hen police ordered Manila Today editor Lady Ann Salem to turn around and, with trade unionist Rodrigo Esparago, stay in one corner of their condominium unit during a morning raid in December, she recalled the many articles she had written and edited that referenced the notorious police modus that she herself was then experiencing.
Salem — Icy to friends and colleagues — said the names of Reina Nacino, Ram Carlo Bautista, and Alma Moran came to mind — human rights workers who in 2019 were all arrested in the Manila office of left-wing Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (New Patriotic Alliance), where police allegedly found firearms, ammunition, and a hand grenade, by now a familiar list of supposed evidence.
She also remembered Cora Agovida, Metro Manila spokesperson of women’s group Gabriela, and her husband Mickael Tan Bartolome, who were made to drop to the floor in a similar raid in 2019, their two young children ordered to go outside the house, after which police supposedly recovered a pistol and two grenades just casually strewn around their Manila home.
“I already knew what was happening. The day they were taken, I wrote an article about it,” she said in Filipino.
Her familiarity with the modus, thanks to her work as a journalist, gave her the necessary composure with which to face the otherwise terrifying ordeal, she said.
Salem’s arrest late last year follows a disturbing pattern of what is widely perceived to be a systematic and state-sanctioned crackdown on activists, human rights workers, and journalists in the Philippines, conducted in the guise of legitimate police and military operations that critics said are marred by irregularities.
The police only declared the start of the search a full hour after they had already freely moved inside her Mandaluyong City (Metro Manila) unit, Salem said, all the while she and Esparago were cuffed with cable ties, their questions about the process falling on deaf ears.
“I just thought then, first, the next time I edit, I’d drop the quotation marks around ‘planted evidence’ because I know first-hand that it’s true,” she said.
Human rights group Karapatan had noted the glaring similarity between the conduct of the arrests, foremost the wanton planting of evidence, and that of President Rodrigo Duterte government’s notorious drug war, which even its own Department of Justice has recently scored for routine violation of standard protocols.
Meanwhile, the Philippine Bar Association had expressed concern over how certain courts, instead of being “people’s shield against unwarranted searches and seizures,” had become “warrant factories” and thus instrumental in “targeting a particular group of citizens.”
December 2020. Lady Ann “Icy” Salem, in cable ties, at her inquest proceeding at the prosecutor’s office in Mandaluyong City in Metro Manila. Salem was taken in on shaky charges built on even shakier evidence. For weeks she was kept in isolation, her right to communicate with her family repeatedly denied. (Photo by Altermidya.)
Red-tagging as prelude to arrests, human rights violations
That “particular group” seems to refer to left-leaning and progressive organizations, mainstream and alternative media outlets, as well as those engaged in critical human rights advocacy work, all of whom find themselves at the dangerous end of a prolonged spate of red-tagging by government officials.
In many instances, being labeled a communist was enough to provoke the persecution, if not arrest and even killing, of unarmed organizers and dissenters, many from the ranks of peasants, labor unions, and women, among others.
Red-tagging is “clearly and undeniably a state policy,” Karapatan said, further institutionalized by the creation of the powerful National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), and which a widely condemned anti-terrorism law seems to give carte blanche legal cover.
True enough, Salem’s arrest came just a week after a Senate hearing in which NTF-ELCAC executive director Allen Capuyan accused Manila Today and other outlets that make up progressive media network Altermidya of being part of the “propaganda machinery” for the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).
The trade organization National Union of Journalists in the Philippines, of which Salem is part, has also been red-tagged in the past.
“I was hit with déjà vu because we weren’t expecting it, although it was inevitable after the red-tagging incident in the Senate,” Salem said.
That she, Esparago, and five other trade unionists were nabbed on December 10 — International Human Rights Day — was an additional layer of irony that was not lost on her, but which she said escaped her oblivious captors.
“They told us at CIDG, ‘You’re even called HRD7 [representing the seven people arrested on Human Rights Day]. We didn’t intend that because we didn’t know it was Human Rights Day,’” she said. “They would always say that they’d undergo human rights seminars, but they didn’t even know when Human Rights Day was.”
The casual naïveté is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a police and legal bureaucracy whose ineptness and tacit complicity, critics said, are clearly being weaponized in the state’s war against dissent.
Still a journalist even behind bars
After being arrested, Salem and Esparago were kept incommunicado for 35 hours prior to inquest, their assertion of their right to talk to family repeatedly denied. After inquest proceedings, they were again held incommunicado, this time for five days. In her first month in jail, three weeks were spent in isolation.
“They deliberately kept on transferring us so they’d have to isolate us in the new place,” Salem said.
In the five days that she was kept in isolation, there was no escaping her training as a journalist, her mind preoccupied with the broader political context around her arrest, even if this time she had become the subject of the news.
At one point, she said they joked about the experience as “integration” in the city jail, a method that she was very familiar with as part of the alternative press. “We don’t just pry in what we report. We really immerse,” she said.
While difficult, she said she knew that so many others — peasants, national minorities, the urban poor in Metro Manila — have no choice but to endure much tougher circumstances. Some 600 political prisoners, more than 400 of whom were seized during the Duterte administration, continue to languish in jail, facing similar and similarly dubious charges of illegal possession of firearms and explosives.
In particular, Salem recalled former University of the Philippines film student Maricon Montajes, who spent seven years in jail after being arrested while doing her thesis in Taysan, Batangas province in the southern Luzon region; and Frenchie Mae Cumpio, a journalist based in Tacloban City, Leyte, in the Eastern Visayas region, who was arrested last year and is still behind bars.
Both were charged with illegal possession of firearms, the same one that Salem, Esparago, and countless others face.
The passage of the highly controversial Anti-Terrorism Law amid a raging pandemic has ramped up state-led attacks against independent media, including members of the alternative press like Manila Today editor Lady Ann “Icy” Salem.
Bigger battles after release
In dismissing the charges against Salem and ordering her release, Mandaluyong City judge Monique Quisumbing-Ignacio declared the search warrant issued by Quezon City judge Cecilyn Burgos Villavert null and void, its vagueness enabling the raiding teams to go on a “fishing expedition.”
The sworn affidavits and testimonies of informants, on which the warrant was based, were also riddled with glaring inconsistencies, the judge ruled.
The decision was a long-overdue corrective to the police practice of filing trumped-up charges against activists via dubious search warrants, said Rachel Pastores, one of Salem’s legal counsel.
“Based on our experience, search warrants are being used to raid the houses of activists,” Pastores said. “Not only them but journalists, lawyers, and other leaders who are critical of the government.”
Villavert’s court also issued the warrants that precipitated the 2019 raids in the homes and offices of activists and progressive groups in Manila and Bacolod in Negros island, which resulted in the arrest of more than 50 people.
It is a state bureaucracy emboldened by a president who regularly insists on ignoring checks and balances when it comes to human rights in the conduct of police operations. In a recent tirade, he ordered troops to “finish off” communist rebels and “forget about human rights.”
Two days later, a wave of arrests in Southern Tagalog, south of Manila, led to the killing of nine activists and the arrest of six others. The 28 warrants of arrest again came from a single court.
If the anti-terror law somehow manages to clear all the legal challenges leveled against it, Salem said the police would no longer even need the “performance” of legality through faulty search warrants and planted evidence.
But as with many uphill battles, it was the concerted and tireless efforts of many – in this case Salem’s family, colleagues, supporters, and lawyers Kristina Conti and Rachel Pastores of the Public Interest Law Center – that gave those campaigning for her release a momentary victory.
Women resisting Duterte
Salem’s release came just in time, too, for International Women’s Month, a “huge slap in the face” of “macho-fascist” Duterte, said Ronalyn Olea of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT), a global network of women communicators and researchers of which Salem is also communications officer.
“[Duterte is] deeply enraged by women truth-tellers like Icy, like Frenchie Mae Cumpio, like Maria Ressa and other women journalists who are disrespected, jailed, and sued with trumped-up charges,” Olea said.
The morning of her arrest, Salem said she had just dozed off and was due to publish the last of the 16 stories for IAWRT’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence campaign.
“It’s so ironic that my arrest led to gender-based violence, I who wanted to publish 16 stories internationally,” she said.
Without meaning to, her three-month ordeal might as well be that last unpublished story, a joyous one, at least for now. If anything, her time in jail only fortified her belief in the critical role that the alternative press plays in a democracy, marked by a deep, if often dangerous, engagement with social issues.
“We shouldn’t be suffering or be punished for our beliefs,” she said. “We shouldn’t be suffering or be punished for our profession, association, for making our voices heard in a country that is supposedly free and enjoys democracy. But if that is happening, maybe it isn’t free.”
Taunted by police and asked if she would go back to her job once released, Salem said she was unfazed. “Of course,” she answered. “We’re not doing anything wrong. And there is so much to do to make things right in our country.” ●
Banner photos courtesy of Altermidya.
Glenn Diaz is a writer and graduate student based in Manila. His work has appeared in CNN Philippines and the Philippine Collegian.
