KARAPATAN supports calls by the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) and other press freedom advocates for justice for the victims of the Ampatuan massacre.
The massacre on November 23, 2009, considered by the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) as the single deadliest event for journalists since it began monitoring such incidents in 1992, resulted in the killing of at least 58 persons, 34 of them journalists. The massacre also marked the Philippines as one of the most dangerous places for journalists, second only to war-torn Iraq.
According to the NUJP, at least 199 media workers have been killed in the Philippines since 1986. From 2000 to 2022, one hundred and forty (140) journalists were killed, with the Ampatuan victims comprising a quarter of this figure.
The media workers killed in the Ampatuan massacre were among scores of persons who accompanied women relatives of a gubernatorial candidate out to file the latter’s certificate of candidacy. As their convoy passed through the town of Ampatuan in present day Maguindanao del Sur, armed men, including policemen dispatched by local warlord and incumbent Maguindanao Gov. Andal Ampatuan Sr. stopped the victims at a checkpoint, shot them with high-powered firearms and attempted to conceal their crime by burying the victims and their vehicles in shallow graves dug by a backhoe.
The case dragged for 10 years, with allegations of bribery raised, and with one of the potential witnesses against the Ampatuans killed and mutilated. The Ampatuans, notorious warlords for decades, had been linked to more than 50 killings aside from the 2009 massacre.
Finally, in December 2019, a Quezon City court meted sentences on 44 of the accused, ranging from 6-10 years for the accessories and reclusion perpetua for the actual perpetrators and the masterminds. Fifty-five of the 100 accused were acquitted. Almost 90 remain at large as of this writing.
Today, 15 years after the massacre, the victims’ families still cry out for justice. With the Ampatuan camp mounting an appeal, and given the Philippines’ deeply flawed justice system, there is no assurance that the guilty verdicts will not be reversed. Also, the families of the victims have yet to receive compensation for the unjust deaths of their loved ones, some of whom were sole breadwinners.
KARAPATAN is in solidarity with the victims’ families and press freedom advocates in their continuing quest for justice and accountability for the dastardly Ampatuan massacre and for all unresolved media killings.