Villagers’ Fears Grow as Death Follows Voting

On a desolate mountain trail about two hours’ walk from this remote village, Marilyn Sanggawa, 15, and two 11-year-old girlfriends may have paid the price for the way their village voted in the Feb. 7 presidential election.

The girls were attacked on their way to school, 48 hours after their tiny barrio of Baguio Villages, which lies in the heart of what is known as Marcos Country 200 miles north of Manila, voted overwhelmingly against President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Villagers found the girls with their necks broken. Marilyn Sanggawa had been stabbed seven times in the chest, and a “Marcos for President” bumper sticker had been pasted across her midriff. Beside her was a note: “This is what you get when you vote against the KBL”--Marcos’ party, the New Society Movement.

The three girls had not voted, but their fathers had. Calixto Sanggawa, 34, had been the opposition poll watcher in Baguio Villages, and the fathers of the two other girls had campaigned for Marcos’ rival, Corazon Aquino, in the area around Diffun, long a ruling party stronghold.

It was largely through the three men’s efforts that the village recorded a 256-to-38 victory for Aquino in a province that, according to official tallies, went for Marcos by a 6-to-1 landslide margin.

Local priests and political leaders blame a local “death squad” for the killing of the men’s daughters.

Before the election, one priest said, there was hope in Diffun for a change--”deliverance from a feudal system of control that is just like the Middle Ages.”

“These men in the remote villages took risks in this election,” he said. “Now they are paying the price.”

Not Only in One Town

Now, there is only fear in the town of Diffun and throughout the province of Quirino. The killing of the three girls was not an isolated incident.

At least 10 local opposition leaders or members of their families have been slain in this small, remote province in central Luzon. Bodies have been found hanging from bridges, along roads, in caves. In some cases, the feet of the victims were bound; in others, the bodies were so bullet-riddled as to be barely recognizable.

A dozen local leaders are missing, and hundreds of people who voted for Aquino have fled the province.

Quirino, which is run by a retired colonel described as one of Marcos’ most loyal supporters, offers an extreme example of the alleged revenge killings that the police and Aquino aides say have swept the Philippines since the election.

Nationwide, according to the Aquino opposition, more than three dozen of the local leaders have been killed, and dozens more are missing and feared dead.

Fruits of Victory

All this activity, they said, is attributable to death squads seeking to punish Aquino’s supporters for her strong showing and to shore up support for Marcos in the wake of an election characterized by widespread fraud.

There have been few arrests in connection with the slayings. But military investigators say that in the Quirino killings, there is a common denominator--the victims were all identified with the opposition.

“Forget election day,” a parish priest said, asking not to be identified by name because, he said, his name already appears on a death list. “That was peaceful here in Quirino. It is only after the election that we are all so afraid. It is now that the real killing has begun.”

While opposition leaders concede that the postelection carnage in Quirino may be the worst in the country, what is taking place here reflects the divisions and fears in Philippine society that have been exacerbated by an election that both sides claim they won.

Poor, Isolated Area

Carved out of a larger province 14 years ago as a tactical move to help put down a burgeoning Communist insurgency, Quirino is still among the most backward of the Philippines’ 73 provinces.

There are few doctors, no telephones, little irrigation here. Outside of Diffun, the main village, most of the people are impoverished farmers. In the most remote barrios such as Baguio Villages, there are no schools and no hospitals. Malaria is endemic.

Quirino is the unchallenged domain of Orlando Dulay, a retired colonel who served with the U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam and later created the first Philippine special forces units. These troops took on a Muslim insurgency in the south and fought the first major battles with the Communist New People’s Army, which now numbers 15,000 and is active in all the provinces.

Dulay retired from the military in 1980, when he was elected provincial governor. In 1984 he was elected to the National Assembly, and he is the province’s sole representative in the national government.

A Private Force

His opponents charge that Dulay maintains a private army, retains a military mind-set and has exercised iron-fisted control over his constituents since he was appointed military commander of the province when Marcos declared martial law in 1972.

“Assemblyman Dulay is one of the last feudal warlords of the Marcos regime in the Philippines,” said former Assemblyman Carlos Padilla, who lost to Dulay in the last legislative election. “He is still one of the top henchmen of Marcos, and I believe he is somehow behind all of this killing.”

In an interview at the villa where he lavishes hospitality on visitors to the provincial capital of Cabbaruguis, Dulay recoiled at the word warlord. “I prefer godfather, “ he said, noting that he once named a boat Godfather.

Dulay, who is short and powerfully built, said, “It is just like a family here,” and he added that much of the development of the province was accomplished with his personal funds.

Libraries and Gas Stations

“It is personalized service here,” he said. “The province had no gas station, so I built the gas station. We had no movie house, so I built the movie house. We had no library, so I built the library and got books from my relatives in America. We had no ambulance, so I bought the ambulance.”

Asked how so tight-knit a community could be so caught up in such violence, he replied: “I don’t know. I just don’t know. That’s what I told the military investigators . . . when they took down my affidavit.”

The investigators spent several days interviewing witnesses in Quirino, but they would not talk with reporters, and the victims’ families had little more to say.

Another Family’s Experience

Cristeta Pastor, whose husband and son were kidnaped just outside Quirino on the eve of the election and found dead several days later, said: “I just don’t know. My husband was a preacher for the Church of Christ. He was the local chairman for Cory Aquino in our town. And then he was dead. That’s all I know.”

Fernando Pastor’s home is in Cabbaruguis. On the night before the election, after campaigning openly for weeks for Aquino, Pastor and his 22-year-old son, Fernando Jr., were returning home from a political meeting with Francisco Laurella, another local opposition leader, who was to be the sole opposition representative on the board that tallied the votes for the province.

None of the three made it home. Investigators theorize that they were kidnaped from a jeepney--a half-jeep, half-bus that is the staple of public transportation in the Philippines. Their bodies, along with those of the driver and his conductor, were found along a road several days after the election.

Cristeta Pastor, who is in hiding in another province, said her son’s body was so mutilated that she could identify him only by a scar on his left hand. She said that she and her five remaining children are afraid to go home. But she refused to say who it is she fears. “It just isn’t safe,” she said.

Broad Peril Denied

Dulay scoffs at this sort of thing. “My province,” he said, “is the safest province in the Philippines. It’s just these few little incidents.”

Dulay denied that he had had any part in any of the slayings. He theorized that robbery may have been the motive behind the killing of the three opposition leaders, who he said were carrying tens of thousands of pesos (thousands of dollars) they planned to use to bribe voters.

He also denied allegations that he, too, had spent tens of thousands of pesos on vote-buying. “I simply called all of my barangay captains (village chiefs) into my home, gave them each 5,000 pesos and told them to think of a good project for their barangay--that it was up to them and their conscience how they spent it.”

Of the killing of the three schoolgirls, Dulay said: “A horrible thing, a horrible shame. But I don’t think the fathers of these kids will tell you they were opposition. There have been a lot of killings in that area.”

Campaign Workers

Indeed, Calixto Sanggawa denied to a military investigator and a visiting American journalist that he had worked for the opposition. But earlier, the independent chief of the village confirmed that Sanggawa was the Aquino poll watcher on election day, that the other two fathers were campaign workers and that the village is now living in terror for the way it voted.

“We are all afraid for our lives, even now,” Jose Sooc, the village’s barangay captain, said. “Many will not even leave their huts.”

Their hope, he and other opposition supporters in the province said, is that Marcos will yield power.

Dulay bristled at this. He said that he and other Marcos loyalists in the province are hurt by the military investigation into the killings, and he lashed out at officials in Washington for their criticism of the conduct of the election.

Alcohol and Anger

One of Dulay’s lieutenants reacted more angrily. Fructuoso Natividad Jr., the mayor of Diffun, was drinking at a hotel in an adjacent province--the day after he was questioned by the military investigators about the recent killings--when two Americans entered.

The mayor was surrounded by his police officers, all of them armed, and he refused to talk to or even look at the two Americans.

At the top of his lungs, the mayor shouted again and again: “Americans, get out of the Philippines! No more meddling in our country! This is Marcos Country! You are not welcome here! Get out, you . . . , or we’ll kill you! We’ll kill you!”