Freedom, She Wrote

Book Review: Press Freedom under Siege: Reportage that Challenged the Marcos Dictatorship.
Ma. Ceres P. Doyo, editor
Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press
2019. 405 pp

What first fascinated me about this anthology is that the women journalists and opinion-writers far outnumbered the men. This discrepancy immediately suggested to me two things. First, despite only having broken ground in the late 1960s, women’s activism had already made its mark. Martial law may have imprisoned many of these women activists, but it could not stop their march. Many of the authors were activists or sympathizers of the radical movement. In 1972, many of them were jailed or went underground. Upon surfacing, however, they immediately went back to what they were extremely good at -- writing. Then, a set of younger colleagues, inspired by what their predecessors were doing, earned their spurs and joined their elders.

And the productivity is quite amazing: 44 articles in Press Freedom under Siege were written by women, only 29 by men.

Second, these were pieces written under conditions that were not encouraging for women. Publishers consigned them to the “margins” and many of the pieces here were, as Sheila Coronel put it, “not for the front pages of the newspapers, but their opinion pages, lifestyle sections, and Sunday magazines.” Repression also forced them to be creative, using “allegory, metaphor, narrative techniques, and indirect language in order to evade censorship.” But as Mao said, one “can turn a bad thing into a good thing.” These women used their “weakness” (being ignored by men), becoming de facto ethnographers, delving into local and provincial lives, and turning these encounters into understated critiques of the dictatorship.

As expected, they were “first not taken seriously” (Coronel), but once stories about the Kalingas and dictatorship’s development dams came out of their pens, the dictatorship took notice, and went after them. The anthology includes stories of women writers being threatened, imprisoned, interrogated, sued for libel. There are also tales of publishers and editors being forced to resign by their publishers (The well-respected editors Letty Magsanoc and Ceres Doyo had to seek the help of human rights lawyers when the regime turned up the volume).

Yet, all this did not deter them from their vocation. In the 1980s and all throughout the 1990s, these women wrote about the trauma Filipinos had experienced under the dictatorship, the frailties of the post-Marcos political system, Catholic communists, “red” nuns, and people’s doctors, militarism and provincial and national corruption. They inspired a new generation of journalists, including the all-women editorial staff of Rodrigo Duterte’s media bête noir, Rappler.

Ceres P. Doyo at the book launch at Bantayog ng mga Bayani.

Today, when someone asks me about the best works on Philippine politics, my instant advise is for them to ignore the country’s academic writings. I then point them to books and blogs of Filipina journalists, which I describe as path-breaking and carry more analytical and empirical weight than what the professoriate produces.

This is not to say that the 29 men’s contributions are not as notable as their female colleagues’ input. Rene Villanueva’s three-part series on Macliing Dulag, the Kalinga leader whose resistance to the regime’s planned dam led to his assassination, and Roberto Coloma’s pieces on the massacre of a village in northern Samar by a paramilitary “Lost Command” are moving and sharp. 

But, for me, this is mainly a book about women journalists.

Their writings set them up for careers in the industry where they shape public discourse to this very day.  Yet, all is not peachy keen. Their works had limited circulation. The “mosquito press’” readership was mainly in cosmopolitan cities, thinning out the farther one got from the capital.

This may partly explain why democracy, as envisioned by Filipino democrats, never sank its teeth in the probinsyas the way it did in Metropolitan Manila or Cebu. In the rural regions, Filipinos also might have heard of the fall of the dictator, but they have remained beholden to or oppressed by the local political clans. Investigative media recognized this problem, and some of the best works of institutions like the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism were directed at exposing the avarice and abuse of local satraps. Their effectiveness also seems limited. Even today, Filipinos in many towns and even small cities have never heard of Magsanoc, Doyo, Mayuga, et. al.

In short, the masses have remained for grabs even after 1986. The authors of the series are well aware of this, going by editor Ceres Doyo’s apprehensive note in closing her introduction. Doyo et al. republished these essays because the current president’s despotism reminded them of Marcos. It is also perhaps a subliminal admission that their works have yet to reach many Filipinos. The onus is now on UP Press to make sure those in Tawi-Tawi and the Batanes Islands get their copies of this fine book.

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Patricio Abinales

Patricio N. Abinales teaches Philippine political history at the School of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Hawai`i-Manoa.

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