All eyes focused on `Tol'

Saturday was one of the days when Negrense eyes and ears were all focused on "Tol", the nickname of Team Unity senatorial bet Mike Defensor.

He and Cesar Montano arrived here, the latter immediately went into a swing around Bacolod with Rep. Monico Puentevella (Bacolod City).

That's why I had just a glimpse of Cesar Saturday evening when he went around the Skyroom of Bascon Hotel to greet members of the Negros Press Club in tow of Newks, a former NPC president.

"Tol", however, was the one who got my attention. Not only because he is the sole candidate of Sammy Palanca, the Old Man by the Sea, but what struck me was that the young senatorial bet seemed almost as fresh as when he must have left his bed in the morning. In the evening, with sugarman Mike Hinojales palpably batting for Defensor, "Tol" conducted a lengthy dialog with sugar leaders and comforted himself with extraordinary fluency. It was almost as if he had undergone a revalida and displayed an extraordinary grasp of national issues, including the favorite of sugarmen - CARP.

I had long been a political writer and could immediately spot out somebody who is trying to pull a leg.

But Saturday, I was impressed with Defensor as a young man who never pretended to have answers to questions he could not handle nor pretended to know what he could not grasp.

Instead, he was candid all the way.

"I live in an urban society. In short, I was not fully aware of what was happening in the countrysides, until later," he said in relation to CARP.

About efforts to drag him into the Hda. Velez-Malaga controversy, Defensor stressed that he was merely made use of.

"All I did was to greet the hunger strikers. DAR secretary Nasser Pangandaman asked me to pay them a visit and greet them," Defensor said. But, he acknowledged, "The next thing I knew, I was already proclaimed as giving them my whole-hearted support.

"I vow that I will pursue the review of the implementation of CARP by the DAR if I were to land in the Senate. But more than that - I promise to call for a moratorium while the review and evaluation process is going on. It is useless for us to spur in good money to support something which, from what is happening now, seems to have miserably failed," Defensor stressed.

That surprised even his ardent supporters among the sugarmen.

But that's exactly what the senatorial bet replied to them and several professionals who attended the tete-a-tete with Defensor Saturday evening at the Confederation of Sugarcane Producers Associations-Negros Panay chapter.

Even Federico Locsin III was struck back by Defensor's candor.

"There was no equivocation. It was clear-cut statement," said Locsin and vice chairman Jose Luis Tongoy. That was the same impression by Tony Trebol of the La Carlota Planters Association and the Buasdamlag Foundation.

Of course, these were already campaigning for "Tol", but the hard-boiled sugar leaders were touched by the honesty of the senatorial bet who candidly admitted that the left, as he called them including the "rejectionists", were adept in waging a propaganda war.

And he confessed that they had taken the upper hand from the neo-conservatives in the debate about CARP. "Let's be honest about it."

They did succeed in masking their agenda with the picture of greedy and rapacious landowners who are loathe to part with their lands, was how Defensor put it while acknowledging the problem posed by non-tillers of the hacienda owner declared as agrarian reform beneficiaries.

His wife, who looked more like a teenaged coed despite three kids, certainly boosted Mike's stature as she went around glad-handling friends and newly-found acquaintances.

After his Confed visit, "Tol" put a full hour with Bacolod barangay leaders at Palanca's Bacolod Pavilion.

Later, at the Bascon Hotel, she plumed herself beside Mrs. Angara on a table. And she did it with complete aplomb, as if she, too, were of the same age level as the grand lady of reelectionist Senator Ed Angara whose fame among the sugarmen was guaranteed long before his espousal of the AFMA and the Agricultural Competitive Enhancement Fund, its spin-off.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Angara, herself, was aware of what the ACEF had done to help the sugar industry raise the funds for the Philsurin and the MDDC's, the principal factors that helped raise sugar productivity.

But she also whispered to me her disappointment that she was not able to see sugarman Teddy Benedicto, one of the leading LDP leaders of Angara in this part of the Visayas.

I replied to Mrs. Angara that Teddy has been campaigning for Angara in his own way sans the usual attempt to get himself in the limelight.

During the NPC induction of which he was also the guest speaker, "Tol" not only impressed local newsmen but also the simulcast listeners of the region that when he offered to be spokesman also of Negros Occidental concerns in the Senate later.

After all, he pointed out, his father Mat, a congressman of Quezon City, also comes from the same Visayas region. And that makes him (Tol) also advocate of common concerns for the Visayas region.

Mayor Evelio Leonardia arrived just after "Tol" had left for La Carlota for the Pasalamat Festival where he was again the toast of the people of La Carlota with congressional bet, Jeffrey Ferrer and mother-in-law Kitchie Benedicto endorsing "Tol" in the fourth district. That Saturday confirmed what I had suspected - that Tol had captured the hearts of Negrenses.*

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