(CMFR/IFEX) – On 2 April 2006, a community journalist was gunned down by unidentified men on his way home in Tarlac City, located approximately 110 kilometers north of Manila. Orlando Mendoza, a columnist who wrote for several local newspapers, was ambushed by the armed men while on his way home, and sustained fatal wounds in […]
(CMFR/IFEX) – On 2 April 2006, a community journalist was gunned down by unidentified men on his way home in Tarlac City, located approximately 110 kilometers north of Manila.
Orlando Mendoza, a columnist who wrote for several local newspapers, was ambushed by the armed men while on his way home, and sustained fatal wounds in the head and body.
Mendoza wrote for the “Tarlac Profile” and also acted as the editor-in-chief of another paper, “Tarlac Patrol”. Mendoza was also the vice president of the Camp Marabulos Press Club (Philippine National Police’s Tarlac camp) and a director of the Tarlac chapter of the Central Luzon Media Association (CMLA).
The 58-year-old journalist also worked at the local municipal office as “documentation consultant” on land disputes, according to CLMA president Abel Pablo in an interview with the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR).
CMFR is still determining whether Mendoza was killed in the line of duty.
Before he began his media practice around 1998, Mendoza was employed by the municipal office of the Department of Agrarian Reform, a government agency tasked with the effective implementation and management of land reform in the country.
According to Pablo, another journalist had accused Mendoza of “fixing” papers to help farmers, families, and owners with certain land disputes. Mendoza filed a libel suit (which was dismissed eventually) against the journalist in question, Pablo added.
Although he did not discount the possibility that Mendoza’s death was media-related, “Tarlac Patrol” publisher Pacifico Guevarra said he was more inclined to believe Mendoza was killed due to his involvement in a number of land disputes, according to a report in the “Inquirer News Service”.
As a media practitioner, Mendoza wrote columns which, local journalists claimed, did not necessarily attack certain individuals or organizations. “He didn’t blast anyone in his columns,” claimed Des Pangilinan, secretary of the Tarlac Press and Radio Club, where Mendoza also acted as a director.
However, Mendoza, along with Guevarra, was charged with libel last month by a local faction of the Phililppine Guardian Brotherhood, a military fraternity, for vilifying them in his columns. The charge was dismissed by a local court in late March.
Mendoza could be the first journalist to be killed in the line of duty in the Philippines in 2006, and the second fatality in Tarlac, after “Dyaryo Banat” columnist Bonifacio Gregorio, who was murdered on 3 July 2003.
