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Gary Olivar must dump US passport

DEMAND AND SUPPLY By Boo Chanco | Updated February 08, 2010 12:00 AM

Granted that Gary Olivar is a dual citizen of both the Philippines and the US by virtue of our laws, the honorable thing for him to do is to totally renounce his US citizenship to dispel any doubts of conflicted loyalties now that he is an important official in Malacañang. Gary, of all people, should know there is no such thing as mutual interest between the Philippines and the US. A conflict will always arise (trade issues like IPR and market access, for instance or political issues like the VFA) that will put his loyalty in serious doubt.

Gary is an old friend going back to our days as student activists at UP. When he returned to the Philippines after getting his MBA at Harvard and decades of working in the Big Apple as an investment banker, Gary and I kept in touch. Last Sunday afternoon, we had coffee at Rockwell’s Power Plant mall. We may not agree on a lot of things about the country’s political life but I want to believe we remain friends.

And as a friend, I had warned Gary that sooner or later his being an American citizen will haunt him because of his combative manner of engaging the political enemies of Ate Glue. I remember that he told me he was thinking about renouncing his US citizenship. That was months ago and even as he got ever so deeply engaged in Ate Glue’s fights, it seems he never got around to doing that. When he traveled to the US last November, he used his US passport.

Now he is being attacked, and rightly so, for his American citizenship which he defends as being in accordance with our laws. “My government work is fully compliant with both the privileges and constraints of that status as defined by both the Philippine and US governments,” the Manila Standard Today report quoted Gary’s statement. I think he is wrong.

But Gary is right to point out he is only taking advantage of a law that was sponsored by then Senate President Frank Drilon, who is ironically leading the charge against him now. The law was passed by Congress to give Pinoy expats a chance to participate in the country’s economic and political development. But I am not sure they can be dual citizens forever. If I remember my discussions with Sen. Drilon on that law when it was pending at the Senate, the law envisions the dual citizens must choose one citizenship over the other at some point in time.

I am not against the law. I can appreciate the wisdom of recognizing that we are a nation of migrants and that while some of us may carry passports of other countries, we will always be Pinoys at heart. I am also the only Filipino in my family, with my wife and children all carrying American passports or soon will. I see them benefiting from this law too. My remaining Filipino and foregoing two opportunities to qualify for another citizenship is by deliberate choice.

My beef with the dual citizenship law, and this is proven by Gary’s case, is that it effectively created a super class of Filipino citizens — it allows a person to be American or Filipino depending on what is convenient. We, the ordinary citizens of this country have thus been reduced to second class status enjoying fewer options than the dual citizens.

Thus, if you take a super citizen like Gary, he can nonchalantly carry out his hatchet job for Ate Glue with no regard to the serious consequences for the country because if things got bad enough partly because of his provocations, he has the option of fleeing to America. The American Embassy will evacuate him in case of a coup or a bloody revolution. He doesn’t have to live with the mess he will leave behind as a defender of Ate Glue.


If Gary wants to do political combat as an Ate Glue gladiator, he should shed his armor of American citizenship and fight with the rest of us on equal footing. It is difficult to have a Malacañang spokesman who if push comes to shove, may surprise us by invoking a special status under the Visiting Forces Agreement.

Besides, I don’t know if Gary, as a US citizen, can legally take on a job with a foreign government and not lose his US citizenship. I remember that when my wife had an offer to work with the then National Media Production Center, she couldn’t take anything more than piecework contracts without jeopardizing her US citizenship status. She just went into private business.

I really hope Gary makes his choice now. On the other hand, I think his critics ought to give him some slack. Gary, as I have known him, is a man of strong convictions. That’s what earned him incarceration by the Marcos regime and I was told, subjected to physical and psychological torture. His dramatic change is likely to be an offshoot of his life experience too. He has become totally disenchanted with Marxism and all its derivatives and has also converted to Roman Catholicism.

The real Gary Oliver is an enigma. Not only is this former leftist student radical (who must have thrown a few Molotov cocktails at the US Embassy) now an American citizen, he is a registered Republican who campaigned for George W Bush. He also took a leave of absence from his job in a telecoms firm to work for free in Raul Roco’s last campaign.

His Malacañang assignment once again puts him in the limelight, and despite the stones and rotten tomatoes being thrown in his direction, I suspect he relishes the attention he is finally getting. His ego is too big to suffer the indignity of anonymity of the past years. No wonder he was simply beaming last Sunday, like the cat who had eaten the canary.

Still, I am sure Gary has his heart in the right place. But he must straighten things out by renouncing other loyalties and just swear allegiance to one flag — the one that flies proudly right at Malacanang. I am sure Gary’s love of country and its people is as strong as ever. But Gary must put the right passport where his pretty wicked mouth now is.

Old rich, new rich

I remember reading somewhere that Bill Gates, today’s richest man in the world, intends to let his only daughter inherit nothing more than $10 million. The rest of the Gates fortune that’s upwards of $60 billion will go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that is even today, spending a fortune fighting diseases and poverty in the Third World and eliminating ignorance in America by improve its school system.

I think that’s a very enlightened way of dealing with big wealth. I like the attitude of Mr Gates that his only child cannot just wait for her inheritance. She has to make herself useful in this world and possibly earn her own billions. The cushion of a $10 million inheritance should be more than enough to give her a start and stay comfortable.

The late John Rockefeller Sr made his money more than a century ago in black gold or oil. The Rockefellers may have been replaced by Gates and Warren Buffett in the list of top billionaires but today, their descendants are still busy sharing some of their fortune with people in need and to causes that would make this world a better place.

Dr. Peggy Dulany Rockefeller, the fourth child of American banker and statesman David Rockefeller and great-granddaughter of John Rockefeller Sr, will be in Manila as guest-of-honor of Knowledge Channel’s “Lead the Change 2010: An Evening of Discussion for Action” forum on February 17. The forum will gather high-profile business, civil society and public officials where they can discuss how to best meet 21st century challenges in the areas of education, environment, health, governance, population and peace.

When Dulany Rockefeller was last in Manila in 2005, she led delegates of the Global Philanthropists Circle (GPC) in visiting the CSR projects of GPC member-families, including the Lopezes. This time, she will visit a school connected to the Knowledge Channel and a relocation site of Kapit Bisig para sa Ilog Pasig.

Dual citizenship

PhilStar reader Melchor Amado Jr. sent me his take on dual citizenship.

“I also have dual citizenship: Filipino citizen since birth and senior citizen since 2002.”

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is bchanco@gmail.com. This and some past columns can also be viewed at www.boochanco.com

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