Nelia Sancho was a 22-year-old student at the University of the Philippines when she witnessed something no student should see: Two of her professors were shot point-blank by government agents in front of her. They had been considered enemies of the state by the despotic regime of President Ferdinand Marcos for their involvement in the Communist Party.
The incident would have a lasting impact. Ms. Sancho was catapulted into a lifetime of activism protesting the Marcos regime, as well as fighting for women’s rights.
It was an unconventional role for her. Until then, she was better known as a beauty queen traveling the world to compete in pageants.
“It was her first experience with that kind of violence,” her daughter, Anna Liao-Balanquit, said in a phone interview. “And she said that’s how her awakening started.”
In 1972, the year before the execution, Marcos had gone on national television and declared martial law. From 1971 to 1981, about 70,000 people would be imprisoned, 34,000 tortured and more than 3,200 killed. Private media were seized and shuttered, curfews were imposed, and strikes and protests were banned. Religious figures, political opponents, farmers, Indigenous peoples, journalists and student activists became the government’s primary targets.
Ms. Sancho was part of a generation of young people who felt they had no choice but to divert their focus from their own pursuits to rise up against a brutal dictatorship.
She was 71 when she died of tuberculosis on Sept. 1, 2022, at her home in Quezon City, northeast of Manila, her daughter said. The death was not widely reported outside the Philippines.
Ms. Sancho was a pre-med student before she switched her focus to mass communications and began writing for The Manila Bulletin. She was also a member of the Sigma Delta Phi sorority.
Behn Cervantes, a fellow student who would go on to become an entertainer, encouraged her to enter a beauty pageant and mentored her for her first competition, Binibining Pilipinas (Miss Philippines), in 1969. She finished second to Gloria Diaz, who went on to win the country’s first Miss Universe title.
Ms. Sancho took home her first crown in 1971, at the Queen of the Pacific competition in Australia. She took a year off from school to compete and represented her country in a six-week tour across Asia.
During her travels, she met an Australian diplomat at a cocktail party in Hong Kong. He warned her that the Philippine government was leveraging her polished beauty-queen persona as propaganda to distract the world from its human rights violations.
“He told me that I was being used, being exploited,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1981. She decided she would no longer compete in beauty competitions.
“I have no regrets,” she added. “Being a beauty queen was part of my education.”
Her acts of defiance started out small. Ms. Sancho and other beauty queens, including Maita Gomez and Gemma Cruz-Araneta, began staging protests at pageants. When…
2023-09-12 06:56:43
Link from www.nytimes.com
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