BY JACKIE BERT ANASTACIO
SAN JOSE, Antique – Today, Antiqueños commemorate the 29th death anniversary of governor Evelio Javier under unusual circumstances.
Javier’s younger brother Exequiel or “Boy Ex” who benefited politically from the former’s assassination on Feb. 11, 1986 has been ousted as governor of Antique just last week.
Today is a special non-working public holiday in Panay Island to mark Javier’s death by virtue of Republic Act 7601 signed by President Corazon Aquino in 1992. The Javier family will offer a mass at Mensa Domini here at 6 a.m.
Since 1986 after gunmen peppered Javier’s body with bullets, sympathetic Antiqueños elected his brother Exequiel every election either as congressman or governor.
Exequiel served as member of the House of Representatives representing the Lone District of Antique from 1987 to 1998, governor from 1998 to 2001, congressman again from 2001 to 2010, and governor from 2010 to 2013.
Exequiel won his reelection bid in 2013 for another three-year term as governor but just this Jan. 12, 2015, the Commission on Elections disqualified his 2013 candidacy for violating the Omnibus Election Code.
The assassination of Javier, supporter of then presidential candidate Corazon Aquino in the 1986 snap election, was one of the events that helped spark the EDSA People Power Revolution that toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Javier was born on Oct. 14, 1942 in Barangay Lanag (now Barangay Evelio B. Javier) in Hamtic, Antique.
He was the eldest of four children of Everardo Javier, a prosecutor, and Feliza Bellaflor, a teacher.
Javier spent his college years at Ateneo de Manila University (Bachelor of Arts in History and Government, 1963) then finished his Law degree in the same school 1968. He passed the bar examination on the same year.
In 1971, Javier ran for governor of Antique and won – becoming the Philippines’ youngest governor at the age of 28.
When then President Marcos announced a snap election, Javier supported Corazon, widow of slain senator Benigno Aquino Jr.
On Feb. 11, 1986 around 10 a.m. while talking to supporters in front of the provincial capitol in San Jose, some three to four masked gunmen attacked him.
Javier fled across a park (now Evelio B. Javier Freedom Park), fell in a pond, and then continued to run to a comfort room of a shop where he was cornered and finished off.
On Feb. 20, 1986, his funeral attracted thousands of grieving Antiqueños./PN