My close encounter with a tycoon

When I read the brief media announcement that Eduardo “Danding” M. Cojuangco Jr. had passed away on June 16, my thoughts rushed back to an incident 44 years ago – shortly after I was arrested on January 14, 1976, detained and tortured by the security forces of the Marcos dictatorship.

Wondering what’s the connection?

It’s because at that early time of my captivity I was offered a deal: my freedom and protection from getting rearrested or harmed in exchange for aiding Danding Cojuangco in setting up a bank. Funded by proceeds from the coconut levy authorized by Marcos decrees in 1973 and afterwards,  the  First United Coconut Bank had been organized in July 1975. As the renamed United Coconut Planters Bank (UCPB), it grew phenomenally under the dictatorship.

Maybe the deal was offered to me because I had worked for eight years covering the economic and business sector for the Manila Times. The intermediaries were a fellow newsman before martial law, a clique of military intelligence officers, and a cult leader (spiritista) based in Mount Banahaw.

At the time, my body was still hurting from the blows and wounds inflicted on me; lighted cigarets had been applied on various parts in futile efforts to make me talk. A key intelligence officer in Southern Tagalog, on orders by his chief, had “borrowed” me from my military-police custodians and brought me to Mount Banahaw in Dolores, Quezon.

It was there where the deal to work with Cojuangco was brought up.  I turned it down, which may partly explain why Marcos kept me in military detention for so long. (After nine years,  I was finally able to release myself by escaping from custody on May 5, 1985.)

There had been a previous weird deal offered to me by the group.  With the political situation coming to a boil in 1972, a newsman friend told me my life was in peril. He urged me to go with him to a spiritist leader’s haunt in Mount Banahaw and have an amulet imbedded in my back that would supposedly make my body invulnerable to bullets.  He said his group believed that I would inevitably become a top leader of the Left revolutionary movement and, as a swap for the talisman, they wanted me to collaborate with them in a plot to “establish a new nationalist social order.”

I spurned the offer, despite my newsman friend warning of dire consequences.

Remarkable is that I did get to Mount Banahaw four years later, to the exact spiritist’s haunt my  friend had mentioned.  But there was no more talk about an anting-anting.  Instead, when we got to the place, we found waiting for us then Brig. Gen. Romeo Gatan, a military officer in Central Luzon.  He was there for a personal request to the spiritist “mamay”: he wanted to acquire a magic stone called “mutya” that would attract women to him.

Had I considered foremost my personal welfare and concerns – my freedom, my family – I would have accepted. I would have involved myself in Marcos’ project to control the coconut industry, then the top dollar-earning export. The project later led to a controversy over the ownership of UCPB (which by end-1983 was the third biggest bank in the country, with Danding as its largest individual shareholder) and Danding’s acquisition of controlling shares in San Miguel Corporation.

Throughout all these developments, remaining unresolved – until today –  are the following: the failure of the coconut industry to develop as it should, with the small farmers continuing to endure extreme poverty, even as the government ignores the mandate to turn over to them some P100-billion in coconut levy funds illegally collected from 1973 to 1983.

I never found out whether Danding Cojuangco had a direct hand in, or at least was aware of, the offer to work with him made in Mount Banahaw. The matter didn’t come up when we met personally for the first time in 1998. Upon his invitation, I sat down with him for two hours in his office at the San Miguel Building in Ortigas. There was just the two of us. We had a simple, take-out lunch.

He was warm and smiling as we shook hands. He did most of the talking and I intently listened, rarely interrupting him.  In sum, he sought to assure me that all his efforts to grow his businesses, initiating diversified ventures that introduce technological innovations and practices, were intended to help build a strong Philippine economy, even as he piled up profits. “Look,” he said, “I earn big, but I put it back in investments in our country and not abroad.”

I didn’t dispute his claim.  However, I raised questions about his “corporative” scheme in Negros Occidental, where – with the DAR’s supposed acquiesence – he bought back the lands that he had agreed to be redistributed to his farmworkers under CARP. He claimed to have made them partners, assuring them better income, as he transformed his former sugarcane plantations into fruit orchards.

I expressed my deep concern over the welfare of the farm workers, who practically have remained as workers on his landholdings. He assured me he would take care of them. On that note, we shook hands and parted.

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