'A travesty of justice' Filipino radio host's jailing is part of a pattern to purge activists

For weeks before the police came for her, Frenchie Mae Cumpio had noticed odd incidents.

- Tess McClure

The Filipino journalist, 21, who hosted a radio show and was executive director of a local news website, told colleagues that a stranger was turning up and asking for her at the boarding house where she lived. She was sent a funeral wreath. She reported that two men had followed her on a motorcycle.Cumpio believed it was deliberate intimidation. She had published a series of reports after visiting poor rural farmers who said they were being harassed by army units in the region.

Neil Eco, a colleague and friend, said: “Frenchie found that as the militarisation grew more intense, it was small farming communities who were being terrorised and forced to leave their villages.”

Those dispatches, and a growing record of work that was highly critical of authorities, Eco said, “put her in the eye of the government and the army”.

Cumpio and the human rights activist Alexander Abinguna had been tipped off that they could be targeted by police - and were so concerned about the risk of being falsely accused that Abinguna wrote to the Philippines Commission on Human Rights, requesting that it inspect their offices to verify there were no illicit or planted materials there.