After completing the 6-month pre-service training on community development at the Community Development Center in Los Banos, Laguna, I was assigned as PACD Barrio Development Worker in Kapatagan, Lanao del Norte.
It was in Kapatagan that I had my baptism of the hard realities in government service, my initiation to the unusual tasks undertaken by the office under the martial law regime and my budding zealousness to perform my mandated tasks and to deliver results. The first milestone in my career as a government functionary was the intervention of the town mayor in the conduct of the population and housing census in 1970 which was entrusted by the Bureau of Census and Statistics to the PACD field offices. The mayor wanted the town’s population bloated to get a bigger share in the national revenue allotments. Due to its illicit nature, the errand had to be executed by my boss and myself, leaving out the enumerators who conducted the head count. We cracked our heads concocting names to bloat the count but were able to maintain the integrity of the census by informing the provincial census officer how to separate the real and the bogus data. It was a risky business with a dire consequence but the mayor never saw the official result of the census. He was murdered in broad daylight at the town’s commercial center. The assailant was rumored to be an Ilaga vigilante but nobody was brought to justice for the dastardly act.
The second milestone was the ratification of the 1973 Constitution by raising of hands. Four months earlier, President Ferdinand E. Marcos declared martial law, abolished Congress and ruled by decree. The town auditorium was packed when we conducted the voting in the Poblacion. The ratification process went smoothly but the town’s police chief was unhappy that there were still a number of hands raised when the no vote was called. He demanded for a re-voting by separating the yes vote to the right side of the auditorium. Expectedly, the left side of the venue was empty. I didn’t know what transpired in the mind and heart of the police chief for such outrageous proposition. Perhaps he was overwhelmed by the sudden dropped of criminality that the declaration of martial law had ushered in his AOR. Peace and order had given him much spare time to attend village assemblies to extol the blessings of Proclamation 1081. Indeed, the first months of martial law surprisingly made people happy. I knew of housewives who would not hesitate to kiss the feet of Marcos for the effect of curfew on the nocturnal activities of their husbands. My initial dismay of the blatant disregard to a modicum of democratic process was however overshadowed by my bias for the proposed Constitution. Among others, it was my firm belief that the absence of a Constitution abetted the Muslim separatist movement in Mindanao. In fact, I vigorously expounded this thesis as a member of the speaker’s bureau that conducted the information drive in all 33 barrios of Kapatagan. The information drive honed my public speaking and my stage fright became a thing in the past. Henceforth, I became an articulate apologist of Marcos’s “New Society” and his doctrine of “revolution from the center.”
