Bacolod journalist harassed

CMFR/PHILIPPINES – In another likely incident of  intimidation and harassment, a Bacolod-based journalist covering the spate of killings in Negros Oriental province was tailed by a still unidentified person on a motorcycle on 4 August 2019. The incident happened in Negros Occidental.

Negros Occidental is 530 kilometers south of Manila.

Marchel Espina, business reporter of the Visayan Daily Star and a correspondent of online news site Rappler was on her way home from a coverage in Canlaon City in Negros Oriental when the driver of her rental car alerted her to a motorcycle trailing them. Espina said the rider, who was clad in black and whose face was covered, followed them for about 18 kilometers as they passed through the municipality of La Castellana in Negros Occidental. The driver told Espina that before he sped away to lose the tail, the rider attempted to overtake them.

Espina told CMFR that she has not received any threat prior to the tailing incident. She said she will report the incident to the authorities.

Espina is currently chairperson of the Bacolod chapter of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP).  NUJP has been repeatedly accused of being a communist front in propaganda materials that are either surreptitiously circulated or publicly displayed by unknown individuals. Rappler, for which Espina also writes, has been critical of the killings in the Duterte regime’s “drug war” and is facing a number of government-initiated legal challenges.

President Rodrigo Duterte’s Memorandum Order 32 issued in November 2018 ordered the police and military to intensify operations against “all forms of lawless violence” in Negros Island, Bicol Region and the province of Samar, but is generally thought to be directed against the New People’s Army (NPA). Last July 18, four policemen were ambushed by the NPA in the municipality of Ayungon, Negros Oriental. Following this incident, 17 individuals, including a lawyer and a one-year-old boy, were reported killed by unidentified assailants from July 22 to 27 in the province.