Only 57 bodies were recovered from that horrible scene of a massacre. One body could not be found, testament to the callousness with which this outrage was inflicted.
As far as the tedious court proceedings are concerned, there are only 57 victims. If the 58th body could not be found, the 58th crime could not be established. That only magnifies the tragedy of this whole thing.
For all those who feel a personal injury from this outrage exactly a year ago, the number is 58. That must be the number of victims history will record for this day of ignominy.
One day after this horrendous crime, about a hundred of the perpetrators remain at large. The trial, as it always does in this country, proceeds at its painstakingly slow pace.
It always seems like this: a gruesome crime comes upon us so suddenly, unhinging our sense of normalcy, pushing all of us back on our heels, and then the pursuit of justice moves on at such a glacial pace we feel it might be denied.
Every section of our community that nurses a grievance finds a stake in denouncing a massacre unprecedented in scale, chilling in its brazenness and incomprehensible in its brutality. It could only have been done by the most perverse of men who imagine their power in the frame of a most perverse situation.
After the families of the victims, the community of journalists sustains the outcry over this massacre. This is because the biggest subset within this motley set of victims is composed of journalists. Most of them tagged along to partake of the generosity of the Mangudadatus who return the favor of their company with a small amount of money.
That small consideration, however, should not cloud the larger reason why the ill-fated convoy was populated with people who proudly wore press cards on their chests. They were invited to join that convoy on the assumption that their presence might deter evil men. The reporters joined not just to report on the fairly routine event of filing a candidacy. They joined to equalize the situation, to dissuade the strong from bullying the weak.
The murderers were obviously unimpressed by the presence of so many journalists in the ill-fated convoy. They might have been irritated by the fact that there were now more people to kill and more bodies to bury.
The irritation must not have been too serious. The murderers were prepared to bury a whole lot of people. They had a backhoe at the ready where the convoy was intercepted.
This massacre set the record for the number of journalists killed in a day. Even for a country that has seen journalists killed with such regularity in the line of duty, this is a horrific record. Because of this event, the Philippines was elevated to the status of most dangerous place for journalists to work in, far surpassing Iraq or Afghanistan.
The backdrop magnifies the significance of this event for journalists. It underscores the fact that in this country journalism is a hazardous profession.
We may have, as we love to tout, the freest press in Asia. But this claim is diminished by the fact that we pay for that freedom with so many lives each year.
The vigilance our media community exercises over the progress of the prosecution is not for the sake of the massacre victims alone. It is to condemn the prevailing condition marking every journalist as the next potential victim.
The second major subset of victims in this heinous crime is composed of women.
The presence of a large number of women in that ill-fated convoy was intended. The culture of the locality, as does the culture of most of humanity, frowns upon the commission of violence against women.
It was assumed (again, wrongly) that a convoy composed predominantly of women will dissuade evil men from whatever violent act they contemplate. The murderers were not impressed.
A convoy of unarmed women escorted by unarmed journalists was waylaid one year ago. A caravan of the powerless failed to evoke mercy from the insanely powerful. Plain humanity was a scarce commodity in Maguindanao that day.
This is more than just a case of excessive impunity. It is a case of excessive insanity.
However, there is little point in condemning pure insanity. When insanity leads to the commission of outrageous acts, this is merely unfortunate. When conditions are such that insanity is allowed (nay, encouraged) to inflict plain barbarity, it is those conditions that must be put on trial.
We pretty much know who is responsible for this massacre. There are only a few who are afflicted with such sense of impunity, who are capable of mustering the firepower to actually commit this act, and who are mad enough to even contemplate mass murder. Those few are all in custody.
One year after the Maguindanao Massacre, the real question to ask is: Have the conditions that allowed (nay, encouraged) this to happen been remedied?
Indeed, have we appropriately defined what those conditions are?
Immediately after this massacre happened, government organized an independent panel to look into the conditions that made such a horrendous incident possible (nay, even thinkable). That panel accomplished practically nothing before a new administration decided its work was unimportant and money will be saved by disbanding it.
Sure, we may still achieve the definition of the conditions that led to this tragic event and even devise mitigating measures to prevent its repeat. But the task will be animated in the main by sectarian or ideological interest. There will be no mechanism for collating the insight or for mobilizing a response.
This is the present misfortune compounding last year’s tragedy.