Brains, brawn, and a bit o’luck
WE have the better halves to thank for our four golds at the 2018 Asiad (aka Jakarta Palembang 2018) – Hidilyn Diaz, weightlifting women’s 53-kg division; Yuka Saso, women’s golf event; Team Philippines (Yuka Saso, Bianca Pagdanganan, Lois Go), women’s golf team event; and Margielyn Didal, skate boarding women’s street event.
Our boxers’ two silvers and one bronze deserved better. Our basketball team, put together at the eleventh hour, did us proud to place 5th. (We could have fared even better if they had not lost steam to end 80-82 vs China.)
Coach Yeng Guiao has just a fortnight to turn around with a reconstituted basketball team, then off for the FIBA World Cup eliminations against Iran on Sept. 13 and Qatar on Sept. 17. Vaya con Dios!
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An old cachet quips that a diplomat is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country. Now that the prescriptive period is over, retired Ambassador Rodolfo Arizala shares his unexpurgated account of a Filipino diplomat thinking on his feet.
Arizala was the deputy when Ambassador-designate-Pelagio Llamas arrived with letters of credence addressed to a president who, as luck would have it, has just been replaced by another. In those pre-Internet days, there was no way to ask Malacañang for new letters of credence, let alone to await a replacement halfway around the globe.
Now it can be told: The intrepid Arizala found a “golden hand” to replace the original name of the president with the name of the new incumbent on the parchment of the letters of credence. Not a step was lost, and Ambassador Llamas presented his letters at the appointed date.
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Arriving in Buenos Aires, the head of delegation, Ambassador Emilio Bejasa, asked if Manila had given instructions on how to vote on a vital issue between India and Bangladesh, which would be taken up at the UN Water Conference. Bejasa said that in the absence of instructions, we should not favor one and antagonize the other. “We should play it by ear,” he said.
When no instructions arrived, Bejasa told his delegation to evaporate quietly before a vote was taken. When the Philippines was called to vote, the chairman, noting the vacant seats of the Philippine delegation, declared in the public address system: “Nobody in the Philippine delegation seats, except a jacket!” to the amusement of the meeting. Arizala later confided, “In our haste to leave, one of us left his jacket on the back of a chair.”
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At the close of UNCTAD III Conference in Santiago, Chile, in 1972, the head of delegation Undersecretary Manuel Collantes gave instructions to dispatch posthaste via special diplomatic pouch the report of the Philippine delegation together with important UNCTAD documents. (Horrors! Someone forgot the seal of the Republic of the Philippines that is used to press an impression on a molten wax.) Fortunately, Arizala had a Philippine 50-centavo coin with the seal of the Philippine Republic. The diplomatic pouch was dispatched with this facsimile, with none wiser. For want of a nail, a kingdom might have been lost.
Arizala concluded: “In Philippine foreign service, one should not only have diplomatic savvy and knowledge of nuances, but also the imagination and resourcefulness to accomplish missions with solutions not found in diplomatic manuals or books.”
*** Arriving on August 21, 1981 to assume his first embassy as the Philippine ambassador to Chile, Arizala checked in Hotel Carrera, where he was billeted for a month before choosing his residence. His account:
When the hotel manager, retired Gen. Carlos Alberto Spoerer Aguirre, learned that I was from the Philippines, he warmed to me, “Excellency, I know a Filipino, Ambrosio Padilla, during an Olympic meet. He led the Philippine basketball team, while I was the leader of the Chilean team. We became good friends.”
“Senator Ambrosio Padilla was my law professor in Civil Law at a university in Manila,” Arizala replied. General Aguirre asked him to convey to Senator Padilla his best wishes and warm regards, enclosing his calling card. Then, with a smile, he asked, “What can I do for you? Are you comfortable in your room at my hotel?”
“I am comfortable, at home away from home. Pending my finding a suitable place for my residence and another place for the Philippine Embassy, I would like to stay at Hotel Carrera. The only problem is that the amount authorized by my government for rent of an office is US$3,000 per month. I could not, therefore, continue staying here, in excess of the ceiling authorized by the Philippine government.”
“Mi querido amigo Filipino, don’t worry.… For the sake of my friendship with Senator Padilla and now with you, you can stay at this hotel as long as you want at the monthly rate of US$3,000.”
I thanked him for his generosity and as I shook hands with him, he added: “Don’t you know my friend that there was a time during the presidency of Don Jose Joaquin Peres that Chile had a proposal to send a naval expedition to the Philippines and help liberate your country from Spain?”
Ambassador Arizala would research that historical footnote… But that’s another story.
*** P.S. From Tattlers’ exchanges among retired and serving envoys, our Ambassador to Belgium Eduardo de Vega swears that at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the athlete Ambrosio Padilla and the Philippine basketball team had fared even better than the bronze medalist Mexico team. FEEDBACK: