Rodolfo Ganzon

Rodolfo Tiamson Ganzon (* 1922 in Iloilo City , Iloilo ; † October 29, 2003 ibid) was a Filipino politician of the Nacionalista Party who was both mayor of Iloilo City and a member of the House of Representatives and the Senate .

Life

Local politician and MP

After attending elementary school and high school, Ganzon began studying law at the College of Law at Iloilo City Colleges and graduated summa cum laude in 1950, with an average grade of 91.10 percent in the national final exams ( Philippine Bar Examination ) took third place. He then started working as a lawyer .

Ganzon began his political career in local politics in 1951 when he was elected City Councilor to the City Council of Iloilo City. In the elections to the Congress in 1953, he was elected for the first time as a member of the House of Representatives as the successor to Pascual Espinosa and represented the constituency of Iloilo II until 1957 . During this time, he was particularly involved in the Iloilo City Freedom Law , which resulted in residents of the Jaro , La Paz , Molo , Arevalo , Mandurriao and Iloilo City Proper boroughs regaining their constitutional right to have their own mayors, vice- Electing mayors and councilors.

In the election that followed, Ganzon was elected Mayor of Iloilo City in 1955 and held this position until 1961 with a short break in 1959. At times he also served as chairman of the League of Provincial Governors and City Mayors of the Philippines Philippines ). In the 1961 congressional elections, he was again elected to succeed Pascual Espinosa with a majority of 20,000 votes to become a member of the House of Representatives and until 1963 again represented the second electoral district of Iloilo.

senator

In the elections to the Senate on November 12, 1963, Ganzon achieved the seventh-best place among the eight Senate seats to be awarded with 2,708,385 votes and was thus elected a member of the Senate for a six-year legislative period . During his tenure in the Senate, he was temporarily chairman of the Senate Committees for Administrative Reorganization, Health, Labor and Immigration, Civil Service and Agriculture and Natural Resources, and was also a member of thirteen other Senate committees.

During this time he put forward the Bill for Free Primary and Secondary Education and was named Father of Free Education for it. In addition, he helped ensure that the Senate Electoral Tribunal approved the candidacy of Benigno Aquino junior from the Partido Liberal ng Pilipinas in the Senate elections on November 14, 1967. Aquino, born on November 27, 1932, did not meet the statutory minimum age of 35 years at the time of the election. However, Ganzon supported the Liberal Party's argument that Aquino had reached this minimum age on the day he took office on December 30, 1967.

In the Senate elections of November 11, 1969, Ganzon ran again for the Nacionalista Party for a Senate mandate. Although he was able to improve his election result to 2,799,849 votes, this time he only achieved eleventh place in the eight seats available for election and thus left the Senate.

Criticism of Ferdinand Marcos, Corazon Aquino and the Catholic Church

In 1971 he was again elected mayor of Iloilo City and held this position until the imposition of martial law by President Ferdinand Marcos on September 21, 1972. In the following period he was one of the critics of the presidency of Marcos, which was developing into a dictatorship , and was shortly after the imposition After a state of emergency by a military court for rebellion and illegal possession of weapons, he was sentenced to two life imprisonment terms and then spent six years in prison before he was under house arrest between 1978 and the fall of Marcos in February 1986 .

Ganzon became mayor of Iloilo City again in 1988 and held this office until 1990. In the following years he repeatedly criticized the then President Corazon Aquino and was then excluded from political office for a total of one year by the Ministry of Interior and Local Government between 1990 and 1991 , before the Supreme Court ( Supreme Court of the Philippines ) ruled that the ministry could not suspend a public person from office for more than ninety days.

Finally, he also criticized the Catholic Church because it, like the state, did not pay any property taxes and at the same time demanded that it auction their property at public auctions. Because of his criticism of the then Archbishop of Jaro , Alberto Jover Piamonte , he was excluded from the sacraments for some time in 1992 .

After the death of his first wife Dolores Pagodinog in 1989, with whom he had ten children, he married Rona Anape, 44 years his junior, in 1991 in 1989. In the following years, since 1996, there were repeated court proceedings in which the children demanded a right to visit their father and ultimately the annulment of the second marriage. This proceeding never came to a conclusion because of the death of Ganzon, who was an adviser to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for Visayas in 2001 .

Web links

• Biography (Homepage of the Philippine Senate)
• Ganzon family fights over his dead body . In: Philippine Daily Inquirer, October 30, 2003