Unabated butchery

No matter the familiarity of the tale, the general sameness of the circumstances, its retelling retains the power to shock and curdle the blood. Christopher Guarin, publisher and editor in chief of the local daily tabloid Tatak in General Santos City, is the latest Filipino journalist to die by an assassin’s hand. As Guarin was driving his wife and daughter home to their subdivision at 10 p.m., two motorcycle-riding gunmen overtook their car and fired at him. Wounded, the 41-year-old journalist managed to jump out of the car and run, apparently to lure the killers away from his family. He was mercilessly pursued and shot repeatedly, in front of his wife, who suffered a superficial wound, and his 9-year-old daughter who, mercifully, survived unscathed.

Hours before the killing, Guarin had read on his evening radio talk show the latest death threat he had received on his mobile phone. He had been a frequent target of such threats, he said. He probably thought revealing them on air would serve as a form of protection or deterrent, but his enemies, on this particular night, proved him tragically wrong.

Guarin’s fatal shooting is the first this new year, but already the 10th since President Aquino took power in June 2010, and the 150th since the People Power Revolt of 1986 restored democracy in the Philippines. Perhaps that should read “ostensibly restored democracy,” because slaughtering journalists this way, with a brazenness and abandon that have marked out the Philippines as among the most dangerous places in the world for media people, can never be a function of a true democracy. A state that genuinely respects, appreciates and observes the freedom of the press enshrined in the Constitution would have moved heaven, earth and everything in between by now to mete out punishment to the perpetrators of such heinous acts. It would have made arresting and convicting suspects, resolving cases and strengthening the climate of security for the country’s media people a top priority, to dissuade any further criminal assaults on them. It would have long recognized that every unsolved killing of a journalist only foments greater criminality and lawlessness, not only because of the chilling effect it has on free and unhindered discourse—the most basic guarantee of democracy—but also, and more ominously, for the open invitation it extends to ordinary people in society to resolve conflicts and differences in ideas with guns, violence and death.

Alas, the government’s record for securing the conviction of the culprits is paltry. Among the 101 cases of journalists and media workers killed from the time President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo assumed office in 2001, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines reports, only seven have been solved with the conviction of suspects, all of whom turned out to be plain trigger men. That suggests that many of the killings can be traced—if only investigations were more thorough and fearless—to people and organizations with the money, influence and power to bankroll such crimes and benefit from their consummation. The worst incident, of course, was the horrific Maguindanao massacre in the last year of Arroyo’s reign, when 32 media workers were mowed down and interred in mass graves, allegedly on orders of the provincial governor himself.

Zaldy Ampatuan and other members of his clan are now on the dock for the grisly, world headline-making crime that has been laid on their doorstep. Their snail-paced prosecution, though, has done nothing so far to restrain the country’s powerful scoundrels and their hired guns from making more Filipino journalists sitting ducks for retributive or exemplary assassinations, Guarin being only the latest of them. Clearly, despite the change in administration and Mr. Aquino’s promise to hew to the path of lawfulness and justice, the culture of impunity the Arroyo administration had enabled with its disinterested pursuit of the hundred or so media murders under its watch remains, sadly, in full force and effect today.

For all the might of accountability that has begun to be levied on Arroyo et al. for their crimes against the nation, and for all the mass ebullience the government has lately wished to incite from Aparri to Jolo to attract more tourists to the Philippines, the unabated butchery of Filipino journalists will continue to be a black, implacable mark on the country’s character. Any which way you cut it, this isn’t democracy. Killing the messenger never is.