By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 10, 2008
MANILA: Two Filipino journalists were shot and killed in a span of four days last week, their murders once again highlighting the “culture of impunity” that prevails in the Philippines, media groups said Sunday.
Dennis Cuesta, who was shot last Monday in General Santos, a city in the southern Philippines, died in the hospital on Saturday after lapsing into a coma, colleagues and the police said.
On Thursday, Martin Roxas, another journalist, had just concluded his radio show in the central Philippine province of Panay when two men shot him in the back. He died an hour later in the hospital.
Cuesta and Roxas had been working as news anchors and commentators for their respective stations, both owned by Radio Mindanao Network, the country’s largest radio network.
While the two murders were believed to be unrelated, both journalists were known for their scathing commentary on the air, often tackling corruption allegations against politicians and airing complaints from residents in their communities, colleagues said.
Their deaths brought to five the number of Filipino journalists killed so far this year. According to the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, 5 were killed last year and 13 in 2006.
The killings of Filipino journalists have received considerable international attention and even prompted an investigation by the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists and other international press freedom groups, the Philippines was next only to Iraq as the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. Unlike in Iraq, however, almost all media killings in the Philippines were premeditated.
Although the killings seem to have declined in the last two years, journalists insist that the Philippine authorities had done little toward arresting or successfully prosecuting the perpetrators.
The killings of Cuesta and Roxas and the way they were carried out - in public and in broad daylight - “merely show that the culture of impunity the government has helped nurture by its inaction, apathy and even its outright attempts to stifle press freedom, continues to thrive,” the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines said in a statement Sunday.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, said “two attacks against outspoken radio commentators in the space of a week is of grave concern to us and our colleagues in the Philippines.” Journalists in the Philippines, said Elisabeth Witchel, the coordinator of the committee’s impunity campaign, “are frequently killed and assaulted with impunity, all for doing their jobs.”
Witchel said the murders this year were “an alarming sign that violence against Philippine journalists may be on the rise.”
The police have arrested several suspects in three other cases this year but released some of them for lack of evidence. The force has also set up a special unit to investigate the murders of journalists, but an overwhelming majority of the 60 killings since 2001 remain unsolved.
