Why I Left Puerto Princesa

By Yasmin Arquiza

In 1989, my bureau chief at the Associated Press sent me to Puerto Princesa to write environmental feature stories. My journey began with a trek to the St. Paul National Park, where I stared in awe at majestic limestone cliffs and mist-covered forests. As a city girl who spent more than five years commuting daily in the dirty streets of Manila, I could not imagine that such natural wonders still existed in the Philippines. It became my epiphany, and I resolved to make it my life’s mission to tell the world about the beauty of Palawan and how we all need to protect our country’s threatened natural heritage.

That short trip became the start of a journey into environmental journalism that has become my calling for more than a decade. I quit the wire agencies, embarked on a freelance career, and finally decided to set up a working base in Puerto Princesa, which I thought was the perfect place for my craft. For the past 13 years, the capital city of Palawan has been my adopted home, but recently, I was forced to leave the place due to a series of sinister events.

In the early morning of May 22, popular radio broadcaster Fernando “Dong” Batul was killed near a busy street corner in the heart of the city. He was a very good friend of Bandillo ng Palawan, an environmental community newspaper published by a non-profit foundation that I helped set up in 1993. Through his radio programs and our weekly paper, we exposed many cases of government corruption and irregularities. Although our print run is a mere 500 copies, Dong Batul helped widen our reach by reading our articles and editorials so that thousands of listeners could hear our stories.

A month before he was killed, two grenades were lobbed into his residence. It was our headline story, and Dong Batul came to our office to get a copy. During his visit, he narrated the grenade incident and named a local police officer that he felt had the capability and the motive for the attack.

To this day, police have not arrested anyone in connection with the incident even though Dong Batul had tipped off National Bureau of Investigation investigators about his suspicions. He had also sent text messages and talked to his friends about it, in case anything happened to him. Two weeks after Dong visited us, he was gunned down.

Although I was not that close to Dong Batul, as a media observer I was able to follow his career. I have known him since his days as information officer at the Crocodile Farming Institute, to his meteoric rise as a commentator for the evening radio program Kulog at Kidlat on dySP, which is part of the GMA-7 network.

Last year, he started making waves again as the primetime commentator of dyPR, the oldest radio station in Palawan. He managed to bring life into dyPR’s staid programming, and clinched the number one spot in just a few months. He often mentioned Bandillo in his program, and our staff strongly supported his crusade against envelopmental journalism.

One thing that Dong Batul and I shared was the dubious distinction of having earned the ire of Mayor Edward Hagedorn. The mayor hated Dong’s relentless and fearless criticism of various anomalies in the city government. In my case, one word was all it took for him to mark me as an enemy for life—when I wrote a chapter for a PCIJ (Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism) book on governance and environmental protection, and I described his Clean and Green program as “cosmetic.” I have learned to take such reactions in stride, knowing that’s part of the territory in journalism. I had nothing personal against the mayor, anyway.

Despite some scary moments when Hagedorn was all over local radio, TV, and even a rival newspaper to denounce me, I figured the issue would soon die down and this itinerant writer could maintain her off-and-on residency in the city. I have been able to do that, until the murder of Dong Batul.

Like most media people in Palawan, I was shocked when I heard about the killing. And like many local residents who were aware about the enmity between Dong Batul and Mayor Hagedorn, I refused to think the mayor could have something to do with it. After all, he knew he would be the number one suspect in the mind of the public. It would be political suicide for him to do such a thing.

Subsequent events have forced me to rethink my position. Just minutes after the killing, the mayor called up dyPR to deny any involvement in the incident. In the days that followed, the mayor’s people went on overdrive, making up negative stories against Dong Batul and blaming the slain broadcaster’s fiery style as the main reason for his murder.

A week after the killing, a bogus website was put up, ostensibly in favor of Dong Batul. In reality, it was a ploy to scare off Bandillo’s writers.

The website was supposedly the handiwork of the Free Palawan Media movement, but we had never heard about such a group. Its web pages contained anti-Hagedorn articles and personal attacks against possible suspects, but surprisingly, it was the mayor’s radio station, dyER, that publicized the website. The radio commentator, a confessed Internet illiterate, proudly announced that he was the only one in Palawan who had a printout of the website’s pages, and he even knew the exact hour when the website was taken down.

What alarmed us was when he and the mayor began implicating Bandillo to the website, mainly because our front page had been posted in one of the web pages. dyER also began interviewing many of the people mentioned in the website, who expressed veiled threats against its creators for maligning them. dyER kept alluding to “two lady writers” with descriptions matching those of Bandillo editorial board member Jofelle Tesorio, who also works as local correspondent for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and myself as the alleged website creators. Mayor Hagedorn went a step further, mentioning my name in an interview with the local Radyo ng Bayan in connection with the website. But the truth is, we only found out about the website when a staffer of the Center for Media Freedom and Res-ponsibility told us about it.

As an editor, one of the website’s telltale signs that caught my eye was the use of numbers in both words and figures, pointing to the writer as possibly a government employee, as they always do that in their articles. Whoever was behind the controversial website clearly wanted those who were maligned there to go after Bandillo’s writers, as we had access to the national media and we were actively seeking the truth about Batul’s killing, in the face of an apparent cover-up by the government.

One of the groups mentioned in the website is the Commando, a shadowy vigilante gang that is dreaded in Palawan. Many listeners who had heard the Commando’s leader threatening to exact vengeance on the website’s creators expressed fears for the safety of Jofelle and myself.

Due to her relatives’ insistence, Jofelle was forced to leave Puerto Princesa two days after Batul’s funeral last June 3. I stayed on for two more weeks, but dyER’s daily barrage against Bandillo and the two unnamed “lady writers” convinced me that the threat was real. I decided it was no longer worth living in a snake-infested island paradise, so I packed my stuff and flew to another island where I could finish some pending assignments in relative peace. It’s a very uneasy peace, I must say, as I continue to receive text messages from media colleagues and friends about the mayor’s moves and dyER’s latest attacks against Bandillo.

Many people have asked me if I thought the mayor had something to do with the murder. My stock answer is that your guess is as good as mine. I would like to think not, but unless the police solved the case and found the logical mastermind, not just some fall guy and witnesses who wanted a share of the P1-million reward money, then I don’t think we will ever find out. It’s like the Ninoy Aquino assassination, in that sense.

As I write this, I have been living out of a suitcase for two months. It has not been easy leaving my spiritual home, but there are times when love for life has to take precedence over everything else. For now, it seems like building my dream home in Palawan is out of the question as long as politicians who think that life is cheap remain in power, and abusive radio stations like dyER are able to operate with impunity. I can only share the hopes of many principled Palaweños for divine retribution to catch up with Dong Batul’s killers, so that genuine peace may return to Puerto Princesa.

Yasmin Arquiza is  the editorial director of the Bandillo ng Palawan.

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