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Featured Stories

PEOPLE POWER
The Paradox of Freedom: People Power in the Information Age
by David Celdran
When public space migrates to the airwaves and the news pages, politics risks degenerating into a spectator sport.

ELECTIONS 2004
Lanao’s Dirty Secrets
by Sheila S. Coronel
What really happened in Lanao del Sur in 2004 that prompted the attempts to silence Brig. Gen. Gudani?

10 Reasons to Doubt the 2004 Election Results
by Yvonne T. Chua and Avigail M. Olarte
The numbers don’t alays add up, and that’s just one reason why last year’s elections are so controversial.

THE FUTURE OF ELECTIONS
Can Comelec Reform?
by Alecks P. Pabico
Despite being hounded by controversy, the elections body is resisting change.

REFORMS IN THE BARRACKS
The Officers Who Say No
by Luz Rimban
Military and police officers believe reforming the system begins with reforming the individual.

JOURNALIST AT RISK
Reporting under the Gun
by Vinia M. Datinguinoo
Mei Magsino escaped the wrath of the alleged jueteng lord who is also Batangas governor.

THE METROPOLIS
Battle of the Billboards
by Charlene Dy
They’re big, bold, and not quite beautiful. They can also be a health and environmental hazard, but so far, no one is policing billboards.

WOMEN AND DISASTER
Resilience Amid Ruin
by Tess Bacalla
Many more women than men died in the Aceh tsunami. Today the women survivors wrestle with disaster relief programs that don’t consider special needs.

YOUTH VOLUNTEERS
A Gift of Self
Young people discover life’s meaning by doing volunteer work.

SPECIAL ON PINOY POLITICAL HUMOR
Impersonating Presidents
by Elvira Mata
This is a coutnry where there's always someone spoofing a president — dead or alive — on TV, during cocnerts, and from time to time, at people power marches. Five actors top the list of the country's best impersonators.

La Vida Doble
by Tony Velazquez
Because Philippine politics is so ridiculous, amateur impersonators are having a feast.

Mobile Clowning
by Sheila S. Coronel
The cellphone has only encouraged the Pinoy propensity for jokes.

Where Has All the Laughter Gone?
by Katrina Stuart Santiago
Websites and blogs have provided an outlet for political humor, but not all of them are funny.

What really happened in Lanao del Sur in 2004 that prompted the attempts to silence Brig. Gen. Gudani?

by SHEILA S. CORONEL
(with additional reporting by Booma B. Cruz and "Probe")

	RIGGED COUNT. the 2004 elections in Lanao del Sur were deceptively calm, with Marines (below) administering the voting in places where there were not enough teachers to man the polls. [photos by Bobby Timonera]

THE GHOSTS of the last elections haunt Lanao del Sur and they refuse to rest. They will not go away. They flit about, seeking resolution. So when Brig. Gen. Francisco Gudani, the commander of the Marine brigade stationed in the province during the last election, testified in the Senate in September, saying that he had been mysteriously relieved from his post two clays after the voting, the ghosts were roused again. Days after the Senate hearing, Gudani and one of his officers, Marine Lt. Col. Alexander Balutan, were sent to court martial for refusing to heed their superiors' orders not to testily. The ghosts, having been roused, are now rattling even more noisily than ever before.

What really happened in Lanao del Sur in May 2004? What did the military do there that necessitated the relief of u stubborn general and later, his frantic superiors' efforts to ensure he would not break the silence? What other dirty secrets lie buried in Lanao? The answer to these questions is whispered about on the streets of Marawi and elsewhere in the province. There was massive cheating in the presidential count, residents and officials there say, and it involved several groups of operators, some from Manila, others homegrown. It happened, they say, with the complicity of the military, the Commission on Elections (Comelec), and even Malacañang.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo insists that she won fair and square. Despite doubts that had been raised about the conduct of the polls, she says that survey results and international election monitors attest to her victory. She dismisses the accusations of fraud and says her enemies are resurrecting the election charges because they want to unseat her.

In 2004, Arroyo scored one of her bigger election triumphs in Lanao del Sur. There, according to the official Comelec count, she clobbered her closest rival, actor Fernando Poe Jr. The score: 158,748 vs. 50,107, or a ratio of three votes to one. While Arroyo did even better in her home province of Pampanga, and also in Cebu, where she was an early favorite, the Lanao del Sur upset was astonishing because Poe was wildly popular there, if only because nearly every Maranao had seen "Magnum .357," the movie where the actor, expertly wielding a revolver, played the role of a fearless Moro policeman.

Questions about the Lanao results were raised even during the congressional canvass that preceded the president's proclamation. Even then, the opposition had pointed out some eye-popping anomalies. In the town of Poona Bayabao, for example, Arroyo got all 4,700 votes; all the other presidential candidates scored zero. Yet precinct-level election returns obtained by both the opposition and the local chapter of the National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) showed substantial votes for Poe. In October, "The Probe Team" visited the town and nearly everyone they talked to there swore they had voted for FPJ.

Indeed, for the entire province, both the opposition and Namfrel count based on precinct returns showed Poe overtaking Arroyo by a mile. Yet by the time the Comelec finished the provincial canvass, the ratios were reversed in the president's favor.

The opposition cried foul but its protests were drowned out by the majority during the congressional canvass. The local Namfrel chapter held press conferences, saying that its own incomplete count showed Arroyo's votes padded in the final Comelec results by 21,217 votes, while Poe's were shaved by 9,174. But this, too, went unheeded.

After all, everyone is blasé about cheating in Lanao. The province's reputation precedes it. In 1949, by all accounts a fraudulent election, it was said that "the birds and the bees" voting in Lanao enabled Elpidio Quirino to bag the presidency. During the Marcos era, the joke was that after every voting, Ali Dimaporo, the Maranao strongman who was a staunch ally of the dictator, would call up Malacañang and ask his patron, "Apo, how many more votes do you need?" Decades later, not much seemed to have changed, but that didn't seem to bother anyone. And so the issue was more or less laid to rest, or so most people thought.

And then the "Hello, Garci?" tapes surfaced. Containing the wiretapped conversations between President Arroyo and former Comelec Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano in May and June 2004. the recording stirred things up once more. Among other things, it showed that three of the 14 phone calls Arroyo made to the commissioner concerned the Lanao count. In one of those phone calls, Garcillano even assured the president that in Lanao as well as Basilan "itong ginawa nilang pagpataas sa inyo, maayos naman ang paggawa (they did a fine job of increasing your votes)." This caused the resurrection of the ghosts. They had not been laid to rest, after all.

A LANDSCAPE OF GHOSTS
Lanao's is a landscape of rugged hills, lakes, and swamps. It is crisscrossed by the mighty Agus and Cotabato Rivers and their tributaries. More than half of the province is still forested land and many of its inhabitants are poor, living on subsistence fishing and fanning. Many towns still don't have electricity or have it only an hour or so a day. Piped water is a luxury, so it is in muddy wells and pools that villagers drink, bathe, and do their laundry. Lanao del Sur is very much datu country — it is a smattering of little fiefdoms ailed by big men. Warring clans hold sway there, exacting loyalty and obedience from their members. This is a country of ghosts, a land of dark secrets and unsettled scores.

Everyone says there is no such thing as an honest election in Lanao. Local bosses, usually armed, buy and bully their way to public office. If this does not suffice, they kill and cheat. Ordinary voters are too poor or too weak, or live in villages too far from the counting, to resist the intimidation and the fraud. Inevitably, Lanao elections are marred by violent incidents involving the killing of candidates and their supporters and the switching of ballot boxes. During the 2001 election count, the provincial capitol, where the canvassing was being held, was hit by mortar fire.

The common belief in Lanao is that the Comelec officials in the province, the teachers who man the polls, even the watchers of rival candidates can be bought; if not, they can be kidnapped or threatened. This is why the operatives of desperate senatorial candidates go to Lanao (as well as other places in Mindanao) to "buy" votes even days and weeks after election day. A network of dagdag-bawas (vote-padding and shaving) operators has existed there for some time, and they are available for a price. Some of them approach the candidates and offer to rig the count for a fee; sometimes savvy political operators working for Manila-based politicians and parties seek them out, with an "order" for manufactured votes. The operators are masters of their craft: they either fabricate election returns or certificates of canvass or else tamper with the genuine ones. They also pay off election officials and teachers to ensure their complicity in the fraud.

While the results of the local elections are closely monitored by rival candidates and their supporters, making it more difficult, although by no means impossible, to mess around with the count, few people in Lanao care about the national count. There are few watchers left when the national count is done. While there is a local Namfrel chapter, it cannot cover the length and breadth of Lanao. Besides, being volunteers and being unarmed in a province where might is right, they can be intimidated as well.

Just about the only ones who had the means to police the elections effectively in Lanao del Sur were the Marines. The 1st Marine Brigade was stationed in Camp Keithley, the military camp on a hill in Marawi. the province's lakeshore capital. The Marines were new to Lanao del Sur, having been assigned there only in 2003. By the time of the elections, they had been stationed there only about a year and so had not been dirtied by the politics of the place. They look their role seriously, even holding dialogues and "peace covenants" among rival political groups.

"This is the first time a Marine brigade is being assigned in the Lanao del Sur area." Brig. Gen. Gudani said in his Senate testimony on September 28, "and that's why my instruction to everybody was clean we need to hold a clean, honest, peaceful election."

"We were victims of circumstances," was all Lt. Col. Balutan, commander of the 7th Marine battalion assigned to secure 17 municipalities of Lanao del Sur, would say when he testified at the Senate also on September 28, "I stood my ground against forces or pressures from any political entity... I promised the people of Lanao a peaceful and credible election...! told them the armed forces and the Marines will protect your vote and we will have a clean and credible election."