Marcos Warns Foes on Violence Over Election

President Ferdinand E. Marcos, charging that his supporters were shot at and stoned Wednesday while traveling in government buses to his final campaign rally, threatened to “hunt down” and use the full force of the military against any opponents engaging in violence during or after Friday’s special presidential election.

“The opposition is announcing a civil war will break out after the campaign if they lose,” Marcos told an audience of about 50,000 at Manila’s downtown Luneta Park. “I tell them, ‘You are like children with small brains because you don’t know the strength of the government. I say to you: You will disappear. . . . We will hunt you down and arrest you.’ ”

The president’s speech, which ended just hours before the legal deadline for campaigning in the two-month presidential race, was his harshest attack yet on rival Corazon Aquino, who closed her campaign Wednesday evening in her home province of Tarlac.

As the Aquino motorcade neared her hometown of Concepcion, 50 miles north of Manila, government soldiers attacked the 200-vehicle caravan, training their weapons menacingly on Aquino supporters and threatening to kill them.

Aquino’s sister-in-law and media coordinator, Lupita Kashiwahara, said the soldiers kicked and battered her car, smashing the windows. They turned on an NBC television crew filming the incident, smashing their equipment, witnesses said. One person said he was injured when a stone allegedly thrown by a soldier at the Aquino rally hit him in the head.

In another incident in Manila, Marcos supporters pushed a television cameraman to the ground when he filmed a stone-throwing battle between them and Aquino supporters.

Aquino has pledged nonviolence throughout her campaign, but she has hinted that her supporters may turn to violent protest if they suspect cheating in Friday’s election, which many opposition leaders have labeled the last chance for peaceful change in the Philippines.

‘We Can Counter Anything’

“I say to them, ‘Stop that atmosphere of anger, of hatred and of revolution,’ ” shouted Marcos, who has been in power for 20 years. “The government of the Philippines is not defenseless. We prefer reconciliation. . . . But if you insist on using violence, then violence it is, and we will show you we can counter anything.”

Hundreds of government buses, jeeps and even garbage trucks were used to carry Marcos’ supporters to Wednesday’s rally. Witnesses said a Philippine navy ship also was used to transport thousands more to Manila for the rally, which was held just 24 hours after Aquino’s final rally in the same park.

Independent estimates of Aquino’s crowd were in the hundreds of thousands. Many of Aquino’s supporters lined the route to the rally site Wednesday, heckling those inside the government buses and waving peso currency notes at them. Several people in the crowd at the president’s rally said they had been paid between 10 and 100 pesos ($1-$10) to attend the event Wednesday.

Marcos aides at the rally blamed the relatively small turnout on a sudden afternoon downpour, which sent thousands of supporters running for cover half an hour before Marcos spoke. But on government television news Wednesday night, commentators said that more than a million people had gathered to hear Marcos.

The sizes of the crowds at the closing rallies are important to campaign strategists in both the ruling party and the opposition. Both are hoping to show signs of massive support on the eve of the election.

Survey Predicts Edge

The president’s aides also released a pre-election survey Wednesday showing that Marcos would defeat Aquino by 13 percentage points, a margin significantly lower than the ruling party had predicted at the beginning of the campaign.

In a press conference a few hours before the president’s final campaign appearance, Manila’s archbishop, Cardinal Jaime Sin, the highest prelate in this predominantly Roman Catholic nation, predicted that Marcos’ rally would be “different” from Aquino’s.

“It will not be spontaneous, and they will be paid,” the cardinal said at his Manila home Wednesday morning. “I have heard that every time they go to a rally, they are paid. But last night (Aquino’s speech) was something different. That is coming from the heart.”

But the cardinal, who has great influence with the nation’s more than 45 million Catholics, stopped short of endorsing Aquino, who has rarely appeared at a campaign rally without a priest or nun on the stage.

“We in the church should never impose that one should vote for this or that person,” the cardinal said. “It is against the separation of church and state. . . . The church is just giving guidelines and evangelical instruction to our people.”

Vote Their Conscience

Among the guidelines the cardinal issued was that Filipinos may morally accept bribes on or before election day, but that they must vote their conscience when they reach the polls.

“I say, ‘When they give you money, accept that. It is not a bribe. It is a donation. In case of necessity, everything is common. If you are hungry, you should steal from the orchard.’ ”

But the cardinal pledged to use the powers of the church to combat the post-election violence that Marcos warned against in his closing speech. “We will try our best to stop all forms of violence, because I think that it is anti-Christian,” he said.

In issuing his pledge Wednesday night to meet force with force, Marcos added, “Our national government under President Marcos wants nothing except peace, but if the opposition doesn’t listen, we will fight them with legitimate force.”

He declared that the campaign, which was marked by bitter, personal attacks by both candidates, “has become the dirtiest campaign I have ever witnessed in my entire political career.”

Several times during his speech, though, Marcos led the crowd in the cheer “Stupid Cory, she knows nothing.”