Philippines

Petronila Cleto
As part of the late 1960s radical and political student movement at the University of the Philippines, Petronila Cleto went into theatre organizing among out-of-school youth and working students, and also into child education among the urban poor of Manila. Surviving Ferdinand Marcos's martial law in the 70s, which forced the student movement underground, she became a journalist, well-known for her investigative reporting on human rights stories, socio-economic issues as well as feminist issues. Her poetry and plays also revolved around the same themes of injustice and the people's democratic rights. In the late 80s, her reportage on a Marcos ally, who was terrorizing the journalists in the Visayan part of the archipelago, brought her a million-peso libel suit. Although that fizzled out, the sense of being under surveillance began to weigh on her. Meanwhile, the unrecognized civil war in the country raged on, and the censorship of the press kept much of the truth hidden from the public.

Cleto, who came to Canada in the early 1990s, is currently working on a project to advocate for the journalists in her country, who are now, more than any other time in its history, under the peril of being killed because of their messages of truth. She is also working on a series of travel poems and on her first novel. Cleto was a writer in residence at McMaster University from January to April of 2008. She recently staged a reading of her new play Operetang Maynila about the inequities of the live-in caregiver program in Canada.