I thank the Lord and Mama Mary for blessing my family, the happiest in Gatchalian I. All the information contained in my curriculum vitae is true and correct. Please pray for those who are trying to distort them.

The reaction of people across North and South America to the declaration of martial law in the Philippines was generally positive; President Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. was popular in the United States of America after he declared authoritarian democracy in Asia.

Tillman Durdin in his special report in The New York Times: “President Ferdinand E. Marcos stepped up his purge of government employees considered corrupt, surplus or incompetent by dropping 452 persons today from employment.

“Mr. Marcos asked some judges of the lower courts to come to his office and he asked them to resign.”

“The 452 dropped from the service were chiefly in the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Bureau of Customs.”

“At the same time, he called for every government employee to submit a letter of resignation indicating that it would be decided whose resignation would be accepted and whose would be rejected.”

“It is estimated that there are 400,000 employees of the Philippine national government, and it has been reported that as many as a third of these may be dropped.”

In 1975, I attended a study group sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The seminar was a combination of both financial management and family planning in Washington D.C. from January to April, together with 18 other participants from the Middle East, South America, Africa and Asia.

I was very lucky. The period of study happened to be the best time to be in America. I arrived in Washington the last week of January when snow was still falling and stayed, with our study tour, through the last week of April, enabling me to see the cherry blossoms at the peak of their blooming from March to April.

This was the moment when I remembered my mother, the late Soledad Villariña Besana, a product of the Thomasites. My mother was fond of reading adventure novels written by Zane Grey, who idealized the American frontier.

The Thomasites were the American teachers who were called such after the name of the ship they arrived on, the USS Thomas. So effective was the American effort to make English the second language of the Philippines that within a few years Filipino schoolchildren were learning it from Filipino teachers.

The most interesting part of the seminar was the second, the family planning portion, where we traveled by bus and train to the sites of the early settlers in the American frontiers of Virginia and Arizona, the local scenes that inspired some of Zane Grey’s novels. Our being there was by coincidence, my sheer luck.

The amazing consensus among the 18 participants was that the martial law declared by Marcos was good for the Philippines and the Filipinos.

During lulls in our group discussions, the participant from Africa asked this question that astonished everyone: What could have happened if America had annexed the Philippines as a member state, instead of just being a colony? The participant from Yugoslavia raised his hand and answered.

President Marcos of the Philippines could be a senator, a governor, or even the President of the United States. By sheer number of inhabitants, the lawmaker coming from the State of the Philippines could easily be nominated for the highest post of the land.

The last comment was received with gleeful applause, and being the lone participant from the Philippines I was asked a lot of questions. In Europe and the Middle East, Marcos was known to be in possession of the world’s greatest fortune.

(To be continued)