A stream of friends and neighbors had been stopping by the home in a remote farming barrio north of Manila since last week. That’s when Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced that the Indonesian government had agreed to repatriate Mary Jane Veloso, a migrant worker and drug convict, after years of legal appeals.

“The only reason why she left was to improve our lot,” Veloso’s 65-year-old mother said as BenarNews visited the family’s rural home outside Cabanatuan city.

“We have been poor all our lives. We never had our own home, our own land.”

Veloso said her daughter, the youngest in a brood of five, was always top of her class but was forced to drop out of high school and find a job to help the family.

After leaving school, Mary Jane, barely out of her teens, got married and bore two sons. She first found a job as a maid in Dubai in 2009, but it was cut short after an alleged rape attempt by her employer that sent her back home.

A year later, she was offered a job in Malaysia by Filipina recruiter Maria Cristina Sergio. Veloso scraped all her savings amounting to about US$400 to pay for her ticket.

“She was so happy when she told us the news, how she would improve our lot,” the elder Veloso said. “She told me that her first salary would be sent back to me, saying, ‘I can now support you and my two kids.’”

But upon arriving in Kuala Lumpur, Mary Jane was told by her recruiter that the job vacancy had been filled.

Desolate and with only clothes on her back, she subsequently accepted a quick deployment to Indonesia arranged by Sergio, who bought her a suitcase. She was then introduced to a Kuala Lumpur-based individual, who gave her a plane ticket to Indonesia and a mobile phone with instructions to call him as soon as she landed.

She was duped into believing a job as a domestic helper awaited her in Indonesia. In truth, she had unknowingly agreed to be a drug mule.

Police intercepted Veloso as she landed in Yogyakarta and confiscated her luggage. They found hidden compartments containing heroin.

“She fainted and woke up as she was being dragged away by the police,” Celia said, recalling what was told to her about her daughter’s arrest.

Previous Philippine administrations tried to work on Mary Jane’s behalf, but only succeeded in achieving delays in her execution.

A breakthrough was reached last week, when Marcos announced on Oct. 20 that Indonesia had agreed to transfer Veloso, now 39, back to her home country to serve out her sentence.

Because capital punishment has been abolished in the Philippines, it meant she would remain in prison unless Marcos issued a pardon.

Veloso’s lawyer, Edre Olalia, said no date had yet been set for her return, although the foreign office said it was working overtime to bring Veloso back before Christmas.

Sergio, the recruiter, was found guilty in a separate labor case in 2020.

Losing all hope

Celia recalled having “lost all hope” of ever seeing her daughter alive. But in 2015, the Philippine foreign department flew her, her sons and Mary Jane’s children to Indonesia. The five days they spent there were the happiest she can remember in recent years.

“Two days after, we returned home. I turned on the television and saw in the news that Mary Jane had been sentenced to die. It was like I was slapped in the face,” she said.

During her 14 years in Indonesian custody, Veloso has become the face of the plight of the Philippines’ estimated 10 million overseas workers, many of whom work as maids or construction workers in the Middle East or seafarers on the world’s oceans. That figure is a tenth of the country’s entire population, a figure that analysts say could impact elections back home.

In fact, a majority of the country’s registered overseas Filipino workers, OFWs as Manila refers to them, voted for Marcos in 2022. So it is not surprising for politicians to court their support.

Veloso’s attorney, Olalia, got his baptism of fire representing OFWs when he helped out in the case of Flor Contemplacion, a Filipino maid convicted of killing her young ward and a compatriot in Singapore. Her execution in 1995 was carried out despite fervent appeals from Manila and strained bilateral ties.

“There are just not enough economic job opportunities,” Olalia told BenarNews. And those who do find employment “do not have enough [of a] living wage to support a family decently”.

With an estimated 5,000 Filipinos leaving the Philippines daily to work abroad, “statistically, there will come a time that there will be another case,” similar to Veloso’s, Olalia said.

“I hope that it doesn’t happen again,” he said of Filipino migrant workers abroad who face the death penalty. “Flor was in 1995, Mary Jane was in 2015. I don’t want to wait around for another Flor, another Mary Jane.”

Because Veloso’s case was “emblematic” of the plight of the migrant workforce, the government must overhaul its protection policies and do better in clamping down on illegal recruiters, Olalia said.

Waiting for Mary Jane’s call

Back home, Veloso’s mother, Celia, clutched a mobile phone. She was waiting for it to ring, in the hopes of hearing from Mary Jane or her Indonesian jailers.

Mary Jane’s youngest son, Mark Darren, 16, had just returned home from the house of his father, who remarried while Veloso was in prison. The boy, now in high school, had only seen his mother in Indonesia when he was a toddler.

Growing up, schoolyard bullies would often taunt him and call his mother derogatory names. But none of that mattered now, he said.

“I don’t know how to feel,” the teen said, while frying hotdogs for breakfast. “I will hug her tightly and kiss her and I will not waste all the time now that she is coming home.”

He promised to make something of himself in the future. 

“I want to be a chef,” Mark said. “That way, she will never have to leave again.”