RC Constantino would have turned 82 today, 15 September 2026. He was the president of the Constantino Foundation from 2016 till his untimely passing in 2024. He is missed deeply.
Among his many contributions to activism, RC was known for his role in 1994 when he defied the Ramos administration by leading the watershed Asia-Pacific Conference on East Timor or APCET. Bowing to the wishes of the Indonesian government, Ramos tried to ban the international meeting, but RC and his many colleagues refused to be coerced. Together with Timor Leste and Indonesian activists, RC led Philippine and overseas NGOs, and dignitaries such as Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Maguire and France’s First Lady Danielle Mitterand to ensure APCET would push through. Today, Timor Leste is an independent nation and a proud member of ASEAN.
RC embraced nationalism as defined by the historically specific, anti-colonial experience of the Philippines: nation as bayan, a people – not just the formality of a country with borders – struggling to be free and obliged to support other struggling peoples fighting for their freedom. It is the reason why the foundation has always supported efforts to free Palestine.
In The Continuing Past, RC’s parents, Letizia Roxas Constantino and Renato Constantino, who passed away on 15 September 1999, wrote: “Contemporary nationalism should be part of a larger internationalism, [a] wider struggle against global control by state and corporate forces that seek the continuation of a system which consigns people to a life of poverty, ignorance, and underdevelopment.”
