COTABATO CITY, Philippines – Local officials who were openly campaigning for presidential candidates Sen. Manuel Villar of the Nacionalista Party (NP) and administration bet Gilberto Teodoro made a last minute switch to support Liberal Party (LP) candidate Sen. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III.
Seeing their efforts coming to naught, the local officials in the provinces comprising the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) made the switch to support Aquino.
Officials of the regional Commission on Elections (Comelec) in the ARMM said Aquino defeated all his rivals in almost 90 percent of the more than 100 towns in the region.
Even Maguindanao’s governor-elect Esmael Mangudadatu and his running mate Ismael Mastura said Aquino trounced his rivals in their respective hometowns even if their constituents knew their political ties were with Teodoro.
“Senator Aquino has won overwhelmingly in our towns,” said Mangudadatu, referring to Buluan where he is the vice mayor.
He said the local officials of the adjoining towns of Pandag and Mangudadatu, whose mayors are his siblings, also went for Aquino.
Aquino also won overwhelmingly in the towns of Sultan Mastura and Sultan Kudarat, the known political strongholds of the Mastura clan in the first district of Maguindanao.
The re-elected mayor of Lamitan in Basilan, Roderick Furigay, said Villar was first choice in all of their 45 barangays, but after the elections on May 10, Aquino emerged the winner in the final count of votes.
“We gave our barangay chairmen and all of their constituent-community leaders autonomy on whom to campaign for and the results of the presidential elections in our city was enough proof that it was Senator Aquino that was the most popular among the presidential candidates all along,” Furigay said.
Paisalin Tago, the former speaker of ARMM’s 24-seat Regional Assembly, said many of the town mayors in Lanao del Sur went over to support Aquino in the last few days of the campaign.
Aquino was also supported by Maranaw leaders identified with the ARMM’s acting governor Ansarudin Adiong.
Adiong is the vice regional chairman of the administration Lakas-Kampi-CMD in the autonomous region.
But all of the ARMM’s more than a hundred mayors that belonged to Lakas-Kampi-CMD crossed party lines and supported Aquino after Teodoro, then the party chairman, expelled former ARMM Zaldy Ampatuan from the party following the Nov. 23 Maguindanao massacre.
Ampatuan was Lakas-Kampi-CMD’s regional party chairman for ARMM.
“We were orphaned as a result of that expulsion of our regional chairman because the party did not designate someone as his replacement. As a result, we were in a disarray and, thus, supported Senator Aquino instead,” one of the mayors in Lanao del Sur said.