The Ampatuan Massacre | 2009

On the morning of November 23, 2009, a convoy of vehicles wound through the highways of Maguindanao province in the southern Philippines. Inside were lawyers, political supporters, journalists, and the wife and family members of a man who simply wanted to run for governor.

They had no reason to believe they wouldn't make it home by nightfall. But they never did.

Armed men blocked the convoy on the highway, and herded the group to a nearby hilltop where several open graves had been dug up. Then, without warning, they opened fire.

When it was over, 58 people were dead. Among them: 32 journalists and media workers, two lawyers, and six motorists who had simply been travelling the same road. It would become the single deadliest attack against journalists ever recorded, and one of the most brazen acts of political violence in modern history. Behind it all stood the Ampatuans a powerful clan whose private army had long operated in the shadows of state power, linked to killings, torture, abductions, and a culture of fear that had gone unchallenged for decades.

This is a story about what happens when impunity becomes a way of life. About power so entrenched it believed itself untouchable. And about the long, gruelling decade-long fight to make it answer for what it did on a hillside in Maguindanao.

 

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