Mysterious Killing in Town Symbolizes Post-Election Woes in Philippines

GUAGUA, Philippines —  When Artemio Caguioa’s son saw his father’s bullet-riddled corpse in the open coffin Friday evening, he wailed and screamed a Filipino curse. In an anguished shriek of grief, he shouted, “I’m going to get you! I’m going to get you!”

One problem: No one seems to know just who fired the nine bullets into Caguioa’s head, chest and arms as the retired soldier stood in front of his house shortly after dawn, preparing to vote in Friday’s crucial Philippine election.

And if anyone does know, they aren’t talking about it in the town of Guagua.

“It’s always like that,” said Lt. Sonny Cunanan, the town’s police commander. “They don’t see nothing, they don’t hear nothing and they don’t know nothing.”

What is known, though, is that the murder of Artemio Caguioa was just one of the more than 30 slayings in a nationwide, one-day flurry of beatings, stabbings and shootings that made Friday’s special presidential election among the dirtiest and bloodiest in Philippine history.

The killing in Guagua just an hour after the polls opened Friday morning was, in many ways, symbolic of the two greatest problems facing the Philippines today, crises that will remain long after the votes are tallied this weekend--lingering political instability and a burgeoning and violent Communist insurgency.

There are differing versions of the killing, and accounts by police and the few witnesses and family members who would talk about why Caguioa, 52 and unemployed, found himself on the list of election carnage.

The three young, unidentified assailants, they said, were either government paramilitary soldiers or Communist guerrillas.

Caguioa’s wife, Luzviminda, said that her husband’s attackers shouted, “Long live the KBL,” referring to Marcos’ ruling party, after they shot and killed a man identified by the town’s opposition political leader as one of his toughest and most dedicated organizers for presidential candidate Corazon Aquino.

But local leaders in Caguioa’s village said that Caguioa had only dabbled in politics. And the local chairman of a national citizens’ poll-watching group hinted darkly that the slain man was, in reality, an agent of Marcos’ ruling KBL party who had infiltrated the opposition and thus was summarily executed Friday by members of the New People’s Army (NPA). The army is the military wing of the burgeoning Communist Party of the Philippines, which had pledged to disrupt an election it saw as futile.

In direct contradiction of his own wife’s version, one of Caguioa’s neighbors distinctly recalled that the assailants shouted, “Long live the NPA,” as they casually walked from the murder scene.

The gangland-style hit hardly came as a surprise to police commander Cunanan. He said it was one of several recent murders of present and former police or government officials by hit squads of Communist rebels, who are now estimated at more than 15,000 armed fighters throughout the Philippines.

Among the clues recovered near Caguioa’s body was a gold “Marcos for President” pin, and the commander speculated that his killers dropped it beside him as a message or that he might have been holding it when they opened fire.

“I suspect they were NPA, and they believed this man was a confidential government informant,” Cunanan said. “What is happening here now is the NPA are gaining support. They are not so strong yet, but they are getting stronger.

“That is why the people in that place are afraid to talk. They are afraid they may be next.”

Many residents of Caguioa’s tiny barrio of Pulungmasle said they were afraid, but not just of the Communists. When the subject changed from the killing to the election, even the elder village leaders sounded far more sympathetic to the guerrillas than the government.

If the election is “stolen” from them, they added, both the insurgency and the political instability that Marcos had said provoked the special election will worsen.

The town of Guagua is, in short, an opposition stronghold that voted overwhelmingly for Aquino. A 64-year-old government scientist who lives near Caguioa’s house said soon after the polls closed Friday, “If we are cheated this time, the size of the insurgency will increase two to three times before the year is out.”

The scientist, who said that he would allow himself to be quoted by name only when “we have the same amount of arms as the government,” added, “A Marcos party man here told me Cory (Aquino) will win here today, but it’s no use. The result was already tabulated before you opened the polls.

“Right now, there are three kinds of NPA--the real NPA with left leanings, which is 10%; NPA who are pretending but are actually undercover for Marcos, 5%, and all the rest, who are just anti-Marcos. If he wins this election by cheating, the membership in all three will go sky high, and then we’re doomed.”

In the dead man’s village, local poll watchers said, cheating was minimal. In the end, the polling was almost unanimous for Aquino there, save for the scores of ballots that could not be cast by legitimate voters whose names, like those of hundreds of thousands throughout the country, had been dropped arbitrarily from registration lists.

But no one at the small elementary school precinct near Caguioa’s house knew whether the votes they had counted there would be the same votes tallied when the ballot boxes reached the provincial canvassing center 20 miles away.

“All I can do,” said the provincial leader of the citizens’ poll-watching group, Msgr. Jose de la Cruz, “is have faith that God will guide them.”

And as she sat beside her husband’s coffin and the large wooden crucifix on the wall Friday evening, Luzviminda Caguioa shook her head and said, “I just don’t know who did this. Only God knows.”