TODAY Newspaper
September 19, 2004

Weekender:
Profile: A MAN OF HIS WORD
By Corazon A. Ong
Photographs by Vicente Carreon

Imprisoned four times under the Marcos dictatorship, Sen. Aquilino “Nene” Q. Pimentel Jr. considers his detention the greatest trial in his 30 odd years as a public servant.

“I was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention [ConCon] which convened in June 1971 but by September, or some three months after, the writ of habeas corpus had been suspended because of the Plaza Miranda bombing. Magulo talaga [Times were unstable]. Then in September 1972, the ConCon was overtaken by martial law. At a time when it was not in vogue to go against [then-President Ferdinand] Marcos, I was already fighting him,” he recalls.

Pimentel was first arrested in 1973 for opposing the Marcos constitution and was detained for some three months in Camp Crame. Next, he got detained for two months in Camp Bicutan for leading a rally against what he termed the “farcical” Interim Batasan Pambansa elections in 1978. In 1983, on charges of rebellion, he was imprisoned in Camp Sergio Osmeña and Camp Sotero Cabahug in Cebu City, and was house arrested for seven months in Cagayan de Oro City.

Not long after, he was once more arrested for some alleged ambuscades in Cebu where, to bail him out, “people contributed centavos and pesos.”

Looking back, he says he was lucky to have survived it all. “I really thank the Lord that I survived the ordeal. It was almost a miracle that I did. A lawyer friend used to admonish me then: ‘Are you not worried about your obligations to your children?’ Maliliit pa ang mga bata noon [The children were still small then],” he recalls. “At the back of my mind, however, I knew I had to do what I had to do. I credit my wife, Lourdes, for bringing up the children as normally as possible. Somehow, my children knew I could not be with them because of my duty to stand up against Marcos.”

His being strong-willed and dedicated, he got from his parents. His mother, Petra Q. Pimentel, was a public-school teacher who so loved teaching in Grade One, she refused time and again to be promoted. “She was a very dedicated teacher who never agreed to be promoted from the Grade One class she was handling,” he says. “Another time, she was offered a promotion at a new school that was about to open. She did help in opening the school, but stuck to her decision of staying as a Grade One teacher. Would you believe, she died teaching in the same grade?”

His father, Aquilino E. Pimentel, was a propoor lawyer. “One of the lessons I learned from him was during the war, when we were with the guerrillas in the mountains of Misamis Oriental. My father sort of became the lawyer for the guerrilla movement for which services, under the law, he was entitled to some backpay after the war, including payment for properties destroyed during the war. I remember him telling me he was not going to claim anything because he thought serving the country was more than enough. My parents were simple people who never wanted things they could not work for and that’s the kind of legacy I got from them,” says Pimentel. It is, no doubt, the same legacy he’s passing on to his six children, who are all professionals and excelling in their own respective fields: Gwendolyn Petrecia, Maria Petrina, Aquilino Martin, Aquilino Justinian, Teresa Lourdes and Lorraine Marie.

As an only child, Pimentel had the best of what his parents could afford. “My mother, being a teacher, was very conscious about having a balanced diet. Thus, vegetables, eggs and milk became my staple diet even when we were struggling to eke out a living because when I was born, my father was not yet a lawyer,” the senator intimates. “It was my mother who sent my father to law school and so we were subsisting on what my mother was earning – wala pa sigurong treinta pesos isang buwan [It was not even P30 a month].” However, coming from Ilocano roots – her mother hailed from Batac, Ilocos Norte – she was frugal and succeeded in making both ends meet.

“She was pioneering in the sense that at the time she went to Mindanao to teach at Claveria, Misamis Oriental, the place was so far away from Batac. She was even more pioneering in that long before adult education came into being, she was already teaching adult education among our neighbors. I remember some older neighbors of ours telling me that if it were not for her, they would not have been able to read or write,” recalls Pimentel.

Politics must be in his blood because a grandfather of his became a mayor of Claveria, where Pimentel was born. “At the time, he was called presidente municipal, a post equivalent to the present-day mayor. He was also a small-town merchant adept at mathematical computations, a trait which must’ve been inherited by my son Coco [Atty. Aquilino Martin Pimentel], who’s also good in math,” he says.

As a father, he always advises his children, especially when they were about to settle down, to marry for love. “I always tell them this: When you marry out of love, problems in your married life will be easily overcome; you can stand all kinds of pressures and temptations.”

“I’m thankful to have a wonderful family. Kung naging magulo ang pamilya ko [If my family life had been problematic], I would have given up fighting a long time ago. It would be difficult to be fighting on so many fronts if my family life was a mess,” he adds.

While a disciplinarian to his own children – he would spank them when they were still small not out of anger, he said, but to instill values in them – he is a doting lolo to his five grandchildren: Dominique, Petrina, Aquilino Crescensio, Aquilino Marie and Aquilino Martin Emmanuel, framed photos of who adorn his Senate office.

Asked how he would like to be remembered by his fellow Filipinos, he says simply: “I hope they would remember me as someone who has kept his word.”