The eight thousand who kept Subic Bay

Subic Bay is deep, sheltered and close to the sea lanes of the South China Sea, and every naval power that has held the Philippines has noticed. Spain established a naval presence here and, in 1885, built an arsenal and ship-repair facility on the bay.

During the Philippine Revolution the Cuban-Filipino officer Vicente Catalan and his fleet took Subic from the Spanish and delivered it to the First Philippine Republic. After the Spanish–American War it passed to the Americans, and in 1909 the US Navy formally selected Subic Bay as a repair and supply depot — the same deep harbour, the same reasoning.

It grew from there into the largest US military naval base in Asia and, until 1991, the home port of the United States Seventh Fleet. At the Vietnam War peak, the naval air station at Cubi Point served as the fleet’s primary maintenance and supply facility.

In 1991 the Philippine Senate rejected the terms for renewing the 1947 US–Philippines Military Bases Agreement, after negotiations had already dragged on for years. The Navy began winding Subic down.

Then, in June 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted — one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the twentieth century. Ash buried the base and collapsed a significant number of its structures. SBMA’s own history names both events, the Senate vote and the eruption, as the twin causes of the turnover.

On 13 March 1992 the Philippine Congress passed Republic Act 7227, the Bases Conversion and Development Act. Section 13 converted the naval base into the Subic Special Economic and Freeport Zone and created the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority to run it, with the tax and duty-free privileges that still define the place.

Richard "Dick" Gordon, then mayor of Olongapo City, became SBMA’s first chairman.

Between the Navy’s departure and any functioning administration, the base was a vast quantity of unguarded property. By SBMA’s own account, Gordon and some 8,000 volunteers took over the facility to preserve and protect around US$8 billion worth of buildings and equipment — in Wikipedia’s framing, residents of nearby Olongapo acting to prevent looting and destruction.

They were, in the most literal sense, protecting their own jobs: the base had been the region’s economy. But the effect was that the Freeport inherited a working naval station rather than a stripped one, which is why the housing, the piers, the hangars and the road network are all still here and still in use.

The conversion worked faster than almost anyone predicted. Within four years the zone had drawn a set of investors that would have been implausible in 1992:

• Federal Express, which ran its Asia-Pacific hub "Asia-One" out of Subic for nearly a decade
• Enron, and Coastal Petroleum — later El Paso Corporation
• Acer, the Taiwanese computer maker
• Thomson SA, the French telecoms company

A 1996 New York Times report, cited by Wikipedia, put investment in those first four years at over US$3 billion and 70,000 jobs created. On 24 November 1996 — the fourth anniversary, to the day, of the last American ship leaving — Subic Bay hosted the leaders of eighteen economies at the Fourth APEC Leaders’ Summit.

Not everything since has gone up and to the right. Hanjin Philippines, at one point the single biggest employer in the zone, went bankrupt in January 2019. But the shape set in 1992 has held.

Drive around the zone and the inheritance is obvious. The roads are wider than the traffic needs. The street names are American. There is a fence, and gates, and a pass system. Whole districts of officer housing sit up in the hills under the trees, lived in now by people with no connection to any navy.

The forest is part of the same inheritance. A military base needs a watershed and a buffer, so the trees were never cleared — which is why a zone this developed still has lowland rainforest, and bats, and mangroves, inside the fence.