From pageant to picket: Nelia Sancho; 71

Nelia Sancho (INQUIRER FILE PHOTO)

MANILA, Philippines — She had often been described as a “beauty queen turned activist,” and was once dubbed “Guerrilla Queen” by Time Magazine for her involvement in the country’s underground left for many years.

Later in life, 1971 Queen of the Pacific Nelia Sancho would continue to defy expectations, at one time becoming president of a Philippine friendship society with North Korea; ballroom dancing in the same social orbit as senators, and pushing for the legalization of prostitution—much to the dismay of her feminist friends.

Whatever else people might have thought of some of her unorthodox choices, they’d all agree that Sancho, who died Sept. 1 at age 71, had lived a rich, purposeful life. She was privately cremated on Saturday, with her wake starting today at 1 p.m., her daughter Anna Louise posted on her Facebook page.

“(Nelia) was happy with what she was doing and what she had done,” said Liza Maza, a former party-list representative of Gabriela, a women’s rights organization co-founded in 1984 by Sancho and Margarita “Maita” Gomez, Miss Philippines-World 1967, who also went underground during the martial law years.

Sancho, the fifth of eight siblings, had an uneventful life as the family followed her father’s assignments all over the country as a government auditor. Finding herself too squeamish during her medical studies [“I would throw up every time we dissected animals,” she said in a 1999 Sunday Inquirer Magazine (SIM) interview], she shifted to journalism at the University of the Philippines (UP).

Drawn to a cause

She would soon join beauty contests, “as an adventure, a fun way of exploring what I could be,” she said, after she became runner-up to Gloria Diaz and Binky Montinola in the 1969 Binibining Pilipinas beauty pageant. Asked to represent the country in the Queen of the Pacific quest in Australia, she bagged the crown and even won the “most photogenic” award.

A year later, in 1972, Sancho picketed the same pageant with fellow beauty queens Gemma Cruz Araneta and Gomez. “We were not condemning the girls, only the contest,” she said, adding that “(dirty old men) were always around with their indecent proposals.”

Helping out in the relief operations during the Great Flood in Central Luzon in 1972 led Sancho to join rallies and meetings with other activists, donating what she could to their nationalist cause. The military raid on a Malabon house in one such meeting however changed her life. “They were after two UP professors from Los Baños,” she recalled, and was shocked when the soldiers shot the two point-blank. Sancho decided to go underground.

It was in the underground network in Mindanao that she met husband Antonio Liao, with whom she had two children: Antonio Karlo, or AK, and Anna Louise. The marriage did not last. “We hardly lived together because we got arrested and detained separately,” Sancho said in that SIM interview.

A year after joining the underground, she was arrested. “I guess I was recognized despite the stoop I had developed and my going around in dusters and no makeup,” she said. Sancho was detained from 1976 to 1978.

NGO work

When the Marcoses fled in 1986, Sancho run under the Bayan party in 1987, but lost. She would eventually leave the militant coalition. “One can initiate change in society not just from street rallies but from different levels and in many creative ways,” she said.

In fact, being on her own led Sancho to several nongovernment organizations (NGOs), among them the Asian Women Human Rights Council which advocates just compensation for comfort women. “Seeing the human face of the political struggle and translating it to [her] personal life” meant putting up Parents Alternative Inc., a community day care for children of political detainees that also served as her “support system,” she said.

Cofounding Gabriela “touched” the feminist in her, Sancho added. “The transformation of comfort women and prostitutes from victims to empowered women also contributed to my growth and empowerment,” she told SIM.

Unflinching on sexuality

Taking up the cause of comfort women — girls conscripted as sex slaves by Japanese soldiers during the war — Sancho founded Lila Pilipina and Lola Kampanyeras, and brought the issue to public consciousness. Again proving that the personal is political, she allowed a statue of comfort women to be installed inside her family’s properly in Caticlan, Aklan, because it had been removed from public places several times after protests from the Japanese government.

Unafraid of controversy, Sancho at one time batted for the legalization of prostitution, arguing for decriminalizing the trade and junking the antivagrancy law “that makes these women criminals and subjects them to police raids and extortion every other day.”

Sancho was as unflinching in discussing the issue of sexuality and sexual orientation, said former Social Welfare Secretary Judy Taguiwalo, a martial law survivor. “As early as 1986, she was already fighting for ending discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” Taguiwalo said. She added: “Whether in the national or international arena, in the private or public sphere, Nelia had always asserted that women’s rights are human rights. She made sure that these were advanced through services for women and their children, and [by any means necessary like] legislative lobbying, education, research, organizing and collective actions.”

‘Lola Nelia’

While colleagues and fellow activists see Sancho as a fearless warrior fighting for people’s rights, her family will miss a loving mother, a doting grandmother, and a generous mother-in-law, her daughter revealed.

“She is inspiring, even heroic, in the eyes of the people around her,” Anna Louise told the Inquirer in an online message. “I can tell my daughter and nieces wonderful things about their Lola Nelia.”

Sounding much like her mother, she added: “The battle to fight for women’s rights and the poor has long started but it is far from over. There will always be oppressors who will feed on the weak.”

Her hope, said Anna Louise, is for more women like Sancho to come out and be part of something bigger than themselves. “We need someone to step up and remind us that we are capable and strong. We can push back if we are being attacked. We can protect ourselves with the help of our community, society and government,” she said.

Source: “Woman Warrior,” Pennie Azarcon dela Cruz, Sunday Inquirer Magazine, March 28, 1999

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