‘Remember Erlinda!’

To be candid, I got very concerned when Finance Secretary Isidro N. "Lito" Camacho had coffee with us yesterday morning at our Tuesday Club in the EDSA Plaza hotel and patiently listened to several of us "scolding" him about the sneaky government plan to conduct a Midnight Madness kind of "bargain sale" of our irreplaceable government properties in the United States.

After the lecture and breakfast, Camacho cheerfully bid us adieu with the promise to consider our arguments against this fastbreak sale of the Filipino people’s "family jewels" just when the GMA Administration is winding down – and, will soon, in June next year, be out of office.

What bothered me most was that the Finance minister, who’d be in charge of any sale, along with Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople, was wearing that smooth "investment-banker’s smile" of his –you know, the expression of a guy who’s about to conclude a profitable transaction!

The GMA government’s alibi for wanting to peddle our diplomatic properties abroad in such a hasty fashion is that the government allegedly needs the "cash" to bridge the yawning deficit and pay its due obligations. This is bullshit. Every administration always needs cash, but why such a last-minute grab at accumulating money on the part of an administration that will be out of Malacañang and the government within less than fifteen months? President Macapagal-Arroyo should have the decency, the delicadeza and the common-sense to leave such matters to the next President and the next regime. Otherwise, she – and her money-men like Camacho and Trade and Industry Secretary Mar Roxas (who belongs to the so-called "Privatization Council") will forever be suspected by the nation of conducting that Midnight Sale so they can pocket the huge cash bonanza and ride off into the sunset – their saddle-bags jingling all the way into history.

* * *

Some weeks ago, I warned in this corner about such a fire-sale being in the works.

Last Monday, Columnist Neal Cruz confirmed that, in a memo dated March 25, our Philippine Ambassador to the US Albert E. del Rosario, had sent a "confidential and very urgent" order to Philippine consulates in the US to "dispose" of seven choice pieces of government-owned real property in the US: Namely (1) The Philippine Center Building in Manhattan, New York (would you believe: That building right on Fifth Avenue, the Main Street of the world, that keeps our flag flying on the globe’s most famous thoroughfare!); (2) the Philippine townhouse (on 66th street) in New York City, where our envoy to the United Nations lives, which is one of our most attractive properties, interior re-decorated in charming baroque fashion during the term of retired Ambassador Philip Mabilangan; (3) the old Chancery Building in Washington DC (Sanamagan, a historic heritage of our people where the weightiest decisions were once made); (4) the Philippine Center Building in San Francisco; (5) the consulate residence in Glen Haven, Houston, Texas; (6) a vacant lot on Terry Avenue, Seattle, Washington State; and (7) a piece of property labeled only as "Chicago".

How deceptive that last item was, I must say. The Chicago "property" is in the posh Highlands area, right where the mansion of Basketball Legend Michael Jordan is located. It’s worth a fortune. Betcha some flimflam artist will get it for a song, then resell it for big bucks.

Methinks, President GMA, some of your bright boys may have Svengali’ed you into approving this "Mother of all Auctions" (to borrow from Sinking Saddam’s vocabulary). Aren’t you worried that when the shit hits the fan the entire sordid caper might be blamed on the innocent First Gent, Mike Arroyo? In the old days, our public men and political leaders were held to accounting according to the principle of "Caesar’s wife". You know the old saw: "Caesar’s wife must not only be virtuous, but must appear virtuous." Nobody ever invokes the principle of Caesaria’s husband, I suppose.

Kindly don’t sell those properties. They are the patrimony of the Filipino nation. And, besides, they’re tangible and visible. When our taxpayers want to know what they own as a people, they can reach out and touch them. Remember what happened to the P25.8 billion paid by the Metro Pacific Corporation and their partners in the Bonifacio Land deal to the Ramos government to acquire Fort Bonificio? Part of that money received, amounting to 35 percent or some P7.8 billion, was supposedly earmarked for the modernization of our Armed Forces. Well, by Finance Secretary Camacho’s own recollection, much of the original amount had already been "spent" by the government before he took over his finance post. Yet, not one single bullet was bought by that fund for our poor Armed Forces! We couldn’t even say, isang bala ka lang! in this connection. Where did the money earmarked for our military go then?

That’s the objection we have to all-of-sudden converting our seven overseas properties (which we’ll never get back again) into quick money. Property you can see: It can’t be made to disappear even with a magician’s wand. On the other hand: Money vanishes.

Now you see it. Now you don’t!

As for Ambassador del Rosario, our Fast Sale Representative in Washington DC, it seems he still hasn’t shrugged off the propensities of his former profession: He was an insurance salesman. To a salesman, what’s important is the sale. (And, whether in insurance or investment-banking, what’s important about the sale is the "commission").

* * *

Some who read my Bataan piece yesterday remarked to me that they hadn’t realized how young the men – who fought in Bataan, and held the line against the Japanese Imperial Army for three months – were. You bet. Most of our 78,000 Filipino officers and soldiers were in their teens and early 20s – including some guys who rose to fame and notoriety, both, for all the fake medals, like Lt. Ferdinand E. Marcos. At least he was there. Macoy fought. (He copped out afterwards.)

As already mentioned, twenty percent of our soldiers in Bataan were ROTC cadets who had simply rushed to join, volunteering to fight – school kids aged 17 to 19. They had rallied to the flag and their country’s defense without anybody prodding them.

The Filipinos fought their Bataan battle in typical Pinoy fashion. There were the weak and cowardly among them, to be sure, but most of them faced danger and death, accepted privation and suffering, with courage and good humor. I know this because we had so many Bataaners in our own family – some who didn’t come back, and others who lived to fight another day in the guerrilla movement. On that doomed peninsula, they laughed at the Japanese; they laughed at themselves and their plight, and their ragged denims, coconut huts, and flimsy rubber shoes.

Even their battle-cry was typical. Americans have always taken their wars seriously (critics claim "hypocritically"). During the struggle to get Texas "free" from Mexico, as Dubya can testify, they avenged the slaughter by Santa Ana’s Mexican troops of the besieged American irregulars at the Alamo, brandishing the slogan: "Remember the Alamo!" When the cruiser USS Maine was blown up and sunk by a mine (did they set it themselves?) in Cuba’s Havana harbor, they declared war on Spain. The war-cry of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders was "Remember the Maine!"

In December 1941, when the Japanese sneak-attacked, it was "Remember Pearl Harbor!"

Not so for the Filipinos. Pearl Harbor was much too far away. Instead, the story spread that a patrol had come upon the half-buried body of a young and pretty Filipino girl who had been brutally raped by Japanese soldiers and then killed. An embroidered handkerchief beside her body bore the name, "Erlinda".

All along the line the tale sped like lightning, and many of our Filipino boys were soon going into combat shouting, "Remember Erlinda!" Even in their abandonment by Mother America, they were perhaps the last of the romantics. (Sounded like one of those old Fernando Poe Senior movies.)

Shucks, let’s hear it from the reminiscences of the late Ferdinand Marcos himself (the guy who jailed Ninoy and all of us when he declared martial law). He wrote of the Death March, but "I don’t recollect so much the sufferings of the prisoners, for they were soldiers meant for death and pain . . ."

He vividly described how, after the ordeal, the executions, the starvation of the Death March, the bedraggled survivors, himself included, arrived at Camp O’Donnell which was to be their concentration camp in Capas, Tarlac.

He arrived, FM recalled, "in the company of Lieutenant Alberto Quiaoit, who had been a platoon commander in the 1st Regular Division . . . He had gathered some souvenirs. Pictures of some Japanese officers he had killed in personal combat were still sewn between the linings of his combat field bag. In the last inspection of our personal belongings inside Capas, the guards discovered these pictures. They questioned him there in the waning day. He stood slim and straight and haughty then, even while he was pulled out of our ranks. That was the last I saw of him alive. His head, preserved in alcohol, was solicitously given his family by one of the civilians living close to the Concentration Camp."

* * *

My final story is about my father’s funeral. He had died of malaria weeks after his release, ironically having survived the Battle of Bataan, the Death March, and four months of hell in prisoner-of-war Camp O’Donnell.

The Archbishop of Manila officiated at his funeral Mass in Paco Church. The Church bells were ordered to toll sorrowfully as his old comrades, also recently released POW’s and Bataan survivors, bore his coffin to the hearse. The Japanese had seized all cars, trucks and buses, so the hearse was a horse-drawn one, with four black horses pulling at it – just like you see in those old Spaghetti Westerns starring a younger Clint Eastwood.

The coffin had to be brought in that procession all the way from Paco Church to La Loma Cemetery in the north of Manila – several kilometers away. As it pulled away from the church, a platoon of ex-Bataaners, from privates to sergeants, to lieutenants, captains, majors, and colonels – those who survived – marched in its wake. Every half kilometer, another group of Bataaners would join the march, falling into step behind the first platoon. And so the procession wound up Rizal Avenue towards Blumentritt. By the time the funeral cortege reached the prepared plot at La Loma, two hundred or more gaunt soldiers in threadbare civilian clothes were marching in disciplined lines behind the catafalque.

What a joy and consolation, as tears streamed down our faces, it was to a soldier’s bereaved widow and her orphaned children. The ragged brave men of Bataan were marching a beloved comrade to his rest.

That is a memory I will always cherish in my heart. Mabuhay to our heroes of Bataan on this day of remembrance! May our hearts beat as true as yours did, to our dying day.