Category Archives: Pinoys

Qwertyman No. 221: The Fil-Am Midterm Vote

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 26, 2026

NEXT WEDNESDAY (Tuesday, November 3 in the US), Americans will troop to the polling stations to cast their votes in what promises to be a historic midterm election, by all accounts a referendum on the tempestuous first half of President Donald Trump’s renewed White House lease. Millions of Filipino-Americans will take part in that exercise, and how they vote could very well affect everything from how much the Pinoy jeepney driver will be paying for diesel to how China will behave in the West Philippine Sea—not to mention outcomes in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and other global hotspots.

According to US immigration sources, over 4 million Filipinos or people of Filipino ancestry now live in the US, of whom almost 400,000 are undocumented. About 2.5 million of these Filipino-Americans are eligible voters. With the US population currently standing at about 350 million—of whom 210 million have registered to vote in 2026—we can see that Fil-Ams roughly represent 1 percent of both the total US and voting population. That may not look like much on the national scale, but their concentration in several states—mostly in California, Hawaii, Texas, New York, and Washington, in that order—amplifies their political importance, particularly in key battleground areas. California alone accounts for over 1.5 million Fil-Ams.

A number of Filipino-American candidates are on the ballot. Running for reelection to the New York State Legislature is Steven Raga, who became the first Fil-Am to sit in that body in 2022. If successful, they will be joining many other political leaders of Filipino ancestry, some serving in the state legislatures of California, Wisconsin, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, New York, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Bobby Scott, a Democrat representing Virginia, is the only Member of Congress with Filipino roots, serving in Washington since 1993. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria is also a Fil-Am, and the first openly gay person in that capacity. Many other Fil-Ams serve on city councils.

But it will be more than ethnic representation at stake for Fil-Ams—and indeed, all Americans if not the world at large—on November 3.

Why does any of this matter to us? Because millions of Filipinos have relatives in America—I have a daughter in California and a niece in Michigan (both Democrats but independently minded women who married into Republican families, to give you an idea of how complex these relationships can get)—and also because any flatulence from Washington impacts our noses here in Manila.

Filipino-Americans are voting primarily for their own national and local concerns, as they should, but inevitably they’re also voting for the kind of global order their leaders will seek to forge. The old order based on rules and respect has been effectively dismantled by Trump, replaced by military power and a disdain for human rights domestically and around the world. So the Fil-Am voting in Kalamazoo for lower prices at their gas pump isn’t doing that just for Michigan but for the world as well.

Fil-Ams have historically leaned and voted Democratic (68 percent blue vs. 31 percent red among self-identified registered voters in 2024, according to a Pew poll), but there’s been a recent rightward shift noted in the polls, which has been true as well of other ethnic groups like Latinos, especially in 2024. However, this shift will be tested in these coming midterms, with issues like affordability, inflation, health care, jobs, and social security ranking topmost among voter and particularly Filipino-American concerns.

Fil-Am voters do need to come out more to the polling booths to make themselves heard. Overall, 90 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI, the rubric under which Fil-Ams are usually grouped) have signified that they will vote in these midterms, but only 54 percent and 63 percent of eligible Fil-Am voters actually cast their ballots in 2020 and 2024, respectively. (In 2024, 54 percent went for Kamala Harris and 44 percent for Donald Trump among Fil-Ams nationwide.)

This is why both parties have been actively wooing Fil-Am voters to support them in the midterms, because their votes could mean victory or defeat in key races like Nevada’s, where Filipinos are the largest AAPI ethnic group at 44 percent.

Nevada is a particularly interesting story. The state doesn’t figure in our migration maps as much as California, Hawaii, or New York do, but Filipinos moved to Nevada in droves in the 1990s and 2000s, attracted by its lower cost of living and jobs in the gaming and health care industries. Today about 200,000 Fil-Ams live there, representing 60,000 votes being courted by Democrats and Republicans with karaoke and kamayan parties.

How did it go in Nevada the last time? A report from the Washington Post dated October 30, 2024—just a week before the election that put Trump back in power—shows how pliable the Fil-Am voter’s mind could be:

“While headlining a Las Vegas rally advertised as a celebration of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Trump told the crowd that he would build an economy that supports the Asian American community. ‘So many amazing Nevada Filipinos, right?’ Trump told the crowd, earning boisterous cheers. ‘… You all are the greatest people, hardworking people, and we’re going to take care of you.’

“Harry Cheng, 57, arrived at the rally an undecided voter. ‘I just wanted to hear what people had to say,’ said Cheng, who immigrated from the Philippines to the United States in 1989.

“By the end, he was convinced.

He knew Trump had made anti-Asian comments—including referring to the coronavirus as the ‘Chinese virus,’ ‘Wuhan virus’ and ‘kung flu’—in the past. But the former president and fellow Republican speakers made a strong case for closing the border and improving the economy, he said.

‘The number of migrants crossing the border has turned into a crisis, Cheng said. Meanwhile, he had immigrated ‘the right way.’

“Besides, he said, ‘Trump also made statements that were pro-Asian. I just heard it firsthand.’

“He stood near a lifelike cutout of the former president as the crowd filtered out of the rally and glanced at campaign T-shirts for sale. He planned to register as a Republican when he got home, Cheng said.”

Thanks to voters like him, Trump won Nevada by a sliver of a margin, at 49.8 percent against Harris’ 48.3 percent. I wonder what Harry Cheng is thinking now, and how he’ll vote on November 3rd.

(Image from Bilyonaryo News Channel)

Qwertyman No. 220: Living with Evil

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 19, 2026

A YOUNGER friend messaged me last week to ask for some advice. Would it be wrong, he said, if he left the country in the event that the Dutertes returned to power? He was neither a political figure nor a tycoon, but just an ordinary middle-class citizen engaged in his own small business.

What revolted him was the thought of sharing space with millions of fellow Filipinos who, regardless of the Senate impeachment trials, still want a Duterte in the Palace.

In another era, until a few years ago, I would have told him, “Don’t. Stay here. Persevere. Endure. Fight on.” Instead, I found myself texting him back, “If that’s an option, why not? Might be time to give yourself a break.”

There’ll be many who’ll be unhappy with that reply, but can you really blame someone who believes that a Duterte restoration will be nothing short of a zombie apocalypse, and who’ll want to escape?

Me? I’ll probably take my own advice, stay put, and find a way to survive. (We do have an option—a daughter living in the States who’ll only be too happy to have us over, but who’s the crazy foreigner who wants to live in Trump’s America?)

I’m no Pollyanna, and maybe it’s just the Boomer stubbornness in me, but I haven’t given up on this country yet, despite all the aggravations we have to live with. Living with evil is what it is—the traffic, the pollution, the floods, the poverty, the injustice, they didn’t just happen; they’re part of the architecture of a State fashioned by morally corrupt and greedy people who couldn’t care less about others.

That’s pretty dismal, I know, and even more reason for my friend to flee. Still, there’s an upside to all this: if only because of the floods and traffic et al, our people seem to be waking up to the existential need to fight corruption, practice good governance, and educate our young so they’ll know and do better than we ever did.

Even the DDS comeback that terrifies my friend might not happen, or come apart with time.

I’ve long argued—and I could be whistling in the wind—that the DDS faithful are not a monolithic bloc. Yes, most of them come from Mindanao and the Visayas, but most are also poor, a more universal and distributed trait. (Don’t count the social media trolls and the hired help.) I suspect—or at least I hope—that many might yet be persuaded to reconsider their loyalties, likely less by any Kakampink logic than by their own harsh realization that they have been betrayed and even stolen from by their patrons.

Sadly, whoever wins in 2028, I think it will take at least two more generations for those learnings to take root. Our present principals have to vanish from the scene to refresh our political stock and spirit, which is why educating our youth today—in school or through the Senate hearings—is crucially important.

If the Dutertes prevail, it will be terrible, but the sky will not fall. We will find ways to keep our heads above the floodwaters; most of us will persevere, and some if not many will fight on.

My own best antidote to despair over our political fortunes is to remind myself that we survived martial law. Having said that, I should add that survival often involves some degree of acceptance, creative adaptation, compromise, and even complicity.

Again I recall Nick Joaquin’s observation that a few weeks after the Japanese marched into Manila, things uncannily returned to normal—not that we embraced the invaders, but had found reasons and ways to persist.

I know that the once much-vaunted word “resilience” has become almost pernicious in our appreciation of it today, but it’s no less true for all the beatings it’s taken.

In a poem about the Second World War, W. H. Auden describes this urge to maintain or feign normalcy amid chaos:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home.

The true danger lies in forgetting the big picture as we fuss over the details of daily routine and struggle. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has this marvelous episode from his novella “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” where his protagonist—a stonemason banished to the Soviet Gulag—is assigned to build a brick wall, a task he performs with great pride and precision, momentarily oblivious to the fact that he is reinforcing his own prison.

Last week’s tributes for and tirades against the late Cesar Virata again brought to fore the issue of complicity in an oppressive regime. He wasn’t alone. There was—and there remains—a small but vigorous resistance to dictatorship, but at least until EDSA, many of us learned to make our bed with Marcos and to lie in it.

Living with evil is a given part of the human condition, and it’s what we do in relation to it that ultimately defines us. There are those who would try to have as little to do with it as possible, and who would demand the same moral consistency of others, but it’s hard to avoid. It’s not some dark entity out there, or even a stranger across the hallway or in the seat next to you; it’s in you, that part of you that thinks killing drug suspects was a good idea.

What may ultimately bring us all together and move this country forward as a whole is the realization and acceptance of the fact that very few of us will come to the table with pure consciences and clean hands. Living with evil leaves stains, but even the stained come with valuable experience and insight.

Sometimes it’s not the obvious enemy, the ones most different from us, who bring the most pain and aggravation, but those closer to us, the ones we agree with on nearly everything—but who disdain and even demonize us for that ten percent we disagree on. Black or white suddenly counts less than shades of red or pink.

As Bertolt Brecht put it in his poem “To Those Born Later”:


Hatred, even of meanness
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

Evil is more singleminded and less quarrelsome than the good. It is not so easily distracted; it does not forget. It will expand at all costs, seize every advantage, tolerate and even accept tactical differences, take and exploit whatever’s available.

If we can be as adept as evil and pitch as wide a tent, then the good in and among us might yet prevail.

Qwertyman No. 219: Notes on Cesar Virata (1930-2026)

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 12, 2026

FOR A personality so closely associated with the Marcos regime, it was inevitable that the obituaries following the passing last week of former Prime Minister Cesar Virata would reflect a broad range of opinion. 

The gentlest take on the man was that he was an honest, modest, and hardworking academic who found himself with an opportunity to help direct national economic policy, and who did his best, within a profligate bureaucracy, to mitigate economic catastrophe and sustain international support for the Philippines.

At the harshest extreme is his depiction as a complicit enabler of Marcosian martial law, a window-dresser for the regime, and ultimately an ineffectual technocrat—like others of his training and generation—who refused or failed to acknowledge the crimes of the regime he had been serving faithfully.

Those assessments came freely in social media last week, from friends I respect on either side. The variance told me as much about how we choose to remember history as how we choose what to forget, or at least to mediate after half a century, which probably tells more about us than about the other person.

I had several opportunities to meet with and to interview PM Virata, as he most likely would have wanted to be remembered, in the course of completing books to which he had something to contribute from his vast experience. We discussed mainly his life as an academic and as one of SGV’s early pillars, as well as being a member of Cavite’s prominent Aguinaldo and Virata clans. Inevitably—usually after the formal interviews, when he took me out to lunch for a more relaxed chat—he opened up about his life as a Marcos technocrat. He allowed me to take notes, from which I now share some interesting episodes and insights—edited for clarity—that might help complete whatever picture of the man we had in mind.

On martial law: “We didn’t know about the preparations for martial law. The President kept it to himself…. I was in the US when martial law was declared. I was attending a World Bank meeting. I went to my hotel room in DC, where we often stayed, although the actual meeting was at the Hilton. I got a call from one of the more senior Department of State reporters who had covered the negotiations on the Laurel-Langley Agreement. He said, ‘Don’t you know, Mr. Secretary, that martial law has been declared?’ I said no. That was around 4 pm because I had a 5 pm tennis game with Ambassador Suarez, who must also have been surprised, because he didn’t know, either. I thought of calling Joy, but she would have been asleep then, so we played our game and I waited until around 6 am to call her. When I did, the operator said, ‘All calls are suspended to the Philippines.’ Later, Alex Melchor and I were told to go to San Francisco and LA on our way home to tell the Filipinos and the consulate there about martial law. I still didn’t know what we were supposed to say. Eventually, when that same American reporter asked me for my reaction to martial law, what I said was, ‘Well, the Philippines just joined the rest of Asia,’ because everyone else around us had declared martial law—South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc.”

On the Aquino assassination: “August 21st, Ninoy was killed. I was at home in Philam that day. Joy was having a show in Makati, so I had lunch with my sister in Kalayaan. I went home and I fell asleep. I was woken up by my military aide, saying that Sen. Aquino had been killed and that the President would be making an announcement soon. We had a TV and a radio in my room and turned both of them on, but the President didn’t appear, just his photo. It turned out that he was about to have an operation. We were called to Malacañang, but when we got there, the guards told us not to approach the President, because he was all bundled up. He was really struggling and had to be helped to the elevator. We learned that he was going to have a kidney transplant! He did instruct us to pay our respects when Ninoy’s body arrived. We went to the house on Times Street but we weren’t allowed in, so I wrote a letter to Butz Aquino, who was the only one I knew then.”

On the Constitution: “I just learned recently that a Cabinet meeting was called right after martial law that I was not present at. The issue presented by the President to the Cabinet was that he had received a summons from the Supreme Court because there were petitions asking for martial law to be declared unconstitutional. There was a group that included the military and I think even Sec. Abad Santos who were in favor of declaring a revolutionary government. But the President did not accept this. He said, ‘How can you assert civilian authority over the military without a Constitution?’ He really believed in Atty. Estelito Mendoza, so he asked Mendoza to respond to the Supreme Court summons, and Mendoza said he’d try to argue that this was a political issue and not within the Court’s jurisdiction.”

On becoming Prime Minister: “The President kept me concurrently as Finance Minister, but my weakness really was that I wasn’t a politician, so I wanted Jose Roño, the Minister for Interior and Local Government, to be my deputy because he knew the local governments and politicians. At that time, Foreign Minister Romulo wanted to be the deputy PM. CPR said, ‘Look at Singapore, Rajaratnam serves as both deputy PM and foreign minister.’ I said, ‘Look, I’m not a politician and you’re away most of the time, so how will I operate? If there was more than one deputy prime minister, I’d probably nominate you, but there’s only one vacancy!’”

There was a lot more I learned from PM Virata, both about and outside of martial law, but there are some stories you realize are being told to you in confidence that are best kept that way. It’s a sad thing that the general tendency these days—especially in social media—is to reduce people to their politically posterized worst, discarding the innate complexity in every person. Maybe I’m too naïve and tolerant, but the fictionist in me looks for those complexities and ambiguities rather than bottomlines better left to accountants and scholars. 

One detail I do remember about Cesar Virata was that he was already dean of the UP School of Business Administration (which now bears his name) when his father Enrique, a professor of mathematics, was named Acting President of UP. Cesar resigned and joined SGV rather than put both of them in an awkward situation. I know his detractors might say that he could and should have exercised the same delicacy in his later positions in government, but that’s a longer argument for another time.

Qwertyman No. 218: A Dead Man’s Voice

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 5, 2026

TODAY I’M going to turn over this column to the voice of a long-dead man, and all because—when last week I picked up a book he had published in 1957—I thought he might as well have been writing in the present, so uncannily familiar were the vignettes he recounted from this country’s political life seven decades and more ago.

The man was George A. Malcolm (1881-1961), the first full-time dean of the University of the Philippines College of Law whose building now bears his name, and later an Associate Justice of the prewar Philippine Supreme Court. The book he authored was American Colonial Careerist (Boston: The Chrisopher Publishing House, 1957), a collection of his memoirs and impressions as a civil servant under the American colonial regime over most of that period.

I was drawn to the Malcolm book because I collect antiquarian Filipiniana, for one, and of course because of the UP connection, but also because Malcolm graduated from the University of Michigan (where I and many other Filipino scholars took their graduate degrees) and had long been intrigued by Ann Arbor’s contributions (positive and surely some negative ones as well) to Philippine education and government. Michigan also produced Dean Worcester, who would defend America’s paternalistic rule, and lawyer Clyde De Witt, who would practice in the Philippines and later set up an endowment for Filipino student-lawyers in Michigan that would support such legal luminaries as Edgardo Angara, Miriam Defensor Santiago, and Raphael Lotilla.

Because of his positions, Malcolm came to know and befriend nearly all the major Filipino and American politicians and leaders of the prewar period, and his book gives intimate and sometimes saucy sketches of them. Manuel L. Quezon, not surprisingly, dominates his memoirs. “The Filipino is a natural and consummate politician,” he writes. “The great Jefe of them all for three decades was Manuel L. Quezon. He was the spectacular figure who gave color to the scene. A close second to Quezon in astuteness, but lacking his dynamic personality, was Sergio Osmeña.” But he also adds that “Quezon dearly loved the trappings of office. He relished the glittering appellation, ‘Your Excellency.’… An added Quezonian touch was a red shoulder-sash and three foreign decorations—a medal attached to his left lapel and two blazing badges pinned on the right side of his coat above the hip.”

Further, Malcolm notes, “Quezon gave an early demonstration of a desire to see the world at the expense of the taxpayers. In the role of official delegate of the Philippines to the International Congress of Navigation, held in czarist Russia in 1908, the young Assemblyman arrived in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) after the Congress had already adjourned. The P34,000 set aside for this trip was trivial compared to the fabulous expense accounts entailed in paying for other pilgrimages all over the globe with a large entourage. Curiously, the Filipino people were rather proud of the impression their effulgent leader was making in foreign lands and rarely complained of his prodigality.” (One who did complain was a young UP student named Ferdinand Marcos, who railed against MLQ’s “extravagance.”)

But Quezon was hardly alone. Malcolm goes on to say that “Quirino filled the expensive shoes of Quezon, and even added frills of his own concoction. A P5,000 bed to case the President’s slumbers became the prize reference in political campaigns. An investigation conducted by an inquisitive Senate purported to reveal that Quirino had spent about a million pesos on four trips abroad. Journalist Teodoro M. Locsin cynically observed: ‘This is living.’”

Indeed, presidential or not, the corruption we seem so upset about these days was already widespread. Malcolm observes that “Certain phases of the electoral process in the Philippines merit special attention. Aspirants for office have flagrantly and repeatedly flaunted the provision of the Electoral Code which specifies that no candidate shall spend for his campaign more than the total amount of the candidate. Yet, it is common information that a candidate for a seat in Congress, whose annual salary is P7,200, has been required to deposit P25,000 with party chieftains and has had to part with many more pesos in addition to have a fighting chance. In the 1953 presidential election, such sums as P2,000,000 were openly mentioned as needed by each of the three contending parties to finance their campaigns.

“Where did this money come from? The money came from candidates who bankrupted their patrimony and from the ‘big shots,’ in particular the sugar tycoons. Moreover, millions of pesos of the people’s money was drained out of the public treasury, generally for local ‘public works,’ to influence the people’s will…. Many phrases descriptive of Philippine politics have been scattered about. Merely as examples, I quote the words of an American publisher and a Filipino educator. Wrote Roy W. Howard, Philippine politics is ‘a great national pastime,’ with politicians “ten centavos a dozen.” Declared Mariano V. de los Santos, President of the University of Manila: ‘There is no activity in which we can engage where partisan politics does not seep in. Business, industry, agriculture, all are permeated by bad politics. Under such a climate, naturally politicians of all sorts thrive. But they thrive at the expense of the general welfare.’”

And where did many of these politicians come from? We go back to the UP College of Law and its poorer cousins which seem to have mushroomed all over the place:

“One potent reason why politics has come to play such a large part in the life of the people is the preference on the part of the youth for academic education. The result is a bumper crop of lawyers with no place to go except into the government service or into politics. It would inure to good government to have legally-trained and disciplined men and women in public life, if such exaggerated importance was not attached to the title of abogado in the Philippines.

“The College of Law, University of the Philippines, was organized to supply quality, not quantity, leaders. All to no avail. Law schools mushroomed all over the Islands. The Bar examinations became great sporting events, with candidates ready to mortgage their patrimony and sell their souls if only they could get passing grades. Yet when the six long years of study were passed and the Bar examination was hurdled, no clients awaited the embryo lawyers. Droves of half-baked parasites were superimposed on an already top-heavy governmental structure and a lean economy.”

Perhaps we need to bring the spirit of Justice Malcolm back in a séance as amicus curiae in the Senate impeachment trial.

Qwertyman No. 217: The Edjop Effect

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 28, 2026

I’LL GET right to the point: my wife Beng and I, along with a younger couple, caught one of the last few screenings of the movie “Edjop”—and we all emerged so moved, albeit in different ways, that we had to spend another hour-plus over coffee just to process what we saw. 

It wasn’t even a matter of “liking” or “not liking” the movie or director Katski Flores’ and scriptwriter Jade Castro’s treatment of the life of the martyred activist Edgar “Edjop” Jopson. Grappling with the broader contours of the story, we were in no mood to quibble over details gotten wrong (and yes, there were a few) or political lines blurred, as many subsequent reviews and critiques seem to have focused on, for their own good reasons.

For Beng and me, the impact was personal, having been activists ourselves who came of age during that tumultuous First Quarter Storm that Edjop—perhaps inadvertently—helped launch. We saw “Edjop” for what it likely set out to be—the story of a young middle-class idealist’s radicalization in an environment of gross injustice, poverty, and oppression. What made it particularly poignant—and this for me represented the film’s true strength, although others may have seen it as a needless diversion—was its framing as a father-daughter story, of a younger generation’s belated understanding and acceptance of their elders’ actions and even excesses. I found it well acted, especially the major roles.

Full disclosure: director Katski had interviewed me, among many others, even while the film project was just getting started, to get my views on Edjop. (She had, of course, other excellent sources, including Bing Pimentel’s books on the man and the period and Joe Cuaresma’s documentary.) I told Katski that I could contribute very little beyond impressions gained from one brief encounter with Edjop.

That encounter happened a few days before January 26, 1970—the date of Ferdinand Marcos’ State of the Nation Address at the old Senate building (now the National Museum), for which the National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP), which Edjop headed, was planning a massive protest rally. An organizational meeting for that rally was held somewhere in Quezon City, and for reasons I can no longer remember except possibly that I was already an activist at the Philippine Science High School, I was there, more of a kibitzer than anything.

I had just turned 16 a few days earlier. We had rallied in high school for local demands such as a new and larger building, but January 26 was going to be our first big exposure to national issues, and we took the lead from the NUSP, the so-called “moderates,” being then deeply mistrustful of the radical Left under the Kabataang Makabayan and Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (KM-SDK). I recall that meeting of senior NUSP leaders and their allies, and Edjop in a white shirt or barong. What struck me was his earnestness, his passionate belief in his cause, conveyed in an even voice and manner. 

We joined the January 26 rally, assembling on the grounds of the University of Sto. Tomas, bearing “J26M” armbands. We marched to the Senate where Marcos was speaking. I was too far from the entrance to follow everything, but I could see that the KM-SDK were also there in front, and I would later learn (though this account might yet be corrected) that Edjop had decided to terminate the rally early because things were turning ugly, but then SDK firebrand Gary Olivar, a formidable speaker, grabbed the microphone to agitate the crowd. Marcos emerged, a black cardboard coffin was thrown his way from somewhere, the security forces moved, and a melee ensued. We ran for our lives. The FQS had formally begun. 

We moderates were almost as indignant about the way the Left had hijacked the event as by the State’s brutal response; I stayed out of the January 30-31 protest rally that proved even more violent, but watched on the news as students were teargassed and truncheoned along Mendiola and Malacañang. I dreaded what lay ahead; I was due to graduate from high school that year. It should have been a time of hope, but I knew only that something was terribly wrong, that the future was going to be harsh, and that I was as confused as anyone about what to do and whom to follow.

As it turned out, history carried a very wry sense of irony—even humor, were the setting not so tragic.

Within that year, I entered UP and almost immediately joined the Nationalist Corps, the Philippine Collegian, and the Alpha Sigma fraternity. The Nationalist Corps became my entry point to the SDK, and now I saw the “clerico-fascist” moderates to be sorely misguided and wanting in revolutionary fervor. In Alpha Sigma, one of my fraternity brothers was none other than the Gary Olivar we blamed for the J26M fiasco; in the Collegian, our editor was another frat brod, Tony Tagamolila. 

As the decade moved on, I would be arrested and imprisoned, and upon my release, I would take on a writing job I needed—with the government. Tony Tagamolila would die in an encounter with the military in Panay. Gary Olivar would move to the US and study at Harvard (and much, much later would become PGMA’s spokesman).

Little did I know that Edjop himself had become radicalized and was performing far more dangerous tasks in Mindanao than most of us ever did even in Manila. His death fell like a rebuke to those who had doubted him. Meanwhile, I had resigned from my NEDA job to go back to UP to study and to teach, and by the time the Ninoy assassination and EDSA happened, I had become convinced—as I still am—that the middle road remains the most viable if not the only one forward. It seems that I’ve returned to Edjop’s NUSP. 

I don’t know what Edjop himself would think of our situation now, of another Marcos in Malacañang trying to face down a possibly even more vicious alternative, of a CPP fractured by internecine warfare, of a people too easily swayed by rumor and shadow. If the effect of Edjop—the movie and the man—is to make us think of where we ourselves stand today, then the effort of making this film will well have been worth it.

Qwertyman No. 216: The Law on Trial

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 21, 2026

LIKE MANY young Filipinos of my postwar generation, I once dreamt of becoming a lawyer. Alongside medicine, it looked to be the most challenging and the most rewarding if not the noblest profession one could get into. Medicine was also a public service, yes, but one basically remained a doctor forever, while a lawyer could go on to business, politics, or the Supreme Court. It occurred to my teenage mind that the only thing a good lawyer needed was a sharp brain—and the gift of gab, which I thought I had, at least the second if not the first.

Indeed my father Jose Sr., reputed to be the smartest boy in our island province, also wanted to be a lawyer, but was too poor to become one. So having the wits and the words but not the degree, he ended up writing speeches and drafting documents for politicians and bosses who were lawyers. 

Much later, it took my younger sister and brother to achieve his dream. Myself, I entered college on the red carpet of the First Quarter Storm, and with the way the country was going, I had decided even in high school that there was no future for the law in a lawless place, and chose Engineering (and, when I failed my Math, eventually English). The imposition of martial law and my subsequent incarceration hardened that perception: the law was for the powerful, but certainly not for me.

EDSA and the restoration of our civil liberties did much to change that. I followed and listened to such luminaries as Cecilia Muñoz-Palma, Jovito Salonga, Joker Arroyo, Rene Saguisag, Fr. Joaquin Bernas, Jose W. Diokno, Lorenzo Tañada, Haydee Yorac, and others of their caliber and character, and I was convinced and relieved that the lamp of truth, reason, and justice would finally shine brightly over our benighted nation.

And then the 2000s came in, and with them the long backslide into the morass of corruption and authoritarianism—much of it enabled and justified by a new generation of lawyers with far fewer scruples than their predecessors. Amidst this transactionalism, my old pessimism has returned, moderated only by my knowledge that many good and honest lawyers remain to carry on the fight.

The Senate’s current impeachment hearings in the case of Vice President Sara Duterte led me to wonder how they might affect young students contemplating a future in the legal profession, and how the general public perceives lawyers and the law itself today, given what they’ve seen.

I posed these questions to some lawyer-friends who have also followed the trial keenly. First, what impression of lawyers has the trial so far left on the general public?

“Negative overall,” says Lawyer A. “Because of the way the Senate is conducting the impeachment trial, the public was collectively exposed to adversarial litigation. So DDS partisans would praise the defense lawyers and bash opposing counsel, and vice versa, not necessarily with any real appreciation of the legal points made. The people are provided with new information but we doubt if these were properly processed. More than anything else, we sense this exposure to adversarial lawyering has further fed political polarization.”

“Overall negative,” concurs Lawyer B. “We cannot blame those who came away thinking even more negatively of lawyers.” But, she explains further, “It is easy, from the outside, to assume that a lawyer believes every word he says. That his argument is his opinion, that his client’s cause is his own. More often it is not. Lawyers are frequently called to carry out a client’s instructions, to give shape to a vision that is not his and to set aside, quietly, what he might feel or think about the matter. It is not necessarily being a mercenary, it is the job. Of course, none of that spares you from the consequences of taking up the cause of the genuinely indefensible. You must be prepared for the scorn of your fellow lawyers as well as of the public. The profession does insist that everyone deserves a defense but it does not promise you will be admired for providing it.”

But there were bright spots as well. Lawyer B continues that “The most brilliant moments of the trial that made me proud to be a lawyer are actually the Chill Chel moments. With decades in courtroom experience behind him and brilliance of thought and communication, he showed the nation what a real grasp of the law can do, and how cutting and effective a sharp lawyer whose skills have been honed can be, all without the table-pounding and the theatrics and the condescension.”

For Lawyer A, “The oral arguments of Diokno and Poa and the presentations of the amici curiae, precisely because they were non-adversarial, provided the quietude so needed for important ideas to be clearly presented. Kapunan also provided valuable lessons for younger lawyers on the delicate balancing act a litigator often has to strike between pure trial advocacy and theatrics.”

The theatrics are of particular importance, given that, for over a month now, a Filipino audience of over 100 million viewers—about 70 million of them registered voters—has been privy to an almost-daily dose of courtroom drama. And like theater-goers, what most of the rest of us see and look out for is the performance. All the Senate’s a stage, and everyone stepping on to it is deemed an actor in a role playing someone not quite himself or herself in real life but something larger, more sincere, more logical, more certain of the ineluctable truth. The prosecution knows that, the defense knows that. 

So in a public arena such as an impeachment trial, where ultimate guilt or innocence might come down to perception rather than fact, would good lawyering require more than a solid grasp of the law, but a performative aspect as well, ie, the awareness that one is addressing not just the court but a viewership of millions? 

“Yes,” says Lawyer A, “but with an important caveat. The ‘performative’ aspect should not be drama for drama’s sake, but as a tool toward good communication and education.” Adds Lawyer C: “What makes impeachment cases unique is the fact that it is driven and decided by elected politicians rather than career judges. The performative aspect then of lawyering becomes extremely important. The Congressmen on three-year terms and Senators on six-year tenures need the votes. They have to get up, dress up, and show up, so that their constituencies will continue supporting them.”

All this leads me to think that it’s not really just VP Sara and not even the Senate itself on trial, but the law and the legal profession itself. As they say in show business, abangan.

Penman No. 489: Grateful and Graceful

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Penman for Sunday, September 20, 2026

IT ISN’T every day that a certified celebrity comes up to shake your hand and to introduce herself to you as your fan—especially when it’s really the other way around. Here’s someone you’ve admired from a distance all your life, maybe even had a schoolboy crush on, and now here she is, taking your hands in hers like an old friend.

This happened last week at the Manila International Book Fair at SMX, where I was signing books for Anvil Publishing among others, and the surprise visitor to my table was none other than Boots Anson-Roa (now Rodrigo)—the actress, radio-TV host, humanitarian, and public servant—who, as it turned out, was also an Anvil author and who was also signing her newly minted biography titled Grateful, co-authored by Jennie Leuterio Ilustre.

Intrigued, I secured a copy of the book, and soon found myself drawn into the engaging story of a life well-lived, despite the inevitable dips and turns that come with surviving so many tumultuous decades. I recalled my own unpublished biography of another great Filipino actress, the late Rosa Rosal, whose vampish roles tended to be the complete opposite of Boots’ motherly persona, and whose real-life drama outclassed anything she portrayed onscreen—two very different images, and yet two women bonded by the same deeply held traditional values and by their devotion to family and public service.

Maria Elisa Cristobal Anson was born on January 30, 1945 ,just days before the Battle of Manila began, to Oscar Anson (later the actor Oscar Moreno, the “Robert Taylor of the Philippines) and Belen Cristobal, a pharmacy board topnotcher and chemistry teacher, who met and fell in love amidst the turmoil. Belen became pregnant, and the book reveals that it was only at age 53 that Boots discovered that the couple had considered terminating the pregnancy because of the harshness of the times; instead they decided to marry, making Boots possible. (The “Boots” comes from “Bebot” then “Bot.”) 

The young Boots tagged along with her father to his shoots, so pretty that Sampaguita boss “Doc” Perez predicted she would become a star, but she was more interested in watching movies than being in them. She did join theater at the University of the Philippines where she studied English, speech, and drama and served as a corps sponsor, but it was a hosting gig at TV 5’s popular Dance-O-Rama—a slot she twice refused—that finally landed her onscreen.

That choice proved life-changing in another, even more significant way, because this is where the “Roa” in her name comes in, care of Pete Roa, her Dance-O-Rama co-host and reputed ladies’ man, who courted her with flowers plucked from the show’s bouquets and asked her out to post-show dinners “to critique her performance.” The tactics worked. Boots fell for Pete, the two decided to get married, the parents on both sides naturally threw a fit, leaving elopement the only way out. The two snuck out of their show after a commercial break, and managed to get then QC Mayor Norberto Amoranto to marry them on June 5, 1964, followed by a hasty church wedding that same afternoon.

So began a highly visible and celebrated marriage of 43 years that produced four children—Leah, Joey, Chiqui, and Ben. The “Roa” would stick to “Boots Anson” so permanently that even after her second wedding to King Rodrigo in 2014, King would urge her to keep it, to honor that bond. 

The Boots Anson-Roa we know comes mostly from her movies—over a hundred of them—and her TV hostings. Her first movie came in 1968, when she was already a wife and mother of two, then highly unusual—indeed unheard of—for a leading lady. It was her role as the governess Carla in Lino Brocka’s landmark 1970 tearjerker Wanted: Perfect Mother that remains embedded in my memory, as in many others’—caring, loving, but also proper and self-sacrificing, an image that probably prompted her daughter Chiqui to call Boots “the quintessential Mama Mary.” Boots received a FAMAS Best Actress nomination for that performance, and she would go on to major roles in such movies as Tatay Na si Erap (named Best Actress along with Vilma Santos), May Minamahal, Mano Po, Blue Moon, Caregiver, and One True Love.

But from her elopement story onwards, Boots would be the first to upend her “Goody Two-Shoes” projection. “I’m not a saint,” she insists—just level-headed, fair, and thoroughly professional, the kind of performer who always shows up on time, delivers, then goes home to family. The book also chronicles her many other roles and jobs, which we know or remember little of: her work with the US Embassy in Washington in the 1980s, with the Population Commission in the 1970s, with the UP-PGH Medical Foundation, with the Philippine Red Cross, and up to now with Mowelfund. She also taught Communication Arts subjects in UP, Ateneo, and La Salle, wrote newspaper columns, and handled radio programs. Always more than a sweet face, she brought substance to the job.

Pete’s passing in 2007 is a poignant highlight. Hit by a stroke in 1997, Pete soldiered on for another decade (I recall being a few beds away from him for physical therapy in the early 2000s at Capitol Med). He later acquired incurable cancer, and facing the inevitable, the family prayed for a peaceful passing, which happened on August 9, 2007, with Boots at his side. Pete had requested a concert instead of a solemn wake, so the industry gathered to pay him tribute. “It was late into the night,” Boots recalls. “All sympathizers and revelers had left what was originally meant to be a quiet chapel. The music was silenced; the animated conversations were stilled; and the laughter was muted. In a rare moment alone with Pete, I did a ‘curtain call’ for his performers. Now allowing that tear to drop, I bid Pete good night until the next morning for his burial. I gleaned a peaceful countenance. I was confident we made him happy. I was glad that, in his repose, he applauded his friends’ command performances. But, tongue-in-cheek, I begged him to spare me his own standing ovation.”

But the book ends with the happy note on which it begins, with Boots’ second marriage to lawyer Francisco “King” Rodrigo Jr., an old family friend and also a widower. For both, it was love the second time around. 

Indeed Boots Anson-Roa has much to be grateful for, as her book title suggests. But “graceful,” which she would never immodestly use for herself, seems just as apt for this woman who has led such a long and distinguished life with dignity, verve, and faith. Pleased and honored to shake your hand, and to wish you and King well for the rest of our earthly time!

Email me at jose@dalisay.ph and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.ph.

Qwertyman No. 215: Crimes and Punishments

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 14, 2026

BACK IN the early ‘90s, I wrote an essay titled “Killing Time in Little Earth,“ in which I noted that “In the Philippines, we have crimes and punishments aplenty, but they have very little to do with each other.” I don’t think much has changed in thirty years, as recent events amply demonstrate.

For example, what it is about impending imprisonment that makes corrupt but otherwise bouncy politicians and officials suddenly acquire some debilitating disease that obligates their solitary confinement not in prison but in some swanky hospital suite?

Our prisons are bursting with inmates afflicted by tuberculosis, gastroenteritis, hepatitis, HIV, and host of other crippling ailments. But none of these inmates get the executive suite, and not everyone gets the treatment they need, if only because our jails are almost 300% congested, according to the BJMP’s own figures. Even if prison hospitals exist, they simply can’t keep up with the cases coming in; they’re swamped, and whoever they can’t serve go back into their overcrowded cells, carrying all kinds of communicable diseases. 

We’ve seen this happen so often here that it might as well be part of the official script: “Public officials above Salary Grade 30 charged with plunder will be subjected to a mandatory initial period of hospital confinement for a minimum of three months and to last no longer than the prescribed punitive period for their offense, during which extensive medical procedures will be undertaken to ensure the patient’s good health and fitness for prospective incarceration. Quality and substantial nutrition shall be provided, along with adequate recreational facilities for the patient’s physical and mental well-being. All this shall be at the state’s expense.”

These country-club habitues and their blue-chip physicians have been known to spin tall tales about how they suddenly acquired hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis, respiratory ailments, and degenerative disc disease, to name the most popular diagnoses.

But to be fair, this epidemic of hospitalitis has been a global phenomenon. The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, arrested in Britain, escaped repatriation and certain imprisonment for six years by reportedly feigning mental incapacity. He was later returned to Chile and charged with many crimes, but ultimately escaped judgment by dying before he could be convicted. Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, convicted of corruption, spent half of his one-year sentence in a Bangkok hospital before being kicked out by their Supreme Court for malingering. He would get in and out of jail more times since then. So politicians and despots find clever ways of replacing steel bars with green curtains, and justice often has to wait in the hallway while they take their time to recover.

Speaking of tall tales…. All this reminds me when, as an aspiring academic seeking relief from Manila’s infernal heat and university politics, I once found myself in a northern hillside village populated mostly by decrepit seniors. A young man there was causing mayhem with all kinds of vile rumors and fiendish schemes, gleefully hurting his elders without compunction for the sheer delight of watching them suffer, as if he hated what he was fated to become. How could someone so juvenile be so evil? 

A community council was called, to which I was invited as an honored guest. I would have been happy to observe the proceedings from a corner, but they sat me in a tall chair beside the village chief and handed me a bamboo cup filled with potent bugnay wine.

It was suggested, only half in jest, that this pest be disposed of as efficiently as possible, such as by driving a stake between his shoulder blades when he was squatting by the river to pollute the flow downstream. 

A heavily tattooed councilwoman less inclined to brute violence proposed instead that they approach the village shaman to lay a curse on the fellow, so that he would retch uncontrollably every time he did so much as utter a mean word, and grow pus-filled blisters between his legs whenever he mentioned the name of a specific villager who seemed to be the prime object of his mischief.

But then the chief turned to me, as the visiting writer and professor from the city, to ask me for my erudite opinion. Surprised but pleased to be consulted, and emboldened by the bugnay, I got up from my chair, thought hard, put on my sagest and most benign countenance, and drew on my command of fiction to offer counsel:

“O most noble chief, tell him this—you are cursed by the power of Fata Morgana! Fa-Tah Mor-gan-ah! Then turn your back on him—like this!—and leave him be to wonder what the curse entails. I trust life’s natural trajectory to bring him down to a deep dark valley where he will feel as much pain and misery as he is causing now. It happens to everyone. But for most of you here, having lived this long, that moment is surely behind you. For him, the worst yet to come, and he will not even know from where it will descend or arise. He will live the rest of his life in constant dread and anticipation of heaven’s inevitable retribution in some frightful form.”

I had to leave right after that to catch a bus to get to a beach resort in La Union before the sun set, pleased that I had contributed some paltry but precious wisdom to the community. The curse I conjured charmed me; I admired the uncertainty of the specifics against the certitude of the outcome.

But I later learned, in a long text message from the comely barangay nurse whom I had befriended in my first hour there, that the council had pondered my advice for about two minutes, and then, when my bus turned the corner toward the national highway, had deputized someone to whack the fellow over the head with a shovel hard enough to make him a slobbering fool forever. 

He injured no one after that, and the villager he had most maligned was kind enough to daily feed him leftovers from the pig trough with a hard wooden spoon, followed by a cool gulp of soapy dishwater, so he must have lived a reasonably long life. I never knew if he reached that low valley I predicted, but I think the plains were punishment enough.

Penman No. 213: The Age of Flex

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 31, 2026

“FLEX” IS a word I began hearing a few years ago from millennial and Gen Z speakers, and it quickly became clear to me that it had acquired a new meaning beyond the way we oldies had always understood it, i.e., in the sense of flexing your muscles so they stand out. Not all that different, really, but more deliberate and more intense: to flaunt, to show off, to rub your goodies in someone’s face. (As it turns out, upon further study. “flexing” this way was already part of gangster rap at least thirty years ago, and as many counterculture words do, slid into the mainstream.)

Whatever, we Filipinos seem to have embraced flexing with a passion, equating it with Pinoy pride in all its exuberant if not extravagant manifestations, from Eala-mania and the next Miss Universe to Michelin-worthy adobo and the Filipino gene in this and that Hollywood star.

That’s all well and good, as Lord knows we need something to cheer and crow about, with all the political and economic depressants we’ve been imbibing. 

Every time I hear the Hon. Robinhood Padilla saying something—anything—I become more convinced that AI will prevail and rule the world, and we may even welcome it, if Robin’s brain—and those of the millions who put him where he is—were to be the standard for human intelligence, as some visiting Martian might surmise. (But wait: isn’t “artificial intelligence” in fact what the good senator possesses in spades?)

I’m sure Sen. Padilla feels he’s flexing something—his wit, his confidence, his irresistible appeal?—when he strides up to that podium sporting that “I know you think I’m dumb, but I’m going to outsmart you” grin. If his charm seems to be lost on doubters like us, that means nothing, because he’s not performing for us but for his faithful, whose adulation for their hero is merely amplified by every brickbat thrown his way. He may, for all we know, even be a lot smarter than we think, may be quietly reading up on algorithms and Habermas over coffee in some Jollibee before sneaking into the Senate to put on his bumpkin act. He’s flexing his acting, his ability to enthrall his audience with his pilosopo character, who pretends to look and sound stupid while nursing some deep-seated truth that every Juan and Juana grasps except all those JDs and professors of Law.

This past month brought some other, far less subtle examples of Pinoy flex. 

At his confirmation hearing, Air Force reservist Brig. Gen. Mikee Romero’s “fruit salad” made an active general’s shirtfront look like plain buko pandan, setting off a storm of outrage and wonderment over how a sitting politician could amass such miraculous medals in much shorter time than it took a serving soldier to dodge a bullet and leap into a foxhole. “I never asked for them,” he declared in self-defense while abruptly announcing his retirement, for which candor I daresay he deserves another Congressional Medal of Candor, at least for confirming how the system works: I get you your choppers, you give me a chestful of chopped oranges and pineapples.

But who needs wearable baubles when you can actually drive one? Businessman AJ Violago must have thought the world was his oyster (or Boxster—or Spyder) when he got the keys from his friend the actor Derek Ramsay to go zoom-zoom in a pricey Porsche and, while he was at it, tack on custom license plates with his initials to show who was Spyder-Man. Unfortunately the caper backfired, revealing not only AJV’s folly but someone’s forgetfulness as well in the amount of PXX million in unpaid customs duties. The 918 has been impounded and will be auctioned off to recover that money, so Derek and his friend can at least take comfort in having indirectly contributed to mitigating the Philippines’ P7.2-trillion budget for 2027. 

And since we Pinoys love prizes and recognition so much, let’s give the 2026 GMA “I Am Sorry” Award (in honor of the former President, for exemplary albeit dubious acts of contrition) to Dimasalang National High School Principal Randy Emmanuel Bulanon, who gleefully attacked Atty. Jesus Falcis, Rep. Percy Cendaña, and Rep. Chel Diokno for everything from their sexuality to their buck teeth. After the inevitable backlash—including the threat of legal and administrative charges and possible dismissal from the service—Bulanon took down the posts and released a lengthy apology, wishing that he had “exercised greater prudence, restraint, and discernment… especially considering my responsibilities as a school principal.” 

I want to show these messages—Bulanon’s original posts, and the letter of apology—to my students in Professional Writing, to ask them which they thought were more personal and sincere and therefore believable, and which may have been AI-generated. It may not matter in the legal sphere where this now all seems headed, but it’s interesting to see where the truth recedes and what takes over when survival’s at stake. (When I look at the “letter of support” circulating on Bulanon’s behalf trumpeting his achievements as an educator, all my AI flags go up, from language to structure.)

Runner-up honors go to Danao City teacher Zenith Enriquez who threatened to shoot presidential spokesperson Claire Castro in the mouth. When netizens recoiled—and Castro threatened to sue—Enriquez said sorry and pleaded for the bashing to stop, because her children were now bearing the brunt of the backlash. Now, I don’t care if you’re DDS, pro-BBM, or as pink as a baby’s butt; but maybe next time, you should keep your lips zipped and look at your kids first before you make that stupid post, because the comeback could be far worse than more words thrown your way.

Confucius could have flexed about all the government positions he held and the rulers into whose ears he whispered. Instead he wrote sobering lines like “The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.” And that’s why we remember him more than all those emperors in their fancy tombs.

Qwertyman No. 211: Saving the Newborn

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 17, 2026

GIVEN ALL the political, economic, and even meteorological turmoil we’ve recently been going through, I thought I’d write about something undeniably and visibly positive this week, if only to remind us that good things are possible if the “whole of government”—including even our fractious Senate—puts its mind to it. 

Full disclosure: I’ve been editing a book on, of all things, the Philippine Newborn Screening (NBS) program, and I’ve been so impressed by what I’ve come across that I requested and secured permission from its author, Dr. Carmencita D. Padilla, to share some highlights of that program. Dr. Menchit, as we call her, is no ordinary physician; a clinical geneticist and pediatrician, former chancellor of UP Manila and a key figure behind its National Institutes of Health, she was named National Scientist in 2023 for her contributions to medicine.

Back in 1990, Menchit had just returned from a fellowship in Sydney, brimming with enthusiasm about NBS, which had already been adopted and routinely practiced in Australia. 

What NBS addresses is this: babies can be born with any of almost 30 conditions inimical to their health, including congenital hypothyroidism (mental retardation and growth delay, with IQ loss possible as early as the second week of life), congenital adrenal hyperplasia (salt-wasting crisis, shock, death by the end of the first week), PKU, and galactosemia. 

A newborn with any of these conditions looks perfectly well: doctors and mothers will see no rash, no fever, no warning. Looking healthy, the baby will go home, with the disorder hidden for months, or even years, until the symptoms appear—by which time, it could be too late to reverse the damage. Ironically, if the problems are spotted early, there are treatments available, often as simple and as cheap as a modified milk formula for phenylketonuria (PKU), which causes irreversible intellectual disability if left alone.

So early screening of all newborns is key. The process itself is fairly straightforward: “puncturing the heel of a newborn, absorbing a few drops of blood onto a special filter paper card, and transporting the specimen to a specialized laboratory for testing.” These cards could be easily mailed to a central laboratory. In the early 1960s, an American microbiologist named Dr. Robert Guthrie—whose own son and niece suffered from developmental problems—created a test to scan blood samples for indicators of anomalies and proposed this solution. But the medical and scientific communities shunned him, until sufficient publicity forced them to see he was right.

It would take more than 30 years for NBS to reach the Philippines, largely through the efforts of Dr. Carmelita Fagela-Domingo, who had seen NBS working in the West and tried her best to persuade the Philippine health bureaucracy to adopt it, and Dr. Padilla, who finally succeeded where Dr. Domingo had initially failed.

What worked for Menchit Padilla was the support of people like Dr. Domingo herself and UP College of Medicine Dean Alfredo Ramirez, and subsequently other allies in both executive and legislative branches beyond academia. Together, the two women pushed for a comprehensive pilot study that could form the basis for official government policy. Padilla also met Dr. Guthrie, who encouraged her to persevere in the effort.

Twenty-four Philippine hospitals took part in the study as members of the NBS Study Group. Private donors contributed computers, video cameras, fax machines, and pagers. A Finnish company donated a refurbished NBS machine. By 1997 the program was well underway. What was needed now was for the DOH to take over for the program’s full implementation nationwide. By 2000, there were still less than 200 hospitals out of 3,000 birthing hospitals participating in the program.

What was needed was an enabling law. This is the part of the story that I find most instructive, given our current Senate, and which I urged Dr. Menchit to include in her book (which she did, despite her initial misgivings). 

Because they couldn’t afford a lobby group, Menchit took it upon herself to draft the bill—after enrolling for a Master of Arts in Health Policy Studies degree at UP Manila. (I wonder how many of our lawmakers would go that far to get things done right—but then of course they have millions to spend on staff.)

Versions of the bill were filed at the House and Senate early in 2003, but by mid-year, hearings had yet to begin. To get the bill certified as urgent, its proponents had to get the support of Sen. Juan Flavier, who warned them that it would likely take ten years to get the bill passed. Desperate, Padilla turned to Sen. Loren Legarda, who was still hosting a talk show; between breaks, Menchit filled her in and persuaded Loren to start hearings on the bill and to file her own version, which she did on August 1. I’ll leave the rest to Dr. Padilla’s recollection:

“With barely three days until the end of the 12th Congress, we were advised to lodge an appeal for an ‘urgent bill’ with the House Presidential Legislative Liaison Officer, Undersecretary Bernardino Sayo. 

“It was a Wednesday, 5 pm. We went to his office at the House of Representatives. After listening to our desperate appeal, which was supported with albums full of pictures of saved and not-saved babies, Undersecretary Sayo agreed to arrange for a certification of an ‘urgent bill’ to be signed by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo the following day Thursday at 10 am. We were advised to return to the House of Representatives the following day for the second reading at 4 pm, the last day of the session at the House. With the bill now certified as urgent, our schedule for a second reading was bumped up. House Majority Floor Leader Neptali Gonzales, fortunately for us, helped the bill pass the second reading in the midst of calls for adjournment from the floor. 

“Garnering a unanimous affirmative vote, the bill moved to the required final third reading the following day, Friday, the last day of the 12th Congress. I received a phone call at 6:30pm from the Chief of Staff of Senator Flavier, Mon Navarra. He said ‘The NBS bill was passed into law! We were able to do it in 10 months—not 10 years!’ And since the House had adopted the Senate version in its earlier deliberations, there was no need for a bicameral session. We just had to wait for the signature of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, which happened on April 7, 2004.”

The NBS bill, RA 9288, had itself become something of a miracle baby, giving hope to millions of newborns and the yet-unborn. Today well over 90 percent of Filipino newborns are covered by NBS, with a 100% rate targeted by 2028. Would that our government were so singularly and charitably minded in our other national priorities, especially for those already long born! 

(Top image from miraclefeet.org)