2004 the year that was

JThe flooding and landslide tragedy in the north was just one of the trials that tested the Filipinos’ resilience in 2004.

Nearly every kind of bad news seemed to have been crammed into the past 365 days. It was a year when nature’s wrath was seen at its mightiest and when man’s folly tested the government’s stand on the war on terror. It was a year of political and economic instability and of the passing away of icons.

On the other hand, the year also saw Filipinos rising to the occasion, it saw history being made during the elections, and national pride reborn thanks to a few good men and women.

The year started with election hype running in high gear as the people witnessed a tight race between the incumbent, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and opposition rival, the late actor Fernando Poe Jr. An economist versus a high school dropout–one banking on experience, the other on mass appeal.

During the election period, national issues begging to be addressed often took a back seat to questions surrounding Poe’s citizenship. The Senate even stepped in to investigate in January. But the issue was finally settled in March with the Supreme Court upholding the ruling of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), effectively declaring Poe a natural-born Filipino.

The bungled attempt to at long last modernize the country’s electoral process also took center stage in the heat of the election period. Again, it had to take the Supreme Court to resolve the issue after it nullified on January the Comelec’s P1.249 billion contract with a private consortium due to irregularities in the bidding process.

The use of automated counting machines was supposed to mark the first time that the country’s electoral process would do away with the obsolete. With the SC decision, some 475,000 public school teachers were given anew the thankless job of manually counting the votes of over 43 million Filipinos.

The Comelec, however, succeeded in making this a landmark year for Filipinos abroad with the implementation of the country’s first ever overseas absentee voting.

In the end, the counting of votes by hand took six long, tension-filled weeks, ending on June 24 when Mrs. Arroyo was declared winner.

During her first three years in office after succeeding ousted leader Joseph Estrada, Mrs. Arroyo struggled without a popular mandate and was constantly hounded by an image of instability, surviving a near-popular uprising by Estrada loyalists in May 2001.

With her inauguration on June 30, she may well become the third longest-serving president by the time she leaves office in 2010.

Meanwhile, Poe and his running mate, former senator Loren Legarda, went on to protest Mrs. Arroyo’s win, claiming massive cheating. But in an unexpected twist, the 65-year-old political neophyte died just after midnight on Dec. 12 after a massive stroke. Throngs of his fans queued at his wake and saw him to his final resting place. With Poe’s untimely death, what will happen to his electoral protest remains to be seen.

After getting a fresh mandate, it did not take long before the celebration ended for Mrs. Arroyo, and she had to make her first tough decision – keeping the Americans happy, or literally saving the life of a lone truck driver.

The Philippines’ close ties with the United States were nearly severed when Mrs. Arroyo, who was among the first Asian leaders to declare support for the US-led war on Iraq, caved in to the demand of Angelo de la Cruz’s hostage takers who had threatened to behead him last July if Manila did not withdraw its small humanitarian contingent in the Middle Eastern country.

At home, the President was a hero, but disappointment rang throughout the western world. Nonetheless, long-standing relations between the Philippines and the US prevailed. Although the Arroyo government’s policies on the global war on terror raised more questions, specifically how to keep safe some eight million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), many of whom are scattered in the Middle East.

The De la Cruz hostage crisis gripped the nation for nearly a month. Hoping to avoid another such crisis, the government banned the deployment of OFWs in Iraq. But this did not stop enterprising Filipinos from grabbing job opportunities amid the rebuilding of the war-torn country.

The result was another hostage drama.

Roberto Tarongoy, an undocumented OFW, was seized by militants last October, forcing the Philippines to seek the help of Iraq’s neighbors to stop Filipinos from sneaking into the country and putting their lives at risk. Tarongoy is yet to be freed.

Fate was kinder to another Filipino hostaged this time in Afghanistan. As the Philippines juggled with two hostage crises, diplomacy worked for Angelito Nayan, who was among three volunteers of the United Nations seized while helping in the Afghan elections. Nayan and his colleagues were released on Nov. 23.

OFWs have become the backbone of the Philippine economy with their $8 million in foreign exchange remittance annually. But threats of terrorism worldwide have raised the issue of the country’s heavy reliance on the hard-earned money of these Filipinos struggling to make it overseas to feed their loved ones back home.

Terrorism or getting caught in the conflict of foreign countries was not the only threat to OFWs in 2004. In Japan, the government has been planning to impose rigid regulations in the hiring of foreign entertainers.

Fearing displacement, Filipina entertainers in Japan numbering about 80,000 are up in arms. Manila and Tokyo are in the process of finding a compromise on the issue.

Meanwhile, homegrown terror made its presence felt anew in 2004 with its worst attack on Philippine soil taking place on Feb. 27.

Over 100 people died when a bomb blast caused a fire that sank the SuperFerry 14 as it neared Corregidor island at the mouth of Manila Bay. The investigation into the incident concluded in October with the Abu Sayyaf emerging as the culprit and six of its members were subsequently charged.

It was the world’s fourth deadliest terrorist blow since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the US and Asia’s worst since the 2002 Bali bombings in Indonesia.

While the year began with Filipinos getting caught up in a divisive election season, its final weeks saw them united in prayer and joining hands in the aftermath of the massive landslide tragedy in Aurora and Quezon provinces.

Illegal logging was blamed as forests were denuded in the Sierra Madre mountains. Debates were revived anew on how illegal logging can be stopped and President Arroyo ordered a temporary ban on commercial logging.

It wasn’t the first time that government action was precipitated by a terrible incident.

In November, 10 people were killed and over a hundred injured when one of the dilapidated trains of the state-run Philippine National Railways (PNR) was derailed on a bad section of track in Quezon.

Critics of the administration and even train officials blamed the "measly" P135 million of the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) allotted for maintenance of the PNR’s trains and tracks. And at the heart of the issue lay allegations of corruption.

PNR employees accused the PNR leadership of graft and messing up the state-run firm’s finances, resulting in the continued deterioration of the country’s national train system.

It seems the year can never be complete in this country without corruption rearing its ugly head. This year, the entire Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) was hit with scandal after scandal.

The cast of allegedly corrupt military officials was led by Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia, who is facing both civilian and military courts for purportedly amassing ill-gotten wealth amounting to over a $1 billion.

The crackdown on corruption in the military shifted to high gear in November after the Ombudsman ordered the forfeiture of the P11.2-million worth of questionable assets of retired AFP chief Lisandro Abadia. The filing of perjury charges were also recommended against Abadia before the Sandiganbayan for his "unlawful" statements of assets and liabilities filed in 1992 and 1993.

Ironically, widespread corruption in what are supposed to be trusted institutions was allegedly taking place as the nation suffered from economic instability.

A looming fiscal crisis, as declared by the President herself in September, kept the government busy in the middle of the year, finding ways and means to keep the wobbly economy in shape.

In November, the President announced to the nation an economic turnaround, virtually saying that we were out of the woods thanks to the unified response of the Filipino people to her calls to address the fiscal crisis at the soonest possible time.

She was referring to Congress working on bills to increase revenues for the cash-strapped government and the "Bayanihan Fund" that got people contributing money from their own pockets.

The year, however, will end with the proposed P907.6-billion budget for 2005 still not passed into law and with Congress passing only one bill – the so-called "sin" tax bill – out of the eight revenue-generating measures Mrs. Arroyo proposed to Congress earlier this year.

Now, for some good news. Even as bad news dominated the frontpage in 2004, a few good men and women showed the nation and the rest of the world what we are capable of achieving through sheer talent and guts.

Manny Pacquiao led that pack. The 25-year-old consensus world featherweight champion slugged it out with Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez to a thrilling split draw last May. A rematch is in the works.

Another sports figure, golfer Jennifer Rosales, 25, warmed the hearts of Filipinos everywhere when she ended her US-LPGA title drought by winning the Chick-Fil-A championship in Georgia last May.

Pacquiao and Rosales were named by the Philippine Sportswriters Association sportsman and sportswoman of the year, respectively, and are leading candidates for the 2004 Athlete of the Year award.

A Hawaiian teen with Filipino roots meanwhile charmed her way onto the global stage. Seventeen-year-old Jasmine Trias made it to the final three of "American Idol", earning her a hero’s welcome when she visited the country not long after the hit television contest concluded in May.

Trias was voted off in the title fight but she nonetheless got a private audience with Mrs. Arroyo when she was in town.

In the military scene, another Fil-Am made the nation proud when he spoke the truth about soldiers’ abuse of Iraqi prisoners last May.

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, a two-star general in the US army, spelled out the abuse in his report that sparked worldwide outrage over the treatment of Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

Taguba, 53, earned praises from US senators investigating the issue. Bottomline, he said, he had to "follow his conscience and do what is morally right."

Amid setbacks and agonies of 2004 was a story of two little angels who best exemplify the meaning of hope.

Two-year-old twins Carl and Clarence Aguirre were two unlikely scene-stealers in 2004 who united the nation in prayer as they amazed doctors by enduring a delicate surgery for conjoined twins.

Carl and Clarence were joined at the tops of their heads until a 17-hour final operation at a New York hospital separated them on Aug. 4.

Recovery for the boys came at lighting speed that awed doctors closely monitoring the twins’ condition. In a revolutionary new process, Carl and Clarence went through four major operations conducted over 11 months beginning in October 2003. The boys and their mother, Arlene Aguirre, have been in New York since September of the same year.

Their survival, similar to those who lived through affliction, gives faith a new meaning. And even as there were countless trials and frustrations this year, Filipinos learned a great deal from these stories of heroism, faith and hope. Living by these is another question, but who knows, maybe we have finally grown up as a nation.

ust days away from the New Year, the world was in mourning for thousands of lives lost in the earthquake and tsunami disaster that struck across southern Asia. No stranger to calamities, the Philippines itself is still reeling from the devastation wrought by recent storms that claimed the lives of nearly 1,600 people.