Heroes and saints we read only about, but she was a heroine and a saint we knew, and loved, and touched, as we were touched by Betty Go-Belmonte’s selflessness. As this year’s Max Soliven Lifetime Achievement Awardee, her greatest gift to the Filipino people was more than just the newspaper she founded. It was how she made goodness within reach of thousands—the high, the mighty, the ink-smeared worker, the street child who lived in a newspaper stall near her office. She was a beloved wife, mother, grandmother and friend—but in the end she belonged to her God. We miss her light, but know she is our guiding star forever.
By JOANNE RAE M. RAMIREZ
Her legacy shines on as brightly as The STAR she left behind, her radiance undiminished by time.
Twenty-six years after she had passed away, Betty Go-Belmonte’s legacy lives not just in The Philippine STAR. It throbs in the hearts of those who loved her, knew her, and were touched by her selflessness.
Betty was and still is cherished by her husband, former Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. for her “steadfast love and reliance on God.”
Betty founded The Philippine STAR with Max Soliven and Art Borjal as the country was teetering on its new- found freedoms on July 28, 1986, the 23rd newspaper on the block.
Armed with faith, she saw it through, until it became the country’s leading newspaper, supervising its operations even as she valiantly fought cancer.
“Mom’s courage in the face of all the things that she experienced throughout her life is one thing I can never forget,” said her firstborn child Isaac, now the head of The STAR’s editorial board.
Betty founded The STAR on a guidance she received from a Bible verse, and she would face life’s many trials with discernment she got from the holy book. “Her absolute, unflinching faith and devotion to our Lord,” is her second son Kevin’s most vivid memory of his mother, who passed away at age 60.
“She showed this in all aspects of her life, from her family to her entrepreneurial spirit, to her battle with the disease. She triumphed throughout, because she knew she had our Lord with her always,” Kevin, president and CEO of Philstar.com, says proudly.
Her youngest son, The STAR president and CEO Miguel Belmonte, continues to put his mother on a pedestal for her simplicity and selflessness. As she led The STAR to greater heights, she also made sure its success was also the good fortune of its employees and the less fortunate who sought its help. Betty established Operation Damayan, which Miguel continues to support staunchly.
“It seems like my mother’s whole life was dedicated to doing good things for other people. She was constantly helping those in need. Never did she put herself ahead of others,” Miguel shared. “And even if she could easily afford it, she never spent on material luxuries for herself. No expensive jewelry, bags, shoes or house. And yet she was one of the most powerful and influential women in the country before her death.”
Betty’s youngest child and only daughter Joy, now Quezon City Mayor, admires her late mother for having been a “very strong, courageous and principled woman who was also extremely compassionate, loving and humble.”
At The Philippine STAR employees’ appreciation party on the newspaper’s 25th year in 2011, Miguel Belmonte paused poignantly in his speech and said, “Without her, I am 100 percent sure that The STAR would not be here today.”
“Sunny & Sweet”
Betty would go down on her knees in prayer, but get back on her feet to work. She lived her Christian faith in every thing she did and lived by it, even when tested by physical suffering and death on Jan. 28, 1994.
Betty Go-Belmonte was born on Dec. 31, 1933, a day her father, the late Filipino-Chinese newspaper publisher Go Puan Seng (“Jimmy Go”) described as a “gay New Year’s Eve.”
“Sunny and sweet, she had brought us much happiness,” Jimmy Go wrote in his book, One in Faith, a chronicle of how faith kept the family going during the difficult war years in the Philippines.
Betty’s faith was inculcated in her by her parents, and was cemented by her own childhood experiences. During World War II, Jimmy Go took his family with him to the mountains, after being guided by a passage in the Bible that they should flee Manila. His wife Fely was a devout Christian, and it was she who brought Jimmy into the warm embrace of her faith.
Shortly after his family (Fely, Betty, Cecily, Dorcie, Elsie and Andrew) left their safe houses (they had at least two) in Manila, the Japanese raided them, reinforcing the family’s faith that the Lord, through the Bible, will always guide them towards the better choice. This unconditional trust in the guidance of the Lord was inherited by Betty, whose 60 years were a testament to her faith.
“In the end, I realized Betty was the saintly person she was because the Bible was the bedrock on which she lived her life,” wrote the late STAR columnist Teodoro C. Benigno, of Betty, in 1994.
Betty was on vacation in Baguio City when she would meet her future husband, Sonny, the son of a judge who was the friend of her father. They would marry in Taipei, Taiwan, a few years later.
Betty struck a healthy balance between home and career, and it would not be uncommon for visitors to see her bringing her toddlers to the office once in a while.
Speaker Sonny Belmonte once told me in an interview that he never asked Betty to give up her career and was proud of her many talents. (She took a leave from The STAR and campaigned by his side when he ran successfully for congressman of Quezon City in 1992.)
Aside from being editor of the Fookien Times Yearbook, Betty would also later on edit the Movieworld, the STAR! Monthly magazine and The Philippine STAR. She is perhaps the only woman who founded the two leading papers in modern Philippine history—The Philippine STAR and the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which she left to establish The Philippine STAR in July 1986.
Her husband was proud of her and supported her dreams. In fact, he helped make them come true from behind the scenes.
“My wife decides things based on her faith and sometimes I’m the instrument of faith because after she has decided it can be done, I sit down and figure out how to do it,” former Speaker Belmonte once told me.
Sonny said he and his wife “complemented each other” even if they were of different personalities. “But still, I understood her and she understood me. I wouldn’t even say we compensated for each other. We actually used each other’s strengths to make the other a better person,” he recalled.
He recounted that a family friend, former Foreign Secretary Bert Romulo, told him how amazed he was at the Belmonte couple’s compatibility. “Bert Romulo talked to me, and then he talked to Betty, on a different topic, at a different time and place. Then he commented to me, ‘I can see that there’s a lot of partnership between the two of you. Pareho kayo ng direksyon, pareho kayo ng values (you have the same direction, the same values), even if you apparently didn’t consult with one another, you gave the same answers’.”
“Betty had a lot of capacity and I thought it was a good thing for her to bloom…she had a lot more capacity than I thought. I knew what she was doing at work, but it turns out she was doing so many things in addition to that. She was helping hospitals, the Red Cross and stuff like that, hardly the subject of conversation between us.
“And later on, a lot of people would tell me they were friends, they corresponded, they talked, that sort of thing. She touched a lot of lives.”
In her farewell to her mother in 1994, Joy said, “Mom, you really loved everybody. Your heart went out to everyone with no exception. I still remember the time when I told you stories about all my students who were neglected or problematic. You told me to just bring them home with me to Manila and we would take care of them and bring them to school here. I thought you were kidding. Later, however, it did not surprise me to learn that you were serious, after all.”
Betty lives on through her family, The Philippine Star and all the publications it now includes, and through the multitudes saved by Operation Damayan, long after she has passed on. She will be remembered for being the guiding light of The Philippine STAR. She continues to be a star, her gentle, guiding light an eternal flame.
