Personal courage and integrity marked the sterling career of Commodore Ramon Alcaraz, attested to by numerous military awards and decorations, as well as the high respect of his peers.
His refusal to follow dishonorable directives from Ferdinand Marcos in the 1960s, however, led to trumped-up charges against him and his subsequent, successful fight for public vindication. It was the start of a purge of the armed forces: officers who refused to kowtow to the autocrat were removed and replaced by those loyal to him.
From then on, Alcaraz would be an active, outspoken critic of Marcos rule.
Joining the Navy right after graduating from the Philippine Military Academy, he fought in Bataan and received a Gold Cross and a Silver Star for his actions. He was captured by the Japanese in April 1942 and interned as a prisoner of war in Malolos, Bulacan. After the war, he continued to serve in the Navy, assuring the transport of Filipino troops involved in the Philippine Expeditionary Force to Korea (Peftok). Later, his recommendations to President Ramon Magsaysay led to the creation of the Philippine Marine Corps. In 1965, President Diosdado Macapagal promoted him to Commodore, and he was placed in command of a naval operations force against smuggling, already a hot political issue at the time.
The clash of wills with Marcos took place when the latter, who had just become president after Macapagal, instructed Alcaraz to “go easy” on the smuggling of “blue-seal” cigarettes off the coast of Cavite province. It had been a corrupt deal made by Marcoswith Lino Bocalan, notorious for then being the “smuggler king.” When Alcaraz refused, Marcos accused him of corruption. But a congressional investigation cleared the officer and the president nearly became the subject of an investigation himself. Alcaraz immediately thereafter announced his resignation, to the applause of those present.
It turned out that Alcaraz had a good head for business. Finding himself out of the Navy, he put up a chain of drugstores (his wife Concepcion was a pharmacist). He called it Commodore Drug and it thrived.
Marcos was running for reelection in 1969, and Cebu politician Sergio Osmeña Jr. was running against him. The Osmeña camp was backed by a group of former military officials (calling themselves the “Working Group”) including Alcaraz. Their call for clean and honest elections was drowned out in “the dirtiest, most violent and most corrupt” campaign in modern Philippine history (according to the American publication Newsweek). Marcos won it, and would go on to wield authoritarian rule just a short while later.
When the government began looking closely into his tax records, Alcaraz knew it was because of his involvement in the campaign; eventually he would have to close Commodore Drug sooner or later. And shortly after the declaration of martial law, he was called in for interrogation. He then realized that his group’s political activities were being closely monitored and that they were being labelled as part of “a conspiracy between the left and the right” – which was among the chief rationalizations for Proclamation 1081.
Quickly, therefore, Alcaraz took steps to actively pursue his emigration to the United States. The immigration process had already been initiated by his children who were already living there. The martial law government could not stop him, probably because Alcaraz remained influential among PMA alumni. He never returned again to the Philippines, except once, before the EDSA uprising happened.
Exiled in California, Alcaraz lost no time in setting up a real estate business and growing it fast. This enabled him to contribute significant financing to the anti-Marcos opposition based in America’s West Coast. He was active in the Movement for a Free Philippines.
Fellow exile Bonifacio Gillego, himself an ex-military man, was then tirelessly working to uncover and document the big fraud behind Marcos’ fake wartime medals. Alcaraz was a big help to Gillego in this task, from 1978 up until the expose was published in 1978 in the Asian Journal San Diego, and reprinted in the Philippines in WE Forum.
In August 1983, Alcaraz was one of a few people whom Ninoy Aquino asked to meet in Los Angeles, informing them of his plan to return to Manila to try and persuade Marcos to restore democratic government. The group tried to stop him from going but Aquino’s mind was made up.
After Aquino was assassinated, and with public anger rising to unprecedented heights, Alcaraz focused on reaching out to activeduty PMA alumni. In January 1985 he published an open letter urging them to “exert pressure on your superiors… to make sure they are guided at all times by professionalism and the honor system as taught in the PMA.” When it became apparent that Marcos had cheated in the snap elections of February 1986, the old warrior led a hundred US-based PMA alumni in calling for nonviolent protests against the regime.
With the Cory Aquino government in place, Alcaraz met with her military advisers Fidel Ramos and Juan Ponce Enrile to press for reforms in the AFP. And when renegade officers turned their back on the democraticallyelected government and resorted to military adventurism to insist on their demands, Alcaraz was disappointed. He loudly denounced this as a betrayal of the PMA’s honor code.
Upon returning to his home in America, Alcaraz continued to serve his countrymen by lobbying US lawmakers to pass a Filipino Veterans Fairness Act. He died of natural causes in 2009 at age 94.
