Silencing the Critics

It's almost as dangerous to be a journalist in the Philippines as in Iraq, reports Gerard Noonan. Local politicians and strongmen are rubbing out their media critics with motorbike riding hitmen, whose
services can be bought for US$100.

By GERARD NOONAN
International Federation of Journalists
Posted by Bulatlat

Eleazar Binoya loves basketball. It's what the 15 year old lives for since his life came crashing down around him in June last year. Eleazar's father, Ely, a prominent radio journalist in General Santos City, a shambling town in the southern Philippines, was shot four times in the back by a masked assailant on a motorbike as he was riding home from work.

Binoya's murderers gunned him down in a ditch on the main road in the mid-afternoon traffic. Brazenly, one stepped off the bike and fired three more bullets into the mouth of the dying radio commentator. When police arrived, Binoya's papers were strewn over the road. They were mainly formal court documents: he had been on his way back home from the local Prosecutor's office where he had just lodged a formal complaint about being bashed by thugs employed by the local mayor Teodorico Padernillo. Binoya's tough commentaries on Radio Natin - part of the Manila Broadcasting Company - had targeted Padernillo and corrupt local police officials.

Ely Binoya was one of 13 Philippines journalists killed in the country last year. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), which totes up the number of journalists killed in the line of work each year, discovered to its surprise that the Philippines was second only to Iraq in the number of journalists killed in 2004.

Since the fall of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, there have been 66 journalists killed in the Philippines, all locals. In those two decades, just one solitary case has reached a prosecution in the courts.

This appalling record led the IFJ to organize a fact-finding mission in January this year to talk with the widows, families and working colleagues of the dead journalists. The IFJ also asked the Philippines' president, Gloria Arroyo, to meet the delegation, which included senior Australian, Indonesian and Philippines journalists.

Even for journalists well used to dealing with tough circumstances, the mission was a harrowing and humbling experience. As Binoya's widow, Grace, was telling her story, young Eleazar sat quietly beside his mother. Her testimony was given without flinching, but when she told of how the boy worshipped his father, a single tear trickled down her cheek.

The boy touched her gently on the shoulder, seemingly embarrassed by his mother's grief. With no income, Grace Binoya is forced to live on family charity. Eleazar's education will now almost certainly end.

Everywhere the delegation went - from General Santos City in Mindanao, Iloilo and Cebu in the Visayas, Legazpi in the Bicol region in central Philippines and in the capital Manila - the stories had an ominous familiarity.

Typically the journalists worked for a local radio station where they broadcast robust commentaries about prominent local identities. Few of the 66 murders documented by the IFJ's local affiliate the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines involved any suggestion of crossing paths with the tough mercenaries of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front or the New People's Army. These were journalists who had rubbed up local strongmen, politicians and police chiefs the wrong way.

In many cases, the broadcasters had been warned by wives or friends to ease up on their commentaries. Some had received death threats, either anonymously in telephone calls or via text messages on their mobile phones.

Traveling between their place of work and home, they would be at a set of traffic lights when an unidentified motorcycle rider with pillion passenger would pull up, unleash a volley of shots and speed off. In one case, the victim was shot while broadcasting in his radio studio.

Gemma Damalerio, widow of award-winning TV, radio and print journalist Edgar Damalerio in Pagadian City in Zamboanga, told the delegation her husband had shrugged off death threats he received in May 2002.

Damalerio had written and broadcast tough commentaries on the provincial governor and police over graft and the failure to crack down on illegal drugs and gambling rackets. Even though he was worried enough to travel with some friends, he was shot in his open vehicle by a masked motorcycle pillion passenger on his way back from a press conference late one evening.

Since then, Gemma Damalerio has waged an unsuccessful campaign to bring her husband's killers to justice. The main suspect is a local police intelligence officer, but after a brief detention he disappeared. During the time the delegation was in the Philippines, it learned that the key witness to the murder, a middle-aged teacher who was a friend of Damalerio and supposedly under police protection, was gunned down outside his school.

Local police were suspects in several murders. In one case examined by the IFJ delegation, the police chief of a local town is presently living with the widow of a murdered broadcaster. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the appetite of the local investigators to investigate and the prosecutors to prosecute is impaired by such arrangements.

In Legazpi, local journalists attending a press conference said US$100 would buy a "hit man" while one other source suggested the price was as low as US$80 in poorer regional areas.

As if to underscore this culture of violence, two mayors in major regional cities in late January were reported in the national media as saying that if anyone wanted to set up a vigilante squad to clean up unruly elements in their towns, they would turn a blind eye.

When mention was made of this extraordinary proposition by a member of the IFJ delegation during a media conference, the mayor of Davao City, Rodrigo Duterte, responded the following week by inviting the "idiot foreigners" to his city. "Let them come to Davao and maybe they will become part of it," Duterte was reported as saying.

The delegation late one night met a journalist who had heard the IFJ delegation was visiting a city four hours' drive from his own town. The journalist simply wanted to report his experience that a local police chief had called him in after a critical article appeared in his newspaper and forced him to eat the page of the paper containing the offending article.

It was situations such as these and, in particular, the failure of the Philippines judicial system to deal adequately with the murders which the delegation wished to discuss with President Arroyo or her representative. But despite an arrangement being made for the last day of the mission, an aide at the Presidential Palace called to cancel the meeting, with a brief statement saying that the government of the Philippines did not condone a culture of violence.

Meanwhile, activists in the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines continue their dangerous work raising awareness among their colleagues. They also use what influence they can muster to obtain some justice for the families of murdered journalists. On the numbers, it's a forlorn hope. But without journalists taking risks in the Philippines, and the disquiet of their colleagues abroad, young Eleazar and his mother can't hope to put the trauma of that June day behind them. Posted by Bulatlat

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