For once, it seems that the murder of a journalist in the Philippines, one of the deadliest countries in the world for reporters, is not going to go unpunished.
This Monday, the country's police accused the hitherto head of the Directorate of Penitentiary Services and Reintegration (Bucor, for its acronym in English) of ordering the murder of a veteran presenter who had denounced the prevailing corruption in the prison environment. A case that has shaken public opinion and once again calls into question the health of the institutions of the Asian archipelago.
The official in question, currently suspended from his duties, is Gerald Bantang, who was allegedly assisted in organizing the crime by his deputy security officer, Ricardo Zulueta, whose whereabouts are currently unknown. "(Batang) is probably the highest ranking official in this country ever charged in a case of this gravity," Attorney General Crispin Remulla said.
Percibal Mabasa, better known as Percy Lapid (63 years old), presented for years a nightly program with tens of thousands of followers called Lapid Fire, where they denounced cases of abuse of power and notorious corruption scandals of politicians, police, military and government officials. ministries and other institutions. In recent times, criticism of him has focused especially on the figure of the controversial former president Rodrigo Duterte (2016-2022) and his bloody war on drugs.
After decades in the gap, two individuals on a motorcycle shot him dead on October 3 at the entrance to a housing estate in the capital, Manila, while he was on his way to work. At that time, agents identified 160 "persons of interest" for the investigation, all of them public figures or well-known businessmen publicly singled out by Lapid for their reprehensible practices.
Two weeks later, the police appeared before the press in the company of the alleged gunman, Joel Estorial, who admitted responsibility for the shooting. In his appearance, the detainee pointed out that he received the order to assassinate Lapid from an inmate of the Bilbild maximum security prison in Manila.
The next day, in a new twist, it was learned that this prisoner, identified as Jun Villamor, had suffocated to death with a plastic bag in his cell at the hands of other inmates just a few hours after Estorial's statement. His suspicious murder led the country's president, Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos, to indefinitely suspend the head of Bucor, now detained Gerald Bantag, for failing in his task of protecting the alleged ringleader of the informer's murder in prison.
This week, the police went a step further and identified Bantag as one of those 160 "persons of interest" that Lapid had alluded to in his program, and indicated that the murder of Villamor e in prison could have responded to an attempt by cover up the attack on the journalist.
"It has been found through the investigation that both (Bantag and Zulueta) were behind the murders of Percy Lapid and Jun Villamor," said Eugene Javier, spokesman for Philippine intelligence services yesterday.
The reasons, he added, were "the continuous revelations" by Lapid on his radio program against Bantag, whom he accused of accepting bribes from prisoners and building "a mansion" on the outskirts of Manila with those illicit profits. The Philippine Public Prosecutor's Office is now studying whether there is enough evidence to file formal charges in court.
The president of the National Union of Philippine Journalists, Jonathan de Santos, welcomed the "good development" of the case, but warned that there was a long way to go. For its part, the family of the murdered journalist has stated that there could be higher-ranking people behind the crime, although they did not offer names.
Despite having a wide range of media, the Philippines is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for reporters. In the last 35 years, it is estimated that almost 300 professionals have been killed in the country, most of them in remote areas, and only 20% of these cases have been resolved, according to data from local organizations. Mabasa's death is the second recorded death of a reporter since Marcos took office on June 30.
