The bicameral committee conference work of the two chambers of Congress has never been free of contentious issues, much more so when a compromise version is being written for a centerpiece legislation. The Eighth Congress, the first Congress to convene after martial law, which also witnessed the full flowering of democratic debates, was legendary for its friction-marred bicameral conference committee process. This Congress transformed bicameral work into a mini-Congress, with verbal fireworks, debates of impossible acrimony — and covert acts of character assassination — morphing into that search for the compromise legislation.
Yet, those observant enough — and the beat reporters who knew about context — did not fail to observe that rare nuance of civility between two legislators that led the hammering of the compromise bill on the two versions of the draft agrarian reform law, the centerpiece legislation of the Corazon Aquino administration: Sen. Heherson T. Alvarez — who led the Senate contingent— and Rep. Edcel Lagman, main negotiator of the House of Representatives who wrote the compromise version under the spirit of rare legislative amity.
One or two Senate beat reporters probably knew about the bond. Sonny Alvarez and Edcel Lagman were fraternity brothers. But there was a deeper connection other than their frat ties and their long years of opposition to Marcos. Both lost a younger brother to the bloodlust of martial law. Marsman Alvarez, accused of ties with the underground Left in Isabela, was tortured beyond recognition, his lifeless body dragged into the town square for all the town people to see. Hermon Lagman, a lawyer who opted to serve trade unions and the disenfranchised — also an act of subversion during the martial law years — was kidnapped with a paralegal, never to be seen again.
Fraternal bond, shared grief
In the case of Marsman Alvarez, the ire of the thugs who murdered him was more directed at somebody several thousand miles away. Sonny Alvarez, who died a tragic death a few days back from the coronavirus disease, was the figure that Marcos hated more — but was beyond the regime’s brutal dragnet. Before Eugenio Lopez Jr. and Serge Osmena 3rd made their daring escape, which was celebrated in the movie “Eskapo,” Sonny Alvarez escaped from the Marcos military earlier, in a fashion as daring. He boarded a cargo ship bound for Hong Kong, without his presence on the ship’s manifest. He was down deep in the ship’s container vans, punctured with holes so he could breath. As the cargo ship was out of Philippine territorial waters, Sonny Alvarez emerged from the container hold into the berth, then to freedom. He sought exile in the United States, worked at odd jobs to survive, while working for the movement that did the overseas fight against the Marcos regime.
After the hasty flight of Marcos, with a brief stop at Clark Air Base, then to Hawaii in 1986, Sonny returned home with wife Cecile Guidote, the driving force behind the Philippine Educational Theater Association and a Ramon Magsaysay Awardee, and their two kids, with names rooted in the word “exile.”
Sonny Alvarez was the original eskapo, and his escape was just as daring. That he had a “good friend” at the waterfront, who overcame his own personal fears to help Sonny escape, made the escape possible. I covered the waterfront/maritime beats in the late 1970s, and I had a guess on who that “good friend” was. After one of his many news briefings on the progress of the bicameral process on the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) law, I stayed behind after the press pack left. I mentioned a name to Senator Alvarez. He just nodded and left it at that.
Sonny Alvarez’s escape from the Marcos wrath, the murder of his younger brother Marsman, the sudden death of his father after Marsman’s murder and narrative of suffering during his exile years were precisely the kind of baggage that Sonny did not drag around after his return to the country in 1986, perhaps because of his forgiving nature. Those brutal acts were supposed to make him bitter and unforgiving. But he was not.
Instead of scorched-earth politics, Sonny’s calling was moderation and temperance.
Nothing was radical about his views; the long years of fighting Marcos never radicalized him. As he shepherded the passage of the CARP law, his stand — and he succeeded — was to stave off the zero-hectare to 3-hectare retention proposal of the pro-peasant bloc in the Senate. The final version signed by President Cory Aquino settled on 5 hectares — neither pro-landlord nor pro-peasant, but rather a compromise solution pushed by Sonny Alvarez and the moderates.
The initial stand of Sonny Alvarez on the total logging ban proposed by Sen. Orly Mercado in the Eight Congress was also one of moderation — allow logging in areas where the forest cover (meaning the original timber stand) was at least 10 percent.
Later, he changed his stand because of the worsening state of forest degradation and the loss of precious watershed areas.
Even the most radical thing he did while in Congress, which was to push the House of Representatives that he joined after his two Senate terms, to impeach then-President Joseph Estrada, was not that radical, given the state of political decadence of that particular era.
Moderation and temperance, as we all know, are not the formulas for success in Philippine politics, where the loudest, most strident and most extreme voices often dominate the political arguments — and get the attention of prime time TV. The public, gullible and without civic virtue, often equates noise and political bullying with strong character and able leadership. Sonny Alvarez, one of the best university debaters during his time, found himself out of sync under the new environment of debates as “gotcha” and not of compelling, rational arguments.
But Sonny Alvarez, if you knew the man, had no regrets. In life as in politics, he was always guided by his better angels.
Source: manilatimes.net