Self-sacrifice. The political response of Alexander Cauguiran. All for the love of Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan.
“I just have to bury my political ambition (to be Pamintuan’s running-mate).” So was Cauguiran quoted as having declared in his panegyric during the 66th birthday celebration of Pamintuan at the city hall grounds the Monday before last. Which merited copious tears from the well-wishers, not the least from city first lady Herminia Pamintuan.
Considering the depth and breadth of Cauguiran’s sacrifice, burying his ambition falls short as fit description. Burning his ambition would have been the perfect idiom.
The smoke of his holocaust rising to the heavens – a most fitting offering to the One above; the ashes scattered by the wind upon the earth, to find fertile ground whence shall spawn more principled characters like Cauguiran’s.
Besides, as one smartass noted: What is buried can be exhumed. What is burnt…stays burnt. No, we know him better: Cauguiran’s word is his honor.
With Cauguiran’s self-immolation, Pamintuan finds himself emancipated not only from the bonds of friendship but from the shackles of principles as well. Therefore, his is the freedom now to play pure politics, be it patronage or populist, popular or parochial.
What do I mean?
Principles
Of all the vice mayoralty material available to Pamintuan, only Cauguiran is cut from the same proletarian cloth as him. Theirs is a shared conscientization in the history of class struggle, with the triumph of the masa as the absolute end of liberation. Theirs is that character forged in the crucible of the Marcos dictatorship, unsoftened,unweakened by the exhilaration of EDSA 1986 that, as subsequent events unravelled, turned less revolution than aberration.
Pamintuan-Cauguiran, by their shared history, embodies the politics of principles. Which has been parlayed into victories in the 1992, 1995, 2010 and 2013 mayoralty contests in Angeles City, albeit with Cauguiran as war horse rather than co-standard bearer, he taking to the hustings the age-old clash of social classes applied in contemporary settings.
Thus, on one hand, the Lazatins and Nepomucenos: representative of the landed gentry, the feudal lords, the political dynasties embodied as the immovable object — preserving the status quo, keeping their socio-economic and political stranglehold of the nation.
On the other, Pamintuan: of the working class, the intelligentsia, the greater mass of Filipino society — banded as the irresistible force to crush bourgeois domination.
Thus, Cauguiran acting the quintessential commissar – steeped in dialectics, inhered in the grassroots pedagogy on the imperative of the rebellion of the poor towards their ultimate liberation – effectively rousing the masa to the cause of Pamintuan as conflated with their own. Mobilization solidifying in the mass movement that is Partido ABE Kapampangan in 2013.
With Cauguiran dispensing himself from Pamintuan’s vice mayoralty options, rears now the head of realpolitik in the electoral field.
Opposites
So it has been headlined in the local papers – Punto not included – that the plebeian Pamintuan is teaming up with the patrician Councilor Bryan Matthew Nepomuceno for 2016.
Past. In the two elections he engaged in, the young Nepomuceno firmly stood – and handily won – in opposition to Pamintuan. Despite his standard bearers miserably losing to the latter.
Present. At Pamintuan’s birthday bash, conspicuous in their presence were the Nepomucenos – the presumptive running mate, his parents, former Barangay Cutcut chief and once Pampanga Vice Gov. Robin, and current Cutcut chair Cecile, who declared “unequivocal” family support to Pamintuan.
Aye, diametrical opposites finding synthesis, if only tactically there. Politics makes strange bedfellows, indeed. The truism gone trite renews its relevance here. So too that maxim on the impermanence of friends and foes vis-à-vis the immutability of interests in political practice.
Absent principles, exigency and expediency are the fundamental rules of political praxis. Not that there is anything patently evil there. As all is fair in love and war. And truly, there’s no substitute to victory.
Lapid
A master stroke may even be Pamintuan’s taking in Nepomuceno. In the light of the disclosures of the pretender to the city mayorship, Sen. Lito Lapid.
If we may recall, in his press conference before the end of 2014, Lapid premised his running for mayor thus: “Here in Angeles, I was convinced by Tarzan (Lazatin) to run for mayor. He is my idol… Who will refuse to run for mayor in Angeles? The Nepomuceno patriarch (referring to former mayor Francisco Nepomuceno) is my godfather and his children are like my own brothers (Balamu kapatad ko pu reng Nepomuceno)…That is why when they invited me to run for mayor who am I to refuse?”
Lapid triangulating his political campaign base in Lazatin, the Nepomucenos, and himself.
Now, with the Nepomucenos – at least the currently serving branch of the clan – going to Pamintuan, Lapid is definitively deprived of a third of that base. How shall stand then a three-legged stool with but two legs?
Or in the scheme of Leon Guerrero, how shall run a troika with only two horses?
Then and there too presents the imperative of a Pamintuan victory, as much as Bryan’s, for the Nepomucenos.
With the mayor re-elected to his third and final term, and the pretender Lapid vanquished, the road is all wide and clear for a Nepomuceno mayorship in 2019. Barring, of course, Pamintuan exercising the Boking Morales doctrine.
1995 review
Now come here parallelisms with 1995 when Pamintuan dug the Nepomucenos out of the political grave to which they were consigned after their ignominious defeat in the 1988 elections.
Indeed, I reprinted here less than three weeks back “Be careful with history” highlighting how Lazatin then admonished Pamintuan for taking in Francis “Blueboy” Nepomuceno as runningmate, presciently warning him that the latter would cause his political demise. As indeed happened in the first district congressional contest in 1998.
So, will lightning strike Pamintuan’s ground twice?
Only if Bryan will do a Blueboy, and with Pamintuan also opting for the House seat still occupied by his ally Yeng Guiao.
Only if Cauguiran is stricken out of the Pamintuan equation too.
Also, in 1995-1998, the movements in city politics was dictated by the then political potentate Lazatin, as sitting three-term congressman wanting to be mayor. The defeat of Lazatin in the very hands of Pamintuan in 2013 – masterfully crafted by Cauguiran, lest we forget – has has rendered that situation moot and academic.
There is least probability of a 1998 redux obtaining anew. But not impossible, politics being the art of the possible, as clichéd.
And yes, while I harped on the disastrous end result – in 1998 – for Pamintuan of that first partnership with a Nepomuceno, I failed to acknowledge its immediate effect – in 1995 – that was most beneficial to him: Pamintuan getting more votes than the combined sum total of all his four (five?) opponents.
That is one déjà vu worth not only considering but desiring.
Its happening in 2016 though I shall deem most manifest of Cauguiran’s sacrifice finding favour with the lord – the One up in the heavens, and the other down here on earth.
Blessed are you, my friend.
