Luis V. Teodoro » Interesting Times for Journalists

By Luis V. Teodoro

As if to announce to the country and the world that being attacked for doing their jobs is still a fact of journalists’ lives in the Philippines, an assassin riding pillion on a motorcycle shot dead a radio broadcaster in Davao City last Christmas eve.

Francisco Lintuan was killed in his car when he stopped at an intersection, and was probably slain for his commentaries, thus making him the second journalist killed in the line of duty this year. Carmelo Palacios, another broadcaster, was killed last April 18 in Nueva Ecija’s Cabanatuan City. Both were noted for their harsh criticism of local corruption.

International media watch groups had earlier noted “improvement” in the Philippine press situation as far as the killings were concerned, since Palacios was the only press casualty for 2007 as December approached.

The same groups had also expressed optimism that the situation would continue to improve compared to 2006. Presidential spouse Mike Arroyo had withdrawn the 11 libel suits he had filed against 46 journalists, two suspects in the 2001 killing of an Aklan journalist had been arrested, and government hostility towards the media seemed to be abating. In 2006 anti-media government policies put the Philippines in these groups’ lists of countries where the press was only “partly free,”

But the arrest of over 30 journalists and media technicians covering the Peninsula Hotel incident last November 29 dampened the optimism, and so has Lintuan’s killing. All’s not well in the prosecution of journalists’ killers either, in which the culture of killer impunity, the result of the intricate web of police-judiciary-local interest collusion, is not only alive but thriving.

An eyewitness in the May 2006 killing of Palawan broadcaster Fernando Batul was thus prevented from testifying in the trial of a former police officer for the killing. Ferdinand Bayles was instead arrested on the strength of a 1998 warrant for alleged involvement in an illegal cockfight.

Prosecution lawyers said there has been “a consistent attempt” to prevent their witnesses from testifying, and cited two previous attempts to block their witnesses, which, however, they managed to prevent.

Tactics such as this have resulted in only two convictions of journalists’ killers since 1986, despite such bright spots as the arrest of two suspects in the 2001 killing of Aklan journalist Rolando Ureta.