Word: dizon
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...Allan Dizon grew up to the shrill squeals of dying pigs. His family home-a humble, jerrybuilt affair of concrete, wood and tin sheeting-stands in the township of Lorega, Cebu, close to a municipal slaughterhouse, but a distant remove from the white beaches and luxury resorts that many people associate with the Philippines' second city. Lorega is a tough area of backyard swineries and poverty, where the chief alleviators of misery are cockfighting, illegal gambling machines and drugs. For a brief time at least, Dizon was one of its more fortunate sons, working as a photojournalist at a local...
...Dizon's own story may not be, as it first seems, one of a crusading journalist whose commitment to exposing uncomfortable truths cost him his life. He was an ordinary, hard-up man, who had to support four children from two marriages on a salary of just $110 a month. One way of earning extra money at the Freeman was to go after exclusives. "You get a bonus for exclusive photos," explains Mercado. For Dizon, the most prolific source of these was Lorega, where he knew how to track down local methamphetamine pushers and illegal gambling operators. According...
...last months, Dizon became increasingly scared. According to his widow, Amelita, he "began moving us from house to house every few weeks," eventually taking the family from inner-city Lorega to Mandaue, a suburb on the way to Cebu airport. "He didn't discuss his work with me at all," she says, "but I had the vague feeling that he stepped on the shoes of some people, and then I learned from people at his funeral that he had been receiving a lot of threats." Dizon's precautions proved hopelessly inadequate. On the evening of Nov. 27-a day that...
...Manila and a few provincial capitals like Cebu, the press is much the same as it is in other countries-with codes of ethics, press clubs and standard pay scales. But as the case of Allan Dizon illustrates, no place is immune from the murky interplay of poverty and crime that pervades many areas of Philippine society. Things are especially bad in the cattle towns and fetid jungle outposts, where the cowboys of publishing rule. Many journalists at small rural papers don't receive a salary, but are instead paid piecemeal, earning a few dollars per story ($10 is roughly...
...many reporters who are murdered are not blameless heroes. The victims "are seen not as journalists killed in the line of duty, but as people who had it coming," says Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc, editor in chief of the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Suspects have been identified in many cases (including Dizon's-Edgar Belandres, a swinery owner, is currently on trial for the murder, a crime he denies committing). But only a few have been convicted since 1986. Stung by criticism from organizations like the International Federation of Journalists and Reporters Sans Frontières, the administration of President Gloria Macapagal...