‘The guiding spirit’

OSCAR M. LOPEZ, the last of his generation to hold the torch for his much respected family of media owners, power and property entrepreneurs, and philanthropists, died on April 22. He was 93.

Only three months ago, he lost his youngest and last living sibling, Manolo, the former ambassador to Japan; he was 88. And less than two years ago, it was his wife of 53 years, Connie Rufino, also 88. Oscar and Connie have left eight children and 27 grandchildren.

At his passing, Oscar was chairman emeritus of First Philippine Holdings, the mother corporation of the family conglomerate, of which he had been chief executive officer, then chairman before his retirement. He received his Bachelors of Arts degree (cum laude) and his Masters in Public Administration from Harvard. Twice he led his family through persecution by two regimes, first under Ferdinand Marcos, then under Rodrigo Duterte.

Upon declaring martial law and installing himself dictator, Marcos closed the Lopez newspaper, The Manila Chronicle, and had an old friend and patron of his, Roberto Benedicto, take over the family’s radio and television network, ABS-CBN. At the same time, he incarcerated the head of both companies, Oscar’s eldest brother, Eugenio Jr. Their father, Eugenio Sr., died of heartbreak before he could get a chance to see Geny sprung from prison five years later and flown to the United States for refuge.

Second-child Oscar was left home to preside over what was left of the family enterprises after Marcos kin and cronies had seized for themselves the most prized among them — Marcos’s own brother-in-law Benjamin Romualdez transplanted the Chronicle’s year-old, cutting-edge press in his new publishing house and also took over Meralco, the Lopez power company.

After Marcos had been booted out of power, in 1986, Geny returned from exile and undertook, with Oscar and Manolo, to rebuild and rehabilitate what the family had managed to keep and recover of its possessions. Oscar became the family patriarch with Geny’s passing, in 1999, at 71.

As I’ve said in the preface to Oscar’s biography “Oscar,” which I co-wrote with historical researcher and writer Carlo Santiago:

“One tends to look for characteristics common to siblings, but with Geny and Oscar, not even two years apart, differences seem the rule: Geny was outgoing, Oscar self-effacing; even as a subject of purposeful inquiry, he has not been, by himself, easy to know….

“Geny was the flesh-and-blood Kapitan you follow to battle… the man on a horse out front you could touch for inspiration and reassurance. Oscar, on the other hand, is the guiding spirit, though one unmistakably sensible in the high-minded philosophies and principles he has stood his troops on and in the far-seeing vision he has set for them to follow in their quests.”

The family conglomerate had been well on the road to a new preeminence when all too soon came a Marcos idolater to cause it another major disruption. However unjustly Duterte may have done it, it cannot be said that he did it without warning. Accusing ABS-CBN of being biased against him, he threatened to close it and did so through his agreeable Congress, which denied it a renewal of its franchise, a normally proforma grant.

At any rate, all those trials have only proved the unassailability of the Lopezes — the “Phoenix,” as the late Raul Rodrigo, their resident historian, called them in his two-volume “Saga of the Lopez Family.”