Telling it like it is

Senator Panfilo "Ping" Lacson, although he comes from Imus, Cavite, is obviously an exemplar of the famous Kapangpangan brag: "Keng leon o tigre, ecu tatakut o ceca pa" (I’m not afraid of even the lion or the tiger why should I be afraid of you?). I heard him being interviewed yesterday by ANC’s Ricky Carandang and Lacson, in his usually blunt and hardbitten fashion, replied to Ricky’s very incisive questions without hesitation – or fear of consequences.

Ping, of course, was the President we never had, coming in fourth in the 2004 election after GMA, FPJ and Raul Roco. The speculation will never end that if Lacson and Fernando Poe Jr. had only joined forces in that campaign, their combined opposition party might have clobbered GMA, Garci or no Garci.

Yesterday, General Lacson, a former National Police Chief and Philippine Military Academy graduate, Class 1971 (a classmate of Gringo Honasan) revealed a few things that could get him into trouble, but he didn’t hesitate. He recalled that when former President Joseph Estrada asked him to become Philippine National Chief of Police in 1998 he almost turned the appointment down.

According to Lacson, he was uneasy about the post since his predecessor was receiving P5 million a month from jueteng and "I didn’t want to do the same thing." Lacson said that he had told Erap that if he became Chief of Police he was determined to reform the PNP, and this included eliminating kotong (extortion) and all other forms of police corruption, including the protection of illegal gambling like jueteng. "Who was your predecessor in the PNP?" Carandang asked Lacson. Without blinking, Lacson replied: "Bobby Lastimoso."

Now, retired PNP Chief Bobby Lastimoso will probably take issue with Ping on his statement, but this is what Lacson alleged. And who was giving the P5 million a month to Lastimoso? Again, Lacson averred: "It was coming from Chavit Singson." Waw! Isn’t Lacson afraid of my dreaded cousin, Ilocos Sur Governor Luis "Chavit" Singson, the man who brought his former boss, President Estrada down? Obviously not, keng leon o tigre, or kuratong baleleng, I guess.

That’s Ping Lacson. He’s the guy who really "goes for the jugular" (with apologies to GMA). When he became PNP Director General and Chief of Police, remember, Lacson found 350 carnapped vehicles being used by policemen and their families instead of being returned to their rightful owners. He hit the roof, castigated the erring police officers, and quickly delivered the stolen cars and other carjacked vehicles to the frustrated owners who had long despaired of recovering them. When the ownership of some left-over cars could not be traced, he had them auctioned off with the money going to the government treasury.

He also went relentlessly after kidnappers, in many instances recovering the kidnap victims unharmed. The same was not true of sundry kidnappers who got killed in…er, shootouts or simply disappeared. The KFR (Kidnap For Ransom) syndicates apparently got the message that a two-gun sheriff was in town – and instances of kidnapping went down dramatically. This naturally made Ping Lacson a hero, especially in the Filipino-Chinese community.

Lacson’s tenure was, unfortunately, too short to enable him to purge the police force and make the PNP credible. His fall coincided with that of his boss, Erap. He bounced back, however, to become a Senator, which he still is. In any event he continues to say that as a public servant he tries to live up to his personal credo: "What is right must be kept right. What is wrong must be set right."

Was Lacson involved in the latest February 24 to February 26 coup plot? Lacson declares he had nothing to do with it. He disclosed that it’s true some of the planners of that aborted caper had approached him and asked him to be a member of a Transition Council to run the country temporarily after GMA would be overthrown. "Of course, I refused" snapped Lacson. "And besides how could a Transition Council govern or be effective? Its members would just become a debating society, arguing with each other over what decision to make. It would never work."

As for the now-fugitive former Senator Gregorio Honasan, Lacson said that it was not right to put a P5 million bounty on the head of Gringo because doing so already condemned him as "guilty", whereas under the law, a person is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.

If you’ll recall both Lacson and Honasan were fugitives in May 2001 when La Presidenta ordered their arrest in connection with the May 1 attack on the palace by Erap "loyalist" mobs. Neither of them were arrested, since both the police and the military turned a blind eye on both of them whenever they were spotted. It will be equally difficult, if not impossible to get Honasan this second time around. In any event, he has sent his lawyer to protest his innocence in the coup plot. Let’s see.

By the way, thanks to the alert reader who corrected me by pointing out that the name of Greg’s late father was Romeo not Ramon. I knew him well when he was the Chief of the Presidential guards of the late President Monching Magsaysay, but in the rush to deadline the name which stuck in my feeble brain was Ramon not Romeo.

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The unexpected achievement of the Czech Republic’s Ambassador, Jaroslav Ludva, of translating our national hero Jose Rizal’s "Mi Ultimo Adios" (My Last Farewell) into the Czech language – then delivering all 14 stanzas of the poem written by Rizal on the eve of his execution in 1896 in the original Spanish – is admirable and breathtaking.

Why did a Czech diplomat undertake such a thing? Ambassador Ludva explains that he was always fascinated with Rizal, especially since Rizal’s best friend was a Czech: namely, Professor Ferdinand Blumentritt. It turns out that Blumentritt had been a school principal in the town of Litomerice, in what is now known as the Czech Republic. (Country names in Europe change dramatically, it must be noted, the Czech Republic was born when Slovakia broke away from the Czechs after World War II, for the country used to be known as Czechoslovakia).

The city of Litomerice has reportedly built four monuments to Rizal including a bust in its city hall. My wife and I were told when we were visiting Prague with our daughter Sara six years ago that in the museum was a gold pen which Rizal had gifted to his friend Blumentritt, the pen with which he had signed the first copy of his revolutionary novel, El Filibusterismo. This piece of information was relayed to us by Ambassador Menchu Salas.

In fact, Dr. Blumentritt was such a fanatical admirer of Rizal, that when he had learned Rizal’s longtime girlfriend, Leonor Rivera, had tired of waiting for Rizal and married an Englishman named Kipping, Blumentritt had written an angry letter to Leonor scolding her for marrying somebody else, instead of such a magnificent and heroic genius as Jose! But how can we blame Ms. Rivera? Rizal, consumed by his passion for liberty, had neglected Leonor for 11 years and had not even visited her on his last visit to the Philippines!

Anyway, Blumentritt as everybody knows, is equally honored here by having had a very long street named after him in Manila. I remember Blumentritt very well, because after the war, with our home in Paco totally destroyed, we lived for a year in the home of my late maternal grandfather on Calle Cavite, and I had to cross Blumentritt Street almost everyday when walking to my third year high school classes in the Ateneo which was then in Plaza Guipit, Sampaloc.

I always thought that Blumentritt had been an Austrian, not a Czech. This was confirmed in a sense by Austrian Ambassador Herbert Jager who said that while Blumentritt is regarded as a Czech citizen, in Rizal’s time he was technically an Austrian citizen because the country was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with its capital in Vienna.

Whether in Spanish or now in Czech, Jose Rizal’s deathless Last Farewell is immortal.

It is always a thrill to me to see the Jose Rizal statue in Madrid, Spain. It stands at the crossroads of a beautiful park and beside it is inscribed in stone his "Mi Ultimo Adios" in both Spanish and Filipino (Tagalog). Passersby always stop by the statue and read the poem, then nod their heads in admiration. Truly, our hero is our nation’s pride.

An interesting thing happened to this writer when I was a student in the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, in 1952. All Fulbright-Smith-Mundt scholars from all over the world were required in those days to take a course in English language studies at that University. When the time came to elect a president of that organization, the leading candidate was a student from India, whose election seemed completely assured since all the Commonwealth countries which had been British Colonies, as well as Canada and Great Britain were unanimously supporting her. In order to make it a two-person fight, my roommate, a young German student named Karl Van Ditzhuysen and Herbert Rauter, who hailed from Dussoldorf, nominated me to my surprise. How could I win?

But when I was on stage, the inspiration struck me. I asked myself – why don’t I explain who I am as a Filipino? I started out by saying how our family had suffered during World War II and Japanese Occupation, losing many members including my father, grandfather, and uncle to Japanese cruelty. We had fought the Japanese in our family including myself and my mother who had joined the guerilla movement. But now the war was over, I said, and we should all now become friends and brothers although we still felt the pain of the wounds of the past. Then, I said that we in the Philippines, aside from having been tutored by the Americans had a proud Spanish heritage. I told the audience that nobody fought for Philippine freedom more ferociously than Jose Rizal our hero, but his finest works including his two revolutionary novels have been written in Spanish.

Then, I recited the Mi Ultimo Adios from beginning to end. At the conclusion of my recital, the Spanish students and all the South American students leaped to their feet and shouted: "Arriba!" and "Viva Rizal!"

When the votes came in all the South Americans, Carribbeans, and the Spaniards, of course, had voted for me. So did the Japanese and the Germans. I could quip later that I had been voted to victory by the Axis vote! Thanks to Jose Rizal and his magnificent poem.