{"id":16,"date":"2019-07-22T21:27:08","date_gmt":"2019-07-22T21:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baleria.com\/wordpress\/?p=16"},"modified":"2022-06-30T15:41:33","modified_gmt":"2022-06-30T15:41:33","slug":"120anniversary_philspanishday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baleria.com\/wp\/?p=16","title":{"rendered":"Unforgettable Moments at the 120th-Anniversary Tribute to the Heroes of Baler during Philippine-Spanish Friendship Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

June 30, 2019 marks a milestone in the long and deep history shared between Spain and The Philippines. For the 17th consecutive year, the Philippine-Spanish Friendship Day<\/a> was celebrated in Baler, capital of the province of Aurora, northeast of Luzon.<\/p>\n

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Adri\u00e1n Valbuena, great-great-grandson of Corporal Jes\u00fas Garc\u00eda Quijano, was the flag bearer in the reenactment of the departure from the church carried out by the Association Heroes de Baler – \u00daltimos de Filipinas 120 years after the end of the historical siege. Photo by Vicente Bataller.<\/p><\/div>\n

The date recalls the day in 1899 in which General Emilio Aguinaldo, president of the first Philippine Republic, issued a safe-conduct ordering that the survivors of the Detachment of Cazadores<\/em> No. 2, after entrenching themselves in the Church of San Luis Obispo de Tolosa for 337 days (and nights) not only were not to be treated as enemies<\/em>, but on the contrary, as friends <\/em>and\u00a0“legendary sons of El Cid and Pelayo.\u201d This decree signed by Aguinaldo went down in History as an unprecedented ode since the year 390 BC, when the Gallic chieftain Brennus, after besieging and conquering Rome, coined the expression Vae victis!<\/em> (Woe to the vanquished!)<\/a> to highlight the helplessness of the defeated.<\/p>\n

After a century of gradual indifference and mutual oblivion between Madrid and Manila, the initiative to recover the historical ties between The Philippines and Spain was taken in 2002 by Senator Edgardo Javier Angara<\/a>, probably the most relevant Filipino politician since Aguinaldo himself and Manuel L. Quezon, the first President of the Commonwealth of The Philippines in 1935 and, like Edgardo J. Angara, also a native of Baler, in whose church the sun set for Spanish empire.<\/p>\n

On this 120th anniversary, there have been innumerable moments of bursting emotion while showcasing the enormous fund of coexistence between the two countries. This celebration has induced to a new step forward in the rescue from oblivion of the universal legacy involved in the events which occurred in Baler at the dawn of the XIX century. We have selected in this post some of those moments.<\/p>\n

The first is this video by Sara Armas, the EFE Agency correspondent in The Philippines, because it sums up well what happened during the event. This news report has contributed more than it is quantifiable to publicize in Spain how the Philippine-Friendship Day is celebrated in Baler every year.<\/p>\n