Mary Jane Veloso’s return to her motherland under a prisoner transfer agreement between Indonesia and the Philippines is the ultimate Christmas gift to those who love her. 

After close to 15 years of imprisonment, she is now 39. Her parents have aged; her two sons approached adulthood beyond her motherly embrace. But the death row convict is alive and in her faculties, and still hopeful despite the lost years. She may be an infinity away from the young woman who ventured overseas in pursuit of a livelihood she could not find here, but she now stands again under a Philippine sky.

The commercial midnight flight from the Indonesian capital Jakarta bearing Mary Jane Veloso and a posse of officials ended in their sunrise arrival in Manila on Dec. 18. Voyeur-like, the attentive observer may try to imagine the tumult in her heart upon disembarking on native soil. (When she disembarked from a plane in Yogyakarta in April 2010, authorities found 2.6 kilograms of heroin in her suitcase, clapped her behind bars, eventually convicted her of drug trafficking, and sentenced her to death. The bewildered single mother denied having anything to do with the contraband, insisting that the suitcase had merely been handed to her by her recruiter, Cristina Sergio. It’s said that language and mistranslation exacerbated the problem.)

Her family’s trip to the Ninoy Aquino international Airport to meet her was rendered useless by her immediate transport to the women’s prison in Mandaluyong City, where she is to stay for the next two months. Resentment, surely understandable, swept her parents and other sleepless welcomers who had traveled to the airport in a caravan. But in the end their reunion could not be stopped. At the women’s prison her sons ran to meet her with flowers, as though she had come back from a long vacation abroad. Tatay Cesar was in near-collapse when he took his youngest child in his arms. Explaining her husband’s emotional state, Nanay Celia, as tough as women mostly are, fondly said he is faint of heart—mahina ang loob.

What is Mary Jane Veloso’s homecoming but, as she herself has described it, a miracle? She is imprisoned still but the fact is that she could have been brought home dead in a box, and her family members would have wept loudly and held on to one another in grief as it was unloaded from the airplane’s cargo hold, with TV cameras recording the grim proceedings. Like other Filipino women who flew overseas to take on employment as domestic workers: Flor Contemplacion, after her execution in Singapore in 1995 for murder, allegedly on a coerced confession. Or Joanna Demafelis, after her mutilated corpse was found in a freezer in an abandoned apartment in Kuwait in 2018. Or the 49 unnamed Filipino workers dead from various causes and reported flown home en masse from Riyadh and Dammam in Saudi Arabia in 2020. Etc. 

Indonesian authorities had gathered her and several other foreign drug convicts for execution in 2015. She was, however, granted a stay on the strength of then President Benigno Aquino III’s phone call informing the Indonesian government that her recruiter, Sergio, had been arrested and convicted of illegal recruitment on charges filed by others similarly victimized. The odds were great that she would have been executed along with the other foreign drug convicts—the so-called “Bali Nine”—despite their respective countries’ pleas that they be spared the firing squad. But here she is, in the flesh, back in the land of her birth. 

There’s ample room to imagine the contours of the anguished years Mary Jane Veloso spent on death row in Yogyakarta, ironically regarded as “an important center for Javanese arts and culture.” How did she draw on her inner resources to endure the darkest night of the soul? (Jean-Dominique Bauby, author of the moving memoir “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” recalled his friend Jean-Paul K. who was taken hostage by the Hezbollah and incarcerated “several years in a darkened Beirut dungeon, endlessly reciting the wines of the Bordeaux Classification of 1855 to keep from going mad.”)

At a press conference in Jakarta held shortly before her flight home, the Filipino prisoner spoke in Bahasa (a mere shadow of the suspected drug mule ignorant of the local language in 2010), sang the Indonesian anthem, and displayed “heart” gestures with her fingers in the course of expressing gratitude for what has been termed as the Indonesian government’s “act of mercy.” She was “charming” and “endearing,” ANC stringer Wendy Palomo, looking pleased, told the broadcast journalist Karmina Constantino in Manila. She had learned to play piano and guitar, as well as knitting and batik work, in prison—surely a determined effort at meaning-making in those long years of fear and uncertainty.

But the Christmas gift to Mary Jane Veloso and her family is incomplete. Reiterating her innocence, she has sought clemency for herself, and her family, her legal counsel Edre Olalia, and civil and activist groups have directed similar pleas to the Palace. But the President is hedging, saying it will take a while before anything like that is granted: “Ang layo pa” was his formulation. He also said he had left it to “legal experts” to look into the matter. “We still have to have a look at really what her status is,” he told reporters.

Is it being simple-minded to assume that her current status is as a prisoner of the Philippine government, albeit permanently banned from setting foot in Indonesia? With the transfer agreement, did not Indonesia release her to her country, subject to its disposition?  

Once upon a time, the Philippines did not consider exporting its people de rigueur. Its labor export policy was instituted during the President’s father’s authoritarian regime. Decades later, the policy is an indispensable pillar of the economy; it has also resulted in fragmented and broken families, children traumatized by their parents’ absence, brawn and brain drain, Filipinos brutalized in countries that treat domestic workers as disposables, even the evolution of illegal recruitment and human trafficking into a veritable industry. Yet many Filipinos still choose to stay on in countries wracked by strife—Lebanon, say, or Syria—such is their despair at finding work and commensurate wages in their own land.  

As of November, there were at least 44 Filipinos on death row abroad, according to the Department of Migrant Workers.