
1947 - The controversial RP-US Military Bases Agreement (MBA) that grants American access to 22 military, naval, and air bases in the Philippines is signed by Philippine President Manuel A. Roxas and United States Ambassador Paul V. McNutt at Malacanang some eight months after the imperialist Bald Eagle nation granted "independence" to its Southeast Asian colony; supposedly forged for the mutual defense of the two countries, the agreement would be decried by nationalists as both a symbol and actual tool of American neo-colonial hold on Filipinos; with the agreement coming 48 years after the Americans formally began the invasion of the then fledgling Philippine Republic by deliberately instigating hostilities, firing the first shots of the bloody and protracted Filipino-American War (1899-1914), the MBA is also criticized for having been approved only as an international executive agreement on the part of the American instead of being ratified by the U.S. legislature as the Philippine side has done, suggesting the status of international legal inequality and continued subservience of the Filipinos to the imperialist Americans.
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