Leticia Ramos-Shahani: The accidental politician

“A politician by accident… who won on luck and auspicious timing,” was how former Sen. Leticia Ramos-Shahani described herself in a speech at Miriam College’s Eminent Women in Politics Lecture Series in 2007.

“I wanted to be a teacher,” added the former foreign undersecretary, who died of colon cancer on March 20. She was 87.

She explained: “My entry into politics was unplanned. I returned to Manila in late 1985, while with the United Nations (UN), because my father (former Foreign Secretary Narciso Ramos) fell very ill…

“When I went to our hometown in Asingan, Pangasinan, to register to vote for the snap elections, I was anxiously asked by the local YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) whom I was supporting for President. I simply and honestly said: ‘I am for change; I am for Cory who can bring about that change.’ This direct, short reply reverberated quickly out of our sleepy town to the offices of national broadsheets, and the next day I made the headlines which screamed that a second cousin of President Marcos was for Cory. Without any TV ads or a campaign machinery, I became nationally known overnight.”

Two-term senator

She added: “Somehow without much effort, I had fulfilled the requirements of a senatorial candidate in this country—a personality known nationwide, who was now accepted and approved by an electorate hungry for change.”

Shahani became a two-term senator from 1987 to 1998, but lost her bid for the governor’s post in Pangasinan in 1998. “I underestimated the kind of micro-campaigning required in 1,355 barangays of Pangasinan, where people were not interested in grand visions for the province but rather in being gifted with monoblock chairs and toilet bowls, and having their pictures taken with candidates,” she recalled ruefully.

That brief unintended foray into politics might be one of the few instances when Shahani relied more on happenstance than on planning and strategy, which characterized her long and illustrious stint as ambassador to Romania, Hungary and Australia, and as secretary general of the 1985 UN World Conference of Women in Nairobi.

Upright character

In a memorial service at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) on Friday, former colleagues recalled the upright character Shahani had been known for even outside her office. Recounted a DFA colleague, Juan Ona: “I usually hitched a ride with her on our way to this regular gathering of retired foreign service officers.  She was serious, soft-spoken and always proper. Once I told her about this foreign ambassador who was divorcing his wife because he was enamored with a Filipina.  Well, she was not about to be drawn into gossip.  All she said was, “Filipino women, deadly yan!  And that’s because they’re so caring.”

But she was not above matchmaking, recalled former ambassador Delia Albert.  When they were together in Berlin, Shahani would needle her about her love life.  “Sige na, say yes to Hans.  Don’t you agree that he looks a bit like Sir Laurence Olivier?” she told me. I told her, ‘what if the DFA asks me to resign,’ which it did?  Women in foreign service were considered security risks when they marry foreigners.  But there were 21 male officers married to foreigners at that time who kept their jobs. So Shahani cited the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women  and said that it would support us…”

Added Albert: “So you see, my boss not just showed us the way but gave us the means (to get there).”

For the sake of her diplomatic mission, Shahani would even risk her job, recalled ambassador Rosario Manalo.  “It was the height of the Cold War and she had asked lawyer Minnie Falcon to draft the bill of rights for women that she would later submit to the UN.  (There were very few women at the UN at the time, so) nobody wanted to co-sponsor it, except for the woman representative of Russia (the bill eventually passed,) but in Manila, Foreign Secretary Carlos P. Romulo scolded us about it because (we had unwittingly aligned with the enemy).”

It was Shahani’s unusual ways of training her on the ways of foreign service that impressed her most, said ambassador Rosalinda Tirona.  “Sometimes when we were discussing some serious matters, she’d put on some classical music—Brahms, Mantovani, Chopin. I found it very difficult to focus, but later realized that she must have been training me to learn to concentrate even in times of distraction.”

Beating the system

Shahani, who authored such measures as the Anti-Discrimination Law or Republic Act No. 6725 and the Anti-Rape Law of 1997, stoked fond memories as well among fellow advocates in the local women’s movement.

Anna Leah Sarabia, who produced Shahani’s two-hour radio talk show “Kayo Naman Po” over dzBB in the early ’90s, recalled an incident recounted to her by another feminist icon and author, Robin Morgan.

Although she was secretary general of the Nairobi International Conference on Women, Shahani was given a shoestring budget of only $50,000 because, according to Sarabia, “Robin said the guys at UN didn’t want the conference to be too successful.  So Shahani called Robin and poured out her frustration over this. Robin then called on her friends—Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, friends from Ford Foundation and other women’s networks to act as sponsors.”  The conference became a huge success.

Added Sarabia: “I think Robin told me this story to let me know that even one such pioneer as Shahani would not have made it on her own because she was trying to change a system so well-entrenched in its disdain for gender equality (at that time). Fortunately for us, Shahani was so much more stubborn than the system. When she found that source of an equal and righteous but untapped power outside the UN, she knew that the system could not stop her.”