun. Emboldened by this success, customs started to seize all air shipments of books into the country and demanded that duty be paid on them. Booksellers and importers, understandably flummoxed by this development, balked. Soon the Department of Finance entered the fray, in the person of Undersecretary Estela Sales, who took it upon herself to reinterpret the Florence Agreement as well as homegrown laws protecting the importation of books. From now on, Ms. Sales told booksellers that “educational books” would have a 1% duty imposed while all other books would be taxed at a rate of 5%. At first, booksellers refused to pay, but their books—held in warehouses while they negotiated their release—racked up astronomical storage fees. Finally, in mid-March, they caved. They didn’t have much of a choice: pay or be ruined financially.

When I first came across this story I had been living in Manila for about six months and writing a column called “Dispatches from Manila” for the online wing of the American literary magazine McSweeney’s. After the initial lead, I did a little reporting and eventually wrote a story for McSweeney’s called “The Great Book Blockade of 2009.”
I thought that maybe my friends might read it and that it would be quickly forgotten. I was wrong. One should never underestimate the collective fury of book lovers when their book supply is threatened.

Within a day or two of my story going online, bloggers all over the Philippines had caught it and were reproducing and commenting upon it, and hundreds and then thousands of book lovers were voicing their outrage.

Some of the bloggers calmly investigated my charges on their own and found that for the most part, I had the story right (my biggest mistake was misidentifying the affiliation of Undersecretary Sales). Other Filipino bloggers unleashed their fury at customs officials and quite rightly felt their government had sunk to a new low: taxing the free-flow of ideas, breaking an international treaty, bringing books and ideas further out of the reach of ordinary Filipinos.

Soon, the story hit the mainstream media in the Philippines when Manuel Quezon III wrote a column for The Philippine Inquirer, also titled “The Great Book Blockade of 2009.” Now the story had gone beyond the blogosphere and other media started picking it up. The Internet is notorious for spreading rumor as quickly as fact. Some blog postings were titled, "NO MORE IMPORTED BOOKS IN THE PHILIPPINES!" Not exactly what I had reported, but such postings alerted readers to the real issue, the taxation of books. Within days, Louie Aguinaldo had started a Facebook Group, “Filipinos Against the Taxation of Books by Customs.” I was about the 200th person to sign up. Three weeks after the publication of my dispatch, the group had recruited nearly 19,000 members. And a group called RockEd planned a Great Book Giveaway, an anti book tax, if you will.

Meanwhile, I found myself more or less at the center of this controversy, with reporters from the Philippines to Germany contacting me, as well as a U.S. Embassy official who told me that if there’s one lesson he had learned from this it’s that “we have greatly underestimated the power and reach of the internet as an organizational tool in the Philippines.”

Indeed. For me, the response was nothing less than awe-inspiring. It was a good thing, I reflected, that I’d titled my original McSweeney’s piece “The Great Book Blockade of 2009” and not, “Daddy, I Want to Grow Up to be a Customs Official,” as originally conceived. Hardly a title to rally around and another lesson of this controversy for me: A catchy title goes a long way.

But I don’t think Undersecretary Sales or her companions at the Department of Finance were particularly impressed by my title. If bureaucrats are known for anything, it’s their ability to dig in for a siege – time, after all, is usually on their side. Undersecretary Sales’s reaction was part Marie Antoinette, part Imelda Marcos. As I’d reported in my original piece, she had claimed to a group of stunned booksellers in March to be the only person in half a century to correctly interpret The Florence Agreement. So it came as no surprise to me that she now stated that “novels aren’t educational,” and dared detractors to take the Department of Finance to court.

But once the story jumped the tracks from the Internet to the mainstream, it started gathering an incredible amount of force that even a bureaucrat couldn’t withstand. One Philippine congressman, Teodoro Locsin Jr., wrote a lengthy appeal to the President Gloria Arroyo to make customs honor the treaty obligations of the nation. A senator, Miriam Santiago, the Head of the Foreign Relations Committee, called for Senate Hearings. The National Book Development Board of the Philippines, under the Office of the President, also voiced its strong opposition to customs’ revenue gambit. And then the coup de grace: UNESCO condemned the Philippines’ tax on imported books as a law with an “inherent antipoor bias” that “blatantly violates” the Florence Agreement.

As I write this, I’ve just heard from a friend that President Arroyo has lifted the book blockade and that effective immediately, there will be no taxes on imported books. Together, Filipino book lovers have performed what I consider a miracle in less than a month’s time.

As for me, I’m floored that my original McSweeney’s piece actually effected positive change. I’m not accustomed to this. I’m accustomed to the usual things that haunt most other writers: creditors, editors, and the assorted hobgoblins of creativity. I love introspective and imaginative writers, such as Proust and Kafka, but I reserve special admiration for writers who try (but most often fail, despite noble efforts) to shake things up in the world beyond the writing desk. And while it’s the collective efforts of a group of concerned citizens of the Philippines (bloggers, journalists, and ordinary book lovers) who deserve the laurels for their efforts, I doubt I’ll ever think again that what I write or say can’t possibly make a difference in our troubled but still repairable world.

Mr. Hemley is the author, most recently, of “Do-Over!: In which a forty-eight-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom, and other embarrassments,” out this month by Little, Brown.