MANILA (Global Post / The Inquirer / Pacific Media Watch): Five journalists have been killed so far this year in the Philippines, with The Global Post reporting that the Phiippines was even worse than Syria for "unpunished violence against the media".
According to the newspaper, journalist Orlando Navarro narrowly survived an assassination attempt on August 26, after he was shot in the back following an exposé he reported on the drug trade.
On June 8, radio journalist Nilo Baculo Sr was shot dead in Calapan City.
According to The Inquirer, Baculo Sr was working on a story allegedly involving a “big transaction” of illegal drugs inside the provincial jail before being shot. The investigation into his killing has not proceeded because the police investigating his killing are "themselves respondents in criminal and civil suits filed by the crusading journalist in the past two decades".
Baculo Sr had asked the courts for protection against assassination since 2007 but was only granted a temporary writ giving him protection until June 2008.
Journalist Jake Soriano reports:
"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 organisation 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.
November 23 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".
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Pacific Media Watch
