WHISTLEBLOWERS ARE NOW AN ENDANGERED species in the Philippines. Jun Lozada, who exposed the NBN-ZTE broadband scam, and Rosebud as well as the other witnesses who revealed the operations of ?jueteng? underground lottery syndicates come to mind. They were witnesses of the state, invited to tell what they knew to members of Congress, and they were put under the Witness Protection Program; but after being milked of all the publicity by and for the senators and congressmen, the witnesses were dumped like dirty clothes on the excuse that there was no more money for their continued protection. Congress has billions of pesos for pork barrel, almost half of which goes to bribes, but it has no money to protect witnesses without whom the criminals and the corrupt will run roughshod over this nation?

Worse than being cast aside, whistleblowers are sometimes killed. Marlene Esperat, a provincial journalist, was shot dead right in front of her family in her own home for exposing the fertilizer scam for which former undersecretary of agriculture Joc-Joc Bolante is now on the dock. So were other journalists (more than a hundred as of last count) killed for doing their jobs, which is exposing wrongdoing. Few of their killers have been identified by the police, much less arrested or jailed.

What the government is teaching our people is that it doesn?t pay to be a tattletale. If you see any wrongdoing, play blind, deaf and dumb and you will live longer.

The latest victim of this see-hear-and-talk-no-evil policy is Felino Palafox Jr., the well-known architect, urban planner and environmentalist who exposed the planned razing of an urban forest in the Subic Bay Freeport to give way to a Korean-owned hotel-casino. Palafox was invited by the House of Representatives to its investigation of the Subic mess as a resource person. He was a guest of the congressmen ? he was not an accused ? and therefore should have been treated with courtesy. Instead, he was ganged upon and harassed by all but three of the congressmen present.

He didn?t want to name names but he was pressured by the congressmen to give them names, and so Palafox did so, but with the explanation that he had no direct knowledge of their involvement and that the names were just passed on to him by employees and residents of Subic. As a result of this, Palafox was sued for libel ? in Olongapo, hometown of the complainants ? and he has been getting death threats. All because he wanted to save some very big trees.

At the Kapihan sa Manila media forum last Monday, Palafox showed videos of the project site, the trees, architectural plans (both the original South Korean-made plan, which he was being forced to sign; and his own, which avoided the trees), the heavy machinery poised to uproot the trees, and a map of the Subic area.

The mature trees are really big, with trunks almost two meters in diameter. No way can they survive if they are balled and transferred elsewhere, as the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) claims would be done. The proposal that SBMA would plant a hundred tree seedlings for every mature tree removed is also a ?consuelo de bobo? [literally, fool?s consolation]. It would take many decades for those seedlings to grow as big as the trees that would be massacred.

The mystery is why the Koreans refuse to incorporate the trees into their architectural plans. That is now the modern trend in architecture. If they want to insist on their original architectural plan, they should move to another location where there are no trees. Subic has many open spaces.

This is the reason that has sent many tongues wagging. I don?t believe their speculations myself, but employees of Subic and residents of Olongapo say the Koreans are not really into hotel construction. They are into treasure hunting.

The Koreans believe, these people speculate, that part of the Yamashita treasure is buried under that urban forest. That is why they want to dig it up. Remember, they add, many of the Japanese occupation forces in the Philippines were Koreans. They probably still have copies of a map of the buried treasure in Subic, they say.

That speculation is probably 99 percent wrong, but if a former president of the University of the Philippines can believe that the Yamashita treasure was buried under Fort Santiago, why can?t Koreans believe that it is buried in Subic?

Anyway, because of Palafox?s opposition to the digging up of the urban forest, a propaganda, legal and harassment campaign has been launched against him. The propaganda says that he is blocking the Ocean 9 Casino at its present site because he wants it to transfer to Moonbay Marina where he owns stocks.

Palafox?s answer: The stocks, which have a monetary equivalent of only P1 million, were an advance payment for his architectural fees. The Subic Coast Development Corp. (SCDC) would later buy back those stocks from him.

?From the very beginning,? he said, ?when the executives of Ocean 9 were scouting for possible locations ... they immediately discounted the area ? because of the cemetery on one its borders which the Koreans said is bad ? feng shui.?

On the propaganda that there also was tree-cutting at Moonbay Marina, Palafox replied that upon instructions of SBMA, most of the trees became part of the design.

On the issue that Moonbay Marina was a nesting ground of turtles, Palafox showed photographs of Camachile Park (the original name of Moonbay Marina) before and after its development.

The ?before? photos showed that the area was a garbage dump for Olongapo City. ?With so much waste and rough surfaces, there was little possibility of turtles using it as nesting grounds.?

It was only after SCDC cleaned up the place that it became attractive to turtles.