The Philippines is deadly for journalists

MANILA, Philippines — At around 1 a.m. on Aug 26, Orlando Navarro was on his way home when he was shot in the back by an unidentified gunman.

Prior to the attack, Navarro — a radio station manager and host of two daily programs — had exposed the proliferation of illegal drugs in this northern Philippine city.

The bullet nearly pierced his heart, but he survived. He believes his exposés were the cause of this attempt to end his life.

Just two months earlier, radio personality Nilo Baculo Sr. was shot dead in another Philippine city a hundred miles south of Manila. Baculo was the fourth journalist killed this year, the 25th during President Benigno S. Aquino III’s six-year tenure, and the 145th since the restoration of democracy in the country in 1986.

The Philippines was once regarded as having the freest press in Asia.

But these figures now make it one of the deadliest places in the world for journalists. Based on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2014 global impunity index, only Iraq and Somalia had worse records in terms of impunity for killing journalists. On this metric, the Philippines beat embattled Syria — notorious for journalists' being abducted or killed — which ranked fifth on the index.

The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR), a nonprofit organization that monitors and investigates violence against journalists in the Philippines, attributes the killings to a persistent culture of impunity — a consequence, it says, of weak rule of law.

Baculo's murder illustrates this.

As early as 2007, Baculo had found out about a planned attempt on his life, supposedly due to exposés on his radio show. He sought protection from the courts through a writ of "amparo," a legal remedy adopted by the Philippine Supreme Court precisely as a response to the rising number of media and extrajudicial killings in the country.

He was granted temporary protection by the Philippine Supreme Court, but the Court of Appeals denied his request for continuation of the writ on June 28, 2008.

President Aquino, in a radio interview after the shooting of Navarro, said the government does not tolerate the killings and is actively pursuing the perpetrators. He argued, however, that many of the killings are not related to journalism, citing various alleged personal motives.

Prof. Luis Teodoro of CMFR disputes Aquino’s assertion, noting that the Philippine government’s figures conflict with those compiled by CMFR and other media advocacy groups. Based on CMFR investigations, work-related killings outnumber non-work-related killings of journalists in the Philippines since 1986.

“Minimizing the problem by claiming that it isn’t as bad as it has been made out to be,” wrote Prof. Teodoro, “won’t make the problem go away, and could even make it worse.”

Of 145 alleged murders of journalists, only 14 cases have resulted in convictions. The latest was in January 2011.

Nov. 23, 2014 will be the fifth anniversary of the worst attack on the press in the history of the Philippines and perhaps in recent world history, in which a private armed group allegedly murdered 58 people, 32 of them journalists, in the town of Ampatuan, Maguindanao in the southern Philippines. The journalists were covering a local politician who was challenging the incumbent governor in the upcoming elections. The accused mastermind of the massacre was the incumbent governor himself and the members of his political family.

Until now, no one has been convicted.