Visiting Forces Agreement

In this session, Miss Tin gave us a 4-paged paper pertaining to the Visiting Forces Agreement, is a bilateral agreement between the Philippines and the United States consisting of two separate agreement documents. As we read the whole article, she divided the class into 2. One is the positive side and the other is the negative side. I need to practice my reading skills because she only gave us 10-15 minutes to understand the whole article. It was totally challenging. After analyzing the article, we gave our thoughts towards it. To defend the negative side, I believe that the United States of America takes advantage of us so that they could establish ports, training facilities and logistical bases for their continuing participation, occupation of and war activities on different parts of the world, especially those in the Middle East wherein we would always be affected whenever there is war. Furthermore, it is also unclear as to what “temporary” stay or visit to the country means. It takes them a week, a month or worst, years. The Subic Rape Case Victim Nicole said a permanent American Camp is now even built inside the south camp in the city of Zamboanga. The soldiers are also here for them to do their job, but not to take advantage the women in our country especially in the area near Clark Base. Yes, I know that the Americans helped us and we owe them a lot but sometimes we also have a limit. I read and agree that the Americans have no respect or regard for our laws and regulations. It is they who are the visitors, yet they want them to reign and set laws and regulations for themselves in our own homeland and territory. Second, in Article V of the VFA, “official acts” needing “official duty certificate” do not include the heinous crimes of the American soldiers in the Philippines, who may even avoid the jurisdiction of Philippine laws and court that will try their cases. However, at the end of our discussion, I realized that we shouldn’t generalize them because not all of them act that way.