For weeks before the police came for her, Frenchie Mae Cumpio had noticed odd incidents. The Filipino journalist – just 21 years old but already hosting a radio show and working as executive director of a local news website – told colleagues that a stranger had begun turning up and asking after her at the boarding house where she lived. She was sent a bouquet of flowers designed for a grave. She reported that two men had been following her on a motorcycle.
Cumpio believed it was deliberate intimidation. She had recently published a series of reports after visiting poor rural farmers who said they were being harassed by army units in the region.
“Frenchie found that as the militarisation grew more intense, it was small farming communities who were being terrorised and forced to leave their villages,” says Neil Eco, a journalist colleague and friend. Those dispatches, along with a growing record of work that was highly critical of authorities, Eco says, “put her in the eye of the government and the army”.
Cumpio and 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 the commission inspect their offices to verify there were no illicit or planted materials there.
The next evening, however, before an inspection could take place, police and military raided Cumpio’s boarding house in the middle of the night. She was taken outside during the police search. About 15 minutes later, the police presented what they alleged had been in Cumpio’s bed: a hand grenade, firearm, and a communist flag.
“It’s like theatre,” says Eco, who has been campaigning for her release. “Sleeping with a grenade under your pillow?”
Since her arrest in February 2020, Cumpio has maintained her innocence, saying the weapons were planted and she has no involvement in terrorism. She, along with Abinguna and three human rights activists arrested in raids that night, has spent almost six years in a prison in Tacloban waiting for a ruling, in what observers have described as a “travesty of justice”.
The court is expected to decide on her case on Thursday, and the now 26-year-old journalist faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted. Prosecutors had previously also accused Cumpio of double murder, alleging that she had killed two soldiers in an ambush. Those charges have been dropped, but she still faces charges of funding terrorism – several thousand pounds in cash were seized, which Cumpio says were from a fundraising campaign – and possessing illegal weapons.
The case against Cumpio has been condemned by a coalition of high-profile press freedom organisations, who say charges against her are “fabricated” and her continued detention is “inhumane”. Her lawyer says the case is “pure harassment”.
Campaigners say that Cumpio’s detention is part of a wider attack on human rights activists and journalists in the Philippines, where they are accused of being part of the country’s communist insurgency. The so-called “red tagging” problem worsened under former president Rodrigo Duterte, who presided over an era of widespread police abuses and violent crackdowns on alleged communist rebels. Investigations into police conduct have found a pattern of unlawful arrests and executions, with police planting evidence to incriminate the victims.
According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF) data, the Philippines is among the most dangerous countries for reporters – particularly radio journalists. At least 147 Filipino journalists have been killed on the job since 1986, 89 of whom were radio presenters.
The Philippine government said in a written response that it “strongly denies allegations that the charges filed against Frenchie Mae Cumpio and her co-accused are baseless and politically motivated … the Philippine government stands on high moral ground and rejects the rhetoric of ‘red-tagging’”.
The UN special rapporteur for freedom of opinion and expression, Irene Khan, has reported that she has encountered numerous accounts from the Philippines of “red tagging” followed by arrest on fabricated charges for serious offences and prolonged detention to harass journalists.
Of Cumpio’s case, she says: “Even if she is found innocent … she has been languishing in prison for five years, waiting for a trial for five years – that to me is a travesty of justice.”
Conditions in the jail where Cumpio is being held have at times been dire, Eco says. The women’s prison, designed to hold about 30 people, has sometimes had up to 80 women crammed into its small dormitory. The prison’s warden stepped down in late 2025 after complaints that inmates were being deprived of proper meals and medical care.
The Guardian was unable to contact Cumpio directly. In a handwritten letter conveyed out of the jail in 2025, she describes the allegations against her as “a story that’s so absurd that if this was a class debate, you wouldn’t even try to rebut”.
“This more than five years of detention is robbing us of so many things – time, family, dreams, plans, future. People call us brave for holding on, although I would have to admit I sometimes feel otherwise,” Cumpio writes. “The fact that they are capable of charging us through mere lies. The fear that we still won’t be safe even when we’re out of this facility – nonetheless, we hold on.”
