The murder of 54 journalists since ‘liberation’ from tyranny doesn’t signify freedom of speech

How can we talk about having a "free press" in this country when journalists are being murdered right and left?

A few days ago, Arnel Manalo was gunned down by motorbike-riding assailants in Batangas. His assassination occurred only five days after Roger Mariano, a radio reporter in Ilocos Norte, was shot down. Before the latest two were "executed" by thugs, Ruben Endrinal, a newspaper publisher and radioman in Legazpi, had been shot to death last February, and last June, Ely Binoya of Radio Nation was slain in South Cotabato.

That brings the score for the year to four. The National Union of Journalists has announced that Manalo was the 54th journalist killed since "People Power" toppled the tyrant Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. In short, our liberation from a dictatorship which muzzled the press and put journalists in jail or "salvaged" them brutally did not result in freedom. Theoretically, "free speech" had been restored – but not freedom from fear. Which means that free expression continues to be cruelly muzzled.

Since the Manalo murder, two Cebu radiomen, George Benaojan and Saul Carillo – reporter and anchorman, respectively, of El Nueva Bantay Radyo – and a friend, who happened to be with them, were fired upon by three men in Cebu City – but this time one of the journalists was himself armed, and allegedly "scared" off their assailants by firing his own .45 caliber pistol.

What should bother us, really, is that very few, in fact, almost none of the slaying of journalists had been solved. In a number of instances, the victims were given vilified by police investigators hinting that they had been involved in less-than-journalistic activities.

The stark fact remains that editors, reporters, and publishers (mostly from what we call the "provincial press", the guys who are on the frontlines/in the trenches of journalism) continue to fall in their fight to report honest news or express fearless views.

Is this freedom? During the more than a dozen years in which we languished in the darkness of Marcos’s martial law, 32 – yes, thirty-two – journalists were killed. A large number, as I mentioned above, by salvaging, a quaint term evolved during martial law to describe how men and women were kidnapped at gunpoint by military assassins, then found dead in a meadow or in a creek, their wrists bound behind them with wire or twine. How tyranny corrupts the dictionary, while savaging human life!

In 1994, speaking before the PANPA, the Publishers’ Association of Australia, at its convention held in the Conrad Jupiters’ Hotel in the Gold Coast, I had reported that the life expectancy of journalists during "freedom time" hadn’t improved during the Presidency of Corazon C. Aquino, the fighting lady who had led us to depose Macoy and his conjugal hegemony. I said at the time that 27 more journalists and editors had also been ambushed, assassinated, or murdered in a span of only six years. We newsmen, quite obviously, are not the darlings of the insurance profession.

And now that death toll has risen to 54.

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What’s uncanny is that the latest fatality in Tanauan, Batangas, Arnel Mariano, was murdered in the same manner that a courageous trial court judge, Butch Rosario, was assassinated by a motorbiking hitman and his back-up associates – not far away – while he was driving home from his courthouse.

Up to now, that brave judge’s assassination, which took place in mid-July, has not been solved – and his killers and the mastermind (perhaps one of the depraved men he locked away in prison) have not yet been identified.

In sum, since there is neither justice nor retribution – I like the sound of the latter so you can dun me as an Ilocano "barbarian" – the killers in this country know no fear. They murder with impunity. This is the time for us to declare: No more!

Yet, sadly, there will be more.

I remember, for some strange reason, our 42nd general assembly of the International Press Institute held in Venice (Italy) in May 1993, at which I was one of the main speakers. In his valedictory address, the outgoing I.P.I. director, Peter Galliner, had deplored the fact that 40 journalists and media persons had already been killed at that point while covering the terrible little war in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Now that "peace" has come to Bosnia, who remembers that horrible war – and the many journalists who were killed covering it? The wars have moved on to Afghanistan and Iraq, and possibly – if the flashpoint ignites and United Nations warnings are ignored even to Darfur in the Sudan (where hundreds of thousands of helpless refugees are being massacred). This is a troubled planet, torn by many hatreds, and journalists happen to be right in the middle of everything.

People like to talk, indeed sneer, about "the power of the press". The press is not bullet-proof. However, its power – ephemereal, though it may be – really exists in its credibility. Truth will prevail, as the Bible says. But not immediately.

One of the brave heroes of our own press, I can recall, very vividly, was Leo Enriquez. He had been a young, militantly outspoken radio reporter in Cebu and a correspondent for a Manila daily. I had sworn him in only a month earlier as vice-president for Eastern Visayas of the National Press Club.

At that oath-taking he had told me: "Sir Max, I’m wholeheartedly with you in our fight for justice, no matter what it costs." This devotion cost him everything.

On October 13, 1987, he was walking from his home to the bus stop when his killers intercepted him. He didn’t have a chance – he was felled in a fusillade of bullets. His murderers were later pinpointed as "Sparrows", the hatchetmen of the Communist New People’s Army.

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Two lawyers – Susmariosep, what will we do with our 50,000 heat-seeking lawyers? – are now trying to resurrect the Fernando Poe Jr. "citizenship" case as an inane argument that FPJ has no right to protest being cheated in the last election. Wasn’t that case already decided with finality? By golly, this sordid mess which we ludicrously call a "democracy" doesn’t seem to abide by the rule of law – but is being jerked around by "the rule of lawyers".

By all means, let the FPJ protest proceed. It is a disservice to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whom everybody already obviously accepts as being duly elected, to attempt to clumsily and irritatingly derail her foremost rival’s legitimate attempt to have the election re-examined.

The FPJ-Loren Legarda protests are important because it’s high time we placed the dubious practices of our Commission on Elections under a microscope. If the people don’t trust the Comelec, then they’ll have no faith in our democracy – and we won’t have the hope of a snowflake in hell of building ourselves, in this land, "a strong Republic".

The most severe indictment against the Comelec was leveled a few weeks ago by FPJ’s eminent and fearless lawyer, Sixto Brillantes Jr., who – in a radio interview – described the present Comelec as "the worst" in the history of that Constitutional body. Brillantes is not an abogado de campanilla – or to invoke that almost forgotten term – an ambulance chaser. If you’ll recall, his late father, the much-respected Sixto Brillantes Sr. was chairman of the Comelec in his day. His brother is the equally hardworking, devoted Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs for overseas workers (did I get his title right?), my cousin, too, Jose "Chito" Brillantes, our former Ambassador to Malaysia.

To stress his point, lawyer Sixto Brillantes announced that after the FPJ electoral protest is concluded, he will stop his law practice at the Comelec because, he alleged, it is not the law or jurisprudence that counts with the current Comelec, but case "fixing" or lakaran.

Do many election lawyers and candidates who’ve filed protests agree with Brillantes’ pejorative description of the poll body? You’ve only got to cock an ear to harken to the widespread complaining and criticism. Even members of the Supreme Court seem to agree, if one goes by the number of decisions by which the High Tribunal overturned Comelec decisions and acquisitions in language reeking with indignation. (For example, the decision penned by Justice Artemio Panganiban annulling the one-billion-peso Mega Pacific automated counting machine contract).

It’s a growing consensus that no electoral reforms will be possible unless the poll body’s membership is revamped. It’s a lame excuse to say that the Comelec’s members have a fixed constitutional term. I hope that in the near future, the Supreme Court will have the opportunity to test a shaky legal proposition which is apparently out of whack – namely, that commissioners of the Commission on Elections will have to be impeached first before they can be criminally prosecuted. This legal presumption is, to my view, what emboldens too many constitutional officers to commit graft and blatantly siphon off hundreds of millions of pesos while in office – "confident" of their immunity.

It’s high time the High Tribunal set the record straight on this issue.

Yet, the Ombudsman, the Hon. Simeon Marcelo, is reputedly (sources say) of the mind that Comelec members cannot, as yet, be prosecuted for deals like the Mega Pacific Consortium "scam" (as suggested by the Supreme Court) until after they are impeached. I trust this inclination not to prosecute is not affected by the fact that all the members of the poll body are GMA appointees.

The election is over, dubious as the ballot may have turned out in some places. It’s imperative that we begin thinking earnestly and soberly of the next election. Otherwise, as everybody knows, there might be aroused a "Messianic temptation" on the part of people with guns to "save" our so-called democracy.