Everyone is simply shocked by the front-page news of the past two days regarding the Binays. First we are told that the Binays and their associates maintain over 200 bank accounts and have moved P600 million around. The next day the figure bloats from P600 million to P11 billion! To do the math on all these requires a calculator especially made for Indonesia, because its currency has more zeroes than ours. The amount does challenge the imagination: How big a suitcase do you need to hold P1 billion in P1,000 bills? The reports are not new in our political history; only the cast of characters and the amounts change. The family says the controversy is meant to derail Vice President Jejomar Binay’s bid for the presidency in 2016.
Browsing through prewar periodicals recently made me realize how politics colors the way in which we remember our heroes.
On Jan. 13, 1927, officials of the Bureau of Lands announced the sale of agricultural land in Dasmariñas, Cavite, at a public auction set on Feb. 28, 1927. This would not have made news except that Emilio Aguinaldo was found to be squatting on 1,200 hectares of the government land known as the Paliparan estate. To regularize his possession of the land, Aguinaldo had to pay the assessed value set at P200,000, perhaps even more if someone bid against him at the auction. Aguinaldo claimed that Manuel L. Quezon had allowed him to use the land, but then Quezon said he could not give away land that did not belong to him.
According to records, Aguinaldo had been occupying and cultivating the land for 16 years since 1911 with nobody objecting, until a candidate for a seat in the House whom Aguinaldo did not support made it public. Four letters were sent to Aguinaldo by the Bureau of Lands from 1911 to 1927, advising him to legalize his occupancy of the Paliparan estate that was part of the Imus friar hacienda measuring 1,175 hectares, an area bigger than any held by Negros hacenderos. But Aguinaldo simply ignored the letters, and since he could not produce legal title to the land or a contract allowing him to settle on and cultivate it, the Bureau of Lands declared the Paliparan estate vacant. The government could have made this arrangement legal in recognition of Aguinaldo’s role in history, but as we know, he and Quezon did not get along, and later ran against each other in the Commonwealth presidential election of 1935.
Aguinaldo asked for some time to settle the issue before the announced auction. Had he executed sales contracts in 1911 when he first occupied the Paliparan estate, it would have cost him P149,000 in cash. If he decided to pay on installment, the government required a down payment of P7,000, with the balance payable in 20 years at an interest rate of 4 percent per annum, which would have made the estate worth P202,929.44. If he paid cash, the estate would have been worth P231,000; on installment, it would have been P20,000 as down payment and roughly P18,000 a year until the balance was fully paid.
With the Paliparan estate scheduled for public auction on Feb. 28, 1927, Aguinaldo fought back on Feb. 6, during a meeting of the Veterans of the Philippine Revolution in Palma de Mallorca, by expelling from the association: Generals Pantaleon Garcia (who called Aguinaldo the “instrument of imperialism in the islands” during a Veterans meeting in January), Aniceto Lacson and Tomas Mascardo, Col. Manuel Sityar, Lt. Daniel Maramba, Sgt. Patricio Mariano, and a few others. The most prominent person on the black list happened to be Major Quezon. In this period, when Filipinos were opposed to the policies of US Governor-General Leonard Wood, Aguinaldo said the way Quezon “has directed our public affairs has been disastrous for the country, and therefore he should resign his leadership so that others may take his place.”
Quezon replied through the press:
“My alleged expulsion from the Veterans Association is a farce. While I am a veteran I have never affiliated myself with the association… The so-called veterans association is misleading. The majority of the present membership are not veterans and have never been veterans but politicians aspiring to get jobs from Governor-General Wood through the influence of General Aguinaldo…”
Quezon even made a remark that many of the so-called veterans had not even smelled gunpowder. He said he could not be expelled from an association he wasn’t associated with, but Aguinaldo replied by providing the press with Quezon’s application for membership dated Nov. 3, 1913, and another document signed by Aguinaldo approving his application dated Nov. 23, 1913.
After the issue with the Bureau of Lands in 1927, Aguinaldo was hounded in 1929 for a decade-long outstanding debt that, coupled with penalties and interest, amounted to almost P80,000. In both cases his defense was that everything was political persecution.
Reading up on this forgotten period in our history and comparing it with events today make me wonder whether our political landscape has changed much since the Commonwealth or even the First Republic.
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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu