Arsenio Lacson - Mayor of Manila

Mayor of Manila

It was only in 1951 that the office of Manila mayor became an elective position, following the amendment of its city charter. Representative Lacson successfully unseated incumbent Manila mayor Manuel de la Fuente in the first ever mayoralty election in the city. He assumed the office of mayor on January 1, 1952. He was re-elected in 1955 and 1959. He immediately became known as a tough-minded reformist mayor, and in the 1950s, he and Zamboanga City mayor Cesar Climaco were touted as exemplars of good local governance. Climaco, in fact, was praised as "The Arsenio Lacson of the South".

At the time Lacson assumed office, Manila had around 23.5 million pesos in debt, some of which had been contracted thirty years earlier, and had no money to pay its employees. Within three years, the debt had been reduced in half, and by 1959, the city had a budget surplus of 4.3 million pesos and paid its employees twice the amount earned by other local government employees. By that time, Lacson claimed that the income earned by Manila for the Philippines supported 70% of the salaries of the national government officials and members of Congress, as well as 70% of the expenses of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

Lacson embarked on crusades to maintain peace and order and good government in Manila. He fired 600 city employees for incompetence, and dismissed corrupt policemen. He personally led raids on brothels masquerading as massage parlors and on unauthorized market vendors. Lacson ordered bulldozers to clear a squatter colony in Malate that had stood since shortly after the war. Lacson established a mobile 60-car patrol unit that patrolled the city at all hours, and he himself would patrol the city at nights in a black police car. Lacson also established the Manila Zoo and the first city underpass, located in Quiapo, posthumously named after him.

Throughout his ten years as mayor, Lacson maintained his radio program, which now aired over DZBB and would also later be broadcast on television. The broadcasts were pre-recorded in order to edit out his expletives and occasional foul language. He spoke out on air on national and international issues, and responded to critics who suggested that he confine himself to local Manila issues that he did not lose his right as a citizen to speak out on public affairs upon his election as mayor. He was a fervent critic of President Elpidio Quirino of the Liberal Party. In 1952, upon the filing of a criminal libel complaint against Lacson by a judge whom he criticized on his radio show, Quirino suspended Lacson from office. Lacson remained suspended for 73 days until the Supreme Court voided the suspension order.

Though the hard-drinking, gun-toting Lacson projected an image of machismo, the author Nick Joaquin observed: