29/01/2025
This week's issue of BARAKO!, Batangas's only weekly magazine.
Cover Story
BARAKO! Magazine, January 27-February 2, 2025
ERIC DE VEYRA: THE VICO SOTTO OF BATANGAS?
By F.E. OLIMPO
The US State Department recently named Pasig City Mayor Victor "Vico" Sotto one of the world's "anticorruption champions," the only Filipino in a list of 12 people around the world known to have demonstrated leadership, courage, and impact in preventing, exposing, and combating corruption.
As one of the awardees of the US government’s “International Anticorruption Champions Award,” Sotto, 35, probably the youngest in the field, stands tall among some of the most respected personalities in their respective countries. These include Albania’s Ardian Dvorani, judge and member of the Justice Appointments Council; Ecuador’s attorney general Diana Salazar; Ruslan Ryaboshapka, former prosecutor general in Ukraine; India’s Anjali Bhardwaj, an active member of the Right to Information Movement; to name just four.
So how did Vico Sotto become an anti-corruption icon recognized not just in the country but globally?
Dr. Cenon Alfonso, dean at the Ateneo de Manila University, has the answer: “His early engagement in public service, marked by his advocacy for transparency, led to his election as a city councilor in Pasig” and eventually as mayor.
What Dr. Alfonso missed to mention as one of Vico’s sterling attributes is his deep Christian faith and upbringing which, many people believe, could be the most important attribute that shaped him into what he is now, a model public servant.
Son of comedian/TV host Vic Sotto, Vico grew up with his mother, Coney Reyes, a movie actress and a self-avowed born-again Christian. She instilled in Vico and all her children priceless Christian values and the fear of the Lord.
Sotto himself underscored the need for a healthy fear of God in public governance. "I think it's really important for us to have leaders with the fear and love of God,” he said during his early days in politics, although he clarified that it doesn't mean policy-making would be based on it.
"My grounding and the fact that I grew up in church with people who are watching me and making sure that I don't do anything [wrong], I think that's very important," he added.
Incidentally, a local candidate avidly subscribes to that idea. Eric de Veyra, of Rosario, Batangas, believes that the only way the country can move forward is for people to elect candidates “na may takot sa Diyos.”
De Veyra, a pastor by vocation, is running for the first time in the professional political league (he ran and won as Sangguniang Kabataan councilor in his town in his younger days) for provincial board member, a position his father, Jessie de Veyra, is retiring from at the end of his third consecutive three-year term in May.
Government leaders steeped in Christian values, he told Barako! in an interview, are expected to be genuinely honest, have word of honor (credibility), and “caring just like Jesus.”
He may not be aware of it but Pastor Eric, as members of his congregation, Jesus the Annointed One, calls him, appears to be following Vico Sotto’s footsteps. Like Vico, Eric is running for the first time for a political position, a seat in the Batangas provincial board, a local legislative body no different from Pasig’s city council to which Vico won as councilor in 2016.
Like Vico, Eric, now 45, has been engaged in public service since his younger days. Right after graduating law in his early 20s, he joined the administrative staff of his father, Jessie de Veyra, a member of the Batangas provincial board or bokal, assisting him in his various people-oriented projects.
During his father’s nine years of service as board member, in which he rose from being a mere assistant to chief of staff, Eric became more and more involved in his father’s pet projects on livelihood, health and scholarships -- collectively known for its acronym and slogan “HALA Bira -- Alagang De Veyra”.
HALA, which stands for Health, Agriculture, Livelihood and Academics, has had hundreds of beneficiaries throughout the 4th district of Batangas. In San Juan, Batangas, it has provided start-up capital and other support to coffee growers and oyster farmers. Through its scholarship program, HALA has helped no fewer than 10,000 needy students finish college.
His father’s scholarship program, which he helped carve and implement, is bereft of politics, unlike many other study grants from politicians. The usual practice, he says, is to give poor students a one- or two-year scholarship to spread the budget and accommodate as many beneficiaries as possible.
Consequently, those removed from the program dropped out, leaving them unemployed, rendering such study programs phenomenal failures.
HALA Bira does it differently, however. “Once you are chosen as scholar, you will be a scholar until you graduate,” Eric says. “Tulong na hindi namumulitika.” It is better to have fewer scholars who are able to finish than have so many who drop out at the end because funding has been spread so thinly, he says.
Another popular project he and his father are into is the free distribution of reading glasses to senior citizens, most of whom indigent, and the free distribution of maintenance medicines for hundreds of hypertensive folk.
After many years of helping his father alleviate the plight of the poor in the district, he can’t imagine himself simply leaving active public service along with him. With his father’s last term coming to an end this year, he can’t in conscience just turn his back on his father’s pet projects, which have helped countless Batangueños improve their lives over the years.
Hence, the decision to run.
But Eric is not your traditional type of politician. Like Vico, he doesn’t believe in pleasing people to be popular. He believes in doing right no matter what. And he believes time is ripe for the right people to win in this election.
“Sinasabi ko sa tatay ko, iba na ang panahon ngayon. I will win not because I have pleased many people but because of the Lord.”
Aside from his commitment to care for the poor, as Jesus mandates, he adds, he plans to be an advocate against corruption by setting a good example for other government officials to emulate.
There is no reason to doubt he can do it. He grew up steeped in Christian values -- as Vico was. He was in his third year of law when he became a born-again Christian. And right after graduation, instead of delving into law practice, he chose to be a youth pastor of their church, becoming a full-fledged pastor in no time.
With love for and fear of the Lord having shaped his entire life, he is not one to pay nothing more than lip-service to honesty as a virtue. Thus, one can be sure he won’t steal from government.
Pastor Eric is married to a medical practitioner, Dr. Haydee Buenafe de Veyra, with whom he has four children, three boys and a girl. He has a thriving slaughterhouse business with slaughtering facilities in Sta. Rosa, Laguna; Kalibo, Aklan; Calapan, Mindoro; and, Bauan, Batangas. And he also has a dealership in new vehicles.
These only mean one thing: he and his family can live comfortably without dipping his fingers in government coffers.
Add to that his genuine love for and fear of the Lord, the same compulsion that has driven Vico Sotto into what he is today, then you have an iron-clad guarantee that Pastor Eric de Veyra will do only the right thing if elected -- as members of his church and the public at large expect him to do.
PHOTO: Pastor Eric de Veyra with one of the farmer-beneficiaries of the "HALA Bira- Alagang De Veyra" program.
