Implicated Ampatuans still running in 2010 elections

‘Still mightier than the sword’

Posted by: Jaemark Tordecilla | February 9, 2010 at 6:25 pm
Filed under: General

The Correspondent, the magazine of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong, featured the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) in its January-February 2010 issue. The report by Jonathan Sharp focused on the impact of the PCIJ’s efforts: “Among the notable scalps of the PCIJ’s investigative reporting has been ex-president Joseph Estrada, who was deposed in 2001 after it was revealed he had helped himself to the nation’s wealth. The PCIJ’s reports were used as evidence in his impeachment hearings and the later trials found him guilty. Current President Gloria Arroyo has also been in PCIJ’s sights.”

Click here to read the whole story.

Ampatuans, Mangudadatus dominate Maguindanao polls

Posted by: Jaemark Tordecilla | February 8, 2010 at 8:03 pm
Filed under: General

Three senior Ampatuans, respondents in the Nov. 23, 2009 massacre of 57 persons, including 31 journalists, in Maguindanao, are now in jail, but the clan could not be counted out as yet as players in the May 2010 elections.

At least 68 Ampatuans and 15 Mangudadatus are running for public office in Maguindanao, according to this report by senior journalist and Mindanao expert, Ms Carolyn O. Arguillas.

MindaNews, an independent media organization based out of Davao City, and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism are working on a number of reporting projects in Maguindanao.

This story sustains the effort and calls attention to what might change or not change, for the better or for worse, in Maguindanao. This development is also lent new context by our Thursday report on how the Ampatuans used elective office to consolidate power in the area.

The presidentiables, and the mysteries of money & politics

Posted by: Jaemark Tordecilla | February 7, 2010 at 7:42 pm
Filed under: General

Our latest report inquires into how the top five candidates for president have managed to grow their wealth after every election year, despite the fortunes that they should have lost to bankrolling their campaign for high office.

This report summarizes the data enrolled in the statements of assets and liabilities and net worth (SALNs) that five candidates for president  – Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino III, Jose Marcelo Ejercito (Joseph Estrada), Richard Juico Gordon, Gilberto Cojuangco Teodoro Jr., and Manuel Bamba Villar Jr – had filed over the years since they first served in public office.

This report seeks as well to discern how fully committed these candidates are to upholding a firm obligation of good governance on those who will serve as President: the law on the filing of SALNs.

This is the first in a series of stories that the PCIJ will produce using our Elections 2010 Database on the wealth and campaign spending patterns of the candidates for national office.

These stories are part of our commitments to the Pera at Pulitika 2010 Network of independent media, legal, academic and civil society groups that will monitor, assess and report on campaign-finance issues in the May 2010 elections. It is our hope that our combined efforts could help inform proposals to institute reforms in campaign finance and other election laws in time.

Fear, terror, poverty mix in Maguindanao

Posted by: Jaemark Tordecilla | February 4, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Filed under: General

The second part of our series on the Guns of Maguindanao talks about the relationship between the Ampatuan family and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and how warlordism in Central Mindanao thrives.

Andal Ampatuan Sr., the family patriarch, had successfully parlayed his role as government’s chief ally against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) into a highly influential and profitable political empire that now spans the breadth of Central Mindanao, using the traditional Moro structures of authority and royalty for his own ends. Warlordism and ‘datuism’, meanwhile, continued to prevail unquestioned, until the events of November 23.

We also compiled a list of members of the Ampatuan family currently holding office, which total at least 44. The number underscores how the family remains a force to be reckoned with, as their hold on political power has grown roots so deep and so extensive.

The guns of Maguindanao

Posted by: Jaemark Tordecilla | February 3, 2010 at 7:50 pm
Filed under: Governance

Our latest report by PCIJ Multimedia Director Ed Lingao inquires into the huge arsenal of mostly illegal guns that the Ampatuan clan has amassed while in power in Maguindanao.

To this day, over two months after the tragic massacre of 57 people, including 31 journalists on November 23,2009, the police have yet to recover hundreds of the unlicensed guns of the Ampatuans. Neither have the clan members surrendered the bulk of their weapons cache, including state-of-art Israeli-made Tavor assault rifles that cost about P500,000 each.

Records of the Philippine National Police (PNP) show that at least 103 persons surnamed Ampatuan have registered a total of 274 firearms, 43 of them classified as high-powered firearms. Three clan members, however, own 66 of these or almost a fourth of the registered total.

These registered guns account for just a fourth of the 1,200 firearms that the police seized last month from in and around the Ampatuan mansions. These registered guns correspond to just 10 percent of the 2,000 militias that the clan, by official accounts, had employed and armed while in office.

Ampatuan patriarch Andal Sr. has licenses for 17 low-powered and five high-powered firearms, for a total of 22 guns. Andal Jr., who is facing murder and rebellion charges, licensed 18 firearms, three of which are high-powered. But it is Zaldy Ampatuan, ousted governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, who has the most licensed firearms: 26, of which 10 are considered high-powered.

And these are not just ordinary firearms. PNP records show that the Ampatuans had purchased seven Israeli-made Tavor assault rifles, that at P500,000 each altogether amount to P3.5 million. Zaldy, Andal Sr., and Andal Jr., each have two Tavors, while an uncle owns the seventh.

To produce this report, Ed took a series of trips to Mindanao, interviewed various sources there and in Manila, and reviewed records of the PNP and relevant government agencies.

The PCIJ produced this and forthcoming reports on Maguindanao in partnership with MindaNews, an independent media organization led by senior journalist and Mindanao expert Carolyn O. Arguillas.

Libel and blogging

Posted by: Jaemark Tordecilla | January 30, 2010 at 10:43 pm
Filed under: Governance, In the News, Media, The Internet

CRITICS of blogging and the Internet often characterize the medium as a virtual “wild, wild West,” a place where any schmuck could make anything up with no consequences. But the latter has been proven wrong, and not only with posts or sites containing less-than-factual information. Just recently, Google took issue with Beijing after the Gmail accounts of some Chinese activists were hacked. Last week, a Vietnam court found three “dissidents” guilty of “anti-state” activities via the Net and meted jail terms. Charged and sentenced with them was a lawyer known for his work with Vietnamese bloggers.

Yet it’s not as if communist states like China and Vietnam are the only countries where words let loose in cyberspace have netted considerable trouble. Just this month, former social welfare secretary Esperanza Cabral filed a libel case against a blogger who had wondered why it was so hard to volunteer to pack goods meant for Typhoon Ondoy victims at a Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) facility. Coming at a height of a crisis in which thousands of people were in need of food, water, and clean clothing, the October 21 post on the blog EllaGanda.com caused an Internet firestorm that left the DSWD and Cabral on the defensive.

“As in sa isang humongous warehouse (1000++ sq.m) na punong-puno ng relief goods hanggang bubong, isang DSWD employee lang at isang security guard ang tao!” wrote blogger Ella in the entry called “Aanhin pa ang damo kung patay na ang kabayo? (A special report from a volunteer),” recalling what she said she and her companions saw at a DSWD facility. And yet, she wrote, “I know somebody who wanted to volunteer many times. She was always bumped off, laging nirere-schedule kasi ‘there were too many volunteers’ daw. At tuwing Sunday lang daw puwede.”

To prove her point, Ella posted several pictures of the relief goods stacked inside the warehouse. The next day, she updated her post, and cited a report in which Cabral was said to have told an underling that there were no volunteers, hence the pile-up of goods at the warehouse.

Cabral was vehement in her denial that anything was amiss, and the department vowed to “probe into the malicious blog more thoroughly.” Some three months later, Cabral, who has since been appointed health secretary, has taken another step further and haled Ella to court.

Libel is a criminal offense in the Philippines. According to Article 353 of the Revised Penal Code, it is punishable “by prision correccional in its minimum and medium periods or a fine ranging from 200 to 6,000 pesos, or both, in addition to the civil action which may be brought by the offended party.” At the very least, however, a complainant needs to prove a malicious intent on the part of the defendant.

One veteran lawyer defines malice as “any act or utterance tainted with evil motive,” adding that among other things, a complainant needs to show falsity of the accusation, as well as the relationship between the parties to win his or her case. At its most basic, the threat of a libel suit should deter anyone from making irresponsible comments or baseless accusations in public. Unfortunately, human-rights lawyer Jose Manuel Diokno, writing in the book Libel as Politics, notes, “Our laws on criminal libel are so broad and sweeping that they make everyone involved in the delivery of information of public concern a potential criminal.”

Previous libel cases against bloggers

For sure, blogger Ella is not the first Pinoy Netizen to be slapped with a libel suit. The first such case involving a blog, in fact, was filed against this one in 2005 by Jonathan Tiongco, then-Department of Environment and Natural Resources Sec. Mike Defensor’s audio expert during the “Hello, Garci” controversy. According to Tiongco, who passed away in car accident in June 2007, PCIJ was harassing him by way of the blog.

In 2006, the Yuchengco group filed a libel case against the Parents Enabling Parents (PEP) Coalition, a group of parents who had bought pre-need educational plans from the Yuchengcos’ Pacific Plans Inc. The Yuchengco group alleged that several defamatory articles, accusing it of mishandling funds, were posted on the PEP Coalition blog. But the suit was dismissed by a Makati regional trial court after the complainants failed to prove that the court had jurisdiction over the case, a decision later affirmed by the Court of Appeals.

Another prominent libel case involved technology blogger Abe Olandres, who attracted the suit not because of his blog, but because of his web hosting company. Several libelous comments were posted in the Internet forum GreedyOldDumbass.com, which happened to be hosted on his server.

The complaint against Olandres was dismissed after he was determined to be a mere service provider. This did not mean, however, that the individuals who posted the inflammatory comments were no longer liable for libel. (Details of the case are available at the blog of JLP Law, the firm that represented Olandres.)

But perhaps the most prominent incident of a libel case against a blogger in recent memory – that is, before the one against Ella — involved Bambee de la Paz, who blogged about the “Valley Golf Incident” that had her father Delfin and younger brother Bino in a brawl with a group led by agrarian reform secretary Nasser Pangandaman Sr. and his sons, Nasser Jr. and Hussein. The Pangandamans have since challenged Bambee’s account, with the younger Nasser, the mayor of Masiu town in Lanao del Sur, filing libel charges against her in the family’s hometown. Pangandaman’s lawyer Teodoro Pastrana told the PCIJ that contrary to some reports, the libel case against Bambee de la Paz is still pending.

It’s far too early to tell what will happen next in Cabral’s case against Ella, who had commented in her October 22 update to her original post: “I don’t want to accuse (Cabral) of corruption but at the very least she is showing signs of being totally incompetent. We are in a state of calamity where every second counts. May namamatay araw-araw dahil sa sakit (There is someone dying every day because of illness).”

“In my opinion,” she added, “these deaths could have been prevented if Secretary Cabral had tried a little harder to do her job.”

An effective piece of citizen journalism

A long-time bureaucrat whose commitment to her work has been admired by many, Cabral probably found those words hard to take. Still, the merit of Ella’s original post seems to have been lost in the debate over the ensuing libel case. Far from rumor-mongering, the post was an excellent piece of blogging and citizen journalism. It was informative, detailed, and well-documented, and it was written in a light, informal tone that resonated with any blog reader. It also asked pertinent questions: Why was it so hard to sign up to volunteer? Why wasn’t the facility taking in more volunteers when other venues had a surplus of them? What was going to happen to the relief goods once the damage from Ondoy becomes out of sight and out of mind?

The post was also effective, because after it gained popularity, traditional media outlets and bloggers swooped down on the DSWD facility to look into the matter. They confirmed what Ella had written about in her blog — that the DSWD could use help so that the relief goods could get out to the victims much faster. More importantly, Ella’s post served as a siren call for volunteers to come in droves to the warehouse and help with the packing of the relief goods. It underscored the power of blogging and highlighted the role of the citizen journalist in calling attention to important issues that may otherwise be left unreported.

Perhaps Ella herself said it best in yet another follow-up to her original post: “I was there in the warehouse. I presented the pictures. I think I’ve done my part as a concerned citizen.” It’s just too bad that like many other concerned citizens in this country, she, too, has been served with libel.