First Person

Jesse (not his real name), a trusted henchman of the Ampatuans, narrates his role in the Nov. 23 massacre and subsequent coverup in the following account:

I DID not have any opportunity to study. My family was poor and my father farmed land that was not his. I only reached grade one. I could neither read nor write.

But I grew up in a town where guns were a fact of life. Guns were prized highly in the community. I learned to use a gun at an early age. For the most part, and because I could not have any gainful employment for being unschooled, I hung around in the neighborhood or played basketball.

But I was tough. People told me that. Perhaps, it was this quality that caught Datu Unsay Ampatuan’s attention.
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By CHIT ESTELLA

FOR someone who had undergone much sorrow and pain, Corazon Aquino laughed easily and well.

People unaccustomed to hearing the former president laugh would quickly turn around to look for the source of the guffaw and be surprised at the woman who was known to be demure and self-effacing.  But she was given to hearty laughter, especially when faced with the ridiculous or simply anything hilarious. On one of those occasions, she was sorely misunderstood.

I was one of the reporters covering Malacanang in the last half of Mrs. Aquino’s six-year term as president. I was working for the daily newspaper Malaya. It was a time when the Philippines became, for some reason, a frequent disaster zone. One calamity kept happening after another–typhoons kept hitting the country and a volcano that lay dormant for 600 years suddenly erupted and put a large area of Luzon under cover of darkness and a thick layer of lahar. Countries and international organizations that rushed eagerly to help the country at the beginning of Mrs. Aquino’s presidency began complaining and said they were suffering from what their representatives called “donor fatigue.”

One day, while waiting at the gazebo for Cabinet officials to come out of the Guest House which served as the President’s office, the ground literally started shaking beneath our feet. Water from the Pasig River began splashing onto the Palace grounds. To keep from falling down, reporters had to hold on to one another for support. Then came the frightening realization: Earthquake!

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By NICO CARTALLA

WE departed the island of Seychelles in the Indian Ocean on April 6 for a 21-day trip that would bring us back to the Mediterranean port of Palma de Mallorca in Spain to get the M/Y Teleost ready for summer. The 160-foot private superyacht sails to the Mediterranean in summer and to either the Caribbean or Indian Ocean islands in winter, entertaining multimillionaire clients who pay $240,000 dollars a week for a nice holiday.

Morale on board the ship was understandably low. A few days ago a charter yacht had been seized off Asuncion island a couple of hundred miles south from where we were. It was the first hijacking incident in the area. That night we received another report of an attack 100 miles north of where we were. A maritime advisory warned vessels against traveling 600 miles close to the Somalian coast. Our captain decided to divert the yacht’s course more to the east, away from the pirate-infested waters.

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