LITMIR.BIZ

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      Because I spent the first twenty-four years of my life in Manila, in the very milieu I cover in this book, I feel uniquely qualified vs. other foreign journalists, to write about this chapter in history with a great deal of authenticity, distilled with the perspective of time and distance.

      Parentage and Early Life

      My beloved mother was a general physician in San Juan who, in fact, had one time attended to an emergency call at the then-Congressman Ferdinand Marcos’ residence, administering a flu shot to Imelda. My father was from an old-time Ermita family. (Ermita was a once fashionable neighborhood in the old part of Manila, laid out grid-like, which came into prominence during the first decades of American rule, where many Spanish, American, and intellectual-class families settled. Many streets were named after the US states. Because my grandfather, Arturo F. Garcia, Sr., earned his medical degree as a 1904 illustrado (“Distinguished Promising Young Men”) from the University of Colorado, Manila city planners named the street he lived on after the state of his US alma mater. My father, who had one engineering degree from the University of the Philippines (U.P.), also happened to secure his mining degree from the Colorado School of Mines.

      By my father’s side of the family, we were also distantly related to president number three, Ramon Magsaysay. He and my father came from the same provincial town, Iba, Zambales, and of the same del Fierro clan. I believe they were third or fourth cousins. But my father never traded on that relation and he never even entered government service until Marcos’ time in 1965. The Garcias were just proud to have Ramon Magsaysay, the small-time boy from their hometown, a legitimately elected leader of the country.

      The only time I ever visited Malacañang, the presidential palace, was when we went to pay our respects to the fallen president when his remains lay in state there after Magsaysay was killed in a plane crash in March 1957. And my father and I lined up like the rest of the other folks who came to pay their respects. No special lines or entrances were set up for the slain president’s kin.

      I had what was considered to be an ‘elite’ Philippine education. I took my high school at the Ateneo de Manila, one of the two or three prestigious private boys’ schools in the country; had Jesuit scholastics from the New York-New Jersey area as my teachers; and where I learned Latin as part of the required curriculum. I then proceeded, like my parents, to the University of the Philippines (U.P.), where I earned my bachelor of arts in broadcast communication (the first male graduate of the institution, in that field) in 1969. U.P. is the primary university in the country established in the American era and along American educational lines.

      My social life pretty much centered on the Manila-Makati axis: books, movies and TV shows from the US; local stage productions of American Broadway musicals in faraway Manila, etc. My parents treated us to a US- European trip in 1968—while I just used to read and dream about these places, I actually experienced the two centers of western civilization first-hand on that trip.

      After college at U.P., my first jobs were at advertising agencies in Manila and as a television production assistant before moving to the US in late 1972—providentially, about a month before infamous martial law was declared on September 21, 1972.

      But before that, I first voted in the local 1967 mid-term election. I was only seventeen when Marcos first ran in 1965, but didn't really care for him even then. There was something sinister and phony about his look in his campaign posters. But then superficially, from his first legal presidential term (1965-1969), transitioning into the second, he (and his wife) seemed to do a good job. But I was also young and naive and altruistic then.

      So that is the milieu in which I grew up—not heavily political but nonetheless, because we lived in the capital and were raised to be well-informed and well-read, I became quite aware of what was happening around me politically. So I do have a lot of firsthand exposure and familiarity with all the shenanigans and showboating of the Marcoses.

      Early Brush with the Marcoses

      Finally, my first distasteful interaction with the Marcoses—which I have never shared with anyone before, but which I suppose left an indelible dent in my psyche—was my father’s attempt to secure the top job of the Gold Mining Assistance Subsidy Board (GMASB) of the Philippines, around 1968-69. As a matter of fact, it was Senator Benigno Aquino’s older brother, Billy, a Colorado School of Mines co-alumnus of my father, who headed said office at the time he was encouraged to join it. After a few years there at the GMASB, the older Aquino was ready to retire, and so there was a scramble to fill the top spot. And because the small but important government mining office was directly answerable to Malacañang, the way to securing the position was via the graces of the President. (Even just writing about it now sickens me a little.)

      So my father . . . as with his one rival for the position, waged a gentle, if subtle, simpatico (the best way I can put it) campaign to have someone drop a good word in president Marcos’ ear—and that person he targeted was the president’s mother, Doña Josefa Edralin Marcos, because it seemed her recommendations held sway over her son. So he waged this campaign to curry favor with the old lady, via a close friend and confidante of hers, to the point of even sending a sack or two of rice to the old lady. To the president’s mother?

      I didn’t say anything at the time but I secretly disapproved of and was disgusted by the modus operandi my father employed—almost like buying chits for the position, when the old woman’s son, the president of the Republic, was supposed to be rendering service to the people . . . and not the other way around. Here he was, my father—an honest, hard-working person, currying favor to the powers that be (for a position) at a time when the Marcoses were already starting to suck up a lot of the resources and riches of the country. He was inexorably stuck into this traditional but distasteful way of patronage in the Philippines. (An uncle also later became Minister of Health in 1979-81.)

      But since my father fed me, raised me, schooled me, loved me – who was I to judge him as long as I lived under his wing and enjoyed his largesse? Nonetheless, there was something about those actions that did not sit right with me. So until I was ready to make a break and be my own man; and no longer accept his support and generosity, I held back my opinion. But to this day, I would not have signed off on such a plan of action even had my blessing been secured.

      (To be fair though, in the end, they told me that leading up to the snap elections of 1986, my parents contributed a little to the campaign of the Aquino-Laurel team via Doy Laurel, whom they knew more than Cory.)

      And then in 1972, I thought I would take my chances in the outside world on my own. The comfortable world that I was lucky enough to grow up in, was provided by my parents – but not my own sweat and blood. I wanted to make it on my own, prove my worth and earn my own place in the sun. By the way, I left some three weeks before martial law was declared by the tonton macoute Marcos and slammed the gates shut. So I moved to the US on my own in August, 1972.

      Mini-History of the Philippines

      For the reader unfamiliar with the history of the Philippines, the islands were discovered in 1521 by Ferdinand Magellan and colonization by Spain began in 1565. Except for its geographic location, the Philippines are almost like a stray co-colony of the Latin American countries who shared the common Hispanic culture, names, and Roman Catholic religion with. Hispanic Philippines (or its real name in Spanish, Las Islas Filipinas, named after King Philip II of Spain) officially came to an end in 1898 when American Admiral George Dewey sailed into Manila Bay with the US Pacific fleet and assaulted the Spanish garrison there.

      The Philippines, along with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam, were ceded to the United States by Spain with the signing of the Treaty of Paris of 1898. Thus, the Philippines entered its democratic, American phase in which the present economic, educational, and judicial systems were begun. The two countries then together endured and fought out a third aggressor, Imperial Japan, in World War II. Barely a year after the war’s end, the US kept its word and granted the Philippines its independence on July 4, 1946. Thus, this capsule description of Philippine history: 300 years in a Spanish convent; 50 years in Hollywood; and 70 years in a Lost, Chaotic Wilderness.

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