The forthcoming Leyte founding anniversary, scheduled for March 10, 1997, is full of bothering symbolism and analogies.

As its most basic, Leyte, which is the mother of all provinces in Eastern Visayas, can be likened to a wasteful mother who is fond of throwing expensive receptions and parties. Somehow she does not know or never bothered about the date of her birth. So she asks a servant to find this out in the local registrar’s office.

However, the servant returns with only a copy of the confirmation paper, not the baptismal certificate. The mother decides that the date of her confirmation was her birthday. She then plans to have a party that should be as expensive and elaborate as one’s debut - which is a society girl’s 18th birthday.

This is the likely spectacle that we will witness on March 10.

In my article which Bombo Allan (Matillano) read on air last night, I proposed that April 22 or 24, 1901, be considered the alternative dates for commemorating Leyte’s founding as a province.

There is in fact an older official date for Leyte’s founding, but I noted that the basic government structure and the perennially harmful effects of Leyte’s adolescent provincial politics on the local constituents could be traced back to April 1901. Leyte thereafter served as the "showcase of American benevolent administration to the American public," the actual cost of which in life and limb of local freedom fighters remains largely unknown to this day.

The general patterns set during the Leyte experiment in "civil government" are still there for all of us to see, not only locally but also nationally.

1. We have a government that is crowded with retired military officials now occupying civilian positions. The Americans experimented with this set-up in Leyte. The first three civil governors of Leyte were retired American military officials.

2. We now have local government legislators who speak with forked tongues. On the one hand, they publicly express grave concern for the plight of the suffering majority. On the other, in the confines of their chambers, they legislate high salaries and remuneration for themselves. The American civil governors of Leyte noted this duplicity among elite Leyteño officials and published their observations in various editions of the Philippine Commission Reports.

The American colonizers benefited much from the cooperation of the Leyteño officials that they always put in bad light. Thousands of Pulahan warriors, composed mainly of rural Leyteño farmers and peasants, fought and died against the American military and later the American-officered Philippine Constabulary, from 1902 to 1907. But their heroism was covered up by convenient labels such as bandido and insurrecto, and the number of deaths were either erased from official records by collaborating local officials or altogether under-reported by as much as 90 percent.

The descendants of American-era officials of Caviteño origin who married daughters of the Leyte elite are still ruling over us now. Their official acts (whether in City Hall or in the Provincial Capitol) continue to strain the moral yardstick of the local culture and the silent majority. Yet, our virtual oppressors somehow always manage to appear as our champions and saviors.

Nothing much has changed in the foundation of our political culture in this province, whether in the past 96 years or 80 years. The law enacted in 1917 merely confirmed a structure set up in 1901. As an occasional historian and social critic, this is what really bothers me about the Leyte founding anniversary.

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