Newsletter from AKBAYAN! Citizens Action Party in the Philippines
In this mailing, we share with you Risa Hontiveros-Barraquel, Akbayan’s youngest and newest dynamic representative in the Philippine Congress. It is a reprint of an article which appeared in the 15 January 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer Sunday magazine, the Sunday Inquirer Magazine.
In peace and solidarity,
Sixto Carlos
International Secretary
REP. RISA HONTIVEROS-BARAQUEL
Cover Story : Fragile She Isn’t-Even After Widowhood, The Fight Goes On For This Activist Congresswoman
(From Philippine Daily Inquirer, Jan 15, 2006)
THOSE who’ve seen Akbayan party list representative Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel link arms with movie actress Susan Roces and former President Cory Aquino in protest rallies might have wondered if the collective moral force of three grieving widows would be enough to topple the present administration.
After all, Filipinos love and support the underdog. As upright widows who bravely took on the interrupted mission of their husbands, Roces and Aquino became themselves heroines, underdogs transformed into symbols who could do no wrong.But Risa is no political widow, her husband Frank Baraquel being a police superintendent who succumbed to a heart attack due to severe asthma in May last year. He was only 43.
Still, widowhood seems to have invested Risa the necessary gravitas to take on the heavy mantle of political leadership. Baraquel’s death, she admits, has relieved her of the pressures that come from balancing respect and deference for her husband’s position as a member of a government institution, with her very public role as a political figure exposing that government’s excesses.
She recounts: “Every time I talk about the jueteng issue and the alleged involvement of the Arroyos in the illegal numbers game, (First Gentleman) Mike Arroyo would send word to him.” Her husband respected her principles and sometimes even shared them, says Risa, but he worked for the government after all, and she constantly worried about his job. This time, she can be bolder, she adds. “They can’t touch him anymore.”
But they can touch her now, and they do, Risa says ruefully. “I value the friendships I’ve made with Frank’s colleagues in the Philippine National Police, but things are different now that he’s gone.” In one of those rallies where Risa again took on the role of a patient negotiator—a carry-over of her former position as part of the government panel in peace talks with the leftist National Democratic Front (NDF)—a plainsclothesman materialized from the ranks of the police and suddenly grabbed her by the wrist, as if to arrest her. It was one of the few times when she lost her cool, she admits. She screamed at the man: “Sino ka? Ano’ng karapatan mong hulihin ako? Nasan ang name tag mo? May arrest warrant ka ba? (Who are you? How dare you arrest me? Where’s your name tag? Your arrest warrant?)” she remonstrated. When the man melted back into the police line, Risa made straight for the commanding officer to demand the man’s identity, but the officer was evasive. In the end, says Risa, the police charged her and several others in court. “We were unarmed and rallying peacefully but they dispersed us violently with water cannons. And they had the temerity to file charges against us, their victims!” The PNP has gone from bad to worse, she adds, “under the illegal and unconstitutional orders of GMA.”
Recent loss
Though Risa is not about to milk the grieving widow image, her recent loss seems to have transformed her overnight into an opposition figure to reckon with. For the longest time, detractors have raised questions about her looks, class origin and choice of marriage partner. What’s a tall, fair mestiza—a confessed petiburges married to a police officer—doing representing farmers, fisherfolk and the urban poor in Congress, people ask.
Marching with them on the streets and facing down water cannons for a start, that’s what.
Ana Theresia Hontiveros Baraquel may not look the part, but she certainly walks the talk as one of three representatives of the broad-based coalition Akbayan, says fellow partylist representative Etta Rosales.
“Her heart has always been with the marginalized and underrepresented sectors of society,” says this Deputy Minority Floor Leader on why the party chose the soft-spoken Risa as one of their nominees to the House of Representatives in the 2004 elections.
The young widow, who retains the fragile air of a sheltered colegiala, is far from being one, says Rosales. “In fact, she took a boat to the middle of nowhere in Palawan with members of an indigenous tribe to see for herself Danding Cojuangco’s pearl farms that are being contested by fisherfolk. Then she delivered a privilege speech challenging Cojuangco’s claims in a House teeming with his allies and relatives.”
She’s also very straightforward, observes Rosales, and would name names even when attacking the powers-that-be. She recalls how Risa questioned the Arroyo lands in Negros, whose distribution under the agrarian reform program has been delayed, even when seated right behind her was GMA son and Pampanga Rep. Mikey Arroyo.
When then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger issued a letter condemning feminism, Risa, a member of the feminist group Pilipina, proved quick on the draw and delivered a privilege speech taking on the Catholic church’s antiquated views on women. Other politicians might tiptoe around the church, a perceived powerbroker in these parts, but not Risa, chortles Rosales, who adds that when Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, the outspoken representative got a lot of ribbing from her House colleagues about the possibility of her being excommunicated.
Risa has learned to take the initial doubts and skepticism in stride, including charges of her being “a clerico-fascist pseudo-social democrat” sleeping with the so-called enemy that some personalities from the extreme Left regularly level at her. “Well, I can’t change my class origin, my looks or my marriage,” shrugs this Ateneo Social Sciences graduate who, being an accomplished singer, once graced the stage as one of the Von Trapp children in the Repertory presentation of “The Sound of Music.” Besides, she adds, “Class origin is not the determining factor in one’s life. What’s more important are the common human values that help us overcome political differences towards conflict resolution.”
Though some still fault her for being too fair and smooth-skinned to represent the deprivations that sunburnt farmers and fishers regularly go through, Risa’s looks, in fact work in their favor, observes Rosales. “Her candor is balanced by her gentle approach,” she adds. “She’s very sweet so people don’t take offense easily and she can get away with a lot of things.”
Admits Risa: “I’m calm and soft-spoken by nature. I deliberately stay away from painful words and strive to put things in a way that won’t do violence to the other person without sounding self-righteous. It’s part of my political discipline.” Before a possible confrontation, she takes a few minutes to pray, then takes a deep breath and wades in. “My main objective is to stay standing and focus on what needs to be done.”
Highest expression
Risa’s activism started when she was in junior high school at the St. Scholastica’s College, when she organized the Nuclear Disarmament Group. “Some of my mentors were national democrats,” she recalls. From the nuclear issue, she became interested in liberation theology, “although even then, I did not share the view that armed struggle and revolution was the highest _expression of political commitment. It was not for me.”
She had just entered the Ateneo in 1983 “prepared to become a teacher, researcher and writer,” when former Sen. Benigno Aquino was assassinated. The ferment that followed saw her getting involved with non-government groups and imbibing the politics of protest.
“My parents were initially apprehensive about us joining rallies,” says Risa of her five younger siblings, broadcast journalist Pia Hontiveros among them. But martial law politics was something that her dad, lawyer Ramon Hontiveros, and fulltime homemaker mom had been quietly discussing with their peers around the dinner table even before 1983, and it wasn’t long before they themselves joined their four daughters and two sons in the parliament of the streets. “You know how it was—there was curfew, and my parents’ friends would stay in and they’d discuss politics, while us kids peered and listened from between the stairs’ balustrade,” recounts Risa. So even as an elementary student at the elite International School, she knew what was happening, she adds.
Alongside the activism that saw her joining Coalition for Peace, Pilipina, Pandayan and Akbayan, Risa did parallel work with media—from acting onstage to broadcasting to TV hosting. “Developing culture should be part of our struggle,” she notes. “The arts is part of our deepest _expression and re-creation of ourselves. It’s always been part of our political culture.” No wonder she thoroughly enjoyed—as part of the protest rallies against GMA’s alleged election fraud—the launch of the “’Wag Kang Manggo-Gloria” CD in a concert at Plaza Miranda in Quiapo. “Sometimes when I get so exasperated with politics, I tell myself, ‘balik na lang ako sa teatro (I’d better get back to theater). I’d like to travel with a band, compose songs... It’s like opening a new door for me or another window of opportunity.”
Just as beckoning is the door to politics, which she reluctantly opened but now finds strangely inviting. “I went in to learn about the system and radicalize it, never to become part of it,” says Risa. Despite grappling with some difficult political decisions—“The most challenging was voting House Speaker Jose de Venecia into another term because it was the party position,” she says—she has realized that she’s actually enjoying the experience. “I really love this life,” confesses Risa. “It constantly challenges me to understand and analyze things, to see how I can participate—to witness and to remember.” She also lives the creed that she heard columnist Randy David quote from political scientist Al Thusser. “He said that it is important for us to establish combat positions within the state.” Of course, she adds, her stay in the political arena would depend strongly on her party’s decision.
‘Troubled relationship’
Her relationship with other party list groups could be better though, says Risa. “It’s a troubled relationship,” she admits. Although they all purport to represent the interest of the masses, “some parties still look at us as competitors.” While they occasionally unite for tactical reasons, “there’s a very strong sense of vanguardism, the feeling that only they have the correct vision and the right answers. I respect their views, but I fear that if they take power, they’d line us up against the wall and shoot us.”
She’s turning 40 this year and that’s something she looks forward to, says Risa. “I was happier in my thirties than in my twenties. Now that I’ll be 40 and presumably wiser, who knows what better things await me? I’ve earned every year and every line on my face, so I’m not afraid of growing older.”
But she sorely misses her husband, and expects a quiet year ahead. “We want to go through the whole mourning process, the period of grief, and not miss out on anything,” she says of her family, now composed of son Kiko, 13, and daughters Issa, 10, Ianna, 9, and Sinta, 4. She and Frank had been married for almost 15 years, and she had always discussed her decisions with him, says Risa. “Now I still talk to him before a major decision and I feel he’s there, listening,” she says of the PMAer who saw her picture in her school yearbook and was immediately smitten. He wrote her and she responded, and ended up as his date during the Philippine Military Academy’s graduation hop, but only because by then, his commander-in-chief, President Marcos, had been ousted in the first People Power revolt.
When she’s not in the session hall, Risa’s probably with her kids visiting Frank at Himlayang Pilipino, or at Planet Dive, the dive resort she, her husband and several friends built in Batangas. Or probably burying her head in an Isabel Allende or Julia Alvarez novel.
If she had one free day, she’d spend part of it doing one thing that her children would like to do, then splurge the rest on herself, says Risa. “I’d wake up early... No, I think I’d sleep late. Then I’ll have breakfast alone, read a book, watch a movie, listen to beautiful music, walk... No! dance in the rain. Go out of the house… or is it better to stay in, for a change? Hmmm...” she muses, savoring the fecund possibilities ahead.
By Pennie Azarcon-dela Cruz