THE former director of Instituto Cervantes, Spain’s cultural center in the Philippines, launched his fifth book Front Pages of Philippine History, at the Raffles Hotel in Makati City on Tuesday.
The event was attended by the country’s elite, members of the diplomatic corps and the media.
Among those present were former President Fidel V. Ramos, former Speaker Jose de Venecia, former Makati Congressman Teodoro Locsin Jr., editors and columnists of local newspapers and a sprinkling of Manila’s rich and famous.
Jose “Pepe” Rodriguez, the author, was once Manila’s bureau chief of Spain’s EFE news agency and is married to a Filipino woman, who is the daughter of National Artist Francisco V. Coching.
Rodriguez said he noticed a recurring theme that had not eluded the country during the last 70 years: rice shortage and pork-barrel controversy.
“The pork barrel [controversy] and the rice shortage were there in the 1950s and are still with us today,” he said of Filipinos’ inability to move forward from the gut issues that often haunts them through several administrations.
“Unfortunately, sometimes, history keeps repeating itself,” he adds.
Rodriguez said the big issue that haunts Metro Manilans today is absent on the front pages until recently: The flood.
“The only things I haven’t found [in old newspapers] are [stories on] floods, apparently it’s a new thing,” he said.
But of course. Manila before and shortly after World War II was criscrossed by esteros, or canals, some 70 of them natural waterways draining the major rivers, like Marikina and Pasig rivers.
“The esteros were eventually encroached upon by the unrestrained growth and urban sprawl and so we have the floods,” he said.
He said the book started from the beginning of Spanish period, then the Spanish-American war, the Treaty of Paris, and all the way to the WW II, and after that the Japanese period, the Commonwealth, the 1946 Independence, and the post independence years,
“I stopped with the suspension of [the writ of] habeas corpus by Mr. [Ferdinand] Marcos in ’72. It’s almost 200 years of history,” Rodriguez said.
He said the book could be a reference book for students of history and a good read for everybody in general.
Image credits: Alysa Salen