Ominous

The election season has indeed begun.

First, there was an assassination attempt on Davao Rep. Prospero Nograles which the NBI uncovered. The congressmen avoided the event where the assassination was supposed to take place.

Then, that strange fire that consumed the vehicle of Rep. Robert Jaworski Jr. The police discovered traces of an improvised explosive device in the car. Fortunately, the explosive was clumsily assembled. The congressman and his companions survived.

Finally, the case of Rep. Luis Bersamin of Abra. Assassins got close to the congressman and killed him.

In all three instances, investigators are looking into the angle of local politics.

That is not a surprise. Historically, the major portion of election-related violence has to do with local political rivalries.

National elections are almost always bloodless. But in the local contests, the rivalries are intense and bitter. They are battles in close quarters, often spiced with blood debts. They often involve political families that have been feuding for generations.

The gladiators in the theater of local politics take things personally. They carry the grudges from other encounters: business rivalries, betrayals and double-crosses.

At the local level, the constituencies are not just plain voters. They are spectators in a blood sport. They cheer lustily when one candidate savages the other. They help magnify political intrigue by passing it around – the better to prime the combatants and spike the dimension of politics-as-free-public-entertainment.

Too, the more intense the contests, the more the tendency for money to be disseminated freely. The more vicious the struggle for power, the higher the price of votes for sale.

And the more expensive it becomes to get elected, the greater the propensity for corruption to happen whichever side wins.

It is not an accident that the larger the spoils at stake, the more violent the electoral contests tend to be. That is almost a tautology.

In the bad old days, local political lords ruled over localities known as havens for smuggling or illegal logging. Remember the great political feuds of Cavite and Ilocos Sur.

In provinces that were once thickly forested, and have since become deforested, the political dynasties associated with logging have disappeared with the forests. The political lords associated with smuggling lost influence when trade liberalization spread.

The old powerbrokers associated with the plantation economy receded with the eroding importance of that sector of the economy. In many localities, they were replaced by philistines fronting for gambling lords.

It was simply that the decline of the plantation economy produced widespread poverty – and with that, a propensity to hang shreds of hope on the illusory promise of financial relief peddled by the gambling syndicates.

There are a few localities where the spoils are even more dazzling: the incredible protection money paid by the drug syndicates. So dazzling are those spoils of power that they provide enough motive to kill.

Where my father comes from, the talk in the barrios is that hired guns may be had for only P15,000 a kill. Life is cheap; and the assassins even cheaper.

The increasing urbanization of our economy produced a new breed of political lords: those skilled in skimming off from the sumptuous internal revenue allotments to grease extensive machineries of political patronage. They are our versions of the legendary Mayor Daly of Chicago when that American city was exemplar of protection rackets operated from city hall.

In our case, as it was in Chicago during Daly’s time, there is weak control over how the revenue allotments of local governments are spent. This is the dark side of devolution: large amounts of public funds as automatically disbursed, as required by law, to local governments that have weak administrative controls. The city council, the municipal and provincial administrators and well as the local electorate are often overwhelmed by the mayors or governors. The elected local executives, with the insulation provided them by the Local Government Code, evolve into minor shoguns in their localities.

Regardless of how well or how badly a local executive runs his shop, the internal revenue allotments just flow in from the national coffers. It is only when a local executive becomes too brazen that enough of a case might be built up before the DILG for that executive to be suspended.

Even then, as we saw in the City of Makati, the local executive may seek relief from suspension by seeking a restraining order from some court.

While so much effort has been put at curbing graft and corruption at the level of the national government agencies, not much progress has been made in professionalizing the way our local governments are run.

Very often, local executives put battalions of their camp followers on the public payroll instead of using their revenue allotments for economic investments in the locality. That buys them a secure base of voters. It also raises the stakes in local election because a reversal of political fortunes is often followed by a mass purging of the local government payroll, paving the way for the replacement of allies of one camp with allies of the other.

In addition to all these, there is one other aggravating element: the extortion activities of heavily armed insurgents who are now even more dependent on using leverage in electoral politics to finance radical movements that have lost traditional foreign sources of funding.

The electoral involvement of armed insurgents ranges from selling "permit to campaign" certificates to all candidates to intimidation of voters to widen their leverage to actual assassination of politicians considered harmful to their established networks of extortion.

All these factors combine to heighten the prospects for more election-related violence in the future.