DAVAO CITY – Rodrigo Roa Duterte is the first Mindanawon to become President but the President who put Mindanao on the Philippine map of priorities was Fidel Valdez Ramos, a retired general who negotiated peace with Moro and communist rebels and championed Mindanao as he pushed for its transformation from the country’s “backdoor” to the “main door … to our ASEAN neighbors.”
The peace agreement with the MILF – the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro — would be signed in 2014 under the Aquino administration and the enabling law establishing the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao to replace the ARMM was passed and ratified under the Duterte administration. Newly-elected President Ramos wasted no time in focusing on Mindanao.
Mindanao leaders pushed for an equitable share of the budget for the country’s second largest island grouping, to allow it to catch up with Luzon and Visayas. In the late 1980s, then Senator Aquilino Pimentel Jr. in a privilege speech, lamented that Mindanao was “the country’s cash cow that gets only dog food.”
The EO provided that the PA for Mindanao will also chair the Mindanao Economic Development Council created through Executive Order 512 of President Aquino on March 19, 1992 – less than two months before the May Presidential elections – and implemented under the Ramos Presidency. Medco preceded what is now the Mindanao Development Authority.
Ramos’ successor, Joseph Estrada, abolished the OPAMIN set-up and the CORD through EO 7 issued on September 30, 1998. In its stead, he appointed PARECOs or Presidential Assistant for Regional Concerns, initially two for Mindanao and later three, but their presence was hardly felt in Mindanao until his ouster in January 2001.
That 1993 statement, Dominguez said in August 1996, “continues to reverberate today because it is a major policy statement and we have seen so many follow-through policy changes by the national government in terms of implementing that policy.”The Mindanao Development Authority noted that from 1994 to 1997, there was a surge of investments in Mindanao. Air routes within BIMP-EAGA opened: Davao-Manado, Davao-Kota Kinabalu, Zamboanga-Sandakan.
The NUC’s recommendations provided the framework for a comprehensive peace process through EO 125 issued on September 15, 1993, which also paved the way for the creation of the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process that same year.
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