New monuments to honor heroes have been separately unveiled in the City of San Fernando, Pampanga and Malolos City, Bulacan.
The City Government of San Fernando unveiled a bust monument of the late San Fernando Municipal President Don Antonio Espino Consunji at his ancestral house along a main street named after him.
Consunji was the gobernadorcillo of San Fernando in 1892 but was removed from the office by the then ruling Spanish government because of his attendance at our hero Jose Rizal’s town visit in June of that year.
He later became the “presidente municipal.”
In Malolos City, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) has unveiled the bronze-molded monument of President Emilio Aguinaldo at the patio of Barasoain Church.
The new monument replaced the old one which was made of stone installed during the previous rehabilitation of Barasoain Church and its patio, in time for the centennial celebration of Philippine independence in 1998.
The new monument was molded from the previous one by the Caedo Sculptural Works, while the old monument of Aguinaldo was relocated to the first floor of the Museo ng Republika Filipina 1899.
Aguinaldo’s monument faces the Barasoain Church where he was inaugurated on January 23, 1899, the day when the Philippines formally became a republic in a ceremony that symbolized the Philippines’ quest for nationhood.
He made Malolos as the capital of the Philippines under the First Republic.
The Executive branch was based at the Malolos Cathedral, Legislative branch at Barasoain Church, and the Judicial branch at the convent of Barasoain.
The NHCP said that historical accounts attributed the structural establishment of the First Philippine Republic to Aguinaldo, who introduced to the Filipino people the principle of having three branches of government namely the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary.