Philippine Daily Inquirer, 03/13/2010
THE MARCH 7 ARTICLE ON Manny Villar’s house along Moriones Street in Tondo
confirmed the belief that he was never poor, never spent his Christmas on the
street and never swam in a pool of garbage. In the early 1960s, if you had a
three-story house in a 60-square-meter lot in the business district of Tondo,
you were considered an aristocrat.
Not too far from that Moriones house were shanties leading to the pier where
children went to the nearby public schools for education. Such was not the case
of Villar: he went to Holy
Child Catholic
School for his elementary
education
and to Mapua for high school. Coming from Moriones going to Mapua, Villar had
to pass by three outstanding public high schools: Jose
Abad Santos
High
School, Arellano High School and Teodora Agoncillo
High School, and public
schools in the latter part of the 1950s and 1960s were at their best.
But not for the Villar children. Because their father was a white-collar
employee and they had a businesswoman for a mother, Manny and his siblings were
able to study
in the best private schools nearby. They had corned beef for breakfast (as told
in Villar’s ad with Boy Abunda) and I am pretty sure suahe and other seafoods
for lunch or dinner.
During the times that Villar claimed he was poor, his family actually
belonged to the AB and upper C economic strata or the top 10 percent of the
population. As in the C-5 controversy, in the conversion of agricultural land
in Iloilo, in
the landgrabbing of the Dumagats’ land in Norzagaray and his questionable use
of socialized housing funds among many others, Villar shows a penchant for
covering the truth.
I hope television’s investigative journalists can dig deeper into this so
the poor people who are being used will find out the truth.
—ELEN FRANCISCO
ETO NA NGA BA SINASABI KO EH, MARAMI TALAGANG NALILINLANG SI C5 AT TAGA!
