By Ermin Garcia Jr.

 

ON May 21, 1966, the country was agog. It was a day after Ermin Erfe Garcia, a community journalist in Dagupan City, was shot and killed in his Sunday Punch editorial office.

It took then President Ferdinand E. Marcos to issue a “shoot-to-kill’ order against the Lingayen councilor who went into hiding and refused to surrender.  At the necrological services that followed, the president was represented by then Press Secretary Jose Aspiras, while publishers of national newspapers, and officials of the National Press Club were in Dagupan on a stormy night to witness services in his honor.

A few months after May 20, 1966, the Quezon City Council renamed a street in Cubao District to honor him.

The investigation of his death was closely followed by mainstream media for over a month at the time until charges were filed in court.

Today, nobody remembers who this ‘Ermin Erfe Garcia’ in whose honor a street was named after him. Not even among Millennials and Generation Z in the city know who he is. Through the decades, when I would meet folks in Q.C., I was always asked being a namesake: Are you that person? Are you related to the ‘Ermin Erfe Garcia St.’? Was he a policeman? A soldier?

I am asked those questions to this day, even by people from Pangasinan. When I reply that he was my father and a journalist, I am met with admiring smiles but with wondering looks. It was easy to glean from their faces that they had this question: What could he have possibly done extraordinary since journalists of all sorts get killed every year?

When I go further to say: He was shot and killed in his editorial office, they ask what he did?

Indeed, people don’t know about him even in Pangasinan today, except that there is a street named after him in Q.C. Even journalism students today have no recollection of a local community journalist in Dagupan City who was killed on May 20, 1966, by a politician because he dared to expose corruption and racketeering in the town of Lingayen.

So, it’s no surprise only a few know that Ermin Erfe Garcia was the founding editor-publisher of Sunday Punch, and the first journalist in the country post-war who was shot and killed in his editorial office for battling corruption in government. While it was then common to see journalists of national newspapers in the 1960s being detained in jail for a day to intimidate them, they were never killed.

So, except for Don Chino Roces, the noted feisty publisher of the Manila Times, circa 1960s, I know of no other journalist who was lionized by politicians for their role in nation building, or a community journalist for his/her role in community development. That would be an antithesis in the traditional play of roles between politicians and journalists.

Perhaps that is the reason why the Dagupan City government then did not find it fitting to memorialize his name in the city’s history, even after the country was profuse in praise for him in the 60s.

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JOURNALISTS ARE NO HEROES.  At any rate, just an added anecdote about the man, whom even a few knew of him. He already had a premonition of his death when he delivered a speech before the Pangasinan Press and Radio Club as its induction as president – “Your Provincial Newspaperman” – on May 19, 1962, exactly 4 years before he was killed. Below are excerpts from his speech.

 “Personal heroism in the newsroom and on the newsbeats is a day-to-day routine, but in the anonymity that is the hallmark of journalism, you never get to read about these bits of heroism. The columns of your newspapers are replete with sagas of heroism of government officials, soldiers, professionals, taxi and bus drivers,——but rarely a line on the heroism sometimes demanded by the gathering and writing of certain news.

“THE ONLY NEWSPAPERMAN HERO IS A DEAD NEWSPAPERMAN. Recognition comes only with death. The complete story of the savage conflict that rages inside a newsman between truth and camouflaged falsehood, between principle and convenience, between heart and mind, between conscience and popular favor, is never told and so is never appreciated—until the newspaperman is maimed or is killed, and only then do you get an inkling of implied heroism between the lines of his obituary.

“This inner struggle that convulses a newspaperman’s being almost every day is fiercest and most taxing in the local or provincial press. …Out here in the ramparts of community life, where the newspaperman is in frequent contact with most of his news subjects, his efforts at objective and impersonal reporting are constantly buffeted.  

“Public officials under fire could be his relatives or intimate friends. He moves around in the same orbit as the very people he must write about, sometimes sympathetically, often vitriolically.” 

“… Crooks in provincial and municipal government offices and regional agencies have been blocked by the press in their attempts at extortion in the past. However… the people who have benefited never knew that in the process, certain newsmen were the recipients of death threats.”

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POST MORTEM ON DAGUPAN ELECTIONS. Dagupeños have spoken. They are tired of the series of obstructions and evident sabotaging efforts of the Belen Fernandez administration.

And there’s a serious lesson to be learned by those who dare follow the example of the epaLIFEs – No political agenda can ever be equated to public service.

Public service should never be considered as subservient to a politician’s agenda.

Personally, when Mayor Brian Lim and his barkada were first elected into office, I thought I saw the emergence of a new breed of politicians who could make a difference for the city. It was not to be. The rush of reports of illegal activities that his barkada engaged in made me perish the thought.

Their succeeding performance as the majority bloc during Belen’s administration to discredit her administration by refusing her annual budgets to prevent her from implementing her health, education, and economic programs was the worst I’ve seen in the city’s political history.  Worse, they refused to accept responsibility during the campaign by dancing on TikTok, and little else.

If only they had taken the opportunity that even as the opposition to show they could have led the way in the development of the city.  It’d not be difficult to believe that they will remain as the political group power to reckon with in the next decade.

Regrettably, they thought making public service subservient to their political agenda was the way to do it. I’m afraid they would have to wait till after 2028 to redeem themselves, and only if the Belen administration, with full control of the reins of governance, bungles it big time which I seriously doubt can happen

But what can make it happen is once political intramurals among the new majority councilors rears its ugly head, forgetting that a political agenda cannot be equated with public service.

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LOST A FRIEND. Last week, I was saddened by family news that my childhood best friend, Alexander Floro,  succumbed to his pancreatic cancer in 30 days from its discovery in Las Vegas County. I’m sure Dagupeños remember him as he best-looking drummer who played sounds of the Ventures, Shadows and Beatles songs before he migrated to the USA with his family. 

Please pray for the repose of his soul. He was a very decent religious person.

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