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Featured Stories

PEOPLE POWER
The Paradox of Freedom: People Power in the Information Age
by David Celdran
When public space migrates to the airwaves and the news pages, politics risks degenerating into a spectator sport.

ELECTIONS 2004
Lanao’s Dirty Secrets
by Sheila S. Coronel
What really happened in Lanao del Sur in 2004 that prompted the attempts to silence Brig. Gen. Gudani?

10 Reasons to Doubt the 2004 Election Results
by Yvonne T. Chua and Avigail M. Olarte
The numbers don’t alays add up, and that’s just one reason why last year’s elections are so controversial.

THE FUTURE OF ELECTIONS
Can Comelec Reform?
by Alecks P. Pabico
Despite being hounded by controversy, the elections body is resisting change.

REFORMS IN THE BARRACKS
The Officers Who Say No
by Luz Rimban
Military and police officers believe reforming the system begins with reforming the individual.

JOURNALIST AT RISK
Reporting under the Gun
by Vinia M. Datinguinoo
Mei Magsino escaped the wrath of the alleged jueteng lord who is also Batangas governor.

THE METROPOLIS
Battle of the Billboards
by Charlene Dy
They’re big, bold, and not quite beautiful. They can also be a health and environmental hazard, but so far, no one is policing billboards.

WOMEN AND DISASTER
Resilience Amid Ruin
by Tess Bacalla
Many more women than men died in the Aceh tsunami. Today the women survivors wrestle with disaster relief programs that don’t consider special needs.

YOUTH VOLUNTEERS
A Gift of Self
Young people discover life’s meaning by doing volunteer work.

SPECIAL ON PINOY POLITICAL HUMOR
Impersonating Presidents
by Elvira Mata
This is a coutnry where there's always someone spoofing a president — dead or alive — on TV, during cocnerts, and from time to time, at people power marches. Five actors top the list of the country's best impersonators.

La Vida Doble
by Tony Velazquez
Because Philippine politics is so ridiculous, amateur impersonators are having a feast.

Mobile Clowning
by Sheila S. Coronel
The cellphone has only encouraged the Pinoy propensity for jokes.

Where Has All the Laughter Gone?
by Katrina Stuart Santiago
Websites and blogs have provided an outlet for political humor, but not all of them are funny.

Mei Magsino escaped the wrath of the alleged jueteng lord who is also Batangas governor.

by VINIA M. DATINGUINOO

	FEARING FOR HER LIFE. Journalist Mei Magsino-Lubis is on the run, fleeing threats from the most powerful man in her province.

MELINDA 'MEI' Magsino-Lubis yearns for many things: her flower and herb garden, the sound of her husband's voice, the kingfisher and maya birds that used to wake her up in the morning. All these she used to enjoy in her five-hectare mahogany farm on top of a hill, in the city of Batangas, around 84 km. south of Manila.

Even now her farm beckons to her like the smell of freshly brewed barako coffee. "It was paradise," she says, "and it was my home."

But the farm — and husband — will have to wait, because Magsino-Lubis wants to live. She is convinced that had she not fled from Batangas one night last July she would now be dead.

Magsino-Lubis is a correspondent of the Philippine Daily Inquirer for the Southern Luzon region and has been reporting on alleged irregularities in the Batangas provincial capitol. She believes her life is now in danger because her stories have angered the provincial governor, whom she has linked to questionable projects, among other things.

The governor is Armando C. Sanchez. In Senate hearings probing jueteng, he was alleged to be one of the biggest operators of the illegal numbers game in the country. He also faces a graft case filed in the Office of the Ombudsman by his vice governor. Recently, the influential Roman Catholic Church leadership in Batangas openly declared its lack of confidence in the governor. (See sidebar) Yet, while he has the demeanor of a street toughie, Sanchez does not have a reputation for resorting to violence when dealing with his perceived enemies — at least not among the general public.

But that is getting way ahead of Magsino-Lubis's story.

PHONED WARNING
At around 10 in the evening of July 7 this year, Magsino-Lubis received a phone call from one of her police sources. She was told two prisoners from the provincial jail had just been released, with specific orders to kill her. She would have to leave Batangas immediately, her source said.

That same night, Magsino-Lubis said goodbye to her family and left the farm, her home for only nine months, and Batangas, where she has lived for all her 30 years. "Doon ako tinubuan ng sungay (That's where I grew horns)," Magsino-Lubis says of her province. "But I did not have a choice (other than to leave)." In her backpack, she tucked five tops, three pairs of jeans, six pairs of underwear, four pairs of socks, documents, photographs, notepads, pens, and about P22,000 in cash. In her bones ran a cold, steady stream of fear.

Not too long ago, Magsino-Lubis had felt relatively safe, since, she says, her employer was not some small, obscure community paper, but the country's biggest daily. "Ang yabang ko noon (I was so confident then)," she says. Now she realizes she is — and has always been — as vulnerable as all the other journalists who had been hunted down and killed in some remote town.

At least one international media watchdog has described the Philippines as "the most murderous of all" when it comes to media deaths, beating even those countries where drug lords reign or civil strife rages. Since 1986, 54 Filipino journalists have been killed in the line of duty. Most of them were broadcasters working outside Metro Manila, and at the time of their deaths reporting or commenting on irregularities in their local governments. Of these cases, only two have resulted in the convictions of the assassins, according to the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR). No mastermind has ever been found and prosecuted.

It is probably no comfort to Magsino-Lubis that elsewhere in the world, journalists who are killed often do not die while covering armed conflicts or some similar assignment. Instead, says the Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ), which studied more than five years of journalists' death records from 2000, a huge majority are murdered in retaliation for their work.

In Batangas itself, journalist Arnel Manalo was killed just last year, on August 5, when two men on a motorcycle ambushed him while he was on his way home on his jeep. He was shot twice, the bullets hitting the left side of the face and his neck.

Manalo was a correspondent for the radio station DZRH and wrote a column for the local newspapers Dyaryo Veritas and Southern Tagalog. He did not mince words in his columns, at one point calling the governor "berdugo ng kapitolyo (tyrant of the capitol)" a month before he was killed, and also saying there was an "atmosphere of fear" among capitol employees in a follow-up piece.

But Manalo was a member of the As-is barangay council as well, which was why the CMFR, in its report about his death, did not rule out political rivals as among the masterminds for his killing. Manalo's family filed a case against someone said to be the triggerman; the case is still at the prosecutor's office. The primary witness was another journalist, who testified that he heard the alleged triggerman planning the killing with the barangay captain, about whom Manalo had also written in the last two weeks of July 2004. The family did not file a case against the barangay captain.

MURDERED OMBUDSMAN
Magsino-Lubis, however, only has to think of Guillermo Gamo to feel particularly vulnerable. They had agreed to have a meeting on May 31. Gamo, who was the Batangas provincial ombudsman, had promised to talk to her and give her documents related to what he said were anomalous deals involving provincial officials. But the day before they were supposed to meet, Gamo was killed on his way to work. According to the police, two gunmen ambushed his vehicle as it took a turn at a junction in barangay Balagtas in the capital. The gunmen fired at least 16 shots, then entered the ombudsman's vehicle and took his briefcase before speeding off on a motorcycle. "That briefcase was for me," says Magsino-Lubis.

In the days immediately following Gamo's death, her sources among the capitol's employees avoided her phone calls and stopped answering her text messages. She tried to visit Gamo's office, but she could not even get close as employees, from a distance, shooed her away. "They were so scared," Magsino-Lubis says, adding that she could hardly blame them. She herself does not pretend she isn't afraid. "Tell me," she says, "how you'd feel if you know you're next."

Just a few months before Gamo's death, Magsino-Lubis had been in pure wedded bliss. She and her husband, a businessman, were married only in October last year. She had taken a couple of months off before going back to work and discovered she had a flair for farming. She even began experimenting with organic methods, and took pride in the variety of herbs and flowers she was able to grow. But she remained foremost a journalist, and she was soon back dispatching stories about agriculture, the environment, crime, and other subjects.

Her plan was, to her mind, very simple: farm in the mornings, do journalism in the afternoons, and come home in the evenings, to her husband and Mochtar, the boy they planned on having as soon as possible, a son they would name after the famous Indonesian journalist. "It was all going to be good and easy," Magsino-Lubis says of the life she and her husband were preparing for. But those plans have had to be put on hold.