Drowning of Revered Icon Symbolizes Filipinos’ Fear : Fighting Between Government, Rebels Rips Bicol Region

The omen came during one of the Philippines’ most important religious festivals. For the first time in more than 300 years, the Virgin Mary drowned in the Bicol River.

It happened during the annual Penafrancia, a festival that attracts millions of Roman Catholics each year to this remote provincial capital 276 miles southeast of Manila.

As the festival approached its climactic moment, an ancient and revered icon of the Virgin Mary, which many Filipinos think has miraculous healing powers, toppled into the river from the pagoda on which it stood and sank to the bottom.

Petrified Spectators

Frantic priests and nuns dived in and searched desperately, and within 10 minutes they had recovered the muddied statue.

But, by then, it was too late. Spectators were petrified. What did this portend for the future?

That was on Sept. 19. Today, the Bicol region is a focal point of fear, a combat zone that reflects the price that Filipinos are paying for political instability, social polarization and a persistent armed insurgency under President Corazon Aquino.

Bicol is occupied by thousands of soldiers, backed by tanks, helicopter gunships and heavy artillery. Ambushes and liquidations are a daily occurrence in the tiny, remote villages that have become battlegrounds in the escalated war between the government and the Communist guerrillas. Hundreds of refugees have swarmed down from the mountain villages to find shelter in town centers.

The people of Bicol are certain that all their troubles can be traced to the incident at the river involving the Virgin Mary. Church leaders are trying to reassure the 3.4 million people of Bicol (about 85% of whom are Catholic) that all is not lost.

“We are going on the radio every day . . . to tell them to be calm,” said Msgr. Sofio Balce, the bishop of the province of Camarines Sur, of which Naga is the capital. “We are telling them that they are not at fault; they are not being punished for the desecration of the Virgin.

“But, you ask whether this is an ill omen. I would say yes. I’m sure we all believe it is perhaps a sign of something--a sign that things are not as they should be.”

Just 24 hours after the festival, the civil war took a turn for the worse in Bicol, a 150-mile-long peninsula that had been connected to the rest of Manila’s island of Luzon only by two narrow bridges, one of which was a railway bridge.

On Sept. 20, Communist guerrillas, seeking to capitalize on disarray in the Philippine armed forces after August’s bloody coup attempt against Aquino, blew up the railway bridge. The guerrillas had dynamited the road bridge two weeks before. With both bridges down, the entire region is now cut off from the nation’s capital for the first time in nearly a century.

As a result, the prices of goods from Manila have soared, while the prices the region’s farmers get for their abundant crops have plummeted. Several mayors said that dozens of infants are dying from pneumonia and other curable diseases because no doctor can reach them.

Troops Moved In

Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, chief of the armed forces, said the Communists are using Bicol to demonstrate their increased strength. He has ordered more than 1,000 crack Scout Ranger troops into the region, along with howitzers and armed helicopters.

Manila’s newspapers carry daily accounts of the situation. One article appeared under the headline, “Martial Law for Bicol Likely.” Another headline: “Vigilantes Back Bicol Offensive.”

Indeed, vigilante squads have joined in the fighting on the government side, along with the 2,000 soldiers stationed in the region. Vigilantes and guerrillas alike have taken to killing suspected informers, according to human rights officials.

Still, despite all the firepower in the region’s six provinces, hardly a shot has been fired in anything like formal combat since Ramos said the Communists were using Bicol--long a guerrilla stronghold--to seize the advantage after the Aug. 28 coup attempt.

According to battalion commanders interviewed recently, there were only three direct encounters between the guerrillas and government troops during September. The army has recorded six liquidation killings and six incidents of sabotage.

These figures, compared to statistics for the rest of the year, appear to confirm comments by military commanders that the government is on the defensive here. In the first nine months of 1987, 82 government troops were killed, compared to 70 rebels confirmed dead, according to military officers in Legaspi, the region’s capital. Most of the encounters have been initiated by guerrillas.

“I wouldn’t say we’re winning the war in the Bicol,” one combat officer said. “I’m not sure we’re losing either. The one thing I can say is that the (Communists) are definitely growing. And what we have here now is largely psychological warfare.”

1,300 Guerrillas

Military intelligence officers in the region estimate that the guerrillas now have about 1,300 men operating on three fronts in Bicol and that they virtually control a third of the region’s 3,457 villages.

These officers blame the worsening economy and the failure of a government amnesty program for the rebels’ expansion here in the 18 months since Aquino took over after the ouster of Ferdinand E. Marcos.

In the six months since Aquino offered cash and farmland to rebels who lay down their arms, only 58 have surrendered, and only two of them had M-16 rifles. One had a shotgun.

“The whole amnesty program has been grossly mismanaged here,” said Julius Cea-Napal, the deputy governor of Camarines Sur and a former staunch supporter of Aquino. “The government is offering the rebels 9,000 pesos ($450) for their M-16s, and you can sell them on the open market for at least 15,000 pesos.

“And they put the rebel-returnee reception center in a rebel-controlled village. So what happened? A few months after it opened, the rebels attacked the center and recaptured two men who had surrendered. God knows what happened to them.”

Neglected by Government

Cea-Napal and other local officials say the region’s economy has worsened because the government has not been able to deliver basic goods and services.

More than two-thirds of the region’s workers earn less than $150 a year. More than two-thirds of the villages, known as barangays , have been forced to close rural health stations opened under Marcos because there are not enough doctors and nurses willing to staff them.

Gil Basmayor Jr., mayor of the town of Minalabac, said that there is no high school and that none of the elementary schools have enough desks, textbooks or space. There are so few teachers, he said, that the ratio is one teacher for every 90 pupils. He could not recall the name of the last town resident who finished college.

“My town and most of those in the Bicol region have simply been neglected by the government,” he said. “This is why the rebels now control almost half of the 25 barangays in Minalabac.”

As a result, Basmayor said, killing has become commonplace in Minalabac, particularly liquidations by the guerrillas. He produced a list of 10 townspeople killed in the past eight months, most of them village chiefs who had sided with the military.

In the last few months, local authorities here as elsewhere in the country have started taking the law into their own hands.

Local Vigilante Groups

With the tacit approval of the Aquino government, many of the mayors and local military commanders have started organizing and arming local vigilante groups. Church leaders and activist lawyers have likened these to the right-wing death squads of Central America. Filipinos call the vigilantes Alsa Masa, or Rising Masses.

One such squad began operating in Minalabac two months ago. Led by a former Communist guerrilla who uses only his nom de guerre, Commander Lope, the group was armed by local military authorities. It includes an uncle of Lope, Zosimo Oida, and several cousins and friends. All said they once had fought with the Communist New People’s Army or helped the guerrillas’ intelligence agents.

‘We Are Afraid’

“We quit the NPA because we are afraid,” said Oida, who has been fighting as a guerrilla most of his life--first against the Japanese during World War II, then with the Communists against the Philippine government and now with the government against the rebels.

His reasons for quitting were not ideological, Oida said, but pragmatic. He said he still dislikes the government. His village has no electric power, even though power lines carry electricity from Bicol’s geothermal plant to Manila; he owns no land and his income is just over $50 a year because he must give three-fourths of his crop to his landlord.

And none of his six children can attend high school because the nearest one is inaccessible.

“The reason we left the rebels,” Oida said, “is simply fear. Here in this barangay, we are afraid of everyone, but the NPA wouldn’t give me a gun. The (vigilantes) gave me a gun, so I feel safer.”

Psychological Warfare

In several towns in the region, the psychological war has taken an even higher toll.

In Polangui, a half-hour drive south of Naga, priests and local people say that as many as 20 farmers have been executed recently as the guerrillas and vigilantes have fought for control of the town’s 44 barangays.

“Polangui is really the hottest spot in the Bicol these days,” said Father Antonio Peralta, a Roman Catholic priest who for four years has lived in nearby Ligao.

Peralta said the rebels have been setting up checkpoints on rural roads, posing as government soldiers and executing soldiers and police officers who come by.

The vigilantes also have established checkpoints in remote areas in an effort to identify guerrilla informers.

More than 1,000 area residents have moved into emergency evacuation centers set up beside the town church--not because of actual combat maneuvers in the villages but because of fear.

Emma Tanay, who fled her village with her three children, said the military had told her she would no longer be safe in her small hut.

“We left because we are afraid,” she said through a translator.

Afraid of what?

“I don’t know,” she replied.

“Everything, everyone, no one--I just don’t know. We are just afraid. Everyone wants to come down (to the center), but there is no transportation, and it’s so far to walk. We just have this feeling of unease.”

Targeted for Death

For Juanito Carlaga, the fear is more specific. He is a casualty of Bicol’s psychological war, and a refugee of it.

Sitting on the center’s dirt floor, Carlaga said he was approached by the guerrillas recently and asked to serve as an informer.

“I said no,” Carlaga recalled. “I only want to be a farmer.”

Several weeks later, the military approached him and asked him to be an armed vigilante.

“I said no again,” he recalled. “I only want to live in peace.”

Three weeks ago, several guerrilla informers in his village told Carlaga the guerrillas believed he had accepted the offer to be a vigilante. Now, they said, he is targeted for death.

As Carlaga told his story, priests at the adjacent church were holding evening Mass. Raising his hands at the pulpit, one priest prayed “for an end to war, real or imagined, and, finally, lasting peace in our troubled land.”

Blast at Manila hotel injures 10. Story on Page 35.