Cagayan de Oro Press Club Statement on the 16th Commemoration of the Ampatuan Massacre

 “The press is free not because it is allowed to be, 

but because it insists on being free.” — Nonoy Espina

WE gather today not merely to mark a date on a calendar, but to honor a blood oath to memory. 

Sixteen years have passed since the hills of Sitio Masalay were scarred by an atrocity that shook the world, yet the shadow of that day still stretches across our nation. 

On November 23, 2009, voices were not just silenced; they were slaughtered. Names that once commanded bylines and airwaves were reduced to a long, aching list that we must never allow history to erase. 

We remember them in the full, heavy weight of their humanity — reporters, drivers, aides — people who went to work on a Tuesday morning and never came home.

Remembering is not a passive act; it is an act of defiance. 

It is a refusal to let grief calcify into indifference. We name the fallen because naming is the first duty of justice. We tell their stories because stories are the scaffolding of truth. Each sentence they wrote and every shutter they clicked was an exercise in courage. To honor them is to keep that courage alive in our own syntax and in our own choices.

There is a particular savagery in hunting those who bear witness. When a journalist is murdered, the public loses a mirror; when the press is muzzled, the light that exposes corruption is snuffed out. 

The Ampatuan Massacre was not merely an assault on 58 individuals — it was a massacre of the very idea that citizens deserve to know. Sixteen years later, that assault still reverberates — in laws that chill dissent, in threats that linger on screens, and in the quiet, corrosive self-censorship that creeps into newsroom corners.

Now is the time to turn remembrance into resolve. 

We must insist — loudly and unyieldingly — that freedom of expression is not a luxury to be rationed, but a foundation to be defended. 

We must demonstrate that press freedom is non-negotiable. 

This means shielding journalists from harassment, strengthening the legal safeguards that ensure independence, and building institutions that hold power to account rather than shelter it. 

It means teaching the next generation to value truth over convenience, and curiosity over comfort.

Let our grief sharpen into action. 

Speak up when a reporter is red-tagged or threatened; stand with editors who refuse to be cowed; demand investigations that are thorough and impartial. Vote for leaders who understand that a free press is the oxygen of democracy, and reject those who would suffocate it. 

Fund independent journalism, defend public-interest reporting, and refuse the easy silence of complicity.

We owe the fallen more than a yearly tribute. 

We owe them a living legacy: a country where the press can probe without fear, where the truth is told without a price on one’s head, and where the people can hear, judge, and decide. 

Let this 16th anniversary be a summons — quiet at first, then rising — until it becomes a chorus that no warlord or tyrant can drown out.

For as long as we speak, write, and insist, their work continues. 

In that persistence, we keep them — and our freedom — alive. #NeverForget #NeverAgain #EndImpunityPH