After a Bloody Campaign, Filipinos Vote : 82 Killed in 45 Days, but Early Balloting Is Called Peaceful

More than 25 million Filipinos flocked to tens of thousands of polling centers today to elect 16,454 local officials after a bloody, 45-day grass-roots election campaign that left at least 82 dead, 52 wounded and 17 kidnaped.

Voting was heavy, and election officials said this afternoon that the situation was “generally peaceful” throughout the country. More than 50% of all registered voters already had cast ballots in most precincts by midday, and although there were several reports of fraud, military authorities reported only a handful of isolated shooting incidents during the polling.

On Sunday, Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, chief of staff of the armed forces, ordered all regional commanders on maximum alert after receiving intelligence reports indicating that renegade, right-wing military squads planned actions to try to disrupt the elections.

Troops, Police Deployed

Ramos had earlier deployed all 159,000 active-duty combat troops and 65,000 police to protect the public and the estimated 150,000 candidates and their poll watchers from assault by the Communist New People’s Army, which Ramos has accused of being responsible for a great deal of the campaign violence.

Much of the killing, however, has been the work of private armies and hired hit men in a clannish country that covets local political power and prestige. More than 100 people have been killed in each of the last two local Philippine elections.

President Corazon Aquino has appealed several times for an end to the bloodshed, and the government’s election commission has declared more than a third of the country’s 103,000 precincts “hot spots” that will be guarded by government troops.

The military is so thinly spread that election officials had to deputize cadets, college students in the Reserve Officer Training Corps and even local Jaycees’ officers as official poll monitors.

In 11 of the country’s 73 provinces, tension was so high that the election commission postponed the balloting until Feb. 1, when more soldiers will be available to guard the polls.

Despite the rising death toll, Aquino has insisted that the elections are vital and must be held. Already, they have been delayed twice, and Aquino has maintained that this is her government’s last, crucial political step toward restoring full democracy in the Philippines after the February, 1986, civilian-military uprising that toppled Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Military authorities have stressed that the current death toll is still well below those of the two most recent previous local elections.

History of Violence

In 1971, 155 people were slain during a four-month campaign with 49 more killed on election day--the last local balloting held before Marcos’ declaration of martial law the following year.

In 1980, one year before Marcos officially lifted martial law, 130 were killed in the last local elections held here.

Today’s election was the culmination of a two-year political process in which Aquino sponsored the drafting of a new national constitution and held national elections for a revamped Senate and House of Representatives. Both were made necessary after she dissolved the Parliament that Marcos had created and suspended a 1972 constitution that had helped keep the fallen dictator in power. At the same time, Aquino also fired most of the pro-Marcos mayors, governors and councilmen elected in 1980.

Ramos and other military experts have said they expect the results of today’s balloting to help in their counterinsurgency effort. For the first time since those 1986 firings, they said, local officials will be in place to help deliver government goods and services to the public. The failure of local government in the last two years has been blamed for many of the strides made by the 24,000-member Communist guerrilla army.

The polls are also seen by political analysts as a bellwether of political change in the country.

Critics have charged that Aquino’s ruling family, which is backing the candidates of many former Marcos kingpins and powerful old political bosses, known here as warlords, is simply returning to the dynastic provincial politics that preceded the 1972 declaration of martial law.

No Popularity Test

The Aquino family’s support for such candidates, some of whom frankly say they want Marcos to return, has led several analysts to conclude that the polls will not be a test of Aquino’s strength and popularity in this still-divided nation.

However, Aquino’s family is also backing some new faces in several regions, and the success of such young professionals against longtime pro-Marcos local leaders is seen as a key to assessing whether the country’s traditional system of patronage politics is changing under Aquino, who is herself an inexperienced yet impeccably honest political figure.