Gun Sales Soar as Philippine Election Nears

For 30 of his 42 years, Leopoldo Ruiz has stood over a grimy worktable in a ramshackle hut in a hidden corner of this central Philippine city, drilling, filing, polishing and perfecting his handmade instruments of death.

Just as his father did for 20 years before him, Ruiz has spent 14 hours a day, seven days a week, making near-perfect counterfeits of brand-name .22-caliber revolvers, .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Police Specials and Colt .45 revolvers.

Ruiz is widely acclaimed by his peers as a master craftsman. On average, he reckons, he can make a ready-to-fire pistol in four days.

Brisk Business

But no matter how hard Ruiz works these days, the soft-spoken gunsmith said through a translator recently, he cannot make enough to meet the demand. Never before in his three decades in the trade has Ruiz seen so many customers who want so much so fast.

“It is most probably because of the elections,” Ruiz said--referring to the scheduled May 11 voting for a national legislature--with an air of knowing what many Filipinos have said they merely suspect.

“The guns are for the use of the goons, and I feel that these elections will be more violent than any before them. It’s because the people are now more divided. In the past, only one man was in control. Now he is gone,” Ruiz said in a reference to President Ferdinand E. Marcos, ousted from power more than a year ago.

“Everyone wants the power. And guns are power.”

Guns Staying Close to Home

Ruiz is one who most likely would know. He is a pistolero , one of an estimated 10,000 residents of this unusual city on the rugged east coast of the Philippine island of Cebu whose lives depend upon the illegal manufacture of handguns.

There is no record of how many pistols have been handcrafted in the backyards and tiny home workshops of Danao in the 80 years since early American colonists began passing along the skills. Nor is there any way to trace the thousands of guns that Danao has shipped to the rest of the Philippines--and, the pistoleros say, to customers ranging from hit men in Chicago to Japanese gangsters in Tokyo.

But one thing is certain, Ruiz and other pistoleros said recently. Most of the guns they are making these days are staying close to home.

The national legislature to be elected on May 11 would be the country’s first since Marcos was driven from power in February, 1986, and his successor, Corazon Aquino, dissolved a pro-Marcos National Assembly soon after it had proclaimed the exiled authoritarian ruler president following a fraud-ridden election.

High Stakes

At stake next month are 24 Senate seats to be elected at-large and 200 congressional slots to be filled in district elections, which traditionally are bloody affairs here.

But in Danao, where a single family has reigned supreme through a mixture of benevolent godfatherhood, shrewd political footwork and just plain good politics since the day this town became a city 31 years ago, there is more at stake than ever before.

Like everything else in a town that epitomizes the modern Philippine frontier, the gun industry of Danao, although still technically illegal, remains under the exclusive domain of Ramon Durano, a political warlord and kingmaker who has rivaled the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley in color and acumen and ranked among Marcos’ most powerful, and feared, supporters.

Year after year, election after election, for two decades Durano delivered the votes for Marcos. These included at least 20,000 more votes than there were eligible voters in his “company town” during last year’s presidential balloting, election commission officials say.

Still-Powerful Machine

Now, Marcos is gone. During the last year, Aquino’s chief political strategists have worked overtime dismantling his powerful political machine by firing thousands of local, provincial and regional officials, men and women like Durano and his relatives who formed Marcos’ formidable political network.

Without Marcos to oil it, the machine has rusted, rotted and all but died in much of the country.

But in Danao, Durano, now 82, and his traditional, right-wing politics remain untouched. His son, Ramon Durano III, is running for congress in a campaign focusing on the nation’s Communist insurgency. The senior Durano, a rabid anti-Communist, is using his still-powerful political machine to brand his son’s pro-Aquino opponent, Cotes (Inday Nita) Daluz, as a Communist.

Most political observers already have ranked the Danao congressional election among the nation’s hottest, and, in a contest that many analysts fear inevitably will raise passions to fever pitch, the pistoleros of Danao have assumed sinister proportions.

Fears of Bloody Election

Leaders of right-wing civilian vigilante groups committed to fighting communism throughout the island of Cebu have visited the Danao gun makers on buying sprees in recent weeks. The vigilantes, whose numbers run into the thousands, have pledged to fight candidates who they suspect are leftists or Communist sympathizers. Human rights workers have voiced fears that election-related death squads could emerge here in the coming weeks.

“There is a proliferation of arms now, and if the trend continues, the election will be very bloody,” said Rex Fernandez, who described himself as chief of staff of the leftist People’s Party, which was formed by former leaders of the Communist Party of the Philippines as a test of the Aquino government’s ability to permit the left to compete fairly in this year’s national and local elections.

“And if that happens, so many people who are left of center will come to the conclusion that elections are hopeless and that only the armed struggle remains.”

Father Ramon Fruto, a Cebu City priest who has been accused by the military and the vigilantes of having ties to leftist causes, said, “There will be a lot of fear in the countryside.”

‘Necessary Evil’

Acknowledging the recent surge in demand for the pistoleros’ untraceable handguns, the senior military commander in charge of the central Philippine region that includes Danao nonetheless insisted last week that there is little anyone can do to stop the arms traffic.

“It is a necessary evil,” Brig. Gen. Edgardo Abenina said in an interview. “Both sides now believe they have to arm themselves to protect themselves. It has become a balance of terror.”

For Abenina, one of the armed forces’ most analytical and articulate regional commanders, the continued presence and recent growth of the pistoleros’ industry is primarily a sign of the crushing rural poverty.

Durano Still Has Support

“That is why we are sympathetic to them,” Abenina said. “They look at this purely as an economic activity. It’s a matter of survival. If they do not make guns, they will not survive.

“We can only try to control their market. I have asked them, ‘Please, check out the backgrounds of who you sell to.’ But, as for us trying to raid them or close them down, they always know when we’re coming. They have spotters all along the way.”

They also have Ramon Durano.

“There is a feeling,” pistolero Ruiz said as he paused for a moment over a half-made .22-caliber revolver. “The feeling is that, in the past, the Duranos helped us. We get warnings that we might get raided, or someone in the (Durano) family will help us if we get arrested.”

Asked whom he and his fellow pistoleros will vote for in the congressional elections, Ruiz flashed a quick smile and said, “Durano.”

But Ruiz and his colleague Ramon Duterte, who was working alongside him making a .38 Police Special, also conceded that their lives have not improved much through their decades of work. And they agreed that economics have trapped their families into gun making for generations.

Constant Fear of Arrest

In spite of their long hours, both men said they earn, on average, 80 pesos ($4) a day, which is, nevertheless, more than double what they would make as carpenters.

The pistoleros, they said, live in constant fear of arrest. The small workshop where they and four others were working last week, for example, was recently moved from the upper level of the shack, where it was better hidden, to ground level because they got tired of jumping from the windows when there was a raid.

And Duterte is a walking symbol of the occupational hazards--he has only half his right index finger because he accidentally sawed off the top while working in the dark.

The pistoleros agreed, however, that they care little who purchases their pistols.

Middlemen Handle Sales

Asked who his customers are, Ruiz said he and the other gunsmiths deal largely through middlemen. He said he knows that many of his guns end up in the hands of right-wing vigilante groups, but an equal number, he asserted, are sold to the Communist New People’s Army rebels.

“I just never know,” Ruiz said, as he filed down the barrel of his latest creation. “As long as the guy has the money, I will sell it to him.”

Ruiz said he had no hopes of ever leaving the business. His only desire is that none of his five children take up the trade. “They are all in school now,” he said proudly.

Duterte, who is 30 and single, was asked if he was ambitious to do something else with his life.

“No,” he said. Then, after a pause, he added: “Yes, I want to make bigger guns. I want to make cannons.”

Push to Legalize the Trade

There are signs in Danao, though, that improvements may be coming in the lives of the pistoleros.

Abenina has been working on a proposal to consolidate the industry in one place and to start a system of giving the guns serial numbers, while congressional hopeful Durano III pledged in an interview to introduce a bill to legalize the gun trade, if the military recommends it.

“We cannot just destroy this industry overnight--the lives and survival of 10,000 people depend on it,” said the 38-year-old son of Danao’s political kingpin. “Since 1901 until today, no one can really control these people.

“But if we legalize it, it will be under the control of the military. The only way to control it is to legalize it.”

Time for New Ideas

The younger Durano conceded that his was a novel idea never attempted by his father, who created and controlled every other institution in Danao, from the Durano cement factory to the Durano sugar mill to the Durano printing plant to the Durano hospital. But, he added, it may be time for fresh blood and new ideas in the city that his father formed in 1956.

Noting that his mother served as Danao’s mayor from 1956 until 1971 and that his brother succeeded her in the post until he was removed from office by President Aquino last year, the congressional hopeful said: “It’s not really that different. It’s just like in the United States. It’s just like the Kennedys and the Rockefellers.”

In an interview, Durano’s aging father, who has just completed an autobiography in which he announces on the first page that he has been known in his life as “Godfather, warlord, killer, boss, Caesar of Cebu and political kingpin,” insisted that he is out of politics for good.

‘I Have a Clean Heart’

“I didn’t even register to vote,” he said. “I’m not even voting for my own son.”

And he strenuously defended his record as a 20-year congressman from Danao.

“They call me the godfather, but not of the Mafia type,” the short, still powerfully built Durano said. “I don’t kill anybody. I have a clean heart. I go to church every day.

“You see I am one of the chosen people. I am 82 years old, and I’m still thinking. This is not me. This is the strength of God.”

When the brief interview was over, Durano strutted over to a punching bag, threw his fists into it for five minutes or so and then sat down at a huge glass table at his oceanfront villa with 15 local political leaders to discuss strategy for more than half of the congressional races on the entire island.