Obituary: Journalist Christine Herrera, 49

Christine Herrera. INQUIRER / MARIANNE BERMUDEZ

Journalist Christine Herrera, 49, will be laid to rest today, Sunday, at the Heritage Park in Taguig.

A native of Odiongan, Romblon, Herrera is survived by her husband, Lito, their daughters Nikki and Abby, son-in-law Jaybee Baraquel, and grandson Malcolm.

A former reporter of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Herrera died of cardiac aneurysm last Nov. 19, while on vacation with friends in Thailand.

Newspaper editor Jullie Yap-Daza, in an opinion piece, called Herrera “a warrior masquerading as a reporter. A fighter. A subversive.”

“She saw only black and white, never gray. She was driven by hunger, the hunger for news and to tell the story well, even if it could mean another libel suit. She lived for her scoops, the deadline kept her going,” Daza wrote of Herrera.

Herrera wrote investigative reports, including an Inquirer series in 1998 in which former First Lady Imelda Marcos acknowledged for the first time that her late husband owned a large amount of the country’s wealth.

Herrera also testified in the Senate impeachment trial of then President Joseph Estrada in 2000, after she and a colleague exposed the alleged illegal wiretapping of senator-judges by the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force using paid assets at a telecommunications firm.

Herrera endured multiple libel suits while she was reporting for the Inquirer and later, for other newspapers.

Herrera and a colleague, along with the Inquirer editors, were slapped with a libel case in 1995 in connection with a story on the Vizconde massacre.

She also faced down a contempt threat from lawmakers in 2015, after she refused to reveal the sources for her newspaper report that House members received a P440-million bribe to vote in favor of the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law.

Herrera was among the first winners of the Luis R. Prieto Journalism Award in 1996 for her story on Melinda de Vera, a girl who for the first 16 years of her life dwelled with her mother and niece in a kariton of wooden tomato crates in Manila.

The award cited Herrera “for excellence in news/feature writing.”

Before joining the Inquirer, Herrera worked for the now-defunct Philippine Daily Globe and two community papers in Cebu, Newstime Daily and Sun Star.