Remembering our Bren

“E KO magmalun, mibangun ya ing Pampanga.”

The exhortation of Governor Bren Z. Guiao for his people to end their collective grief, rise from despair, and believe in a renascent Pampanga brought the first ray of hope in the wake of the Mount Pinatubo eruptions.
It was the faintest flicker of hope though, the Kapampangan trapped in the most desperate straits: damned in a wasteland of buried homes and broken dreams, doomed in a landscape of death and desolation.
Beyond PR savvy – of which Guiao was a guru – the slogan was founded on the governor’s unwavering faith in the Kapampangan character: of grit and resiliency, that have served him well in rising from every adversity, be it socio-politico-economic, as in the agrarian unrest, the Marcos dictatorship and the communist rebellion; or natural, as in the floods that perennially devastated the croplands and aqua farms of the province and damaged its infrastructure…
A faith well placed. A prophesy coming to pass. Pampanga indeed rising from the ashes Pinatubo to use that overwrought cliché. As Bren Zablan Guiao promised. As my foreword in the book Pinatubo: Triumph of the Kapampangan Spirit (2008) put it.
Leave those credit grabbers to their delusions, but it was Bren Z. Guiao – then already out of the governorship but chair of Kabisig, an NGO under the Office of the President – and his nemesis, Gov. Lito Lapid, that worked hardest for the FVR megadike systems that ultimately saved Pampanga. How and why did I know? I was Lapid’s senior consultant then, privy to practically even the lowest whispers in the corridors of power.
I covered Bren Z. Guiao long before he became governor, starting off in the post-Ninoy Aquino assassination rallies, going to the 1984 Batasan polls, onto EDSA 1.
It was during his watch at the Capitol that Pampanga saw frenzied infrastructure development concretized in the Paskuhan Village, the Pampanga Sports and Convention Center that hosted the 1990 Palarong Pambansa, the Ninoy Aquino By-Way and the Quezon Road.
The “Growth Center,” he dubbed Pampanga, most appropriately so as the province ranked Number One in investments immediately prior to the Pinatubo eruptions, and “easily” – to use his favourite expression – rebounding to Number Five three years after.
Of all the things I wrote about Bren Z. Guiao, I find this Zona Libre column published in the May 21-27, 1995 issue of The Voice the best.
Sense of history 
BREN Z. GUIAO lost the governorship of Pampanga. But he won the adulation of the whole nation.
His early concession of defeat is a total departure from the standard praxis of Philippine politics: File protest. Do not concede. Nobody loses. One only gets cheated.
From a politico, Bren Z. Guiao transfigured into a hombre de estado, the ultimo caballero.
We are reminded of a column we wrote here on Guiao’s Legacy a month before the elections which a Guiao lieutenant termed as an “advance obituary” for the governor.
Our piece proved – modesty be damned – prophetic, thus: “The three-term administration of the Honorable Bren Z. Guiao, governor of Pampanga, will be long remembered, nay, forever enshrined in the heart of the Kapampangan, not so much for its grand edifice complex but for its strong political will to uphold the sanctity of the ballot in May 1995.”
No, egocentric as we may seem, we have not yet the conceit to claim that the good governor heeded our word.
Bren Z. Guiao has a keen sense of history. Key player as he was in major epochs of contemporary Philippine politics: victor in the Constitutional Convention of 1971, victim of Martial Law and the 1984 Batasan polls, victor anew in the national epiphany of EDSA and its immediate aftermath. This was the factor most at work on the night of May 8.
Our column concluded: “A few years from now, people shall be misty eyed when they remember Bren Z. Guiao of having the courage, the supreme will to uphold the Kapampangan’s sacred democratic right, whatever the price. Even at the cost of losing that which he cherished most.”
No, we were not fully right. More than the governorship, Bren Z. Guiao cherishes his place in history.
Shame on us for forgetting his by-phrase oft-quoted early in his term but lost somewhere in the exhilaration the governor’s chair invariably brings: “Power is ephemeral. All this will pass. We just have to give our best to our people. And be the wiser for it.” Or something to that effect.
Godspeed, Sir. And thank you, if only for the memories.
(July 9 was Governor Guiao’s 84^th birth anniversary. He died on April 17, 1997.)