Lex Adonis, one of Davao City’s hard-hitting radio broadcasters, is behind bars after a court convicted him of the libel case filed by House majority leader Rep. Prospero Nograles. Adonis’s misfortune illustrates what happens when a powerful public official uses the country’s libel laws to get back at a journalist who was too poor to hire a lawyer or attend court hearings.
Related item: ‘No One to Blame But Adonis Himself — Bombo Radyo’
The Philippines’s ranking in the “Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2006” by the Paris-based Reporters Withour Borders has slipped, from 139th last year to 142nd this year. The country is in the bottom 20 of the rankings, sharing the ignominy with the worst violators of press freedom in the world. Reporters Without Borders blamed the continuing killings of journalists and the defamation suits filed by President Arroyo’s husband for the slip in ranking.
The police allegedly duped an elderly mother into signing documents that said the New People?s Army killed Macel and George Vigo, the two journalists murdered in June in Kidapawan. Church and human-rights groups, in a fact-finding mission, assailed the authorities for the alleged cover-up and for Oplan Bantay Laya.
By Germelina A. Lacorte
davaotoday.com
KIDAPAWAN CITY ? Norma Alave is 60 years old and has a failing eyesight. The day after her daughter Maricel ?Macel? Vigo was murdered along with her husband George, on June 19, then Philippine National Police chief Arturo Lomibao came to this city to personally hand over a 10,000-peso check supposedly from President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
The following day, the police summoned her to the police station and asked her to sign some documents. She was told that the papers were meant to establish that she was Macel?s mother and that George was her son-in-law. ?So I signed the documents,? Alave said, even though she couldn?t read what was written on them.
It was only later when her son Gregorio Alave, 29, found out that the documents his mother had signed included a paragraph that identified the Vigo couple?s killer as someone named Dionisio Madanguit. ?I retracted the statement because I never knew that man,? Mrs. Alave said.
This incident, according to human-rights and church groups that recently conducted a fact-finding mission in this city to investigate the killings, tended to suggest a whitewash and was meant to fit the authorities? oft-repeated line that the communist New People?s Army was behind the murder of the Vigos.
Two months after the fatal shooting of Armando Pace, a hard-hitting radio commentator in Digos City, the case remains in limbo.
By Cheryll D. Fiel
davaotoday.com
DIGOS CITY ? He was called the ?Jun Pala? of Digos, a fire-breathing broadcaster who earned another moniker, ?Rakman,? because of the sheer firepower (rak-rak!) of his radio commentaries.
He feared nobody and never hesitated attacking anybody, even sometimes on a personal level. Armando Pace, the 55-year-old broadcaster from AM station DXDS-Radyo Ukay in this city, certainly made many enemies. And just like Pala, he was felled, on July 18, by an assassin?s bullet. He was said to be the first radioman in Digos to have been murdered.
75 years ago, a group of campus writers formed the College Editors Guild of the Philippines. It went on to become a vanguard of freedom and patriotism. Last Tuesday night, Davao-based members of the CEGP came together not just to reminisce but to keep the flames of the guild burning.
CEGP members and alumni at the 75th anniversary bash at the Kanto Bar, Matina Town Square. (Click here for more pictures.) davaotoday.com photo by Barry Ohaylan
By Cheryll D. Fiel and Tyrone A. Velez
davaotoday.com
DAVAO CITY — It was a special day on the calendar. They could not wait for dusk to come. All roads that night led to Kanto Bar at the Matina Town Square for these individuals who are as diverse as the roles they have assumed now.
Some of them are lawyers, teachers, government employees, NGO workers, political advisers, editors and writers of the dailies, politicians, wives, mothers, fathers, the still-proud-and-crazy-after-all-these-years punks, poets, artists and bohemians by heart.
But that evening was not about who they are, who among them are successful, who arrived in the latest car model, who married whom, who has aged. Forget about that sort of triviality. Because that Tuesday night this week, they were just this: activist-writers eternal.