Early life

Born Luis Diaz-Beltran on April 7, 1936 in Manila

Manila

Manila is the capital of the Philippines. It is one of the sixteen cities forming Metro Manila.Manila is located on the eastern shores of Manila Bay and is bordered by Navotas and Caloocan to the north, Quezon City to the northeast, San Juan and Mandaluyong to the east, Makati on the southeast,...

, he was known for his outspokenness. During Martial Law, when he was on the staff of the Evening News, he was one of the many journalists arrested and detained at Camp Crame. After his three months of imprisonment, being bankrupt he bred fighting cocks, calling the champion breed he developed Newshawk. He commented on current issues on radio and hosted Straight from the Shoulder, a television show in which current events were analyzed and was the original host of the television show Brigada Siete. He was the first editor-in-chief of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

Philippine Daily Inquirer

The Philippine Daily Inquirer, popularly known as the Inquirer, is the most widely read broadsheet newspaper in the Philippines, with a daily circulation of 260,000 copies. It is one of the Philippines' newspapers of record...

. He also worked on other newspapers, including the Philippine Star.

After President Ferdinand E. Marcos was overthrown by the EDSA Revolution, Beltran became the editor-in-chief of a new newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer. The pre-martial law show he hosted, Straight from the Shoulder, was revived on GMA 7. He moved from newspaper to newspaper, ending up as a columnist for the STAR. It was then that he became notorious for mentioning in a column about the 1987 coup attempt that then President Corazon Aquino

Corazon Aquino

Maria Corazon Sumulong Cojuangco-Aquino was the 11th President of the Philippines and the first woman to hold that office in Philippine history. She is best remembered for leading the 1986 People Power Revolution, which toppled Ferdinand Marcos and restored democracy in the Philippines...

 had been hiding under the bed during the coup. For this statement he was sued by the President for libel. Aquino went so far as to show journalists that she could not fit under her bed. Beltran, who openly expressed his belief that the President was lacking in competence, countered that his words were not meant to be taken literally, but Aquino still pursued the case against him and the STAR’s editor-in-chief Max Soliven. On 22 October 1992, the court ruled in Aquino’s favor, sentencing the columnist and his editor to 2 years of imprisonment and ordering them to pay 2 million pesos in moral damages.

Death

The case was thrown out of court by the Court of Appeals nearly 3 years after Beltran died of a heart attack on September 6, 1994. He was 58.