Campaign Death Toll 47 as Philippine Vote Nears

The general in charge of keeping the peace during Friday’s special presidential election was surrounded Tuesday morning by the signs of campaign carnage past and future.

Nine large blackboards bore the grim statistics: 62 violent, election-related incidents that have left 47 civilians dead and 40 more injured during the last two months; 2,150 Philippine villages where election-day violence is “probable,” and 394 others where such incidents are so “highly probable” that troops already have been deployed there in force.

And, in the last column of the charts, the general’s strategy to combat bloodshed: 118,793 soldiers and police who have been deputized and deployed specifically to keep the peace during an election in which analysts here and in Washington say peace and order are among the most crucial issues.

But, as Lt. Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, the chief law-enforcement officer for the election, told the press conference at a military camp in Manila on Tuesday, the worst may be yet to come.

Ramos quoted from a document captured by the Philippine military during a recent raid on a Communist rebel camp near Manila. It says that, as part of the armed insurgents’ struggle against the government during the next few days, “they must increase their rate of ambushes, their attacks and their harassments of military police and civilian government targets--police stations, small military detachments and town halls,” Ramos said. Beyond that, the general added, “we cannot anticipate every possible incident that could take place because even this can be sparked by quarrels between two rabid partisan followers of the two parties.”

These, then, are two of the major components that have made Philippine elections during the country’s four decades of independence so bloody and deadly--Communist insurgencies and vicious political feuds, both of them endemic to this island nation.

There are other factors behind the bloodshed--an overabundance of firearms, many of them left over from the war with Japan, as well as a cultural factor peculiar to the Philippines. This is a trait that an aide to Ramos, Col. Alex Aguirre, identified Tuesday as “our tendency to personalize too much the issues, to think that if I lose, I will lose face.”

But, as Gen. Ramos faced television cameras to discuss the military’s plans to safeguard the peace and honesty of the coming election, his principal concerns were neither cultural nor historical.

Ramos, who also serves as deputy military chief of staff to President Ferdinand E. Marcos, pledged that he and his powerful armed forces will remain neutral Friday in carrying out their duties of guarding against violence at polling places, escorting election officials as they transport the returns to counting centers and investigating all reported fraud.

At the same time, the general tried to convince the Filipino people, who were ruled under strict martial law for the nine years before 1981, that the military will be vigilant in neutralizing threats from local strong-arm leaders of Marcos’ political party and from the Communists, who have vowed to use violence to enforce their demand for a boycott of Friday’s poll.

There is ample cause for concern. Ramos said the casualty toll so far in the campaign is lower than in the last three Philippine elections but that those numbers could increase significantly in the next few days.

Already, there are many signs of the human damage incurred.

Marlyn Bayaborda lies semicomatose in a hospital on the central island of Negros after an ambush at dawn Sunday left her wounded and her soldier husband and 10 other soldiers dead. The military blamed the rebels for the attack.

A few hours later, Marcos’ wife, Imelda, interrupted her campaign tour in the province of Camarines Sur, south of Manila, to attend the funeral of Lorenzo Padua, the pro-Marcos mayor of a small town who was shot while campaigning on his motorcycle last week.

Padua was known as “the most active mayor fighting against the Communists,” according to military investigators, who again blamed the Communist New People’s Army for the murder.

And opposition candidate Corazon Aquino still prominently mentions in her campaign speeches the grief of the widow of Jeremias de Jesus, the campaign leader in Aquino’s home province of Tarlac, who was riddled with bullets while distributing posters two weeks ago.

Of the 47 killed in the current campaign violence, Ramos said, 10 were opposition leaders, 20 were Marcos loyalists and 17 were “undetermined.”

In each of the three previous elections, according to government statistics, more than 200 civilians and soldiers were killed before the counting was over and the winners proclaimed. The roots of election violence in the Philippines, though, date back to long before the half-dozen national and local polls held during Marcos’ 20 years in power. In fact, Marcos himself was charged with murder in a case of election violence nearly half a century ago.

In 1935, when the Philippines was still a territory of the United States, Marcos’ father, Don Mariano Marcos, was defeated in a legislative election that was held to show the country’s ability to hold free and fair polls.

After his defeat, supporters of the victor, Julio Nalundasan, rode by the Marcos home 250 miles north of Manila and paraded a mock coffin bearing the words “Marcos Is Dead.”

The next night, it was Nalundasan who was dead. He had been shot in the back with a .22-caliber rifle, and the young Marcos, an expert marksman who had such a weapon, was charged with the murder, along with two of his uncles.

The case dragged on for four years while Marcos finished his law degree, graduating at the top of his class. It was then that the judge, another political rival of the Marcos family, found him guilty of the murder. But after an articulate, 830-page brief was submitted to the Philippine Supreme Court in 1940, the conviction was overturned.

Thirty-three years later, Marcos was blamed by many Filipinos for yet another political murder, one that most political analysts here believe led to Friday’s election--the Aug. 21, 1983, assassination of his chief political rival, Benigno S. Aquino Jr.

Now, Aquino’s widow, who still suspects that Marcos had a role in the killing despite the acquittal of all 25 government soldiers implicated in the slaying, is facing the president in a poll that she predicts will be equally violent.

But Aquino’s family, too, has been implicated in major political violence during its decades at the forefront of Philippine opposition politics.

Benigno Aquino himself was charged with several political murders in 1972 after a bomb exploded under a campaign stage in Manila, killing most of Marcos’ other leading rivals of the day.

Aquino was on the stage that day, and he maintained that he was innocent. But Marcos kept him in solitary confinement for more than seven years, and has referred often to the incident and Aquino’s alleged guilt during the current campaign.

Indeed, in the days before martial law, Aquino, like so many prominent and wealthy landowners in the Philippines, maintained his own private army, complete with uniformed soldiers and heavy artillery.

In an interview two years ago, Corazon Aquino’s cousin, Margarita (Ting-Ting) Cojuanco, lamented that when martial law was declared, “the government even took our armored personnel carrier.”

During his press conference Tuesday, Gen. Ramos disputed claims by Marcos on Saturday that his government has managed to wipe out all such private, political armies since declaring martial law. Ramos says he remains concerned that, despite having disarmed “many armed groups,” supporters of either candidate still may use private force to influence the final tally.

Perhaps the deepest concern among Filipinos, though, is for the aftermath of the election. Aquino and her supporters have predicted that there is no way that Marcos can win a clean election, and so any election that returns the president to power will not only be rigged but will trigger mass demonstrations and possibly mass violence.

“I think we should all pray that Mr. Marcos will be enlightened enough to allow the election to reflect the genuine will of the people because I am really afraid what an angry and frightened people will do,” Aquino told an audience of her supporters a few days ago.

Aquino has tempered her predictions of postelection violence by telling interviewers that she is nonviolent--”violence only begets violence,” she has said. But Marcos and his aides have tried to turn the violence issue around on his opponent.

Speaking to religious leaders in his palace Monday, the president labeled Aquino a “terrorist” whose dark hints of mass protests are “no different from the tactics of airplane hijackers who demand, ‘Give us everything we want or we will kill all our hostages.’

“The threat of Cory Aquino and her followers to plunge the country into violence if she is defeated was the most reckless and irresponsible campaign strategy ever pursued by a candidate for president of the Philippines,” he said.

In the past, however, Marcos has issued dark hints of his own--that he would consider declaring martial law again if the violence gets out of hand. He has also warned voters that an Aquino victory would trigger a Communist takeover or a coup from within the military.

Marcos Promises Peace

Speaking to Filipino and foreign businessmen Tuesday at the same time that Aquino was holding a mass rally, Marcos, too, tried to soften his stand: “Whoever wins, I will perform my duties as president and see to it that there is peace in the land.

“If I am president, I’ll forgive my enemies. I’ll re-embrace them, and ask them to act like Filipinos--to be united. We cannot survive as a divided people.”

During his press conference Tuesday, Gen. Ramos agreed. He vowed that his men will not permit a Communist takeover, will effectively fight any street violence and will remain loyal to whichever candidate wins.

Still, not even the Roman Catholic Church, which is widely seen as tacitly supporting Aquino, accepts such pledges. Noting that Manila’s archbishop, Cardinal Jaime Sin, the highest prelate in this overwhelmingly Catholic nation, has called a special meeting of all 73 Philippine bishops for Feb. 13, one aide to the cardinal noted:

“There are situations in which armed conflict could be justified even by the church--when all peaceful means are exhausted.

“This election is our last chance at peaceful change. We Filipinos are a very patient people, but when we reach the limits of our patience, we become a raging bull, and it kills.”