FROM her secret perch overlooking Malacanang Palace, June Kiethley in February 1986, decided to play an old campaign jingle on the airwaves. That jingle was “Mambo Magsaysay.” To play that song at that time, was a pointed jab at an Ilocano dictator, reminding him of another Ilocano president whose fame was built on redeeming the sanctity of the ballot, while Marcos’s notoriety was built on stealing ballots.
Perhaps you’ve heard that tune. But have you paused to reflect on its words? And why they captured the imagination of the electorate in 1953 and served as an inspiration to the electorate in 1986?
Everywhere that you would look
Was a bandit or a crook
Peace and order was a joke
‘Til Magsaysay pumasok
That is why, that is why
You will hear the people cry
Our democracy will die
Kung wala si Magsaysay.
Mambo, mambo Magsaysay
Mabu-mabu mabuhay
Our democracy will die
Kung wala si Magsaysay
Birds they voted in Lanao
At pati Aswang pa daw
Ang election lutong macaw
Till Magsaysay showed them how
Mambo, mambo Magsaysay
Mabu-mabu mabuhay
Our democracy will die
Kung wala si Magsaysay
We tend to overlook in our present era of pop songs recycled and repurposed as campaign jingles, how revolutionary — and subversive — the Mambo Magsaysay was.
A few years back I bought a Perez Prado album and in the liner notes, another Philippine president, Elpidio Quirino, did a cameo. He was quoted as saying that the Mambo craze that swept the Philippines was “a national calamity.” And indeed it was. A song helped sweep him out of office.
Goeffrey Bocca, President Macapagal’s biographer, said, upon looking at the famous portrait of Magsaysay that he looked “very much the tough guy: He probably chews glass.”
In our profoundly embittered and cynical times, it seems unimaginable that Filipinos would want, so mightily, a leader to lead them out of a time of Communist rebellion and seemingly total government corruption. Equally unimaginable, perhaps, to us today, is the idea that the political system could still produce leaders capable of delivering good government.
But I don’t think what Filipinos wanted then is different from what they aspire to, today.
Magsaysay gained public confidence for the reforms he instituted in the armed forces. Corrupt generals were swept aside, the welfare of the enlisted men attended to, and the armed forces trained to stop their previous habit of abusing the peasantry which only helped the cause of the Huks.
He was also fanatical in his insistence in distinguishing public from private funds, something he could perhaps afford to do, because in today’s money, the president’s salary would be equivalent to five million pesos a year.
Here’s an example. In October 1955, Magsaysay flew to Tacloban on a Philippine air force plane. The president then sent P1,642.57 to a very surprised AFP chief of stuff, to reimburse the trip. Even the press was surprised. A reporter later asked Magsaysay, but wasn’t that an official trip as president? Magsaysay had been invited to deliver the main speech at the commemoration ceremonies of the landing of the American forces of liberation in that locality.
This is Magsaysay’s reply, as quoted in the Philippines Free Press: “If I had delivered only that speech during their commemoration ceremony while we were in Tacloban, that would have been a purely official trip. But don’t you remember that I also spoke before the Lion’s Club of Tacloban and followed that with another speech before provincial and municipal officials and public school teachers of Leyte? I talked politics in that last speech. Lest I be accused of using a government airplane for electioneering, I had to see to it that the air force was fully paid for the use of that plane we took to Leyte.”
An economy that grew at a rate of 7 percent a year throughout his term also helped.
The legend came to an end on March 17, 1957. President Magsaysay was returning from Cebu, where among the last pictures taken of him shows him with former President Sergio Osmena. The president’s party boarded his plane, the Mount Pinatubo early in the morning.
As the day wore on, extra editions of the newspapers screamed the president’s plane was missing. Jess Sison recounts that Mrs. Luz Banzon Magsaysay spent those hours of uncertainty on her knees in the Malacanang chapel, praying the rosary. Finally, at around noon, it was confirmed. President Magsaysay had died, at the age of 49, when the presidential plane crashed into the side of Mount Manunggal in Cebu. And so, there are two significant Ramon Magsaysay anniversaries this year. On March 17, it’s the fiftieth anniversary of his death; on Aug. 31, it will be the centennial anniversary of his birth.
In 1953, the year Magsaysay was elected, the Free Press published an editorial. It observed that, “the need to establish a regime above personalities, a government of law instead of men, cannot be exaggerated. In a rule of law alone lies social stability. Those who are for chaos may welcome a personal regime; those who are for order know the need for an impersonal government.” It said that while notable Filipino leaders in the past had a “private conscience which drew the line beyond which it would be dishonorable for a public official to go,” the country couldn’t continue pinning its hopes on officials privately drawing “a line which only an impersonal law should draw.” The editorial writer couldn’t know how prophetic he was being.
Ramon Magsaysay’s landslide had not been seen in Philippine politics since before World War II; such was the charisma and integrity of the man that he almost single-handedly rejuvenated public confidence in government. But by 1957 Magsaysay was dead; and the country was left with the painful realization the editorial writer had expressed three years before: In the absence of a genuine rule of law, the restoration of public confidence was an impossible task. We continue to look for that rule of law, just as we have never found a people’s champion to replace him.
