No justice for the massacre victims
This is why impunity reigns in this country. Seven years after a pack of savages massacred 58 people on a hillside in Maguindanao, relatives of the victims are still waiting for justice.
The man accused of leading the massacre, Andal Ampatuan Jr., at least remains behind bars. But his father and clan patriarch Andal Sr., believed to have given the green light for the grisly crime, died in July last year. Several other members of the Ampatuan clan are facing trial. But other Ampatuans remain in local government in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
Of the estimated 200 to 300 men, mostly militias and police who participated in the mass murder, only over 100 have been arrested and are facing trial. Certain key witnesses have been executed. The late senator Joker Arroyo warned that considering the number of defendants and the state of the Philippine justice system, the nation may have to wait 200 years for a final verdict.
Recently, relatives of the victims visited the site of the mass murder for the first time in Sitio Masalay, Barangay Salman in Ampatuan town. They laid flowers and lit candles at the site where the victims, 32 of them media workers, were shot dead and then packed together in a shallow mass grave using a backhoe of the provincial government.
As the relatives mark their seventh year of waiting for justice today, there are still local kingpins out there who think like the Ampatuans, believing that political power gives them a blank check to do anything they want. The Ampatuans believed they could get away with killing 58 people just to prevent a political rival from challenging their hold on the provincial government. They blurred the line between public and private funds and property, and intimidated their constituents into looking the other way. Their enormous wealth stood out in one of the nation’s poorest regions.
On the seventh anniversary today of the nation’s most atrocious case of election violence, justice remains elusive for the victims, and impunity reigns.