Born in 1932 into the political dynasty that had controlled the politics of the Central Luzon province of Tarlac for decades, Ninoy Aquino has been described as a politician who knew even from childhood what he wanted to be, and that was President of the Philippines.

Aquino already knew the role the media could play in Philippine politics long before the rise of politicians elected to public office through exposure in television and film. His decision to interrupt his college studies to pursue a high-profile journalistic career by covering the Korean War in 1945 as well as other Southeast Asian countries has been widely interpreted as an attempt to get into the national limelight for the sake of a future career in politics. Only 22 years old, Aquino was a young man in a hurry who knew what he wanted.

If calculation his pursuit of a journalism career was, it was one that paid off, as the Manila Times, then the most widely circulated newspaper in the Philippines, published his dispatches first from Korea and later from Vietnam and Malaya to a readership to which his byline became one of the most popular. Later he exclusively covered, and also claimed credit for negotiating, the surrender of HMB (Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan–the New Peoples’s Army forerunner, Army for the People’s Liberation) leader Luis Taruc, thus boosting his popularity further.

Aquino began his political career as the governor of Tarlac province in 1963, or at the age of 31, and was elected a senator of the Republic four years later (1967) at 35. From the Senate, where he soon became one of the most visible members of the opposition (Marcos had been elected President in 1965), the road seemed clear to the Presidency of the Republic. Aquino rapidly became one of the most popular political figures in the country by, among other calculated means, appealing to the younger sectors of the electorate by taking up their most urgent concerns.

In an era when surveys were almost unheard of, Aquino relied on public opinion polls to guide him in discovering and addressing the issues that most appealed to the majority of the electorate. Not only the surveys guided him in the enterprise of stoking his popularity, however. He also had the sound instincts for the public pulse of someone who knew how to use current sentiments to his advantage.

This meant, between the years 1967 and 1972, active criticism of Marcos, who soon enough knew that Aquino was fast rising as his worst, because most popular critic. On the eve of the declaration of martial law in 1972, Aquino, reelected senator in 1971, told an interviewer that Marcos, for most of the electorate, had become the issue according to the surveys he had commissioned, which was why it was as a critic of Marcos that he was likely to gain the presidency.

There is almost no doubt that if the presidential elections of 1973 had taken place, Aquino would have won over any candidate from the Nacionalista Party, the rival for power of Aquino’s own Liberals (Marcos would have been disqualified from running by the 1973 Constitution). Aquino reached that level of popularity through the usual paths of cultivating a populist image through media that was both youthful as well as
businesslike and knowledgeable. It was a path his rival Ferdinand Marcos had taken himself, and which included, among other means, marriage to attractive, prominent women– Aquino to Corazon Cojuangco, and Marcos to Imelda Romualdez.

Aquino’s path to the presidency was blocked by Marcos’ declaration of martial law in 1972. But martial law was an event that forced Aquino, the traditional politician who would be president, into the thoughtful leader the opposition groups needed. One of the first to be arrested upon the imposition of martial rule on Sept. 21, 1972, Aquino’s detention as a high security prisoner seems to have given him not only the opportunity to read, but also to see himself in a new, historical light as the most visible symbol of opposition to martial rule, and as the political and social system’s last hope for survival.

His being sentenced to death on charges of subversion in 1977, as well as his leading the Laban (“Lakas ng Bayan”–The Nation’s Strength) campaign for seats in the rubber stamp Batasang Pambansa (National Assembly) in 1978 seem to have broadened his support further, which could explain why the Marcos regime
allowed him to leave in 1980 for medical treatment in the United States.

Once outside the country Aquino became the recognized leader of the opposition to Marcos, but realized that it was in the Philippines where his destiny awaited. He returned on Aug. 21, 1983, hoping to prevent the total military takeover he believed would be likely in the event of Marcos’ death, but was instead assassinated at the Manila, now the Ninoy Aquino, International Airport.

Aquino’s decision to return despite the risk of imprisonment or death, and his subsequent assassination, made him both martyr and hero, and sounded the death knell for the Marcos dictatorship. Although it would take three more years before the collapse of the Marcos government, his assassination in 1983 set into motion a series of events that inexorably led to the regime’s collapse, and to the restoration of the institutions of liberal democracy, in 1986. Warts and all, Aquino was an authentic Filipino hero.

In addition to his martyrdom’s being an occasion for national remembrance and celebration, Aquino’s story is also a lesson in how great events can awaken the best instincts of the unlikeliest of men and women. It suggests as well how the conventional concepts of the hero as one born heroic and untarnished by human flaw are themselves fatally flawed. To remember Aquino is thus to remember that the worst of times can result in the best of responses.

(abs-cbnNEWS.com. August 15, 2003)

These ethical and professional problems in the media, plus a host of others, are by themselves bad enough because they impede the flow of the information free men and women need to make decisions in a democratic setting. But what’s even worse is that the freedom the press claims to have recovered in 1986 is under direct and overt assault, and in a way far more damaging than being berated for “abetting rebellion” by the President of the Republic.

Since 1986, 41 journalists have been killed while on duty in the Philippines, all of them from the communities. In the first few years after the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship the killings, most of them perpetrated by local warlords and their henchmen, were dismissed as part of the hang-over of martial law, and part of the necessary pains of the transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Within a few years, however, specifically by 1991, when the number of journalists killed in the Philippines had risen to nearly two dozen, it had become evident that the number of deaths was beginning to surpass those during the martial law period, prompting the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists to describe the Philippines then as the world’s most dangerous place for journalists.

Since 1986 an average of three journalists have been killed in the Philippines. This year, however, six have so far been killed, doubling the average and raising the number killed in the line of duty from 36 to 42.

The most recent death occurred only a few days ago. In the evening of September 6, unidentified motorcycle-riding men shot and killed Juan “Jun” Pala while he was walking with two companions on his way home from a friend’s house in Davao City.

The controversial Pala, host of a radio show called “Isumbong mo kay Pala (Tell Pala),” had survived two earlier assassination attempts, one last year, and the second one only last April 29. Pala was once known as the spokesman of the vigilante group Alsa Masa, but as a broadcaster has been focusing on criticizing local officials, especially Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, whom last April Pala blamed for the failed attempt on his life.

Only last month, on August 20, Rico Ramirez, a radio reporter in San Francisco, Agusan del Sur, had been shot and killed by unknown assailants. His death had followed that of Noel Villarante, also a radio broadcaster and print columnist, only the day before in Santa Cruz, Laguna.

Bonifacio Gregorio of Tarlac City, Tarlac, was killed July 8 this year; Apolinario Pobeda of Lucena City, Quezon last May 17; and John Belen Villanueva Jr., of Legazpi City, Albay last April 28. All were either radio broadcasters or were in both print and radio, suggesting that it was for their radio commentaries — radio has the widest reach of all the media in the Philippines– that they had been targeted.

Ironically, the increase in the number of journalists killed this year compared to last year’s — when, in keeping with the average, three were killed in connection with their work as journalists — followed an alarm raised by several Philippine press freedom groups over the continuing assassination of journalists.

This alarm coincided with the Committee to Protect Journalists’ expression of grave concern in late 2001 over the situation in the Philippines, and was followed in January this year by the Philippines’ being listed as 86th — behind such other Southeast Asian countries as Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia — in the Press Freedom Index of the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres) which rates countries according to their level of press freedom compliance.

Last year the Philippine groups — among them the Philippine Press Institute (PPI), the Kapisanan ng Brodkaster sa Pilipinas (KBP), the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR), and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) — and several individuals formed the Freedom Fund for Filipino Journalists.

FFFJ initiated last January a dialogue with Interior and Local Governments Secretary Jose Lina and Philippine National Police officials to call for police action on recent as well as past killings, and specifically for the apprehension of the principal suspect in the killing of Pagadian City, Zamboanga del Sur’s Edgar Damalerio, also a broadcast and print journalist, who had been similarly shot to death.

Unlike in almost all of the past cases, at least two witnesses had identified one of the killers of Damalerio as a policeman in active duty. The suspect, however, managed to elude arrest early this year by disappearing from the police camp where he was supposed to be in the custody of his superiors.

The dialogue with Secretary Lina and the police resulted in a promise for the speedy investigation of the case and the apprehension of the principal suspect. The suspect, however, is still at large, and is in fact the subject of a “countdown for justice” in several newspapers, wherein his photograph is featured together with a report updated daily on the number of days he has remained at large despite a warrant of arrest issued against him.

The primary reason journalists are still murdered in the Philippines, by common agreement among international and Philippine press freedom groups, is impunity, which refers to the failure to prosecute and to punish those responsible for the murders. This is as true in the Philippines as in those other parts of the world — in Colombia, for example, where the drug problem has led to the killing of journalists on a scale similar to the Philippines — where the killing is continuing.

Not a single case of the 42 cases in the Philippines has been solved. No one has been arrested for any of those offenses except the occasional fall guy. No one has been prosecuted, and no one has been punished.

While this outstanding fact undoubtedly encourages those who want to retaliate against journalists for some reason or another, the killings are also indicative of the generally low levels of security available to everyone and not only to journalists in the Philippines specially in the countryside, where police and military officials are often in collusion with the local officials and criminal syndicates that journalists frequently target.

It is also true that, as some journalists’ groups like the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) have argued, the unsolved ambushes on, and murders of other citizens specially of activists and members of advocacy groups, the impunity with which security forces arrest and torture crime suspects and sympathizers of the Moro and communist insurgencies, have also encouraged the killers of journalists, which over the years have discovered that journalists do not have any special powers that could enable them to gain redress.

The killing of journalists in the Philippines is not only a serious matter that requires the attention of journalists and their organizations. It is also a symptom of a deeper problem of governance rooted in the failure of the justice system, starting with the police and security forces, to truly protect — and on the contrary even to attack — the very citizens whose rights and lives it is supposed to defend. Even more fundamentally do the killings put in serious question Philippine claims to democracy, because they target a fundamental right, the right to a free press, without which no society and no government can claim to be democratic.

(abs-cbnNEWS.com, September 10, 2003)

In early February, or four months ago, and only two months after she had announced her non-candidacy, for example, she suddenly took bag and baggage for Kuwait supposedly to reassure Overseas Filipino Workers there of their safety should the US attack Iraq–but right at the point when the final version of the Absentee Voting Bill was about to pass Congress.

In that context that trip could only have looked like an attempt to ingratiate herself with the OFW millions whose votes, if delivered and counted, could henceforth decide the outcome of any elections.

The consistency of her support for US war policy was equally suspect. The same Mrs. Arroyo who in 2002 welcomed US soldiers into the Philippines despite a possible violation of the Constitutional ban on foreign troops, early this year committed the Philippines to the so-called Coalition of the Willing, despite the possibility that a war in Iraq could spread throughout the Middle East and put in harm’s way the very same OFWs for whose welfare Mrs. Arroyo had taken the greatest pains to demonstrate concern.

In support of the US drive for war, last February she also chided the UN and urged it to use force against Saddam Hussein despite the demonstrated effectiveness of UN arms inspections. Her government followed that commitment to the use of force in Iraq by expelling an Iraqi diplomat for his alleged links to the Abu Sayyaf, in what looked like an attempt to validate US claims of links between Al Qaida and the Iraqi government.

Also in February, the Philippine military launched its now infamous Pikit offensive, which created tens of thousands of refugees, escalated the shooting war in Mindanao between the Armed Forces and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, and made the peace talks more problematic than it has ever been in years.

While Mrs. Arroyo did attempt at one point to rein in Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes, she almost immediately after gave the military carte blanche in continuing with the offensive, justifying it variously as defensive, and, on the eve of her departure for her May state visit to the United States, as a campaign to seek out the terrorists “embedded” in MILF ranks. Mrs. Arroyo indeed timed an order for a new offensive against the MILF with her departure for the US, as if to further convince her US patrons of her toughness against terrorism.

The offensive in Mindanao as well as the US visit were popular among the majority of Filipinos, according to the surveys, and Mrs. Arroyo seems to have been driven by that sense in adopting a get-tough policy with the MILF together with an unconditionally supportive one when it came to the United States.

Her frequent demonstrations of total support for the US also bore fruit not only in terms of US President George W. Bush’s declaring the Philippines a non-NATO ally, and his pledge of US military and economic aid, but also in the lavishness of her reception at the US capital. Mrs. Arroyo thus returned triumphant from her US visit–which for a non-candidate was distinguished by the political windfall of US support.

That visit now appears to have been a turning point in deciding whether Mrs. Arroyo will run in 2004 despite what she said last December. Its impact on her approval ratings is likely to be positive in a country where pro-Americanism is part and parcel of the political culture. It is thus no coincidence that the enthusiasm among her partisans in Malacanang and Congress in pushing for an Arroyo candidacy in 2004 reached fever pitch immediately after her US visit.

The result has been her almost certain candidacy in 2004. The year 2003 had begun with none of the “groundswell” that her supporters now say justifies her candidacy. There was none of the endorsements she has received from US President George W. Bush, as well as, allegedly, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Muhamad Mahathir, and none–this also from her partisans–of the improvement in her approval ratings in the public opinion surveys.

She now has all that in her pocket–plus a political landscape equally favorable, among them the disunity within the opposition, and the threat of a split within the administration coalition. Mrs. Arroyo thus has every reason to “change her mind.”

That very possibility has been assailed as well as defended, although it could be argued that it might not be a case of her changing her mind, but of proceeding to the next phase of a crafty strategy meant to silence critics, buy enough time to boost her approval ratings, and then run anyway.

Whether she would be indeed changing her mind, or merely proceeding as planned, Mrs. Arroyo’s detractors say nevertheless that she would be violating her word of honor if she runs in 2004–as if words of honor have ever mattered in Philippine politics, in the practice of which more pledges than the stars in the sky–pledges based on honor, country, God and motherhood–have been violated since the Commonwealth period.

Mrs. Arroyo could indeed “change her mind”. She would have every right to do so. Perhaps it would be just as well that she did.

The outcome of an Arroyo candidacy in 2004 would be the survey to end all surveys on the Arroyo administration’s performance since it came to power in 2001. It would finally lay to rest the question of whether on balance it has been, as its partisans claim, a real alternative to the mismanagement and corruption of the Estrada years, or whether it has brought the country to far greater ruin than Joseph Estrada and his cohorts would have ever been capable of.

It would be a test, finally, of whether what matters to this country’s electorate is not food on the table, its safety at home and in the streets, and a predictable future, but total commitment to the interests of a foreign power, and to the use of force as an instrument of policy not only in Mindanao but in other areas of conflict.

The results could be as expected and not pretty. Mrs. Arroyo could yet win in 2004. In such an event the country would have clear evidence not only how easily an uninformed electorate can be manipulated into approving even those policies contrary to its interests; it would also once more demonstrate the persistence and triumph of traditional politics.

Lest we forget, it was that very politics Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo vowed to eradicate when she took power in January 2001–and the very same politics she then proceeded to champion with fierce devotion.

(abs-cbnNEWS.com)

But from the minute Malaca

Former Abu Sayyaf hostage Raul Recio agreed with Burnham that there was indeed Abu Sayyaf-military collusion, as claimed by Burnham in her newly released book on her captivity by the Abu Sayyaf, In the Presence of My Enemies.

Recio, a travel magazine publisher who paid the ASG a P1 million ransom in exchange for the release of his sister-in-law in December 2001( he and his wife escaped from the Abu Sayyaf in June that year), had claimed before a 2002 hearing of the Senate Committees on Defense, Justice and Human Rights that certain military officials were in league with the bandits. He arrived at that conclusion, he said, because the Abu Sayyaf had somehow managed to escape from Lamitan, and because it would regularly come upon food and government-issued medicine along the roads or trails they passed.

Recio also told the media that Burnham had told them, as she claims in her book, that it was the military that killed her husband and wounded her last year during the attack by a military rescue team on the ASG.

According to Recio, Burnham had told them exactly that during a conversation she had with other ex-hostages in Manila shortly before she was flown home to the United States last year.

Also a former hostage of the Abu Sayyaf, Fr. Cirilo Nacorda, parish priest of Lamitan, Basilan, had earlier claimed the same collusion. He had accused ranking military officers before the same Senate Committee of sharing ransom payments with the Abu Sayyaf, and of receiving bribes from them in exchange for their escape from the siege of Lamitan.

The Burnhams, Recio, his wife and his sister in law, as well as other hostages were abducted by the Abu Sayyaf from the Dos Palmas resort in Palawan, and then taken to Lamitan. Recio and his wife escaped from the Abu Sayyaf in Lamitan, where Father Nacorda was briefly taken hostage.

Recio

No other phrase describes a situation in which men and women identified with various militant legal organizations have been arrested and tortured, and in some cases have been murdered or even disappeared without a trace, as happened in Central Luzon last year, when some two dozen leaders of militant groups were killed.
Or a situation in which the security guards of private companies can charge the picket lines of striking workers and maim them at will while the police look on; or a state in which, whether in city or countryside, and even in the most crowded streets, people can be ambushed, kidnapped, robbed and killed with impunity.

Only a state of lawless violence describes the impunity with which community journalists are being killed in this country at an average of three a year since 1986.

Only that state can describe the fact that in the two cases of murdered journalists last year, in which a broadcaster in San Pablo City, Laguna, and a newspaper editor in Pagadian City, Zamboanga del Sur, were killed? the first on a busy street in the early evening and the second on an equally busy street in broad daylight?no one has been taken into custody and tried.

In the case of Edgar Damalerio of Pagadian, witnesses had identified the prime suspect as a policeman. He has been charged and was confined to a police camp, from which he conveniently disappeared once a warrant for his arrest was issued by a local judge. Despite urgent appeals to the Department of the Interior and Local Government and the Philippine National Police by Damalerio’s widow and colleagues as well as several media groups, the suspect is still to be apprehended, and is suspected to be under the protection of his associates and superiors in the police.

Of course it’s not just journalists who’re urdered in Philippine streets. Bodies turn up regularly in Metro Manila, usually the victims of either professional criminals or, even more regularly, of police vigilantes. In almost every case, no one is brought to justice, leaving the kin of those murdered to lament the lack of simple justice in this country.

All over the Philippines the evidence mounts. Despite a well-developed legal system, which includes a hierarchy of courts run by more or less competent men and women, despite the penal code and a prosecution system in place since before independence, and despite its many laws guaranteeing due process, life, and liberty, lawlessness and its companion, violence, have become the rule rather than the exception in Philippine society.

One is thus tempted to urge the President to declare the entire country to be in a state of lawless violence, which would merely describe its current state. Except that such a declaration would probably result in more lawlessness rather than less, among other reasons because such a declaration, as in Davao, would empower the police and the military even further, encouraging both to take those legal short cuts that, by demonstrating to the citizenry that their rights exist only on paper, fuel rebellion and armed resistance.

That the police and the military will interpret any declaration of an emergency anywhere as a license for their own brand of lawless violence is evident in Davao City, where police and military raids on citizens’ homes have continued despite the complaints of Muslim leaders that their communities are being singled out for harassment. Several people have also been abducted from the communities, for which residents blame the police and military, although they have denied the charge.

Before the complaints of harassment and abductions, Davao officials have reacted with what amounts to resignation and a confession that they’re powerless. The Davao City prosecutor, for example, limited himself to advising the Muslim community to file complaints of violation of domicile against police and military teams that have been entering homes at will. Heavily armed soldiers, say human rights groups, raided a coastal community in Davao only last week, and without the benefit of any document, searched residents’ homes?and, as if the country were still under martial law, “invited” community leaders for questioning.

The Arroyo declaration of a state of lawless violence in Davao City was prompted by the bombings at the Davao airport and the Davao wharf?bombings which have been blamed on the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, whose involvement is at the very least unverified.

Apparently, the police and the military are eager to show results in their hunt for the bombers. To do that they have resorted to the usual shortcuts that amount to the use of the very same lawless violence they’re supposed to curb, in effect attempting to combat terrorism with terrorism. The violence and lawlessness thus continue, not only from the usual suspects from the armed Muslim and Left groups, but also from the very agencies charged with implementing the law.

In Mindoro, however, lawless violence by police and military elements is going on without the benefit of any declaration. The murder of human rights activist Eden Marcellana and peasant leader Eddie Gumanoy are only the most recent manifestations of that state.

While the military command in Mindoro has denied the involvement of any of its troops or units in the abductions and killings, only the military stood to benefit from them. That alone provokes enough suspicion that at least some soldiers, or even units of the military in Mindoro are involved.

That the abductors went out of their way to describe themselves as members of the vigilante group Alsa Masa, which has never operated in Mindoro, reinforces that suspicion further, as does the military’s dismissal of the charge that it was responsible.

Col. Jovito Palparan, commanding officer of the 204th Army Brigade in Mindoro, went as far as to imply that the killings were justified when he told the media that the groups to which Marcella and Gumanoy belonged had been “coddling” guerrillas of the New People’s Army, and that they had been killed by citizens tired of NPA depredations.

The more likely reason for the killing of Marcellana was that she was in the forefront of a human rights campaign in Mindoro, in which her organization, Karapatan (Rights) has documented hundreds of human rights violations since 2001, all of them attributed to the units of the 204th Brigade and to the paramilitary groups under its command. On the eve of her murder, Marcellana was also scheduled to appear before the Commission on Appointments in Manila to argue against the promotion to one-star general of Colonel Palparan.

While these do not provide conclusive proof that the military was responsible for the killings of Marcellana and Gumanoy, they do at least suggest the possibility. They also suggest that, given this country’s experience both past and current?the police and the military, the government’s own Human Rights Commission has consistently found, are the leading violators of human rights in the country?much of the appalling lawless violence that afflicts it could be reduced by the civilian authorities’ exercising greater control over the very agencies charged with curbing violence and implementing the law.

The alternative is more rather than less of the lawless violence threatening to turn not only Davao and Mindoro, but other parts of the country as well, into a showcase of police and military terrorism and abuse.

(abs-cbnNEWS.com, April 24, 2003)