Emmanuel Pelaez

Emmanuel Pelaez occupied important positions in our country. He was senator, secretary of foreign affairs, vice president, ambassador. Each of these positions he held with distinction.

He was a true patriot who worked for the real interests of this country.

I came to appreciate that fact in the course of my researches. During the ten years from 1974 to 1983 I spent the greater part of each year in Washington working with our ambassador, Mr. Eduardo Romualdez, whom I consider a great man. I was given access to classified material, including the minutes of the meetings of the Philippine and American panels in the renegotiation of the military bases. Pelaez had been a member of the Philippine panel, and though he played a minor role, he gave staunch support to the efforts of the chairman of the panel, Ambassador Eduardo Romualdez, to assert the sovereignty of the Philippines over the military bases. They had hitherto been called and treated as "American military bases". Our panel asserted that they were not American bases. They were Philippine military bases, integral parts of Philippine territory, being used by the United States with the permission of the Philippine government. Hitherto only the American flag was allowed to fly over the bases. Our panel demanded that the Philippine flag must be flown over those bases as everywhere else in the Philippines; that Philippine law had jurisdiction over American personnel once they stepped out of the bases; that the United States must pay for their use of our territory; that no nuclear weapons be brought to the bases.

That the Philippine panel did not succeed in obtaining all of these demands was one of the tragedies of Martial Law, that yielded to the Americans everything they asked for.

I have been told on good authority that during Martial Law the President offered to appoint Pelaez a Justice of the Supreme Court. Pelaez asked to be excused. He declined the appointment. What his reasons were for declining the great honor of being on the Supreme Court I do not know. But his refusal saved him from becoming a member of a Supreme Court that had lost its former luster and had become a rubber stamp for presidential dictations.

But it was not as a statesman or a politician that I knew Maning Pelaez well. I knew him better and admired him more as a person, as an individual.

Let me just mention one little incident to illustrate the point. When he was vice president, he was invited by the Ateneo de Manila, his alma mater, to be the commencement speaker. After the ceremony, when people were starting to go home, Pelaez was talking to a small group of persons. Suddenly a woman screamed. Her bag had just been snatched by a thief who ran off with it. Quick as a flash Maning Pelaez ran after the thief, finally caught up with him, grabbed him, dragged him back to the woman and said, "Is this your bag?"

That was a magnificent thing to do. It was also dangerous. And it was impulsive, instinctive, unthinking. It came from the character of the man. He was not a young man then. But he did what many young men would not have done. He ran after a thief, caught up with him, dragged him back to return the stolen goods to their owner.

That was Maning Pelaez.

He was the last of that remarkable group of men who had their education at the old Ateneo de Manila in its original location in Intramuros – the Ateneo of such great teachers as John P. Delaney and Joseph Mulry and Joaquin Vilallonga and Francisco de Paula Sanchez and Manuel Peypoch who died a martyr and is now a candidate for beatification. Maning Pelaez was the last survivor of that Grand Alliance that tried to bring honesty and integrity and dignity and vision to our public life.

In a political field swarming with pygmies, Maning Pelaez was one of the giants.