“Welcome home, Mary Jane” title, in one, The Manila Bulletin Wednesday December 18. A central photo shows Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Junior and his wife with two members of Mary Jane Veloso’s family, a portrait of whom adorns the left corner of the page. “Mary Jane Veloso arrived in Manila this Wednesday morning, shortly before sunrise, which, writes the Philippine daily, could symbolically mean for her a new beginning in a life full of misfortunes.”
More precisely, it is fourteen years of misfortune – or at the very least uncertainty – that the young woman has experienced since her arrest in 2010, in Indonesia, with luggage which contained 2.6 kilos of heroin. The fact that she was “duped”, to repeat the word of Manila Bulletin, and that she did not know what she was carrying did not move the Indonesian justice system, which found her guilty of drug trafficking and sentenced her to the death penalty. She escaped an execution at the last minute in 2015 and, since then, her fight against capital punishment and to have her innocence recognized has fascinated Filipinos.
Waiting for a pardon
Her return to the country was made possible by an agreement between Indonesia and the Philippines, through which custody of the detainee was transferred from one country to another. “This means that Mary Jane Veloso will remain in prison for her drug trafficking conviction, despite her parents’ pleas to release her,” explains it Manila Bulletin.
During a short press conference, Mary Jane Veloso, now 39, asked for a pardon to finally be granted to her, “a decision that the Indonesian government leaves to the Philippine government to make”, specifies the Manila daily. In the process, Malacañang (name of the presidential palace of the Philippines) declared that it was still “premature to speculate” on what President Marcos Junior would do.
Indonesia has one of the harshest laws on drug trafficking, which provides for the death penalty and where convicts are regularly executed.
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