JOURNALISTIC – FIRST PLACE
Modern journalists primarily chase clicks, scandals, bad news, and public take-downs. What impact does this have on our society?
DOMINIC CRAIG L. CARPIO, JOURNALISTIC
THE PHILIPPINES
Blinding Spectacles
“Wherefore, all the accused…are hereby found guilty beyond reasonable doubt of two crimes of kidnapping and serious illegal detention and are hereby sentenced to imprisonment of two reclusiones perpetua (life sentences).”
In the middle of the cramped, hot courtroom, amid the uproar of the court’s decision, the 21-year-old accused Francisco Larrañaga—commonly known as Paco—is embraced by his family as they are drowned in the flashes of cameras.
Paco is charged, along with six other men, to have abducted, sexually violated, and murdered two sisters in the central Philippine island of Cebu. Paco, the gang’s alleged leader, also belongs to a prominent political family in the country which includes a former president and other local political figures. His privileged upbringing and his Spanish-Filipino descent made him what Filipinos would call a mestizo: a term carried from the Spanish colonial caste to refer to an upper class of mixed heritage.
The year was 1997: the country was in the infancy of rebuilding from the upper class’s kleptocratic reign. Just a little over a decade ago, the Philippines underwent one of the most fundamentally transformative chapters of its history: a bloodless revolution monikered “People Power” ousted and exiled former dictator President Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. Under his brutal 14-year rule, the freedoms of the press were significantly stifled. Under the presidency that followed, the country with a new constitution created what is described as the “freest press in Asia.”
The press now unafraid and bold, the country’s insatiable hunger for a big story was sparked. “People think in terms of flashing headlines,” said Sheila Coronel, an investigative journalist. Tabloids in the country’s many languages would prove very popular, and television newscasts that have adopted a tabloid format of reporting have captured as much as 60% of nightly national audiences in their prime.
And for a country obsessed with headlines on justice: crime stories, corruption scandals, and holding the powerful to account, Paco’s arrest caught the media’s undivided attention. For the sheer gravity of the crime, what left a particularly sour taste in the public’s mouth was the fact that Paco was a mestizo. As political families are pervasive in the Philippines, coming from such a lineage was in itself perceived as corruption. Thereupon, the unfolding saga “was the story that was selling headlines and much more interesting,” said documentary filmmaker Michael Collins.
“I said, well, good for the justice system. A rich boy is going to jail, I mean, it works… Right? None of [his family’s] power could stop him because that was what I was getting from the newspapers,” said Solita Monsod, a journalist and economist.
His arrest and the baring of the crime’s details caught the country by storm. Graphic pictures of the dead body of one of the sisters ran on papers and television. “Cop describes violated body,” a headline ran. A Filipino journalist doing a piece on the case cupped his two hands together, saying: “This much sperm was found inside the victim’s body.”
Paco, who the media often described as a “scion” of a prominent family for his lineage, was soon painted by journalists as privileged drug-addict along with his accomplices. A nightly television magazine news program, Assignment, did a piece on Paco’s crime. “The fate of the…sisters shows what drugs can do. These animals were not born drugged. They made themselves into drug addicts,” said the reporter.
Meanwhile, the media also made a spectacle of the daughters’ bereaved parents. The victims’ mother would testify how Paco and his companions pursued her daughters. The parents sat for interviews and would retell how Paco’s group repeatedly threatened the two. “My daughter told me Larrañaga was always trailing her in school. They ruined my children’s future. And I think that I deserve justice,” said the mother of the victims in a televised interview.
Despite months of investigation and a presidential intervention that saw more law enforcement agencies looking into the case, substantial evidence was yet to be found against Paco in what the media now called “the trial of the decade.”
That was until the 8th member of Paco’s gang surfaced.
Davidson Rusia turned himself in, saying his conscience was haunted by his victims and immediately confessed. He soon became the star witness for the case and the central basis of the prosecution, outlining exhaustively the gruesome details of their crime.
“Rusia took the witness stand for several days, and every day it’s like a teleserye (soap opera) that people watch, and people want to know what Rusia had to say. It’s like he has this fan club,” said Suzanne Alueta, a journalist, on his time as a witness.
One need not imagine what a soap opera based off of Rusia’s account would look like. Even before Paco and the defense could present their case, a highly dramatized reenactment of the crime was broadcast across the nation by a prominent television network in an installment of a true crime investigative documentary series.
Now already two years since the crime took place, the verdict to the case could finally be delivered. A large convoy of government vehicles bringing police and the accused to the court were greeted by crowds of citizens and the media that surrounded the courthouse. The courtroom was visibly packed beyond capacity, with the squeezed crowd dotted by both photographers and television cameramen who brought along their equipment.
Immediately after the court’s conviction, the room erupted into chaos. Cameramen raised their heavy equipment above the heads of people to capture the maelstrom of journalists swarming the victims’ mother who was screaming in distress. “We want death!” she screamed. As if echoing the calls of the victims’ weeping family, the scores of people that surrounded the courthouse shouted “Death!” as they jeered and booed Paco and his accomplices.
Amid all this spectacular media sensation, one could easily see how this story is an arc of justice: how a “scion” of a wealthy and prominent family was brought to justice when he dared to heinously cross the line.
Indeed, justice saw its way, and the word “death” left people’s mouths and found itself on paper.
The Supreme Court, acting on appeal of the conviction, elevated the sentence of life imprisonment and ordered Paco and his accomplices to death by lethal injection.
It was only by that point when everything unraveled.
Paco, at the time when the alleged crime occurred, was attending classes in Manila, an entirely different city on an entirely different island, more than 500 miles away. Classmates, teachers, passenger records, and photographic evidence stood irrevocably in his defense.
Despite countless witness testimony and evidence that would otherwise serve as unequivocal facts that supported his alibi, a corrupted justice system deprived him of a fair trial.
“In this fight for justice,” goes a message recorded by Paco in prison, “I have no voice. I need you to be my voice. My hands are shackled. I need you to be my hands.” With the crazed spectacle he has become, his pleas now succumb to the deafening, spectacular “truth.”
An otherwise innocent man with every good reason has been turned into a vile thug by the cyclical hunger for a spectacle. In an overload of graphic pictures and emotional rhapsodies, the “truth” can seemingly materialize itself. However, when we want the story to climax, when the narrative is so convenient, must we allow sensation to speak for the truth?
Perhaps this conviction needed no courtroom—the media’s spectacle was enough for the country to pass its resolute verdict on Paco.
