Jaime V. Ongpin reimagined

I didn’t know a lot about him. I didn’t know that he took his own life.

Instead, I first heard of him as the name behind a journalism award, the JVO Awards, touted as the local version of the Pulitzer.

Sometime in 2007, I stood on a stage with two colleagues – from my former employer BusinessWorld – Paolo Lising and Kristine Alave to receive a JVO plaque for our story on the cost of traffic in Metro Manila.

Even at that moment on stage and decades later, I had no idea how much JVO, the man, contributed to our nation. I just knew him as a former finance secretary who must have done something good to have a prestigious award named after him.

Once in a while, I would sit down with his brother Roberto “RVO” Ongpin, the brilliant ex-Marcos trade minister-turned-genius dealmaker, but we didn’t talk much about his late brother.

The enigma

I only truly got to know JVO weeks ago, through the poignant words of the brilliant writer and National Artist Nick Joaquin.

Joaquin’s Jaime Ongpin, the Enigma, immortalized the life of the man who was among the first to stand up against the Marcos dictatorship.

Flipping through the pages of the book which I borrowed from JVO’s friend Cesar Buenaventura, I was glued to his story for many nights. It was better than any Netflix series because nobody tells it like Nick Joaquin and JVO’s story is, quite literally, one for the books.

Last Saturday, June 15, JVO would have turned 81.  He died at the age of 49. If he were still around, I imagine our country to be in a better place, even just a bit better.

‘The leader of the business opposition to Marcos’

Young,  brilliant and good-looking, JVO was a Harvard-educated executive. He was the first Filipino president of the then New York-listed Benguet Corp. He was a businessman who cared a lot about what was happening in the country.

He wrote an angry letter that appeared on the Asian Wall Street Journal on June 6, 1981 about the Marcos ills. Little did he know it would create a furor.  Friends called him crazy, but he said: “If we kept on looking the other way, things would only get much worse.”

Undaunted, JVO went on to write more letters. The international press called him “the leader of the business opposition to Marcos.”

In March 1983, he wrote a satirical take?off on the “11 Major Industrial Projects” the brainchild of his brother, the minister. JVO’s “11 Major Infuriating Problems” questioned government bailouts of erring firms, among others.

Indeed, he was the first to speak when nobody talked about crony capitalism. And when he was called to serve during the time of former president Corazon Aquino, he did, and he did well. He left his comfortable life in the private sector.

Our story

Now why am I talking about a man who has been dead a long time?

It is because it is an honor to know his story and to retell it for today’s generation of Filipinos.

It is because the fight of JVO fought isn’t over.

It is because we continue to be disappointed, as JVO was, over the changes we strived for — and won. We were disappointed yesterday and continue to be disappointed today. Especially today.

And most of all, it is because we need to keep on fighting like he did.

As his wife Maribel said: “This is the story of my husband..It is mine too. And it is also the story of our generation of Filipinos. Because we share one country whose past flows into our present and will run into our future, it is a story of all Filipinos in the Philippines.”

“It is the irony of history that, in the course of events, we became victims a second time,” she said in the book published in 1990, almost 30 years ago.

How still true and fitting this is in this day and age.

Nobody knows for sure why JVO put a bullet to his head. In the book, the testimonies of friends and loved ones speak about his depression and disappointment over what had happened to the country after Marcos was toppled.

What is clear is that JVO fought the good fight. Sadly, decades later, the Marcoses are back in power and on a patch of earth in the sprawling hills of Taguig, in a place only for heroes, the late dictator rests in peace.

What a shame.

JVO must be rolling in his grave. I imagine things to be different if he were still around. I imagine him still fighting the good fight. I imagine him speaking against the distorted sense of values we have now, the nonstop nastiness, the shameless attacks on our sovereignty, and all that empty bravado.

Iris Gonzales’ email address is [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales.