HE MUST BE GOOD? Virata in group picture at honoring ceremony by the Japanese embassy Nov. 25, 2016. With officials from different administrations: clockwise from extreme left: Emmanuel Esguerra, NEDA head under Benigno Aquino III; Jaime Laya, Marcos’ central bank governor; Ernest Leung and Victor Macalincag, Marcos’ finance undersecretaries; Romeo Bernardo, President Ramos’ finance undersecretary and Globe Telecoms board member. To Virata’s left is Amina Rasul-Bernardo, Ramos’ Presidential Adviser on Youth Affairs and an avid supporter of Aquino III’s peace pact with the MILF.
The UP, a bastion of anti-Marcos sentiment, even renamed its College of Business Administration as the “Cesar E.A. Virata School of Business,” the only building or institution in the country’s premier educational institution ever to be named after a living person. The UP Press even published (i.e., paid for) a 900-page hagiography by Virata’s protégé Gerardo P. Sicat entitled Cesar Virata, Life and Times: Through Four Decades of Philippine Economic History. (To Sicat’s credit though, the book is a well-researched account of the economy during martial law, that’s far from the Yellow narrative.)