SAN JOSE, Antique – In years past, Antiqueños commemorated the death anniversary of slain governor Evelio Javier with music and speeches, church masses, wreath-laying and candle-lighting. The provincial government held programs at the park here renamed after him.
This year, however, is a challenge. The coronavirus pandemic is restricting people’s movements and activities. A large gathering today for Javier’s 35th death anniversary is highly unlikely.
Today, though, remains is a special non-working public holiday not only in Antique but the whole Panay Island to mark Javier’s death by virtue of Republic Act 7601 signed by President Corazon Aquino in 1992.
Javier’s assassination was one of the events that helped spark the EDSA People Power Revolution that toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos. He campaigned for then presidential candidate Corazon Aquino in the February 1986 snap election which was widely deemed as fraudulent.
Some three to four masked gunmen attacked Javier on Feb. 11, 1986 around 10 a.m. That time, he was talking to Aquino supporters in front of the provincial capitol in San Jose.
According to witnesses, Javier fled across the park, fell in a pond but then continued to run to a comfort room of a shop where he was cornered and finished off with more sprays of bullets. He was 43 years old.
Nine days after, on Feb. 20, 1986 Javier’s funeral attracted thousands of grieving Antiqueños wearing yellow shirts, Aquino’s snap election campaign color. They also played his favorite song, Impossible Dream.
His killers are presently detained at the New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa City, Metro Manila.
The mastermind, however, has never been identified.
The late Supreme Court Associate Justice Isagani A. Cruz once wrote of Javier:
“Let us first say these meager words in tribute to a fallen hero who was struck down in the vigor of his youth because he dared to speak against tyranny. Where many kept a meekly silence for fear of retaliation and still others feigned and fawned in hopes of safety and even reward, he chose to fight. He was not afraid. Money did not tempt him. Threats did not daunt him. Power did not awe him. His was a singular and all-exacting obsession: the return of freedom to his country.
“And though he fought not in the barricades of war amid the sound and smoke of shot and shell, he was a soldier nonetheless, fighting valiantly for the liberties of his people against the enemies of his race, unfortunately of his race too, who would impose upon the land a perpetual night of dark enslavement. He did not see the breaking of dawn, sad to say, but in the very real sense Evelio B. Javier made that dawn draw nearer because he was, like Saul and Jonathan, swifter than eagles and stronger than lions.”
WHO WAS EVELIO?
Javier was the eldest of four children of Everardo Javier, a prosecutor, and Feliza Bellaflor, a teacher. He was born on Oct. 14, 1942 in Barangay Lanag (now Barangay Evelio B. Javier) in Hamtic, Antique.
He spent his college years at the Ateneo de Manila University (Bachelor of Arts in History and Government, 1963) then finished his Law degree in the same school 1968.
He passed the bar examination on the same year.
Javier made history in 1971. He ran for governor of Antique and won – becoming the Philippines’ youngest governor at the age of 28. He served that post until 1980.
When then President Marcos announced a snap election in 1986, Javier supported the widow of slain senator Benigno Aquino Jr., Corazon.
Antiqueños remember Javier’s admirable concept of public office: “Bukut burugasan, bukut paranubliun” (Not a source of livelihood, not an inheritance).
In 1980, when he turned over the Antique governorship to Enrique Zaldivar, he rationalized his act by saying that public office was not something one held on to.
He voluntarily left the post, despite his popularity under Marcos’ KBL party, to pursue a master’s degree under a scholarship at Harvard University. In 1984, he came home and ran against Arturo Pacificador, a known Marcos ally, for the position of Antique assemblyman.
Evelio lost in that election, but was posthumously declared winner in 1987./PN
