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Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Roperos: Politics and Blas
By Godofredo M. Roperos
Politics also
Too bad Blas F. Ople died when the fun of the 2004 campaign is just starting. For if there was a man who loves and thrives in politics, it is Blas, who only last Saturday, was still the Secretary of Foreign Affairs.
I met Blas during my Manila Times years when he was a columnist of the Daily Mirror, sister daily of the Manila Times where I was associate editor of the weekend supplement, the Sunday Times Magazine. We were a crowd of about seven or eight then who would “go out evenings after work to relax.”
In a way, he was our group’s political mentor. An avid nationalist, we looked up to him as some kind of an intellectual “watering hole” over endless cups of black coffee.
It was a mark of honor for any of us who can put up to Ka Blas cup for cup of black coffee. It was coffee for him in exchange of the bottles of hard drinks that we used to survive on, night after night in Manila of the 50s and early 60s.
It was an unwritten arrangement among us then that during elections, some of us would go to the opposition while the others would work for the administration candidates.
Thus in 1953, during the EQ-RM political encounter, some of us worked with then president Elpidio Quirino while Blas and the others worked for Ramon Magsaysay.
That was how I came to do research at Quirino’s house after his defeat by Magsaysay, for his biography which was being written by Juan Collas, while Blas worked with Magsaysay at the Palace.
When Magsaysay died in the plane crash at Mt. Manunggal, we all banded together to get the late Manuel Manahan elected president to continue Magsaysay’s heart-warming populist policies that show a sort of revolution in the political process of the country.
In the early days then, candidates for top government positions only campaigned in cities, and seldom if at all, in big towns. But Magsaysay changed all that. He initiated the campaign at the barrio level, and won overwhelmingly.
Since then, the nation’s political exercise has been brought down to the ground level.
It has become a must for candidates to be seen and to shake the hands of rural folks. Magsaysay initiated the change and Blas felt it was important that Magsaysay’s brand of politics should continue.
The late Manny Ma-nahan who was also very close to us in the media appear to fit the Magsaysay mold, and so we supported him.
But he lost to then vice president Carlos Garcia who ascended to the presidency at Magsaysay’s death. Garcia won the 1957 elections with Diosdado Macapagal as his vice president.
When Garcia showed a genuine nationalistic turn of foreign policy, Blas and the rest of us congregated with him. Blas it was who helped developed the Filipino First policy of Garcia, the policy that brought him the ire of the US.
Truth is, if it were not for the fact that Blas was later appointed by the late president Ferdinand Marcos as labor secretary, I doubt very much if he could have gone to the US at the time.
Indeed, I never thought that Blas would accept the offer of President Arroyo to be foreign affairs secretary. It was all right to be labor secretary, the plight of the masses the biggest concern of his public life.
Had he stayed on in the Senate, he would have finished his second term and ended his public service career through legal fiat, not with “his boots on” as it was. And it would not have ended as dramatically and as fruitfully as it did last Sunday.
Indeed, for a man who many say had just finished high school, a man who truly taught himself to become a well-honed political guru and an intellectual giant of his time, Blas did leave a void in a country where mediocrity in thought and politics has become a badge of honor.
(e-mail: gmr@sunstar. com.ph)
(December 16, 2003 issue)
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