Media Killings Continue in the Philippines

By Nonoy Espina

It is to be expected that when President Benigno Aquino III visits Europe, he will boast of his administration’s great strides in ridding the Philippines of corruption, resuscitating its economy, establishing peace in the troubled south, and uplifting the lives of the people. What will be left unsaid or, at best, glossed over, is the river of blood that continues to flow through our 7,100 islands, the thousands of lives claimed by extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances, all of which continue to cry out for justice, the battered minds and bodies ravaged by torture and inhuman incarceration, the cries of hunger and despair of communities driven from their homes to satisfy the greed of large mining and agricultural firms. It is also likely that nothing will be said about the 171 journalists who have been murdered since 1986, when the country was supposed to have wrested back its democracy after 14 years of dictatorship. Indeed, this is one of the many contradictions that mark life in this supposed bastion of democracy in Southeast Asia – that the country that is home to what many call the most vociferous, some even say licentious, press in the region, continues to lose so many journalists to targeted killings, all but a handful of which have been solved. And of the 11 cases in which convictions have been secured, the only ones found guilty have been the gunmen. Not a single mastermind has yet to be tried, convicted and jailed.

Two cases are notable in this regard. On March 2, 2005, Marlene Esperat, a community newspaper columnist who had exposed corruption within the Department of Agriculture, was shot dead as she sat down to dinner with her children in their home in Tacurong, Sultan Kudarat. The three gunmen accused of carrying out the murder have been convicted. But the alleged masterminds, Osmeña Montañer and Estrella Sabay, regional officers of the department, have successfully managed to evade arrest through legal maneuvers and continue to report for work. On January 24, 2011, Gerardo Ortega, a radio host and environmental activist in Palawan, was shot dead as he shopped for clothes in Puerto Princesa City.

Almost immediately, the team of hired guns who carried out the hit were arrested and named former Palawan governor Joel Reyes and his brother Mario as the ones who ordered Ortega killed. But days after a warrant of arrest was issued against them, the Reyes brothers managed to flee the country with the help of crooked immigration authorities. They remain at large to this day. Indeed, these two cases illustrate why journalists’ murders – and human rights abuses in general – continue to be committed with impunity. This is not to say that media killings appear to be part of an officially sanctioned campaign, unlike the murders and abductions of activists, which even United Nations special rapporteur Philip Alston noted, following a 2007 visit of the Philippines, were tied up to a government counterinsurgency strategy that included leaders and members of legal organizations openly labeled by the security forces as “legal fronts” of the rebels as targets. Media killings – and the apparent apathy our government has consistently shown in the face of a phenomenon any genuine democracy would consider an outrage – are the result of a corrupt system of governance. It is what the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines describes as a governance of expedience through which the central government in Manila allows the warlord and criminal politicians to amass ill-gotten wealth and build powerful private armies maintain control in the provinces and regions they control in exchange for their loyalty and votes. It is a system of governance that made inevitable the worst incident of electoral violence in recent Philippine history and the single deadliest attack on the press, the November 23, 2009 Ampatuan massacre in Mindanao’s Maguindanao province, which claimed the lives of 58 people, 32 of them media workers.

The accused masterminds come from a clan that had ruled Maguindanao for a decade, amassing a fortune and maintaining a private armed force that ran to the thousands, and who could not allow any challenge to their almost absolute power. It is a system of governance Aquino has done nothing to change, notwithstanding his promises of reform. Aquino, whose father was a former senator whose 1983 assassination by the forces of the dictator helped spark the uprising that ended totalitarian rule three years later, paving the way for his mother to become the first woman president of the country, campaigned for the presidency on a platform of justice, human rights and transparency. However, since he became president in 2010, already 30 journalists have been murdered, a record second only to that of his predecessor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whose nine-year presidency saw a total of 103 journalists killed, including the 32 of the Ampatuan massacre. Not only that, Aquino, who also promised to enact a Freedom of Information Law, has so far not delivered on his pledge but has signed an anti-cybercrime law that press freedom and free expression advocates say threatens freedom of expression.

As for reforming the corrupt system of governance, Aquino has shown himself long on words and words alone. His vaunted anti-corruption crusade has turned into a witch-hunt against political opponents even as he has brazenly ignored all calls to investigate and prosecute his allies. Worse, he has taken a “with us or against us” attitude, branding all those who question or criticize him as forces of corruption and discord. This includes an increasingly critical media, which has called him out on his double standards and question his priorities. It is an attitude that has further emboldened those who would seek to silence their critics in media. But perhaps nothing best illustrates Aquino’s attitude towards the murder of journalists as his reply to a question from Fox News’ Ed Henry during a joint press conference with visiting US President Barack Obama in April. Henry asked what Aquino’s administration was doing about what at the time were the 26 media killings under his watch, noting that suspects in only six of those murders had been arrested. Responding to the question, for which he was obviously unprepared, Aquino went on to flub the figures of the worst media massacre in history by saying: “Now, as far as journalists are concerned, perhaps the track record speaks for itself.

The Maguindanao massacre involved something like 52 journalists, and there are presently something like over 100 people who have been indicted for this crime and are undergoing trial.” Not only that, he was also wrong in the number of indictments, which is way less than a hundred of the more than 190 suspects, roughly half of whom are still at large. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, he went on to tell Henry – and the whole world – that the reason there appeared to be no progress in solving the murders of journalists was because “we do not reveal the discoveries by our intelligence agencies and security services, perhaps (because) we are very sensitive to personal relationships by the people who are deceased who were killed not because of professional activities, but, shall we say, other issues.” It was a statement that understandably outraged Philippine media. As the NUJP said: “While it may be true that there are those in our ranks targeted for reasons other than the work they do, such a wholesale aspersion cast on the victims practically amounts to an attempt to justify their murders.” It doesn’t take a genius to see that this dismal state of affairs will continue for the last two years of Aquino’s term and beyond, unless a leader bold enough or a people who have reached the end of their rope decide to forge a better system of governance. In the meantime, the record below speaks for itself. We ask: Can a country that allows the murder of so many of its journalists still be a democracy?