Nandy Pacheco of Gunless Society

“What has the Philippines done to foster peace in nearly 500 years of Christianity? What has each Christian done to promote Christ?”

“Sad to say, as individual Christians and as a Christian nation, what we have accepted is that the peace that the world gives is highly dependent on the strength of power of arms and more arms, and on the discarded principle of ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,’” says Reynaldo “Nandy” Pacheco.

Random killings on the streets, the threat of a nuclear war, and mass shootings take place everywhere, due to the culture of machismo and gun violence, and a profit-driven arms industry, he adds.

How can we have peace? Nandy’s answer: “Embrace a radical shift from the culture of peace the world gives to the culture of peace that Jesus Christ gives.”

Embracing Christ’s peace is the engine that drives Nandy Pacheco’s advocacies – a gunless society, a Kapatiran political party and nature conservation. Gunless Society is his continuing primary concern – still elusive since he started it 30 years ago, but, he says, is realizable – with Christ’s peace.

How Nandy began his relentless campaign to regulate arms ownership and use is contained in his biography written by two newspaper writers, titled, The Man Behind Gunless Society, Nandy Pacheco, which will be launched at the Aristocrat Restaurant on Roxas Boulevard this afternoon. In addition to Jerry Lirio’s and TJ Burgonio’s detailed episodes on the life and times of Nandy, one can know more about the peacemaker from the introduction by columnist Randy David and the reflection of Henrietta “Tita” de Villa, former ambassador to the Vatican.

Nandy was born in Balanga, Bataan, where at age 9, his hometown was bombed by the Japanese on Dec. 8, 1941, the day World War II began. Nandy experienced the horrors of war – the frightening sounds of bombs and strafing by Japanese planes, of families marching with Filipino soldiers away from Bataan under a scorching sun, under threat of being shot or bayoneted to death, seeing dying persons along the way. The constant flight and hard life remained etched in his mind, even as he finished the law course at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila.

After graduation, Nandy held different jobs – as an assistant of Education Secretary Gregorio Hernandez Jr., as a public relations man, and helping run the campaign of Emmanuel Pelaez, vice-presidential candidate in the 1961 election, then as the Department of Foreign Affairs press officer when Pelaez won.

He enjoyed a two-month grant at the United Nations Office of Public Information in New York, and upon his return, he was named information assistant and officer in charge of the UN information center in Manila. His proposal to have Isaac Peral street where the UN offices in Manila stood renamed to United Nations was approved by the Manila City Council. Nandy’s career peak was as chief information officer, the first highest position held by a Filipino, in the Asian Development Bank, a job he held until he retired in 1990 “to devote more time to God and country.”

While he was with ADB, he felt restless; news stories of people being gunned down with impunity were to him too much to bear. In 1987, he gathered a group of friends, among them National Artist for Literature F. Sionil Jose, some lawyers and columnist Luis Mauricio, and together they formed NATURE (National Action for Total Uplift and Restoration of the Environment), a non-government organization that would work for a more peaceful and wholesome environment.

But Nandy soon realized that protecting people from pollution was one thing, protecting people from violence was another. In no time, NATURE gave birth to what would be Nandy’s life-long advocacy – Gunless Society, a movement seeking to ban the carrying of a gun in public places, except by law enforcers on duty and in uniform.

Gunless Society was welcomed by columnists, the Catholic hierarchy, respected politicians and prominent citizens including Bea and Jaime Zobel, who allowed Nandy to put up no-to-gun billboards on Ayala Avenue, once a no-no site for ads.  President Corazon Aquino certified a bill to institutionalize Nandy’s Gunless Society, but, according to N andy, her brother at the House of Representatives, Jose “Peping” Cojuangco Jr., sat on it, eventually killing it. The frustrated Nandy said, “If you want something done, do not rely on politicians.”

Frustrated but not cowed, Nandy and lawyer Santiago Dumlao decided to run in the 1998 elections dominated by guns, goons and gold. Santi was the standard bearer of Partido Bago, or Kilusang Pambansang Pagpapanibago. Nandy was his running mate. Their reformist platform was to “Put God First” in the shaping of national policies and espousing “Biyaya Economics,” or growth for all, as their economic reform program. They lost in the elections.

Instead of throwing in the towel, Nandy formed Ang Kapatiran, or the Alliance for a Common Good political party. In 2007 it fielded new faces in the senatorial elections, but they all lost. In 2010, Ang Kapatiran fielded JC delos Reyes as its presidential candidate. He was a tailender in the elections. Smarting from the defeats, Kapatiran boycotted the May 2016 presidential elections.

Finally Nandy launched Gunless Society. He believes that the violence and killings of people is due to the proliferation of guns. Today, more than 30 years after its launch, Nandy still dreams of this country becoming a gunless society.

In late 1990, religious leader Henrietta “Tita” de Villa, a good friend of Nandy’s wife, Priscila Reyes Pacheco, asked Nandy to join the deliberations of the Second Plenary Council in crafting new church politics. The soft-spoken, God fearing-and-loving man from Bataan said yes, and found, wonder of wonders, during his research a PCP2 document duly approved by the Vatican, on page 240, Article 23, Rule No 3 that read that all sectors of the church “must actively work for an end to the production and manufacture of the technology of death and the arms trade as part of its vision of peace.“ This discovery was like wind under Gunless Society’s wings.

True to his no-no stance against guns, he opposed the government’s rendering of a 21-gun salute at the arrival of Pope John Paul II. The Vatican said yes to Nandy’s proposal.

In all his struggles for the utopian Gunless Society, Nandy believes that if Filipinos had taken Jesus Christ’s words in  John 14:27 (‘’Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives, do I give it to you”) to heart and lived by them, there would have been less blood spilled, and few lives lost to violence due to the unregulated use and possession of guns.

Nandy is now organizing a movement called the Bearers of Christ’s Peace, that is calling on all Christians to participate in a nonviolent cultural change from the “peace that the world gives” to the “peace that Christ gives.”

The highest accolade given to Nandy is the late Jesuit priest Denis Murphy’s writing in his column in a broadsheet that if the church were to choose a lay person for canonization, it would be Nandy if only for his work on the Gunless Society and Ang Kapatiran Political Party.

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