CAGAYAN DE ORO, Philippines – It was the morning of November 23, 2009, when Normal Santos Metropolis-based lawyer Cynthia Oquendo-Ayon’s fingers moved frantically throughout her cellphone. Trapped together with her father, who was driving for her, and surrounded by armed males as bullets cracked by means of the air, she typed messages to ship out an alert. It was a determined name for assist.
The messages had been hurried, fragmented, virtually cryptic, written in panic, but solely decipherable to those that knew the context. Every line was a cry for assist from a lawyer dealing with loss of life and bearing witness beneath unthinkable circumstances.
“Christian grtng (greeting)! Kidnap me with tatay, dahan mi, pls advise shopper Ampatuan. Tama na, pls, we myt get killed they r firing. Pls ship to Tom,” she wrote. (Dad and I, together with a number of others, have been kidnapped. Advise Ampatuan’s shopper. Please cease this, we could be killed. Ship this to Tom.)
“Tom” referred to one of many Ampatuan attorneys at the moment and her buddy, Tomas Falque III, who then sought the assistance of different attorneys, together with the presidential assistant for the now-defunct Autonomous Area in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
Moments later, Cynthia despatched one other message: “Daghan na patay. Sunod mi. Igna tom.” (Many had been already killed. We’re subsequent. Inform Tom).”
She additionally despatched a textual content to point their location on the time: “MNLF HQ SH Aguak, Nascom 12.” It referred to a former camp of the Moro Nationwide Liberation Entrance close to the bloodbath website in Sitio Masalay, Barangay Salman, Ampatuan city, in what’s now Maguindanao del Sur.
Her colleague, Arnold Oclarit, the lawyer who acquired the texts, known as Cynthia instantly. However she shortly advised him, “Don’t name. Cell telephones aren’t allowed right here.”
The Nationwide Bureau of Investigation (NBI) subsequently recovered her Sony Ericsson cellphone. Quezon Metropolis Decide Jocelyn Solis-Reyes admitted the textual content messages beneath the precept of res gestae, noting they had been made throughout a life-threatening occasion and helped place Andal “Unsay” Ampatuan Jr., one of many masterminds, on the scene.
Lawyer and former Bayan Muna consultant Carlos Isagani Zarate stated Cynthia’s textual content messages despatched from her broken telephone had been retrieved with the assistance of investigators from the US.
Cynthia’s messages, he stated, had been apparently pushed by what he known as a “lawyer’s intuition,” which kicked in on the very second loss of life was closing in round her.
All due to politics
Cynthia and 57 different victims had been en route for the submitting of the certificates of candidacy of then-Buluan vice mayor Esmael Mangudadatu after they had been kidnapped and later executed. They had been touring in a convoy of six automobiles, however individuals in two extra automobiles, not a part of the convoy, had been mistaken as belonging to it and caught within the assault.
Mangudadatu was getting ready to problem Ampatuan Jr., one of many sons of the sitting Maguindanao governor, Andal Ampatuan Sr., within the 2010 gubernatorial elections. These brutally killed included 32 journalists and media employees, Mangudadatu’s pregnant spouse, his two sisters, attorneys, aides, and extraordinary motorists who had been simply within the flawed place on the flawed time.
In December 2019, the court docket delivered its long-awaited verdict within the Maguindanao bloodbath case. Brothers Andal Jr., Zaldy and Anwar Sr. had been convicted on 57 counts of homicide and sentenced to reclusion perpetua with out parole. Their father, Ampatuan Sr., the patriarch of the clan, died lengthy earlier than the decision was learn, escaping the judgment that might have fallen on him as a type of charged.
Twenty-eight co-accused, together with cops, had been additionally discovered responsible on 57 counts and acquired 40-year jail phrases. Fifteen others had been sentenced to 6 to 10 years as equipment to the killings. Fifty-five people had been acquitted.
Over 80 others stay at giant, displaying the unfinished attain of justice 16 years after the bloodbath.
The Union of Peoples’ Legal professionals in Mindanao (UPLM) remembered Cynthia and the 57 different victims, together with their colleague, lawyer Connie Brizuela, a founding member and treasurer of UPLM.
Brizuela, a fierce defender of human rights and the marginalized, was additionally killed that day with Cynthia. Their killing, the group stated, was a direct assault on the authorized occupation itself.
“The brazen plunder of public funds and the grotesque misuse of presidency applications aren’t remoted ills,” the UPLM stated in an announcement forward of the sixteenth anniversary of the Maguindanao bloodbath. “They’re the logical extension of the identical tradition of entitlement and unaccountability that led to the homicide of 58 harmless individuals.”
The case of the 58th sufferer
The reminiscence of the bloodbath is preserved within the voices of households who misplaced family members. Amongst them is Reynafe Momay Castillo, daughter of Reynaldo “Bebot” Momay, the 58th sufferer whose physique has by no means been recovered.
For 16 years, the household has lived with uncertainty over what precisely occurred to him on November 23, 2009. They by no means lit a candle. They may not carry out the rituals of mourning, couldn’t mark a grave, couldn’t say with certainty the place he fell.
Exterior the courtroom, Momay, a Tacurong Metropolis-based photojournalist for the Midland Evaluate, was counted by colleagues and kin because the thirty second media employee and the 58th sufferer of the mass killings in Ampatuan city. However in 2019, the Quezon Metropolis regional court docket formally acknowledged solely 57 victims, dismissing the Momay case. Prosecutors had didn’t show he was amongst these killed. With out a physique, essentially the most fundamental proof of homicide was absent, leaving his loss of life formally unacknowledged.
“Yearly, November 23 jogs my memory of the day my father by no means got here house,” Castillo stated. “Whereas different households acquired the painful dignity of laying their family members to relaxation, we by no means even had that probability. We didn’t discover his physique. We didn’t maintain a funeral. We didn’t have a grave to go to. All we’ve are recollections… and the reality that my father was there among the many victims, a fact that has waited sixteen years to be absolutely acknowledged.”
“For sixteen years, our household has carried an invisible grief – one made heavier by the truth that my father’s identify nonetheless waits to be acknowledged in full as a sufferer of this brutal bloodbath. And but, regardless of the ache, we proceed to face as a result of we all know he deserves to be remembered, honored, and acknowledged.”
To Castillo, her father was merely Papang (dad) who “believed that fact mattered – even when fact was harmful.”
She stated, “He went out that day to do his job, not figuring out it could price him every part. Sixteen years later, we nonetheless combat for him. Sixteen years later, we nonetheless hope for his recognition. Sixteen years later, we nonetheless pray that justice will lastly embody his identify – the 58th sufferer.”
Castillo added, “My father’s story is just not completed. And so long as I’m right here, so long as my household breathes, we’ll maintain telling it. We’ll maintain searching for justice. We’ll maintain remembering.”
Journalists remembering
Sixteen years on, journalists themselves are remembering the bloodbath and defending the rules it attacked. The Nationwide Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) and the Cagayan de Oro Press Membership (COPC) are holding a commemoration on Monday, November 24, on the Press Freedom Monument in Cagayan de Oro Metropolis.
The media organizations may even conduct a dialogue with younger reporters, together with campus journalists, to make sure the following era understands the story and ongoing authorized standing of the bloodbath.
In an announcement, the COPC stated, “Sixteen years have handed because the hills of Sitio Masalay had been scarred by an atrocity that shook the world, but the shadow of that day nonetheless stretches throughout our nation. On November 23, 2009, voices weren’t simply silenced; they had been slaughtered. Names that when commanded bylines and airwaves had been diminished to a protracted, aching listing that we must not ever enable historical past to erase.”
COPC president Froilan Gallardo stated the bloodbath was an assault on the very concept of residents’ proper to know.
“The Ampatuan bloodbath was not merely an assault on 58 people – it was a bloodbath of the very concept that residents need to know. Sixteen years later, that assault nonetheless reverberates – in legal guidelines that chill dissent, in threats that linger on screens, and within the quiet, corrosive self-censorship that creeps into newsroom corners.”
Gallardo known as for concrete motion: defending journalists from harassment, strengthening authorized safeguards, constructing accountable establishments, and educating the following era to worth fact over comfort.
“Let our grief sharpen into motion. Communicate up when a reporter is red-tagged or threatened; stand with editors who refuse to be cowed; demand investigations which might be thorough and neutral. Vote for leaders who perceive {that a} free press is the oxygen of democracy and reject those that would suffocate it. Fund unbiased journalism, defend public-interest reporting, and refuse the straightforward silence of complicity,” learn a part of the COPC assertion. – Rappler.com
