Yesterday, Tuesday, May 22, the longest serving post-1986 senator and the most reformist Filipino legislator, Edgardo J. Angara was laid to rest in his native Baler, Aurora, at rites fit for a national hero. Which he was.
Ed or EdJA improved the social fabric and national welfare in vital areas like education, agriculture, business, the economy, health, home financing, and senior citizenship with his landmark pieces of legislation.
Many of the laws with far-reaching and profound impact today bear Angara’s signature and vision.
He also promoted deeper Philippine-Spain relations, and his Aurora home province as the next major tourism and investment destination.
Ed died on the morning of May 13 at 83, on an apparent heart attack. He woke up at 7 a.m. in his Tagaytay farm house, went back to sleep, and then was found not breathing anymore at 10 a.m.
As a legislator, Angara made his name through landmark pieces of legislation on education, agriculture, healthcare and social welfare, culture and the arts, economy and financial system development, science and technology, and good governance.
PhilHealth extends free health care to 97 million beneficiaries, (92 percent of the population), enabling Filipinos to enjoy better medical care and more broadly, than Americans under Obamacare. Free high school education benefits over 7.9 million Filipinos.
The 15th Congress, Angara recalled to me once, “was a watershed for education reform. We provided access to early childhood care and development programs (Early Years Act), created a well-rounded learning environment for Filipino students (Kindergarten Education Act), and started to make basic education on par with the best in the world (Enhanced Basic Education Act or ‘K to 12’).”
As a legislator, Angara endeavored to meet a nation’s aspirations through landmark pieces of legislation on education, agriculture, healthcare and social welfare, culture and the arts, economy and financial system development, science and technology, and good governance.
Angara sought to promote teaching as a profession—a most noble one, in fact—through the Philippine Teachers Professionalization Act.
More than seven million senior citizens enjoy tax-free perks on food and many essentials, including free movies, free parking, and exemption from color-coding in places like Makati. The Senior Citizens Law is, in fact, known as the Angara Law.
About 8 million have graduated from courses offered by the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority, an Angara brainchild. Combined with free high school, Tesda has become an effective social mobility measure which may partly explain why the Philippines has been so dynamic.
Angara also authored the Agricultural and Food Modernization Act of 1997, the Pag-IBIG Law that finances home purchases, the Data Privacy Act, the Cybercrime Prevention Act, the Biofuels Act, the Renewable Energy Law, the Real Estate Investment Trust Law, the Personal Equity and Retirement Account Act, Credit Information System, repeal of the Central Bank Act, and of course, the APECO Law, among many others.
Because of the Bangko Sentral, the Philippines’ became only two banking systems in the world with a positive credit rating from Moody’s.
To fight graft, Angara authored the Ombudsman Law and the Procurement Reform Law.
With the return of democracy in 1986, Angara was first elected into the Senate in 1987, serving for five years till 1992. He sought reelection and served until 1998. That year, he sought the vice presidency, of Joseph Ejercito Estrada, but lost. He then served in the Estrada cabinet, first as agriculture secretary, May 1999 to Jan. 5, 2001, and later as executive secretary, Jan. 6 to 20, 2001.
In 1987 when Angara first became senator, he winced at “rampant poverty, illiteracy, crime, and economic stagnation hounded the country, the foremost challenges a renascent Congress had to address head on.”
He served a total of four terms in the Senate—once as Senate president—and some nine years in various other capacities in the Executive Department as well as a term as president of the University of the Philippines. He retired in 2013 elated that “the seeds of reform have borne fruit, and committed leadership is making the yield all the richer.”
EdJA wore many hats in his life—lawyer, educator, farmer, banker, patron of the arts.
But being a lawmaker, he said, allowed him to channel multifaceted interests and experiences toward meaningful work that made a difference in the lives of our countrymen.
On the economic front, Angara also authored the Agricultural and Food Modernization Act of 1997, the Pag-IBIG Law that finances home purchases, the Data Privacy Act, the Cybercrime Prevention Act, the Biofuels Act, the Renewable Energy Law, the Real Estate Investment Trust Law, the Personal Equity and Retirement Account Act, Credit Information System, repeal of the Central Bank Act, and of course, the APECO Law, among many others.
In retirement, Ed went back to his first love—Baler, the land of his birth and childhood dreams, and to the land, which had nurtured him as a boy, sent him to school, and jump-started his professional life.
Angara wanted Baler to be famous again, which is what it was originally famous for, as a bustling port servicing the Mexico-Acapulco galleon trade. Baler would be the service city to Casiguran, 115 kms further north.
Casiguran hosts what is called Apeco —Asia Pacific Economic Zone and Freeport.
Apeco is dreamt of as the Gateway to the Pacific.
As a barefoot boy growing up in Baler, on the distant and rugged Pacific coast of Luzon, Angara could not have anticipated these positions he served in and opportunities to serve the people, except in his wildest dreams.
The Angaras had always been a family of farmers and fishermen. An ancestral farm of 20 hectares provided the family their basic needs, rice, coconut, fruits, vegetables. Back in the 1940s-50s, Baler didn’t have a market. So people produced their needs themselves.
Schooling for Ed was difficult. He had to walk miles to school daily. He didn’t mind the hardship and taught himself the discipline of reading, reading, reading. Baler had no high school so Ed went to relatives in Marikina and San Juan for his secondary education.
Ed graduated high school valedictorian which enabled him to enter the University of the Philippines. He was the only student from Baler at UP Law. He finished law in 1958. His sister, Bellaflor, five years younger, would follow Ed to UP Law. In 1962, Ed got the one-year DeWitt Law Scholarship at the University of Michigan.
Returning from Michigan in 1964, Ed was recruited by lawyer-technocrat Rafael Salas to help the presidential candidacy of Ferdinand E. Marcos who would be president for 20 years, 14 under martial rule which was good for lawyering.
Ed would be elected delegate to the 1971 Constitutional Convention and set up the Angara Abello Concepcion Regala & Cruz Law which would be the largest not only in the Philippines but also in the rest of Asia. At its peak, ACCRA had 150 lawyers. The largest Philippine corporations and foreign multinationals were its top tier clients.
It is politics and legislation that Angara would carve a bigger name and leave a lasting legacy.