Jail guards assist a detainee vote at a school used as a polling station in Taguig City, south of Manila, yesterday.
MANILA: Police and troops were on high alert across the Philippines yesterday as millions of voters went to the polls to choose village leaders, with 22 people killed in pre-election violence.
Poll officials said about 336,000 village chief and councillor posts were up for grabs in the country’s dynamic but corrupt brand of democracy, where politicians are infamous for employing private armies to kill or intimidate rivals.
While villages are the smallest government units, they are hotly contested because they allow major political parties to cultivate a grassroots network and widen their support base.
“There has been violence due to intense political rivalry, with emotions running high on the ground between rivals,” national police spokesman Reuben Theodore Sindac said.
He said 22 people had been killed in the four-week run-up to the polls, half of them incumbent politicians running for re-election.
The latest reported fatality was the brother of a candidate for village chief, who was gunned down Sunday on Basilan, a violence-plagued island in the south of the country that is a stronghold of Islamic militants.
Twenty-seven other people were hurt in election-related violence across the country, including two policeman and two election officers who were ambushed by unidentified gunmen in the central island province of Masbate on Sunday.
Despite efforts by President Benigno Aquino to curb the power of political warlords and their private armies, Sindac said this year’s violence was worse than the last village polls in 2010, when 15 people were killed. “We have intensified our efforts to protect the security of everyone,” Sindac said.
The armed forces deployed about 6,000 soldiers to four provinces in the restive southern region of Mindanao that were perennial “hot spots” of violence, said regional military spokesman Colonel Dickson Hermoso.
Still, this did not deter armed supporters of some candidates from carrying out “isolated cases of intimidation and coercion of voters,” he said.
AFP
