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The Philip­pines is one of the most west­ern­ized coun­tries in Asia with strong ties to the US and the United Nations. Yet a local war­lord that dou­bles as a gov­er­nor, Andal Ampat­uan, just mas­sa­cred 57 peo­ple —12 of which were jour­nal­ists — to pre­vent a guber­na­to­r­ial can­di­date from fil­ing his papers.

Sound crazy? I’ll say. What’s cra­zier is what we know about this highly mil­i­ta­rized, clan-led coun­try that makes you won­der why the US or the United Nations ever befriended it. It’s com­mon knowl­edge that the Philip­pines grants impunity for polit­i­cal vio­lence. Why? Just ask Philip­pine Pres­i­dent Glo­ria Macapagal-Arroyo. Under her reign, the Arroyo admin­is­tra­tion has ignored reports by jour­nal­ists of mil­i­tary abuses and turned its back when war­ring fac­tions assas­si­nated envi­ron­men­tal­ists and church workers.

But there are more legs to this story that are sup­port­ing what has proved to be the dead­liest day for jour­nal­ists any­where. Offi­cials found a gov­ern­ment con­struc­tion vehi­cle parked at the site of hastily dug mass graves. Just to give you an idea of how hur­riedly these so-called “secu­rity forces” dug — offi­cials spot­ted a sin­gle grave with 17 bod­ies piled on top of each other.

Arroyo has released a num­ber of state­ments and her lat­est sug­gests that she is out­raged by these bar­baric acts. Really? This along with her other state­ments don’t coin­cide with her record of ser­vice (or what many deem disservice).

Arroyo’s vow to “per­son­ally over­see mil­i­tary action against the per­pe­tra­tors” is about as telling as ask­ing the wolf, “Who emp­tied the henhouse?”

Sound­ing more like a heinous mafia movie than real life? Yep. Think the inves­ti­ga­tion ordered by Arroyo will be fair and impar­tial? Nope. Besides her cor­rupt gov­ern­ment, she is still lick­ing wounds in the wake of the Octo­ber typhoon that killed hun­dreds. Arroyo’s lack of aid to typhoon vic­tims drew crit­i­cism world­wide. The world is get­ting a clear pic­ture that Arroyo is just as respon­si­ble as the crim­i­nal ele­ments she enables with the blood­shed of 57 peo­ple on her hands cou­pled with her administration’s record of tol­er­at­ing violence.

So let’s take a closer look at Arroyo. She has any­thing but a spot­less record. In fact, her 2004 elec­tion tal­lied more votes than reg­is­tered vot­ers. Then, there is her rela­tion­ship with Ampat­uan. Reports indi­cate that Ampat­uan is a staunch ally of Arroyo and he and his fam­ily helped Arroyo win the vast major­ity of votes in her 2004 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion (many of which belonged to no one). Ooops!

And it doesn’t stop there. Arroyo issued an exec­u­tive order in 2006 that allowed local offi­cials and the Philip­pine National Police to dep­u­tize vol­un­teer watch­man to fight insur­gent groups in the south­ern regions. This is exactly why local politi­cians (or in this case war­lords) wield the power that they do. And just how do they mis­use it? They use their posi­tions for per­sonal gain by gun­ning down any­one who will run against their can­di­date. In Ampatuan’s case, one of his sons.

Locals blame Ampat­uan for order­ing his army of 500 to stop oppos­ing can­di­dates at all cost. So his pri­vate mili­tia did what any army of thugs could: they kid­napped and bru­tally killed and pos­si­bly tor­tured, raped and beheaded Magudadatu’s mes­sen­gers. These mes­sen­gers were none other than the wife of the can­di­date, Ismael “Toto” Man­gu­da­datu, his sis­ter and a group of jour­nal­ists who went to file paper­work for Mangudadtu.

Sound­ing more like a spy thriller than real life? I’ll say.

There is no ques­tion that reform is needed to pre­vent atroc­i­ties like the griz­zly one that con­tin­ues to unfold in the Philip­pines. Maybe this is a good time for the Obama admin­is­tra­tion to focus on denounc­ing coun­tries with long-standing human rights abuses instead of dic­tat­ing where Israelis should lay their heads at night.

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