The faith of Jesse Robredo

We are told that Jesse Robredo was not meant to be inside that plane, on that day, at that time. His wife did not know he had boarded the 6-seater, twin-engine Piper PA-34 Seneca. He was expected to take a flight from Cebu to Manila that afternoon, and a bus to Naga City later that night with his two daughters. Instead, the Piper Seneca bound for Naga took off at around three in the afternoon from Cebu. At 4:40 in the afternoon, Leni Robredo finally managed to call her husband. He was calm, she said. He said he would call her back. He never did.

These were the details, and for 3 days the national media pushed headline after headline before an increasingly anxious public, each new fact adding another layer of proof to the possibility that the former mayor of Naga lay many feet under the Masbate sea. Those of us whose duty it was to tell the story discussed Robredo’s chances, sitting in newsrooms whose desk editors filed photos from reporters standing on beaches watching divers surface empty-handed. We were told that every passing hour lowered the chances of Robredo’s rescue. We were told the word “rescue” was already a euphemism for recovery. 

I was aware of this, and believed myself to have accepted it. I am a human rights reporter, the beat I cover demands keeping a list of the dead, in my head if nowhere else, a sort of memorial for the lost whose bodies I may or may not have shot in the aftermath of violence or disaster. People like me are realists by necessity.

Men die, even when they shouldn’t. They have names, faces, family; my job is to tell their stories. I did not, however, believe it odd that I was constructing a different story for Jesse Robredo, one whose many elaborate storylines involved his having been kidnapped by Indonesian pirates, struck by amnesia, perhaps organizing local elections in some island off Scarborough while drying out his mobile phone. I thought I understood, more than most, that death very often does not make sense. It was only when his body was found, 800 meters off the coast of Masbate, that I realized I had up to that moment refused to believe that Jesse Robredo was dead.

I do not claim any sort of special relationship between myself and the former mayor of Naga. Like most journalists, I have, with his permission, barged into his office, disrupted his day, assaulted him with a barrage of questions, and reached the same conclusion every reporter has—that the Secretary of the Interior is an unusual man. He does not field questions; he answers them. He does not protect himself, even while he protects his own people. He does not pander, he does not pretend to misinterpret statements, he does not launch into the distraction of the overblown compliment. Neither does he disappear just as the last dangerous question is posed.

He will do all in his power to arrest Jovito Palparan, but he does not promise he will succeed. He holds his own policemen accountable for beating protestors already in custody after the bloody demolition at Silverio Compound, but he is unwilling to join the left-wing bandwagon that put the entirety of the tragedy in the hands of the Philippine National Police. In 2010 he ran to the Quirino Grandstand to do what he could, even knowing he had been withheld the power to command the PNP. One year later, he took responsibility for the death of eight tourists, even after his own President withdrew his apology to the people of Hongkong.

In the tense days after the murder of Fausto Tentorio, pastor of the blue church at the foot of Arakan Valley, Jesse Robredo was there, talking to the police, closeted with priests, interviewing the colonels of the armed forces. Long after the media moved on from the story of the Italian priest who bled into the soil of North Cotabato, long after I had stopped asking questions and demanding answers, Jesse Robredo was on the phone, calling past midnight, sending text messages, asking, do you know this, have you heard of this, does your witness know, could you verify. And because I am not the sort of journalist that Jesse Robredo thought I was, I never returned to Arakan Valley, never managed to verify if he was right, never found out if my witness knew this or saw that. 

A good man

I am better at writing about bad men, or hypocritical men, or men who believe they speak with the voice of God. These men never disappoint, because the bar is placed so low, and every door is usually the same door opening to the same senator or congressman or mayor grinning with robotic amiability. Maybe the Lacoste crocodiles on their shirts will vary in size, maybe the platitudes they spout will occasionally contain some nugget of truth, maybe they have compromised less or lied more or said today exactly what they promised yesterday never to say. Hands are shook, pleasantries are exchanged, and little will change beyond tomorrow’s sound bite.

Robredo is a difficult man to write about, because he is a good man, and the existence of a good man demands more from those around them, including 26-year-old journalists who once promised to stand fast.

We are told many things about Jesse Robredo. They say he took the bus regularly from Manila to Naga City, even after he became Secretary of the Interior and Local Government, the same sort of bus that he was meant to take on the evening of August 18, 2012. We are told that as mayor he wore the blue city government uniform to work, that he was in his office at eight in the morning and that he received his constituents directly, instead of asking them to go through his secretary. We are told he was a regular sight on the streets of Naga after typhoons, shoveling away at the mud long before city employees came in to work, and long after they went home.

The reason Jesse Robredo is mourned is not only because he was extraordinary, but because this is a country so content with the ordinary that men like Robredo have no choice but to die legends. If he had lived and continued he would have failed, again and again, because not even the son of God could have succeeded in a country that refuses to believe in better. 

The City of Naga, said Robredo, was good not because he was brilliant, but because Naga wanted to be brilliant, and demanded it from him. The kind of revolution in governance that the Aquino administration promises would not have come to pass in the term of Jesse Robredo, but he would have kept the faith, and the story would have changed, if only by a little, through the sheer strength of his will and his unwavering faith that people can do better. 

But Jesse Robredo is dead, and by his death we are diminished. I am a journalist, the stories I tell do not change the world, and I doubt they ever can. But I promise to keep the faith, to try, to ask better questions and all the questions after that, to ask my witness whether he knew this or saw that even when the issue is reduced to a sidebar on a human rights web page. I will attempt to give the benefit of the doubt to the next man who sits in the seat Jesse Robredo left, and will at the same time demand from him the head of Jovito Palparan.

And I will tell this story, again and again, the same as I tell the stories of the bastards and the liars and his honor the plagiarist, as proof to myself and everyone else not so much that good men die young, but that good men can live. – Rappler.com