A dangerous profession

E·N·Q·U·I·R·Y
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL

A dangerous profession
Sunday, 04 17, 2005

The pen is mightier than the sword. Wielded with courage and determination, the pen can right wrongs, push back the powers of darkness and oppression and bring them into the cold unforgiving light of truth. The ilustrados of the Propaganda Movement in the 1880s were well aware of the enlightening powers of the exposés they wrote in La Solidaridad. Rizal’s Noli and Fili were by themselves extended exposés about the cancer of corruption and oppression that festered within the Philippines during the Spanish rule.

So it would seem that investigative journalism had been practiced by Filipinos long before the term was coined. The atmosphere for free expression even got better under the democratic environment introduced by the Americans. The Philippine press enjoyed the distinction of being the most vibrant, the most dynamic, the hardest-hitting press this side of Asia. No cow was too sacred; the courageous journalist simply took the bull by the horns and wrestled it to the ground.

But wait. A grievous turn of events has been happening these past 20 years. The sacred cows - or the attack dogs of these sacred cows - have decided that a journalist nosing about into their turf is definitely a threat to their comfort and well-being. What’s more, they decided that a well-aimed slug to the head or a well-administered blow to the body is all it takes to blunt the might of the pen of these journalists.

In the case of Marlene Esperat, her pen was not only blunted; it was forever stilled. She will write no more about the worms and cankers that infest the government. Like others before her in that steadily lengthening roster of murdered crusading journalists, Marlene is now effectively silenced. Her murderer must have derived grim satisfaction as he reported to his masters how the bullet tore through Marlene’s eye, rendering it incapable of witnessing any further the evil that men do, how the bullet crashed into her brain, reducing it into a mass of useless, splattered tissue.

Marlene will write no more about the shenanigans in the Department of Agriculture. Somebody silenced her, just so she would not expose the politician’s sibling, or the politician himself, or the factotum of the politician’s spouse, or the factotum’s surrogate, and so on down the line, all of whom were subjects of her mighty pen when she was alive.

Marlene had said as much when she talked to me for the last time sometime last February. She had been acting like a scared mouse ever since she wrote those explosive articles in Midland Review and filed cases, backed by damning evidence, against the powerful and mighty. With dread foreboding, she had mentioned names of people of consequence who should be investigated in case something happened to her “anytime soon” - which makes me now agree with Justice Secretary Raul Gonzales that the investigation into the circumstances of her death has to continue. The investigators should look deeper, despite the arrest of the suspected triggerman.

The parallel investigation in aid of legislation promised by Senator Nene Pimentel would be interesting, not so much in what it could do to fast-track the passage of the “Whistleblower’s Protection Act” but more in what it could probably unearth by way of exposing “who is behind the triggerman.” The continued, premature statements about a hasty solution to the killing of Marlene can only lend to public cynicism when the facts surrounding her killing are eventually unearthed.

There have been at least 66 journalists - all of them reporting vigorously against corruption - killed since February, 1986, 13 of them last year alone and 3 already this year. This amply demonstrates that crusading journalists exist at their own risk until they are either neutralized through threats and intimidation or are silenced forever through grave physical harm or death.

And just as Rizal, del Pilar and their fellow indios bravos were considered enemigos del estado during their day, it does not help that a recent PowerPoint presentation by the military considers some journalists as “enemies of the State.” This present-day view of the military should scare the bejesus out of every crusading journalist, since it would encourage every crooked politician or erring government official to complacently order the liquidation of inquisitive writers and broadcasters since, according to the military, they are enemies of the State anyway.

So, even as the police were gleefully congratulating themselves and patting each others’ backs on the announcement that Marlene’s killing had already been solved with the arrest of the triggerman, crusading broadcaster Alberto Martinez, also of Mindanao, was shot. Martinez was lucky enough to have survived the ambush; but the very fact that it did happen in the heat of the Esperat investigations, augurs of more terrible things to come to our journalists.

Certainly, the investigation into the killing of Marlene being followed by the ambush of Martinez exposes the weakness - others would even say, reluctance - of the military or the police in their duty to keep journalists like Marlene and Martinez alive and well. Marlene was given security protection, all right. But how come there was a breach of that security, allowing her to be mercilessly and methodically murdered right in her dining room, when all along the suspected triggerman had already been noticed to be reconnoitering her place three weeks before she was slain? Was she an enemy of the State? Or, put differently, is the State now protecting her enemies?

Journalists are getting to be the most endangered species of professionals today. They have to band together, if they are to achieve justice for those who have been felled by the killer’s bullet or maimed by the paid thug’s fists, if they want to save those among them who are determined still to continue with their crusade against corruption and oppression. The threat of bodily harm or certain death must not deter them; for it has been rightfully said: “You have not conquered a man just because you have silenced him.”



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