Part 2
A deadly country for journalists
The Philippines’s current ranking as 3rd (next only to Iraq and Syria), out of the 10 Deadliest Countries for Journalists, did not happen overnight. This shameless attack on press freedom and the painstakingly slow turn of the wheels of justice for slain journalists date way back to the Cory Aquino administration.
Thirty-four journalists who had exposed graft and corruption and other venalities of the Aquino government were murdered and many others were persecuted in the legitimate pursuit of their profession. In comparison, during President Ramos’s six-year term, 18 journalists were slain.
Of the 52 combined slain journalists in the Aquino and Ramos administrations, six were killed in Metro Manila, including two who were caught in the crossfire in the 1987 coup attempt; 22 were slain in Mindanao—five in Cotabato City, three each in the cities of Zamboanga, Davao, and Iligan; two each in Surigao and General Santos cities, and one each in Dipolog, Ozamiz, Basilan and Davao del Norte); 13 in Luzon (outside Metro Manila—three in Laguna, two each in Cagayan, Pangasinan, Isabela, Cavite and Lucena City; and 11 in the Visayas—including three in Cebu City, two in Iloilo and one in Tacloban.
Only a few of these killings saw resolution and, ironically, none of the cause-oriented groups that accused Marcos, and later Presidents Ramos and Estrada, of stifling freedom of the press or of human-rights violations had created even a whimper of protest during the time of Cory.
The respected columnist Ninez Cacho-Olivares commented years later, in July 1999:
“Chutzpah must truly be their middle name given that their leader, Aquino, while invoking the holy name of press freedom and democracy, willfully and unilaterally closed down two opposition newspapers during her regime: the Philippine Daily Express and the Times Journal… Apparently, to them it was wrong for Marcos to close down newspapers but right for Aquino to do the same.”
Only the late journalist Renato Constantino, the late Louie Beltran of the Philippine Star, Melinda Liu of Newsweek, Catherine Manegold and Luisa Torregosa of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bill Branigin of the Washington Post, Tom Breen of the Washington Times, Seth Mydan of the New York Times, Rigoberto Tiglao of the Far East Economic Review, Luis Teodoro of The Manila Times and this author had extensively written articles on human-rights violations during Cory Aquino’s watch.
The late Louie Beltran even faced a libel suit from Aquino, the first sitting President to file a libel case against a journalist, claiming her rights as a private citizen but, at the same time, invoking presidential immunity in a countersuit.
It was also during Aquino’s time of “freedom and democracy” that virtually all the electronic media were placed under the control of government and her political allies. Yet, many journalists either turned a blind eye or deliberately obfuscated issues in favor of the Aquino regime.
The rampant human-rights violation not only in the case of journalists, but more so in other neglected sectors of society, began to brew more social discontent, and so did the street protests started again to grow.
To be continued