Wanted: a closure of our history with the US

Thanks to the foul mouth of Pres. Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte, he gave US President Barack Obama a bitter lesson in US history, about the US atrocities against Filipinos under the command of Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, which the Americans went out in great lengths to hide from us Filipinos and the American public. A year ago, I wrote this piece of US history, which I read from the book, “Imperial Cruise” written by James Bradley who wrote the national best seller, “Flags of our Fathers.”

I wrote that piece last year at the height of a US Senate investigation on the use of waterboarding and I wanted the Americans to know that the first people that US soldiers water boarded were the Filipinos under Gen. Aguinaldo. Waterboarding is a kind of torture wherein water is forced into the throats of people forcing them to talk. I recall that of the 140 Filipinos water boarded by the Americans, 70 died from its effects.

So when Pres. Duterte tried to remind Pres. Obama of their own human rights violations, suddenly their meeting is cancelled. Why? It was the first time ever that a Filipino President had the guts to point his fingers at the American President to tell them of their ugly past. Mind you, this doesn’t turn me into an anti-American. What we need is to educate our people of the sordid incidents that happened in the past, which was purposely buried and hopefully forgotten!

While Pres. Digong may have been referring to the Bud Dajo massacre in Sulu, there were many other incidents that even ordinary Filipinos have not heard about. The Balangiga massacre in Samar is another dark and stark incident where 2,500 Filipinos (they were not Moros) killed and US General Jacob Smith ordered all Filipinos in the Island of Samar to report to concentration camps. Concentration camps? Isn’t this what the Nazi’s used to do? Incidentally, there was a US Senate investigation on these killings, but it ended with a reprimand for the US soldiers who committed those crimes.

Are you appalled that the Americans did this 115 years ago? Perhaps the problem stems from the fact that after World War II was over, most of our historians (I can only remember Gregorio Zaide and Teodoro Agoncillo) and the history books they taught us in high school were “cleansed” or “sanitized” by the censors. They projected the Americans as accepting Filipinos as their “Brown Brothers” and no mention of the Bells of Balangiga or Bud Dajo is ever mentioned even in our own history books!

It is also a fact that any gun-loving Filipino who knows his guns know that the .45 caliber round was created in the 1911 by Samuel Colt as the US Forces under Gen. John “Blackjack” Pershing needed a man stopper round that would bring down a man with one shot. The .45 caliber pistol was born to stop the advancing Juramentados! Now is it wrong for us to seek an apology from the US for those atrocities?

Perhaps we should also ask the question whether it is wrong for the Armenians to seek an apology from the Turkish government for the Armenian Massacre of 1894-1896 that resulted in the deaths of 80,000 to 300,000 Armenians in the hands of the Ottoman Empire? What we need is some kind of closure from the Americans about these ugly incidents more so that these skeletons of their past have been brought into a new light. If Pope John Paul II apologized for the Crusades, what’s wrong if the US President apologize for the mistakes of their past Presidents? Abangan!

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A great icon of tourism, Anos Fonacier, the man who put Cebu on the world map of tourism more than 35 years ago has passed on to eternal life at the age of 89 years old. When he built the Cebu Plaza Hotel (now it is called the Marco Polo Plaza Hotel) it became Cebu City’s iconic tallest building that marked the beginnings of Cebu’s tourism industry.

To sell his rooms at the Cebu Plaza Hotel Fonacier’s marketing group had to coin a new slogan for Cebu and they ended with that catchy phrase…. “An Island in the Pacific.” It was the best marketing slogan Cebu and the Philippines ever had simply because it triggered the start of Cebu’s Tourism industry! Soon those chartered flights became direct flights from Tokyo to Cebu and back… and Cebu experienced what we called “Cebooom!” Tourism has reached the shores of Cebu and it has become a major contributor to the economy of Cebu and the whole country as well.

After the first wave or tourists came to our shores, they also brought the Japanese investors, which is why we created the Mactan Export Processing Zone (MEPZ 1 & II) and Cebu’s economy took off! Few people had the foresight and vision of Mr. Fonacier because before he came to Cebu, we really did not know the treasures for tourism that lurked within our midst. It had to take a visionary to bring it out. May God grant him eternal rest.

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