Pinatubo at 35/Part 1: It was the worst of times

 

JUNE 10, 1991. Angeles City awakened to its worst nightmare: the American dream was over.

Dashed was the hope – against hope – that GI Joe would stay, come what may. A belief borne by the new concrete wall around the base perimeter that had just been completed, the frenzied base housing construction seen as a sure sign of increased troop deployment, and the second runway built reportedly to serve as alternative landing site for the space shuttle Columbia. All coming to nought.

Before stunned eyes passed the very end of the city’s economic being: By car, bus, truck, American servicemen and their dependents started their exodus from Clark – jamming the North Luzon Expressway in a three-mile-long convoy – to Subic where US warships and troop transports awaited them for the long journey home.

Their departure from Clark was for the Americans a less than stoic acceptance of the impending repudiation by the Philippine Senate of the bases treaty – to ultimately come in September – than a hurried, harried flight from certain catastrophe.

June 11. “16,000 evacuated from Clark” bannered the Stars and Stripes, with the subhead: “Major eruption feared from Mount Pinatubo volcano.”

The rumblings of the hitherto hardly known volcano starting to get frequenter and stronger by the hour.

June 12. Philippine Independence Day. For the first time in 90 years, Angeles City was thoroughly free of a foreign occupation force. The meaning of the day though was utterly lost to Mayor Antonio Abad Santos whose speech before the city hall alternated between carping – “overacting,” he called the American abandonment of the base, and comforting – that the greater number of Angelenos need not panic, being outside Pinatubo’s immediate 10-kilometer radius that was initially tagged as danger zone.

Thunderous explosions cut Abad Santos in mid-speech, a giant plume of ash shot up 20 kilometers in the sky, immediately followed a rain of hot ash and pumice stones. It was 8:51 in the morning.

Panic – people froze in their track, eyes in the sky and mouth agape, shocked and awed by nature’s might.

Then pandemonium – the rush for home, hither and thither like headless chickens, amid the cacophony of frightened shrieks, nervous prayers, screeching tires and blaring horns.

With the acrid smell of sulphur wafting in the ash-laden air, masks – surgical and industrial – ran out in the city’s drug and hardware stores. The surplus biochemical masks from Desert Storm which found their way to the PX stalls of Dau and Nepo Mart had been snagged, wholesale, by some very enterprising profiteer much earlier. 

Braving the cloud of ash, President Cory Aquino flew by helicopter to Clark to see the situation first hand, and dropped by the Angeles City High School where the eruption’s very first evacuees of 2,000, mostly Aeta tribesmen, have taken refuge.

“This could only be the beginning.” So warned Dr. Raymundo S. Punongbayan, director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) of the June 12 eruptions.

June 13. Phivolcs recorded more eruptions, the volcano gushing greater clouds of ash and gases 25 kilometers in the sky. “Phenomenal eruptions,” Punongbayan called them, and declared: “This is already the Big Bang. I can’t see any other eruption that will exceed this.”

June 14. Dark clouds blanketed the city, ominously dimming the garish neon lights of Balibago.

June 15. A much Bigger Bang that proved Punongbayan’s declaration deadly wrong.

The Great Eruption that turned bright day – starting at 8:15 in the morning – to darkest night. The roll of thunder, the flash of lightning, the rain of ash and stones, and the tremors of the ground foreboding the very end of days.

The city’s secondary economic lifeline – next only to Clark Air Base – furniture and handicraft manufacturing totally collapsed, literally, from the weight of ashfall: Factories – roofs, beams, posts and walls – crashing down on machines, equipment, supplies and finished products.

Collapsed too, as many houses in the city, was the roof of the Philippine Rabbit Bus terminal downtown, killing two waiting passengers and injuring scores of others. Later in the day, the city’s very icon of the finest Chinese cuisine – Shanghai De Luxe Restaurant – burned to the ground after its roof collapsed on the liquefied petroleum gas tanks in its kitchen. 

By 2 in the afternoon, steaming mudflows – soon to enter the lexicon as the terrifying “lahar” – sprang from the foot of Pinatubo, rampaged through the Abacan River, destroying in succession Friendship Bridge that led to Clark, Hensonville Spillway, Abacan Bridge, where MacArthur Highway traversed and Pandan Bridge that led to Magalang. Scouring the riverbank and gobbling up houses and buildings, including the remnants of the collapsed Angeles City General Hospital. 

It was the city’s first taste of the devastating power of lahar – a horrific byword sending people to higher ground at the slightest drop of rain.

West of the city, the lahar-swollen Mancatian River swallowed its eponymous bridge cutting off Angeles City from Porac town. Mudflows overtopped the Sapang Balen Creek and spread steadily across the city proper. The public market and commercial area of San Nicolas and the business district, indeed the very heart of the city, Sto. Rosario where city hall, the “big church,” the enclaves of the rich, as well as the city’s and Central Luzon’s biggest private school, Holy Angel College were all sited, all inundated by steaming mud. 

There, a long-established tale belied: As the elevation of Angeles City is levelled with the very spire of the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Fernando, any flooding in the city would mean the capital town under at least 30 feet of water.

On Doomsday itself, no flooding was recorded in San Fernando.

With supplications to the Almighty drowned by the rumble of the volcano, with the onslaught of mudflows and the rain of ash unabating, it was hegira for the Angelenos.

All the roads leading south of the city were filled with dazed and dazzled refugees, on foot, in cars, on buses, on truck: seeking relative safety in the homes of relatives and friends, finding temporary shelters in evacuation centers, the first of which was Amoranto Stadium in Quezon City provided for by Mayor Brigido Simon, Jr., a Kapampangan himself, who also brought buses to the very ramp of the Angeles exit of the North Luzon Expressway to ferry more evacuees.

Buried in ashes, reduced to a virtual ghost town, Angeles City and its twin basetown, which also bore the initial brunt of the eruptions, made easy picking for the moralists’ sermon of the wrath of God heaped upon Sodom and Gomorrah. The host cities to the US military bases long known as deeply mired in decadence and debauchery.

But erased from the face of earth like the biblical sin cities, Angeles City refused to be.

(Agyu Tamu: Turning Tragedy into Triumph (2011), edited by Bong Z. Lacson)

 

Sans epal, no ayuda

“NO PUBLIC officials holding elective positions, electoral candidates, politicians, political partners, or any of their representatives, except for officials having direct administrative and executive authority over the implementing agency, shall influence, be present in, participate in, or take part in the actual distribution of any cash assistance and other forms of financial aid.”

Thus, states Section 19 of RA 12314 or the 2026 General Appropriations Act.

Further, Section 20 also prohibits the display and affixing of the name, picture, image, motto, logo, color motif, initials or other symbol or graphic representation associated with any public official, whether elected or appointed, on signboards for all government programs, activities and projects. 

Covered by these prohibitions are the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s protective services for individuals and families in difficult circumstances, including the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), Ayuda para sa Kapos ang Kita Program (AKAP), and the Assistance to Individuals in Crisis Situation (AICS) Program; the Department of Labor and Employment’s Tulong Panghanapbuhay sa Ating Disadvantaged/Displaced Workers Program (TUPAD); and the Department of Health’s Medical Assistance for Indigent and Financially Incapacitated Patients Program (MAIFIP). 

“Hindi ko papupuntahin iyong mga paymaster namin at iyong mga social worker namin habang nandoon iyong mga politiko. I think that’s a proactive measure,” Social Welfare and Development Secretary Rex Gatchalian himself declared sometime in January 2026 during a briefing on these very provisions in the 2026 GAA.

Emphatically iterating: “Well, again if (politicians) gatecrash, we can stop (the distribution). Our social workers…will not allow themselves to be used for political gains of anybody.”

What the law sought to prohibit, prospered in its very practice.

So, has there ever been a time since these prohibitions were publicized that politicians, in all levels of governance, were ever absent from all ayuda dole outs, be they 4Ps, AICS, MAIFIP, TUPAD, Cash Relief Assistance, and – in these times of oil price surges – TUPAD Tuloy Pasada to jeepney and tricycle operators and drivers’ associations?

Why, with the barangay and sangguniang kabataan elections waving, prospective candidates who have affinities – familial, entrepreneurial, or political – to the sitting mayors have made themselves all too visible, and audible – some are reportedly even given time to talk – in ayuda payouts.

Sadly, we have yet to hear of one instance that social workers stopped aid distribution due to a politician’s presence.

Shame.

Green palette

scorching light of

midafternoon sun

verdancy’s grandeur

wilts not.

Hann Reserve. New Clark City. May 21, 2026. 

Doggoned Senate

 

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THOSE OF age in 1997 may well still remember Wag the Dog.

For one, it starred Hollywood A-listers Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman. 

More worth unforgetting though is its plot – a Washington DC spinmeister distracts the electorate from a sex scandal (shades of the Bill-Monica affair) a few days before the election by hiring a film producer to…well, produce a bogus war with Albania.

The movie did not birth the idiom “wag the dog,” having been in the American lexicon since the 1870s, originating from “the tail wagging the dog.” Nonetheless, it was the movie that really made it an operative word in politics and communications, spawning the meaning “to start a war or military operation to divert political attention away from yourself.”        

General usage now has “wag the dog” meaning to create a situation to divert the people’s attention from what is otherwise of greater significance, concern or interest to them. 

Wag the dog. That is precisely what I saw in the acoustics shootout at the Senate last night. No, I have absolutely no pretensions to expertise in forensics, at best being an armchair generalist. Still, the tell-tale signs are all there.  

Doggone it.

Cancelling Abad Santos

MAY 7 is a special non-working holiday in the Pampanga and Angeles City in commemoration of the martyrdom of the Kapampangan hero and former Chief Justice Jose Abad Santos.

In the long bygone days of the boomers, the day was celebrated with endless school plays of the last hours of Abad Santos highlighted by his admonition to his son Pepito to “show these people that you are brave…that not everyone is given the opportunity to die for his country.” So honored was Abad Santos then that his martyrdom was even parallelled with Jose Rizal’s as greatest epochs in Philippine history, the Spanish Colonization for the latter, the Japanese Occupation for the former.

That was then, a long dead past.

For the past decades now, the remembrance of Abad Santos, much less memorializing his heroism, has not gone beyond the perfunctory wreath-laying and rhetoric on his official death date at the foot of his monuments – only four very visible in the whole of Pampanga: at the Provincial Capitol grounds, at Heroes Hall in the City of San Fernando, fronting the Museo ning Angeles, and of late, at the northbound entry of the North Luzon Expressway in San Fernando. 

So what school, public or private, elementary or secondary, vocational or college, in San Fernando, in the whole Pampanga for that matter, has been named in honor of Abad Santos? 

Ah yes, there was but one: Jose Abad Santos High School in 1966 per act of Congress via a measure sponsored by 1^st District Rep. Juanita L. Nepomuceno at the time when the province had only two congressional districts. Which in 1991 reverted to its old Pampanga High School, courtesy of 3^rd District Rep. Oscar S. Rodriguez, a PHS alumnus.     

Why, at the very demolition of the Abad Santos ancestral home just off the old public market in the late 1980s (early 1990s?), not even a whispered whimper of a protest was heard from the town officials or from local heritage advocates, despite the site proudly sporting the marker of the National Historical Institute as the birthplace of the hero.

Why, but for an afterthought of civic and business groups was the Gapan-San Fernando-Olongapo Road was also named Jose Abad Santos Avenue, albeit limited in usage to the San Fernando stretch, and the Department of Public Works and Highways still referencing to it in its maintenance contracts as GSO. 

Why, even the P1,000 bill that bore his image, along with fellow WWII martyrs Vicente Lim, and Josefa Llanes Escoda, have been replaced by the new “plastic” P1,000 bill featuring the endangered Philippine eagle.

Alas, to the dustbin of history has Abad Santos, along with most of our heroes, been veritably consigned. Unhappy is the land without heroes, so ‘tis cliched. But damned is that that willfully forgets them – being part of the lessons of history that Santayana admonished about.  

 

Where men fall...

 

            Punsalan. Capil. Maglanque.

MAYOR ABUNDIO “JP” PUNSALAN, JR. of San Simon. Unseen. Unheard.

Whereabouts unknown since the Sandiganbayan issued two arrest warrants against him in November 2025 for graft – with P90,000 bail – and malversation of public funds – non-bailable – in connection with an allegedly unlawful P45-million land purchase in 2023.

Punsalan had served a number of suspensions from the Office of the Ombudsman and the Pampanga sangguniang panlalawigan for grave misconduct but what projected him into the national consciousness was his arrest in flagrante delicto on Aug. 5, 2025 in an entrapment operation by the National Bureau of Investigation relative to an alleged P30-million extortion on RealSteel Corp., a business company operating in San Simon.

A hold departure order was also issued in November 2025, to prevent Punsalan from leaving the country.

MAYOR JAIME “JING” CAPIL of Porac. Suspended.

“Accused Capil was charged with committing fraud when he gave unwarranted benefit, advantage, and preference to Lucky South 99 Outsourcing Inc. by approving, issuing, and granting a mayor’s business permit in favor of Lucky South 99 to operate as a POGO despite not being legally entitled to such permit,” read a portion of the suspension order for 90 days issued by acting Presiding Judge Josephine Advento of the Regional Trial Court Branch 265, Pasig City on Feb. 23, 2026.

The Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission raided the POGO facilities located in a leased property of the Royal Garden Golf and Country Club Estate in Barangay Sta. Cruz in 2024 and subsequently filed the criminal case, which includes seven counts of graft for violations of RA 3019 (Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act).

In October 2024, the Office of the Ombudsman ordered the preventive suspension of Capil and other local officials for gross neglect of duty in relation to the illegal POGO operations.

In April 2025, the Ombudsman found Capil guilty of “gross neglect of duty” and imposed the penalty of dismissal from service, including the cancellation of his government service eligibility, forfeiture of retirement benefits, and perpetual disqualification from reemployment in the government.

In November 2025, the RTC Branch 265 issued a warrant of arrest against Capil over seven counts of violations of (Sections 3(e) and 3(j) of RA 3019.

In December 2025, Capil posted a cash bond of P630,000 for his temporary liberty. 

MAYOR RENE MAGLANQUE of Candaba. Suspension affirmed.

In a resolution dated April 24, 2026, the Sandiganbayan affirmed its Jan. 19, 2026 resolution placing Maglanque under a 90-day preventive suspension over 97 counts of violation of RA 3019 (Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act) and 97 counts of Malversation of Public Funds filed against him and others in relation to the P900-million Malampaya Fund scam.

Notwithstanding Senate President Pro Tempore Panfilo Lacson tagging former Public Works Secretary Manuel Bonoan in a “family business” connection with Maglanque’s Globalcrete Builders that reportedly secured P2.195 billion worth of flood control projects in Bulacan between 2018 and 2024, and their daughters, along with that of former DPWH Undersecretary Roberto Bernardo, jointly owning MBB Global Properties, no charges have been officially filed against Maglanque.

Punsalan. Capil. Maglanque. They easily make the rogues’ gallery – sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb – in the local governance milieux of Pampanga. Could not think of any other province in Philippines with as much or higher ratio of 3:19 or 15.78 percentage on the suspended vis-à-vis the total number of municipal mayors.

                     Canlas. Capil. Macapagal.

…women stand

BY COINCIDENCE – serendipity, mayhaps – taking over the mayoralty from the suspended three are all women.

VICE MAYOR ANNE CANLAS of San Simon.

In matters aesthetic alone, Canlas readily found the spot in the hearts of the Simonians – seeing her as the very antithesis to the brash, belligerent brusko Abundio.

Her immersion in the day-to-day concerns of her constituents – from tambak on potholes, monitoring market prices, P20-bigas allocation, garbage collection, general neighborhood cleanliness, street lighting, and some such domesticities – struck their chords of endearment.

A singular project that has earned environmental points for Canlas is the recently ground-broken materials recovery facility, for so long absent in a town crammed with factories, warehouses, and all that they entail.

It is in public health though – and rightly so, Canlas being a medical doctor – that the acting mayor is getting all the love. Hands-on, be it in medical missions, regular health consultations, even emergencies, mayor-doc does it all. An indelible mark Canlas imprinted in San Simon’s folklore: Her active participation in the rites of passage of boys to manhood. Something surely to be passed on from generation to generation.

Rather than an ad interim stopgap, Canlas is a much-welcomed permanent replacement at the mayorship.  

VICE MAYOR JEN CAPIL of Porac.   

Her father’s daughter, unarguably. But no bratty nepo baby certainly, is this CPA, magna cum laude grad.  

With a just-another-day-at-the-office nonchalance, Capil took the LGU reins out of the familial and familiar frame, imprinting her own brand of governance that impacted most in arts and culture, youth and sports development, and tourism – earning for the municipality five recognition in the recent Department of Tourism-Region 3 TRES (Tourism Recognition of Enterprises and Stakeholders) Awards including Most Outstanding Tourism Month Celebration 2025 Grand Winner.

In so short a time, Poracqueños are getting convinced of the daughter already succeeding her father in more ways than simply subbing at the mayor’s office.

VICE MAYOR THELMA MACAPAGAL of Candaba.

Nothing out of the normal bureaucratic rote obtains in the municipio with the man monikered “Ing Malugud” absent from the mayor’s office: Macapagal, no more than a Maglanque continuity in LGU matters, on the surface.

Still, the odiousness of comparison between the suspended and the substitute somewhat permeated the recent spiritual twinning of the Nuestra Señora de la Merced Parish in Barangay Bahay Pare and the Basilica de la Mercè in Barcelona, Spain.

Macapagal hosting breakfast for apostolic nuncio Archbishop Charles Brown at the town hall and standing beside him during the civic reception raised some what-ifs among not-a-few of the attendees: What if the graft-and-corruption-charged Maglanque were in Macapagal’s place? E ya caya milablab, o minasuc mu man?    

Yes, comparisons are indeed despicable.

Distaff dominance

Canlas. Capil. Macapagal. They have upped the ante among women in local governance in Pampanga with four elected mayors – Malu Paras-Lacson of Magalang, Esmie Pineda of Lubao, Lina Cabrera of Sasmuan, and Vilma Balle-Caluag of the City of San Fernando; three elected vice mayors (aside from the three acting mayors now) – Rhodora “Oday” Nacpil of Sta. Ana, Gloria “Ninang” Ronquillo of Sto. Tomas, and Lucia "Buday" Guintu of Masantol.

That “a woman’s place is in the house” is far from just a sexist idiom but can become a political reality, Pampanga proved with three of its four House districts ruled by women: Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in the 2^nd, Mica Gonzales in the 3^rd, and Dr. Anna York Bondoc in the 4^th leaving only the 1^st to Carmelo “Pogi” Lazatin Jr.

And then, of course, there’s Gov. Lilia “Nanay” Pineda at the Capitol.

Oh, the women in Pampanga politics, further author sayeth naught.

 

 

 

 

Ode to Labor Day

 

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WORK ‘TIL you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up. Do it again.

Work. Underpaid? Bereft of benefits? No job security? Work. Be thankful to be working. Work harder.

Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up. Do it again.

Give quality time – not to the growing children, but all to work. Keep bills paid. Years pass. Chances pass. Lucky, work you have. Be glad. Thank God.

Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up. Do it again.

Get older. Get scared to work less hard. Work harder. Prove you still can.

No time for neighbors, community, friends, or the laziness of leisure. No riches. No home left.

Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up. Do it again.

No savings. No pension. All spent staying barely healthy enough to work harder.

Holidays a time for silent desperation. Of work deprivation. Why stop?

Work. Don’t stop. Drop. Get up. Do it again.

Or maybe go to sales at the stores where workers are working ‘till they drop, reminders of just another working day. Don’t be sorry for them. They work. You don’t. Envy them.

No job here. Work somewhere – sweat to your last drop in Saudi, Dubai, Bahrain, even in war-torn Libya, Iraq, and Yemen. Work in any way – nanny in Singapore, caregiver in Israel, nurse in London, factory worker in Incheon, domestic helper in Hong Kong, duped to be drug mule to Indonesia. Do anything. Stay alive. Keep the family back home alive.

Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up. Do it again.

Rich people and bosses have no guilt about holidays, no fear in a nap.

Workers have no need for holidays, all fear in a wink.

Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up, get up, get up, get up. Do it again.

Pay your taxes. Pay your bills. Pay their taxes. Pay their bills. You’ve lost everything that you valued anyway. Loser. Loner. Lazy. That’s how the power class sees us all. We are tools of their greed, and the fools who lost all dreams. They are far, far smarter than we. Whoopee.

Labor Day?

Why are you not working? No job? Lost it? A day off? Why are you not working? At least, with the little left in your pockets – if any – go buy something that will swell the profits and power of those who find us all so pliable, so pitiful, so useable, so exploitable, so workable. Listen for the call. It may be the need for profits calling. If so, get up. Now.

Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up. Do it again.

Then stop. When you finally expire – literally and figuratively. Unless the wealthy and the powerful figure out a way to prolong our lives a little longer to make a few more pesos as they inject us with pain killers and tranquilizers so we cannot even scream on the way out of their profit-making schemes. Physically, emotionally all spent. No savings. No pensions. No hope.

Labor Day?

That’s all day, every day, in every way.

The Philippines is a country of holidays – special, national, local, working and non-working. But certainly not for workers or those who wish they were. We labor for the wealthy and the powerful to have their holidays, every day.

Our labor. Their day. Aye, we are their holidays.

(By Donna Smith, executive director of the Health Care for All Colorado Foundation. Published on September 05, 2011 by Common Dreams.org. With minimal alterations/additions by this columnist to fit into Philippine setting. First published here on May 6, 2015)