Republican Party Reptile(18)
On election day, between seven hundred and a thousand foreign reporters spread across the country watching voter-registration records being destroyed, ballot boxes stolen, opposition poll watchers barred from their stations, and army trucks full of “flying voters” moved from one polling spot to another. Marcos was doing everything but training circus animals to vote.
About half an hour before the polls closed, I had my driver take me to his precinct so he could cast his ballot. It was a comfortable middle-class neighborhood called Bay Palms. The polling place was a tidy scene, voters standing neatly in line, ballot boxes screened for privacy. A quietly enthusiastic crowd of Aquino supporters was gathered at the proper legal distance from the polls.
And the military was right in the middle of it, a full company, armed, with a general standing on a truck screeching through a bullhorn. Volunteers from NAMFREL, the National Movement for Free Elections, were nearly in tears.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“The military is here to close the polls exactly on the hour,” said a matronly woman, “even though the people waiting in line to vote are supposed to be able to do so as long as they were in line before three o’clock.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Bay Palms is an anti-Marcos district,” she said. “And in the next district, Guadalupe, only a mile away, our volunteers are calling for help. There is violence and thugs and the ballot boxes are being stolen, and we have begged the military to go stop the violence in Guadalupe, but they are here making sure this polling place closes on time instead.”
My driver came back. “I can’t vote,” he said. “They’re making sure the polling place closes on time.”
I went back to the hotel and ordered a drink. A moment later an Australian television crew came running into the bar, their eyes as big as pie plates. “In Guadalupe,” one yelled, “there’s violence and thugs and the ballot boxes are being stolen!”
“And they shot at us,” yelled another, “and took our camera at gunpoint and smashed it and grabbed the videotape!”
The Australians, being as dumb as Australians, called the police. In a little while there were a couple of greasy Criminal Investigation Service agents in the bar, drinking it up on the Aussies’ tab and hinting broadly that for 10,000 pesos maybe the videotape could be found, but probably not until after the election.
I went up to my room, hoping that I had some drugs I’d forgotten about in my luggage. TV Ronnie was on the air with the Metro Manila chief of police. “Yes,” said the chief, “there have been no reports of election-related trouble in the Metro Manila region.”
A SALVAGE HIT
“The election was marred by violence” is a nice phrase. It summons images of teens with cans of aerosol mayhem, going out to deface campaign posters. Photographer Tony Suau and I went to investigate one such mar or scuff near the town of Moncada, in Tarlac province, about 130 kilometers north of Manila.
Political killing in the Philippines is called “salvaging”—the victim has been “salvaged from communism.” This was not one of the big murders that made headlines in the United States or even in Manila. The opposition papers gave it one paragraph and spelled the man’s name wrong. He was Arsenio Cainglet, a tenant farmer in a rural barangay called Banquero Sur.
Arsenio was the barangay captain for the UNIDO opposition party. We had to drive a long way from the paved road to find his house, through miles of flat rice land tufted with stands of bamboo and coconut palms, looking everything like snapshots my drafted buddies brought back from Vietnam. At a hut that serves as the Banquero Sur town hall and medical center I found two members of the CHDF, the Civil Home Defense Force, which is supposed to be for anti-guerrilla self-defense but has been used more often as a local enforcement arm of the KBL. This pair looked like somebody gave the town drunks M-16s. They were surly but seemed frightened by Tony’s cameras. A touching omniscience and potency was being attributed to the foreign press just then. And not many people with blue eyes ever venture to Banquero Sur anyway. They gave us directions to Arsenio’s home.
Several dozen mournful people stood in the yard. Fifty feet away were three uniformed policemen surrounding a fat-necked man in civilian clothes. “Please don’t use my name,” said Agent Ramos of the Criminal Investigation Service. He wore a large gold ring and gold Rolex and reported no progress on the case. “Mayor Llamas is investigating,” he said, pointing to a thin chain-smoking man of about sixty talking to the people in the yard. The moment I turned my back, Agent Ramos and his policemen slipped away.