Cotabato ’65 COMMENT 05/20/2010

Cotabato ’65

COMMENT 05/20/2010 Let’s take a respite from the prevailing election-related tensions by revisiting election year 1965. Contending were the Liberal Party (LP)’s candidate for president Diosdado Macapagal and his running mate Sen. Gerardo Roxas (Mar’s dad) for vice president, as against the Nacionalista Party (NP)’s tandem of Senate President Ferdinand Marcos for president and his running mate Fernando Lopez for vice president. It was generally an NP landslide that year which saw Marcos easily reaching an early won position, and Lopez enjoying a virtually insurmountable lead. It was all over bar the shouting with a relatively small number of votes left to be counted in Cotabato province. Convened in Sen. Jose Roy’s house were top NP campaign strategists who had confirmed an intelligence report that the Liberals’ reputed head of their dirty tricks department, DND Secretary Macario Peralta, would be flying to steal a win for Roxas with manufactured ballots. A worried Marcos gazed out the dining room’s window and, his hand superstitiously rested on a grenade fragment embedded in his shoulder — an act he was wont to do whenever pondering a conundrum — asked Roy to form a three-man task force to dissuade Roy’s childhood friend from Moncada, Tarlac from carrying out his sinister plot. In an hour, Roy, Roquito Ablan and a Cotabato businessman named David Ghent were at the Manila Domestic Airport taking off on board a chartered plane. Within minutes after touching ground at the Cotabato airport, the three were having a chat with Roy’s Kumpare Salipada Pendatun, the province’s governor in the latter’s mansion. But they failed to elicit Pendatun’s cooperation who said it was “beyond (his) power to interfere with the Defense secretary’s functions.” Dejected, they left the mansion and contacted leading members of the Ilocano community for an action-plan bull session. After an hour, the three returned to the airport with a contingent of supporters.... MORE   Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100520com6.html

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