Risa Hontiveros Baraquel
By Miriam Grace A. Go
February 26, 2006
Inq7.net
Ana Theresia “Risa” Hontiveros (now Baraquel) refused to join her Ateneo schoolmates when they went to welcome Ninoy Aquino at the Manila International Airport on Aug. 21, 1983. It wasn’t political apathy or ignorance on her part. Active in various cause-oriented groups since high school, the then-17-year-old Social Science student doubted the exiled senator’s commitment to the anti-Marcos struggle.
“He didn’t fight beside us. He is just another politician,” she remembers telling her colleagues at the university student council.
But when she got a call that afternoon “that somebody killed him,” Risa knew that she had found the biggest challenge to her own involvement in fighting the dictatorship. “If they could kill the opposition leader just like that, they could do something worse to us.”
By the time the Marcos government made a mockery of the 1986 snap election, Risa thought her generation was done with being mere “boycott and noise barrage kids.” (At 12, she banged pots and pans during that nationwide in-your-own-backyard protest against the wholesale fraud in the 1978 Interim Batasang Pambansa election.)
When defense chief Juan Ponce Enrile admitted that they had defrauded Ninoy Aquino’s widow in the polls and announced his break with Marcos, Risa and the rest of the Ateneo student council monitored the news, solicited food from private subdivisions and brought them to rallyists on EDSA.
It was on February 24, the second to the last day of protests, that Risa joined the crowd on EDSA—then with a cadet who she would later marry. “All those years, my parents talked to us about martial law and its abuses, about how we (she and five siblings) should be involved one way or another.”
“It was exhilarating…the experience that we could embody an opposition to the dictator without resorting to violence,” she recalls. That’s the lesson of EDSA that she intends to keep: “That there’s a place and value to opposing without violence even when your opponents are using violence against you.”
Between then and now, she became a newscaster and host of various TV talk shows for 15 years, got married, had four children now aged four to 13, sat on the government panel in the peace negotiations with the Left, got elected party-list representative of Akbayan, and was recently widowed. But never did she disengage herself from the movement.
In 1986, she expected reforms in the military and in the prevailing brand of party politics. But little has changed.
One reason is that “many of the promises of EDSA were abandoned” by the new government because Corazon Aquino was “cacique rin pala.” However, she does not diminish Aquino’s role: “She was the rallying figure. At that time, she symbolized everything that we and the various groups before us had fought for.”
Would she like another EDSA to happen? “Yes!” she turns excited. “But I don’t think it will happen in just one geographical area, probably not even in EDSA anymore. But I would want another EDSA in the sense of [having] enlightened civilians saying, “Enough.”