A final farewell to the year 2006!

This is the last column for the year 2006 and let me say good riddance to it… it was definitely a bad year for me personally because of the death of my close friend in Manila, Joey Pineda, who died last March 5 after five years in coma. Then last Aug. 13, my mother, Ascension S. Avila, passed away at the age of 86, though we didn’t spend a single centavo in hospital bills, as she was never sickly. Who would expect that Christmas 2005 was to be our last Christmas with our mom?

Then came that fateful day of Friday, Nov. 24, when I heard another dreadful news… that The Philippine STAR publisher and columnist, my mentor and friend for the past 20 years, Sir Max Soliven, passed away in Tokyo while he was trying to reach the Narita International Airport terminal. The passing of Sir Max was devastating for me… after all, I never expected him to make his exit to life eternal this year. This is not to mention that this year, I also lost a lot of other friends, although I won’t mention them anymore.

The year 2006 also had the whole oil-consuming world paying the highest price for gasoline on a per gallon or liter basis. Thanks to still volatile Middle East nations which decades or should I say, centuries later still can’t live with that tiny nation called Israel. One would think that the economies of the world would have collapsed due to the record-breaking world prices of crude oil, but somehow we got through with it.

The year 2006 also brought a lot of natural calamities to our country and the big one happened last Feb. 18 in Guinsaugon, St. Bernard, Southern Leyte where a whole barangay was covered with mud when the entire mountainside slid down when an earthquake struck near the area. To date, no one knows the exact death toll in Guinsaugon, where whole families perished when their homes were swept away by the mudflow.

This calamity brought many nations to our shores; after all, the Guinsaugon tragedy was given top news in CNN and BBC. There were many other natural calamities that were given international prominence, especially the mudslide in Albay when Mt. Mayon spewed lava and ash. Then there was typhoon Milenyo and in the Visayas, typhoon Seniang which did more than the usual typhoon damage; it caused the postponement of the 12th ASEAN Leaders’ Summit, which will be held in Cebu come Jan. 11-15.

Perhaps the biggest news we got for the year 2006 was that ill-fated and stupid coup attempt by disgruntled elements of the military that apparently had colluded with the Communist Party and the power-hungry opposition with certain groups claiming to be from the civil society. But that coup was dead long before it even started… now these plotters have to face the consequences of their actions.

I don’t know why it took the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) eight months to find prima facie evidence against the coup plotters, but at least it finally had the guts to file rebellion charges against former Senator Gregorio Honasan, military officers like Marine Col. Ariel Querubin, former Army Scout Ranger Commander Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim and former Marine Commandant Maj. Gen. Renato Miranda, and their civilian component — former University of the Philippines (UP) president Francisco Nemenzo, former Ambassador Roy Señeres, Council of Philippine Affairs (COPA) Pastor "Boy" Saycon, businessman Jaime Regalario, Don Pepe Araneta, and a few others.

The year 2006 also brought us pleasant surprises. Early last June, Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia did something that no elected public official ever did… declare all-out war against the New People’s Army (NPA) and its allied front organizations. This move came about after Gov. Garcia got a briefing from the military of the insurgency situation in Cebu where a few armed regulars (less than 40 as of last count) could instill so much fear in the countryside, especially among the farmers. Hence, she made that declaration so that once and for all, the NPAs could no longer operate with impunity in the province of Cebu.

Quite unexpectedly, a few weeks later, no less than President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA) also declared all-out war against the communists, something that obviously put the communists and their allies in Congress off-guard. A series of TV reports also revealed mass graves or killing fields in Baybay, Leyte of former NPA cadres suspected of being military informers. Finally, the Filipino people had had enough of the killings by the communists and thanks to this move by the President, the NPAs are losing control of many areas, even their known strongholds. Worse was when they ambushed a military convoy bringing relief goods for the Quezon flood victims. At last the communists have become a pariah in this country.

Perhaps the best thing about Gov. Garcia’s call for all-out war against the communists is that six months later, we still have to read about a shooting war or bloodbath that many officials of the leftist organizations warned the public would happen in Cebu because of the governor’s declaration. Actually, the communists lost in the shooting war simply because too many people were looking for those armed regulars, while they also lost the propaganda war because the provincial Capitol went into an all-out PR blitz to inform the uneducated people in the far-flung areas of the evils of communism.

With communism in check, Cebu focused its attention on the upcoming 12th ASEAN Leaders’ Summit, which should have been held here last Dec. 11-15. That meant for Cebu province to build the Cebu International Convention Center (CICC) in a record-breaking period of only eight months. Of course, many pundits thought that the CICC would never be finished on time, more so that its builder, architect Manuel Guanzon, offered a P1-million bet that he would finish the edifice by Nov. 15. But lucky for him, there were no takers of his bet, but he failed to deliver the CICC on his self-imposed schedule.

However, last Dec. 8, his beloved eminence Ricardo Cardinal Vidal officially blessed the CICC… with no less than Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo saying that he, too, was a skeptic, but the Cebuanos had pulled a miracle. Indeed, the CICC is the epitome of the indomitable fighting spirit of the Cebuanos as praised by Gov. Garcia. The year 2006 was a bad year, especially for people like me who were born in the Year of the Rabbit. Let us hope and pray that we would have a great year in 2007!

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns in The Freeman can also be accessed through The Philippine STAR website (www.philstar.com). He also hosts a weekly talkshow, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable. Bobit’s columns can also be accessed at www.shootinginsidecebu.blogspot.com.