Soon after the Aquino assassination twenty-five years ago, Victor S. Barrios, economist, development banker and original Fellow of the Development Academy of the Philippines, put his foot in his mouth with a speech in Malacańang, Ferdinand Marcos in the audience.
Speaking for a thousand Filipino business leaders as chair of the Philippine Business Conference and co-founder of a young and militant Bishops-Businessmen’s Conference, Barrios let fly on urgent reforms, free and fair elections topping the list.
Two weeks later, the business community put its money where its mouth was with P100 M to clean-up voters’ lists in preparation for such elections. Fire had been ignited, but the moment had not come.
First there would have to be three years of a parliament of the streets, ballooning nationwide and leading to the snap elections impulsively announced by Marcos in that globally televised in-your-face interview with the American talk show host Ted Koppel. When those elections came to be, Barrios, the security he provided and the NAMFREL volunteers he supervised would have to duck gunfire at the Muntinlupa Elementary School. Thankfully, there were no casualties.
And so the first EDSA came to pass. In that surge of new energy, he joined a group of advisers on how to recover ill-gotten wealth from Marcos and his cronies, only to have their suggestions ignored by a new dispensation in a chaos of crossed swords and vested interests. By late 1986, frustration had mounted enough for Barrios to close PISO, the investment bank he founded in the ‘70s, and join his family in diaspora, bayside in San Francisco.
For the next two decades, following a lead from friends at the World Bank, he would travel the world as a finance and development consultant to a dozen developing economies– China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Lao PDR, Turkey, Russia, Uzbekistan, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland (with the U.S. as the lone developed economy in his client list).
Even with his American MBA and masters in economics, Barrios was a rare Filipino among predominantly Western consultants re-engineering national economies in the aftermath of a collapsed Iron Curtain and a Soviet Union unraveling. His consulting and financing firm was kept busy on financial reform, credit and financial operations for command economies beginning to open up to the world.
Not for a minute has he regretted the fall of historical dice. Bumping into Madame Marcos 20 years since he left the Philippines, he expressed thanks to her late husband for unwittingly “opening the way to my global career.”
But once a Filipino, always a Filipino for such as Vic Barrios. The first registration for Overseas Absentee Voting in 2002 was a new turning point. Old reflexes kicked in out in San Francisco, where he began campaigning for registration and writing think pieces on dual citizenship, charter change and representation of overseas Filipinos in Congress back home.
That year, with like-minded Filipinos in the Bay Area, he went on to found a Global Filipino Coalition with the overall goal of aligning the experience and potential resources of Diaspora with the urgent needs and yet untapped potentials in the home country. Call it shiatsu economics.
Fast forward six networking years later to May 2008 at the University of Makati just outside Bonifacio Global City. There – in the first Global Filipino Nation conference with 831 delegates, home-based and OFW signed up from 19 countries – came a fast and furious exchange of notes on the enrichment of diaspora weighed against its price at home and abroad. Also filling the air were insights, methods, standards and systems imbibed on foreign shores that overseas Filipinos would dearly wish to share with a home country to improve the collective lot.
For three days, the conference raised the bar for transparent and accountable governance in the homeland. It held a job fair as it arrived at an ingenious plan to help ease the rice crisis. It networked to expand the collective entrepreneurship of Small and Medium Enterprises. It moved closer to direct development partnerships between Filipino organizations in Europe and local governments at home.
It planned to enhance professionalism and share global opportunities with Philippine-based Filipino architects and engineers. It conceived a Fil-American scheme to improve Philippine health care. It planned to unleash the power of infotech to protect the social fabric from further ripping in the psychological costs of diaspora. It warmed up for a quantum leap in the crucial arena of Philippine education with RIPE, a new pedagogical technology evolved by an impassioned overseas Filipino pro.
It was not only a reunion marked by native brilliance and humor. It was also a sociological delight, with many individual stories waiting to be told – about urban poor and rice farmers exchanging ideas with development experts and organizers; about thoroughly professional, U.S.-based nurses ready to go beyond sending remittances home to uplift healthcare in the homeland (They had to leave; they have not deserted.); about the new global perspectives of home-based participants meshing with the visions of overseas participants – a strikingly rich spectrum of humanity of many shades, with many accents, everyone a Filipino.
For now let it be said: the Global Filipino Coalition and its new parallel Global Filipino Nation, made up of broad sectors and hospitable to more, are twin bright spots in Philippine history.
Two governors were also invited to address the conference, collectively designed with an eye to peace and social justice as non-negotiable basics. One was Zacarias Candao, former Cotabato governor and present adviser to the MILF peace panel. The other was Pampanga’s present priest-governor, Fr. Ed Panlilio, now everyone’s “Among Ed,” a loudly applauded global folk hero.
The conference declared support for continuing the peace process with the MILF beyond static from Bush to Arroyo. It also opened the way to replicating Among Ed and his allies’ path to people-empowered governance, with more Filipinos answering the continuing challenge of rescuing EDSA’s waylaid dream of nation all over the country, to include a long-delayed embrace of our older Moro heritage.
At the rousing end, with mini-flags of 19 OFW host countries waving under the one flag of home, several delegates approached Barrios to ask for his autograph. “Why me?” he asked in genuine surprise.
Yes, he was conference chair. But from beginning to end, he had defined “Global Filipino Nation” as “a movement” cum networking platform – for Filipinos all over the world to plant, nurture and eventually harvest seeds of vision for a collective future where everyone can be more truly equal, at last.
But human enterprise needs leaders. Requests for his autograph were really only spontaneous recognition that Vic Barrios – a leader at the center of homecoming, wearing subliminal EDSA yellow over Marian blue – has been reading the times right. With everyone, he looks to but sees beyond raw need – as the Philippines becomes a consciously global nation, famous warmth intact.
All that considered at summer’s end, light rain cooling the air, what remains to be said is “Mabuhay!” Why, this could even lead to more of us cleaning the air and waters of home together.
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