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- Click www.newint.org for an article on Marie
on New Internationalist (NI) Issue 371,
September 2004 (Mao Cover)
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CURRICULUM
VITAE: Marie Hilao-Enriquez
Updated March 13, 2004
Full name
is Amaryllis Hilao-Enriquez. Born June 27, 1953 in Bulan,
Sorsogon, a province in the Bicol Region, located at the
southernmost tip of Luzon islands in the Philippines ,to
Maximo H. Hilao, a fisherman, and Celsa Rapi Hilao, a
homemaker.
She spent her elementary grades in her hometown, Bulan;
her last elementary year was in Metro Manila.
Consistently in the honours list during her elementary
years; and graduated in high school as class
valedictorian.
She entered the University of the Philippines as a
UP-Government scholar taking up a bachelor's degree in
Occupational Therapy, in 1970, the time of heightened
student activism in the Philippines. Became a member of
the militant student group Kabataang Makabayan (
Patriotic Youth), organising out-of-school youths and
urban poor dwellers in Quezon City (one of the cities
which make up Metro Manila). When martial law was
declared, in 1972, she continued organising the urban
poor in the underground as the dictator Ferdinand Marcos
declared the Kabataang Makabayan as well as other student
and youth groups as illegal.
On April 4, 1973, the apartment occupied by her family
was raided by Philippine Constabulary (PC) soldiers.
Marie was held captive for hours but was able to escape
at this time but her sisters, Liliosa (a senior college
student and associate editor of her school's student
paper) and Josefina (a high school student at that time),
were arrested without warrants. All three suffered
torture from the hands of the military. Liliosa was
killed on April 6, 1973 inside the detention camp in Camp
Crame, Quezon City. She was the first woman political
prisoner who was killed during martial law. Her death
would lead to the formation in 1974 of the Task Force
Detainees of the Philippines, the leading human rights
organisation, which documented human rights violation
cases of the martial law dictatorship.
Marie spent her time in the underground organising
students and farmers in the provinces and continuing the
struggle against the dictatorship with thousands of youth
who went underground during martial law. On October 8,
1974, she was arrested together with her husband, her
brother and sister-in-law. She gave birth to the oldest
of her two daughters while she was imprisoned. On July 6,
1976, the then PC Chief, General Fidel Ramos (who was
President of the Philippines, from 1992-98) and the then
Secretary of National Defense, Juan Ponce Enrile, were
forced to release her, together with another political
prisoner and a nursing mother, when all the political
prisoners in Camp Bagong Diwa staged a hunger strike for
their release.
Having a daughter to feed, and with four of her family
members still incarcerated, Marie had to work in a
Government agency to support her family (these were
difficult years to have job outside the Government as the
stigma of being a political prisoner sticks with a
released detainee). However, she continued assisting the
political prisoners in their campaign for release. In
1978, she was one of the founding members of KAPATID, the
organisation of relatives, friends and supporters of
political prisoners, which worked for the release of
political prisoners and help them in the litigation and
follow-up of their cases; it also helped in the
detainees' other needs like milk and food for the
children, attending hearings in court, campaigning for
their release.
In 1978, she went back to the University of the
Philippines to work as a research aide at the College of
Social Work and Community Development. Here, she
organised students to spend time in the rural areas to
organise farmers for their struggle for land. In 1981,
she worked with the Farmers' Assistance Board, a
non-government organisation assisting farmers in their
struggle for land and at the same time with their desire
to improve production of their farms without using any
chemicals. She also helped establish provincial
non-government organisations to help the farmers in their
localities. She was instrumental in setting up the
Appropriate Technology Center for Rural Development
(ATCRD, an NGO which deal on researches on organic
farming and technologies appropriate to the level of
understanding and capacity of farmers). In 1985, she
helped in setting up SIBAT (Sibol ng Agham at Akmang
Teknolohiya or Spring of Science and Technology) a
network of NGO's involved in organic farming and
appropriate technology in the country. SIBAT coordinated
the activities of the NGO's and served as an organisation
where professional scientists and technologists could
share their expertise with farmers' groups.
In 1986, when Marcos was ousted, Marie volunteered to
help in the setting up of the national secretariat of
SELDA (Society of Ex-Detainees for Liberation, Against
Detention and for Amnesty), the organisation of former
political prisoners organised in 1985. She organised the
national congress of the organisation on May 25, 1986.
Before the congress, upon decision of the founding
National Executive Board of SELDA, Marie, as head of the
national secretariat, assisted in the filing of the
landmark class action suit against Ferdinand Marcos. This
is the class action suit initiated by the victims of
martial law against the dictator and his family. Marie
had to convince her parents to be the lead plaintiff in
the class suit. The victims of martial law were able to
gain a favourable judgment at the Hawaiian court in 1992
(the nearly 10,000 human rights victims were awarded
$NZ1.9 billion in damages. A Hawaiian court had
jurisdiction because, under US law, if a human rights
violator is resident in the US, then he/she can be sued
in a US civil court. The Marcoses went into Hawaiian
exile when they were overthrown, in 1986).
In 1989, Marie left SELDA to be the Executive Director of
Binhi Agricultural Resource Foundation Inc. an NGO
assisting farmers in organic agriculture and appropriate
technology in Visayas and Mindanao. She held the position
until 1995 when she was called back to be the Secretary
General of SELDA.
By this time, an information campaign, as well as an
education one, had to be launched by SELDA among its
members because of the American lead lawyer's attempts to
enter into compromise and settlement agreements with the
Marcos family, without consulting the lead plaintiffs in
the Hawaii class action suit, much less SELDA. Together
with Attorney Romeo Capulong, general counsel of SELDA,
she launched a campaign to explain to the members of the
class suit the status of the case; and, consult them on
their position as to the compromise and settlement
agreements which the American lead lawyer made with the
Marcoses and the Philippine government. This campaign
brought her to protest rallies in Hong Kong in 1996 when
settlement negotiations were being conducted by the
American lead lawyer and the Philippine and Swiss bank
lawyers. In 1998 she went to the Swiss Parliament to
relay the majority of the victims' desire to ensure that
the victims would have an allocation of the Marcos'
assets being transferred by the Swiss government from
Swiss banks to an escrow account in the Philippine
National Bank (several hundred million $US of illgotten
Marcos wealth had been identified in Swiss banks in the
1980s and frozen, pending resolution of legal claims).
In 1995 Marie became the general secretary of KARAPATAN
or the Alliance for the Advancement of Peoples' Rights, a
human rights alliance which was set up by the originators
of the former Philippine Alliance of Human Rights
Advocates or PAHRA. Differences in the analysis of
Philippine situation and how the groups view human rights
work after the dictatorship, led to the split in the
human rights movement in the country. Karapatan members
still believed that no substantial change in the system
occurred despite changes in leaders; political control is
still wielded by the elite classes and the violations
continue even after restoration of democratic
institutions in the country. The State is still the major
violator of human rights. PAHRA members believed that
human rights could be fought within the Government set-up
as there are progressive individuals who were serving in
Government.
Karapatan is one of the organisations that actively
worked for the overthrow of the Estrada regime in 2001.
It was the first organisation to call for the ouster of
President Joseph Estrada in 1999, as cases of human
rights violations were being committed by the Estrada
regime in its counter-insurgency operations dubbed as
Oplan Makabayan (Estrada was overthrown by People Power
2, in January 2001 - People Power 1 overthrew Marcos in
1986 - and remains in nominal detention, undergoing a
very leisurely trial on charges of massive corruption. He
was replaced by his Vice President, Gloria
Macapaghal-Arroyo).
As general secretary of the human rights alliance, Marie
led the fact-finding missions to the island province of
Basilan in 2001 when Arroyo launched a crackdown on
supposed Abu Sayyaf suspects (a notorious group of
bandits, who specialise in very high profile kidnappings
and murders in the southernmost Muslim islands, between
the Philippines and Borneo). She also led a similar
mission to Sulu in April 2002. These missions led the
Arroyo government to brand Karapatan as "Abu
Sayyaf" lovers and coddlers of terrorists. In July
2002, Karapatan was one of the convenors of the
International Solidarity Mission to Zamboanga City,
Basilan and General Santos to evaluate the impact of the
US troops' entry into the Philippines and their military
exercise in Basilan. Marie led the Mission team that went
to General Santos City (Zamboanga City and General Santos
City are in the southern island of Mindanao, where the
majority of the Philippines' Muslim population live.
Basilan is one of the islands between Mindanao and
Borneo).
Nearly 100 years of US military presence in the
Philippines ended with the historic 1991 vote by the
Philippine Senate not to renew the treaty allowing the US
to maintain massive bases there. Ever since that forced
withdrawal, the US has been trying to regain a military
presence in the Philippines, and with President Arroyo
having declared her full support for the US in the
"War On Terror", there have been a whole
succession of US military exercises in the Philippines,
including near the southern battlefronts where the
Philippine military has been fighting Muslim separatists
for decades.
Karapatan is responsible for documenting human rights
violations in the country. It submits its findings to the
Philippine government through Congress, the Senate,
Commission on Human Rights, the Defense Department, the
Philippine National Police and other Government bodies.
It urges the legislative bodies to open up inquiries and
investigations into cases of human rights violations. It
also campaigns for the release of political prisoners,
and intervenes in the court hearings of their cases.
Human rights education is also carried out by the
Alliance.
In 1998, when the Comprehensive Agreement for the Respect
of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law
(CARHRIHL) was signed between the Republic of the
Philippines and the National Democratic Front of the
Philippines (the coalition body headed by the Communist
Party of the Philippines, whose New People's Army has
been waging an armed struggle for 35 years) in their
peace negotiations, Marie was nominated by the NDFP,
together with the Supreme Bishop of the Philippine
Independent Church, to be one of the independent
observers in the Joint Monitoring Committee (JMC)
stipulated in the agreement to be set up by both parties.
When President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo assumed the
presidency in January 2001, she immediately announced the
resumption of the peace talks between the Government of
the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the National
Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP). The talks
were held in April 2001 but were scuttled by the GRP in
June of the same year. Marie attended both events but
these talks yielded no concrete results.
Alarmed by the increasing cases of human rights
violations under the Arroyo regime, KARAPATAN decided to
send Marie on a speaking tour of nine cities in the US
and Canada to talk on the worsening human rights
violations in the Philippines. In the process, she also
spoke in the big rally in Washington DC (January 2003)
against the impending war on Iraq launched by imperial
America. In her speaking tour, she denounced the return
of the US military forces to her country and strongly
criticised the Arroyo administration for being a
too-willing puppet to the American government's
impositions.
Upon her return to the country in February 2003, as the
US was preparing to invade Iraq, the Philippine military
launched preemptive bombing strikes on February 11, 2003
in the Moro* areas in the Pikit Complex in North
Cotabato, Mindanao, home to the forces of the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Immediately, hundreds of
thousands of Moro families evacuated from their homes,
scores of children died in the evacuation centres. * Moro
- the common name for Filipino Muslims.
Marie headed the fact-finding Mission to look into the
circumstances of the Moro evacuees whose number swelled
to 400,000 by March 2003. The mission also looked into
the reasons why the military bombed the MILF areas even
without provocation.
In April 2003 Karapatan lost another of its staunch human
rights activists, Eden Marcellana, who was murdered by a
death squad comprised of military men and/or their
agents. The violations have grown in an alarmingly rising
fashion and committed in a continuing pattern of wanton
impunity.
On October 20-21, 2003, Marie, together with a lawyer
from the Public Interest Law Center and another volunteer
from Karapatan, attended the 78th Session of the UN Human
Rights Committee in Geneva, Switzerland and submitted an
NGO report to the body. It was in this session that the
compliance of the Philippine Government to the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
(ICCPR) was reviewed by the UNHRC.
The early part of 2004 saw Marie actively lobbying for
the enactment of the compensation bill that would
indemnify the victims of martial law. This was because
the Supreme Court ordered the transfer of the $US684
million Swiss deposits held in escrow by the Philippine
National Bank, to the National Treasury. As national
elections will be held in May 2004, Marie warned the
Arroyo government not to use the money for her election
campaign.
By February 2004 Arroyo called for the resumption of the
peace talks between the GRP and the NDFP which she
unilaterally suspended in 2001. Marie attended the peace
talks in Norway as one of the NDFP-nominated independent
observers. She saw to it that the agreement that will be
forged in the talks will cover the indemnification issue
and the release of the political prisoners.
The Oslo Joint Statement is the product of the peace
talks. Among other things, it contains the agreement of
the two parties to work for the preservation of the money
for the indemnification of the martial law victims, the
release of political prisoners and the formation of the
Joint Monitoring Committee (JMC) which will monitor the
compliance of the two parties to the provisions of the
Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and
International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL), an agreement
both Parties signed in 2000.
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Click www.newint.org for an article on Marie on New
Internationalist (NI) Issue 371, September 2004 (Mao
Cover)
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