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I remember him
well. I think I will continue to remember him as long as I live. And I
remember him especially today, as this is the day when he was born.
I have heard so
many things about Tomas Confesor when I was yet working in the
provincial treasury of Iloilo. He was a strict school supervisor in Jaro,
an able director of the Bureau of Commerce, a representative of the
third district when he gained renown as the Stormy Petrel in the House
of Representatives. He caused President Quezon to be ruled out from the
session hall of the Constitutional Assembly. So they said.
Yet, all these
things did not matter to me personally until he became governor. I had
the good fortune to work with him while he was governor and I can say
with truthfulness that not only I, but also my co-employees in the
Office of the Governor shared my view that working for Tommy Confesor
was both pleasure and an honor.
Tommy Confesor as
governor was a very conscientious man, aware of his duties and
responsibilities. He had the capacity for hard work. His main concern
while at the helm of the provincial administration was to serve and
serve well the best interests of the people of the province. He made
frequent trips to the municipalities to find out the needs of the
people, not only during fiestas but also on workdays. And, in all such
trips, he always dug and dug deep into the problem of the people in such
towns.
He dealt with
people not with condescension but with sincerity that pervaded their
very being. To him, suggestions from people in the common walk of life,
if good were taken with the same grace as those from experienced men. He
knew that wisdom comes from the different strata. He found out that he
could not shout to the four corners of the provincial building as he did
in Congress. For while in Congress, he was clashing with his fellow
legislators but in the provincial building, he had simply to serve the
people.
Tommy Confesor was
the number one criticizer of President Quezon and yet Tomas Confesor was
not an obstructionist. That was why he enjoyed the confidence of
President Quezon. He was the President’s fiscalizer. In his life as
governor, he was given wide latitude by President Quezon to offer
suggestions and to criticize the management of government corporations,
national offices, and even government departments. After he was through
discharging work in office during the day, he would stay far into the
night and deal on problems that confronted not only his administration
but also those of the national government. That was the reason why he
wrote memoranda to some government corporations, offering suggestions
here and criticizing there.
In his
commencement address in Silliman University, he took to task President
Quezon by criticizing the President for favoring the revival of the
bicameral legislature and the amendment of the Constitution allowing for
the re-election of the President. When this speech was delivered, it
elicited comments from public officials, especially from department
heads. President Quezon wrote a letter to Tomas Confesor informing
Governor Confesor that a member of his Cabinet informed the President
that he, Confesor, lambasted the administration of the President at
Silliman University.
However, the
President also further said in his letter that, after reading a copy of
Confesor’s speech, he did not find anything obnoxious in that speech.
And he even praised Tomas Confesor for expressing his views at Silliman
University and expressed the hope that our young people would discuss
public questions as intellectually as Tomas Confesor did in Dumaguete.
Tomas Confesor was
a hard worker in office, and more that that, he was constantly studying,
reading books, weighing problems, finding solutions to such problems and
considering improvements in the local governments as he saw them while
he was governor.
From his
experience as Iloilo’s chief executive, he learned that a governor had a
very limited sphere of action. He was strong advocate for greater local
autonomy. He knew that during the transition period when we had the
Commonwealth government, we should not operate our local government sin
the limited manner outlined in the Administrative Code because we were
then preparing to be on our own and were no longer under the tutelage of
the Americans.
It would not be
out of place for me to say here that Tomas Confesor was recognized as an
expert in local governments not only but our national officials but also
by American officials abroad. For that reason, in 1939, Tomas Confesor
was designated by President Quezon to head a committee on local
governments to study ways and means to be introduced to Congress for
amendment to some provisions of the Administrative Code in order that
the provincial law, if so amended, would be a better working basis for
the operation and management of local governments. Unluckily however,
the suggestions and recommendations of that committee did not
materialize as our country caught up with the war. I know this because I
was the secretary of that committee.
When Tomas
Confesor presented his views on the needs of the country for several
kinds of cooperatives like manufacturers’ cooperatives, retailers’
cooperatives, industrial cooperatives, farmers’ cooperatives, in fact
all kinds of cooperatives that came into the mind of Tommy Confesor,
President Quezon promptly asked him to submit a memorandum for the
President’s consideration and information on how these cooperatives
would work and the capitalization of each kind of cooperative.
Governor Confesor
and I worked for ten days in Balabago, Jaro on that memorandum which
described the structural set up of what was to be the nucleus of the
national cooperatives from which the Namarco, the Facomas and other
cooperatives sprang. President Quezon was so impressed with Tommy
Confesor’s practical and workable recommendations in the memorandum that
he whisked him away from the gubernatorial chair and made him the first
manager of the national cooperatives.
Tomas Confesor was
a man who delighted in assuming responsibilities and as proof of which,
he humbly took it upon himself to perform the duties of other officials
in the Commonwealth government when the Japanese overran the country and
occupied Panay. By sanction of President Quezon, he operated his outfit
as a little regional commonwealth in this part of the Western Visayas.
He made appointments to the Court of First Instance. To name three of
them: Ceferino de los Santos, Pedro Davila and Fulgencio Vega. When the
appointments were wired to President Quezon in Washington, D.C., the
same were confirmed. He ran his organization and called it the free
civil government of Panay. The people in their own way called it the
civil resistance movement.
When Tommy
Confesor returned to Iloilo from Manila one sunny day on March 16, 1942,
one month to the day to be exact before the landing of the Japanese
Imperial Forces in Iloilo, I found him sitting on his chair in his
office eagerly waiting for my arrival. He caught me by surprise.
Although I heard from the grapevine that he came by way of Buruanga, I
never expected him to be in office that day. I shed tears in meeting
him, which I always did in most cases for the almost brotherly
attachment we both had for each other.
The civil
resistance did not just come out as a matter of course. He planned it
and that was the reason for his return. I was jubilant. I know that here
came a man who had in his hands the destiny of the province during those
perilous days of Japanese occupation to guide. Immediately, he set to
the task of organizing the free civil government.
He explored the
possibilities of Bucari for use as a site of his government in exile.
When he found from his ocular investigation the suitability of the place
and how flexible it was for his purpose in evading the penetrations and
punitive expeditions of the enemy, he started to handpick his men to
help him in running his organization.
People became
aware of his leadership. Whenever freedom-loving people in the free area
were found, there you would hear Confesor’s name whispered among them
almost with reverence for in him they hoped to find salvation from the
clutches of the ruthless hands of the invader. What happened during that
time is now common knowledge and belongs to history.
When liberation
came, we found Tomas Confesor a very much-changed man. As a result of
the privations and hardships he suffered in the hills in his efforts to
maintain peace and order and keep our island from chaos and at the same
time to bolster their morale and keep high their fortitude, he became a
very much-embittered man against the Japanese.
Thus, upon
liberation when we found him again in the Cabinet as Secretary of
Interior, we were not surprised how hard he hammered the collaborators
as if those were living inside enemy occupied area were all traitors. He
lambasted them at the Lotus Theater in Manila.
But we could not
all live in the free area. That would have been impossible. Life in the
enemy area was, I believe, not all roses and bouquets. Those who were
within must have had their share of the perils of war. They must have
been in constant dread just as we were in the hills when the Japs when
after us for 45 days in July and August 1943.
Luckily, we found
Tomas Confesor again as a member of the Far East Commission of Gen.
Douglas McArthur where he regained his old self. About his work in this
commission, he wrote to the one man closest to his heart one of the most
magnificent lines he had ever written in his life, a reflection of is
character as a lover of mankind when he said, “It is indeed a tremendous
change from being hunted by the Japanese to be sitting in judgment over
them.” So his expression went. In that letter, he showed compassion for
the Japanese people.
That was Tomas
Confesor, the man in whose honor the people of Cabatuan and the province
of Iloilo as a whole commemorate this day. He was a credit to any
community. He gave lusted to the country, honor to the province, and
dignity to the town that gave him birth.
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