Manila, December 17: Twenty years of independent reporting on lawlessness and corruption in the Philippines has earned a small band of courageous journalists many enemies.
It has also earned the team from the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism this year’s Kate Webb award, set up by Agence France-Presse (AFP) to honour the life and career of the legendary correspondent who died in 2007.
Powerful interests all too often buy off, intimidate or even kill reporters in an effort to tame the Southeast Asian nation’s free-wheeling media.
Amid this relentless pressure, the PCIJ has stood firm.
“The first line of defence is to act independently,” said PCIJ executive director Malou Mangahas, one of nine reporters who established the center in 1989 with little more than a second-hand typewriter and a battered computer.
While it still does not have more than 10 full time editorial staff, the PCIJ today is firmly entrenched in Philippine society as a fearless watchdog that roams amid a culture of impunity.
Its motto is: “We tell it like it is. No matter who. No matter what”.
Among its highest-profile scalps is former president Joseph Estrada, who was deposed in 2001 after it was revealed he had spent his three years in power plundering the nation’s coffers.
The PCIJ’s investigative reports were crucial in exposing Estrada’s crimes, and were used as evidence in his parliamentary impeachment hearings, and later the plunder and perjury trials in which he was found guilty.
Current president Gloria Arroyo has also been a PCIJ target.
This year it produced a series of reports on Arroyo’s apparently unexplained rise in wealth during 17 years of public office, accusing her of taking a “path of token compliance” in relation to legally required assets declarations.
In many other countries, such investigative reporting is a matter of course.
But the Philippines is the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, based on the number who are killed.
A total of 134 have been murdered since the fall of dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, with 97 of the deaths occurring over the past eight years when Arroyo has been in power.
The risks reporters in the Philippines face made world headlines last month when a warlord family in the south of the country allegedly organised a massacre in which 31 journalists were among 57 people killed.
The Ampatuan clan accused of being behind the massacre had for eight years been a close Arroyo ally, ruling the province of Maguindanao as members of her ruling coalition and allowed to have its militia forces.
Nearly every journalist in Maguindanao knew not to report unfavourably on the Ampatuans, making them a perfect target for the PCIJ.
Last year, the PCIJ’s Jaileen Jimeno travelled to Maguindanao three times over a period of six months to report on life for the province’s impoverished 800,000 citizens under the rule of the fabulously wealthy Ampatuans.
Local reporters warned Jimeno not to report negatively on the Ampatuans. Others refused to help her. While in Maguindanao, mysterious hands would knock on her hotel door as a warning that she was being watched.
The PCIJ employed long-standing tactics to protect Jimeno, including making only short hit-and-run-style missions from Manila to Maguindanao, informing lawyers about the threats, and always keeping track of her movements.
Mangahas, 49, acknowledged the dangers for the PCIJ reporters, but said these were minor compared with those faced by the journalists who lived in the Philippines’ outlying regions and had to face the threats every day.
“The things we do they do with greater courage in the provinces and the towns where political conflicts are more acute and politicians are more intolerant of independent coverage,” she said.
Against this backdrop, the PCIJ intends to use the 5,000 euros (7,250 dollars) in prize money for winning the Kate Webb award to train Filipino reporters in how to report safely on powerful interests in their home towns.
The PCIJ already carries out training sessions alongside its reporting activities, and the new Kate Webb-funded programme will help to extend its mission of developing a culture of independent, strong journalism.
–Agencies