She is rich. She is one of the Philippines’ largest landowners. She is a sole heiress to what could be a stupendous fortune. She is descended from veritable national heroes.
So why is Mary Ann L. Susano running for congressman of the fifth district of Manila?
“I think of it as payback time,” says the former congresswoman of Quezon City. She means it. Helping the poor and philanthropy seem to her a 24/7 passion and vocation.
Susano routinely donates land, by the hectares, schools by the buildings, and road projects by the kilometers.
During her stint as a two-term congresswoman of Quezon City, she donated a two-hectare lot on which was built what was supposed to be a college for the poor with their tuition to be paid for by her. The city government converted it into an elementary school instead, with more than 10,000 students.
In front of the Batasan building, aghast that several students had died while crossing the 14-lane highway, she helped finance what she says is the longest pedestrian bridge in the Philippines. She pitched in P20 million of her personal funds, while the government expended another P70 million. “We saved a lot of lives,” she gushes.
In Quezon City, Susano began her foray into politics as a councilor and later won as congressman for two terms. She would have been a cinch for a third term as congressman of the city’s second district. Instead, in 2010, she opted to run for mayor. Machine politics defeated her.
In 2010, the city’s second district was the largest in the Philippines, with about a million residents, half of whom were voters. Unless one is financially endowed and willing to dispense moolah liberally, one cannot expect to win hands down, against Susano. However, she lost in her mayoralty bid.
Her district was gerrymandered, greatly diminishing her influence. So when she tried to regain her congressional seat in 2013, she was upstaged by a virtual unknown. It was the election where the power of PCOS (precinct count optical scan) machines was displayed in full force and the ruling Liberal Party swept all of Quezon City’s six congressional districts. Hocus PCOS?
Also contributing to Susano’s setbacks in 2010 and 2013 was her opposition to the city government’s plan to auction the vast 200-hectare Veterans Memorial Hospital property for commercial development. Mary Ann fretted about the plight of tens of thousands squatters displaced by such commercialism and by more than 100,000 trees that would have to be cut down. “The Veterans compound is bigger than Fort Bonifacio [the business district cheek-by-jowl with Makati],” she notes.
Mary Ann is again making a political comeback, this time in Manila’s fifth district. Here, the population is much smaller, about 350,000 but the demographics are the same. It is a poor man’s district.
Behind the patina of elegance epitomized by upscale hotels in its Malate-Ermita tourist belt and the ancient Intramuros in its walkways of history are cesspools of squatters like the reclaimed area called Baseco on the edge of beautiful Manila Bay.
At this writing, Susano has visited Baseco at least three times, hobnobbing with barangay officials and people who daily, cope with grime, crime, and drugs. More than 90 percent of its streets are unpaved, literally and virtually, living latrines and toilets. Lurking behind the ramshackled shanties are drug dealers and drug victims, and for all we know, even Muslims sympathetic to the separatist movement and its violent means.
The candidate promises to build health centers, to pave the streets, to provide livelihood, to build schools. It is a formula that has spelled success for her in Novaliches. The only difference: Her family owned much of Novaliches.
Under the late Don Tomas Susano, the family patriarch, the Susano clan once owned vast tracks of land sprawling from the old Kalookan to Quezon City and Montalban. This was the Don Tomas Hacienda. Don Tomas was the father of Inocencio, an engineer and the father of Mary Ann. Inocencio’s wife, Doña Rosa, a school teacher (and Mary Ann’s mother), was a Spanish mestiza.
The Susano Hacienda had plenty of horses, cows and carabao. The Novaliches property alone totaled 6,000 hectares. The Susanos put up the Novaliches market (now a mall), back in 1906, predating today’s SM and Robinsons malls by 70 years.
Mary Ann relates that Novaliches got its name from nova leche—new milk, the source of dairy for Metro Manila and the raw material for the famous Selecta and Arce ice cream. The original Selecta owner, Arce was related to Serrano who in turn was related to Susano. A cousin of the Susanos sold the land where the Iglesia ni Cristo central is now on Commonwealth Avenue.
About 20 of the 120 hectares of the Montalban property were donated for the benefit of teachers. In the kangkong farm of Apolonio Samson, Mary Ann’s grandfather, Andres Bonifacio and at least 500 Katipuneros staged the Cry of Pugad Lawin, the ritual tearing up of their cedulas [residence certificates], in defiance of 375 years of Spanish rule.
In Manila’s fifth district, Mary Ann owns a little more than an obligation to help the poor and the dispossessed.
Two congressmen, Amado Bagatsing and Joey Hizon, had alternated in their stranglehold of Manila’s fifth district. Amado’s son wants to keep the district he has held for three terms while the father runs for mayor. Hizon is making a comeback of his own. “Initially, Bagatsing had the upperhand in the district,” confides one barangay official. “Lately, Susano has been gaining ground and popularity. She is a tireless campaigner,” she says.
Susano also wants to redevelop Ermita and Malate into bustling tourist districts.
If Novaliches and Manila have any common thread, it is Andres Bonifacio. The Great Plebeian is considered the hero of Manila. For its part, Quezon City has a heroine named Tandang Sora.
She was born in Banlat, Kalookan (now Banlat, Balintawak, Quezon City) on Jan. 16, 1812. So when she joined the Revolution in 1896, she was well past her senior at 84.
When Bonifacio and about 500 Katipuneros showed up at Tandang Sora’s farm in 1896, she willingly helped them, cooking and providing them food, medical care and shelter.
It happens that Tandang Sora was related somehow to the great grandparents of Mary Ann Susano.
It was on the farm of Susano’s grandparents that Bonifacio and his men tore up their cedulas.
Today, Mary Ann Susano is staging a defiance of her own, by challenging the powers-that-be of Manila. In the name of the poor and the dispossessed.