Teachers bear the brunt of election violence in the Philippines

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By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: June 7, 2007

MANILA: Nellie Banaag and her crew had just finished counting the votes cast hours earlier and were about to bring the ballot boxes to Taysan Town Hall when the men arrived. The men, masked and armed, fired their guns, poured gasoline on the boxes and set them ablaze.

Banaag and another woman, Leticia Ramos, ran to the toilet to hide.

But the flames quickly spread and burned down the building in Taysan, a town in Batangas Province, south of Manila. Banaag and Ramos burned to death inside the toilet. A dozen other people were injured, and one of them eventually died in the hospital.

Banaag, 42, was a teacher who supervised voting in a school May 14 during elections that were as cumbersome and chaotic as they were violent. According to the Philippine police, more than 130 people were killed in violence related to the elections.

Although Banaag was the only teacher to have died in those attacks, several of her colleagues nationwide were abducted and harassed during the voting and the days afterward.

The other two fatalities were poll watchers hired by political parties to guard against improprieties. Days after the incident, two police officers allegedly working for a Taysan politician were implicated in the attack.

Banaag’s death outraged Filipinos and again highlighted the plight facing teachers during elections. Public school teachers are the backbone of the nation’s electoral process: they run and supervise the voting precincts and manually count the ballots, which they transport to town halls and city halls for tabulation.

According to the Department of Education, about 450,000 of the nearly 500,000 public school teachers nationwide served in the elections May 14, when Filipinos elected their senators, members of Congress, governors, mayors and councilors.

The results showed the opposition holding its majority in the Senate, while allies of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo won most of the districts in the House of Representatives.

Because of the violence that teachers face, many of them no longer want to serve during elections.

“I’ve had enough; I want to look for another job, even if it’s manual labor,” one of four teachers abducted in the southern province of Maguindanao said at a news conference in Manila last week. They were kidnapped, the teachers said, so they could not report to election duty, thus ensuring a failure of elections in their voting precincts. The teacher refused to divulge his name or have his picture taken for fear of his life and his family’s safety.

Not taking part may not be not that simple, however: Filipino teachers are required by law to serve during elections. The Alliance of Concerned Teachers, the largest organization of education workers in the Philippines, said it would revive its campaign to have this law amended.

But despite the risks, said Antonio Tinio, chairman of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers, teachers performed their task, even developing a sense of moral responsibility for doing it.

Banaag’s family had warned her not to report for election duty because of the increasingly violent campaigning.

“We told her several times not to report for duty,” Edlyn Buenafe, Banaag’s sister, told The Philippine Daily Inquirer. “But she would just answer that it was her responsibility as a teacher to work in the elections.”

Teachers are paid 3,000 Philippine pesos, or about $65, for an extra week of what has become hazardous work, in which they are subjected to all forms of violence, harassment and intimidation, often from losing candidates or those out to cheat.

Voters who could not find their names on the voting list, which happens all the time because of the antiquated system used by the Commission on Elections, almost always turn their ire on these teachers.

“It is a role they are bound by law – and by their own integrity -to play,” Tinio said. The teachers were required to serve poll duty mainly because of the lack of manpower. But perhaps more important than that, teachers are held in high esteem in the Philippines and are considered the most honest and credible members of the civil service.

In one case, on the night before the recent election, armed men forced teachers to fill out ballots in favor of administration candidates in Maguindanao. In Abra Province in the north, two teachers were wounded when they were attacked while transporting ballots after the voting.

Tinio said that no election in the country had ever taken place without teachers’ being harassed or assaulted. In the 1995 elections, Filomena Tatlonghari, a teacher in Batangas Province, where Banaag died, was shot and killed by men who snatched the ballot boxes she was protecting. And in several instances in the past, teachers were sued on the ground that they had helped candidates cheat.

“All throughout the country, the harassment against teachers were fairly common; they were very vulnerable,” Tinio said. “People vent their frustrations on them and they are targeted for intimidation, especially in the local level, where elections are particularly violent and where cheating is more rampant.”

Tinio said most of the perpetrators of crimes against teachers were not prosecuted, mainly because the attackers were not identified or witnesses were afraid to come forward. Many Filipino politicians, particularly in the provinces, are known to maintain private armies and to resort to violence to settle disputes.

Apart from making sure that the elections proceed as smoothly as possible, several Filipino teachers have also exposed themselves to danger by coming out and exposing election fraud, as in the case of the teacher from Maguindanao who revealed to Lente, a group of lawyers who monitored the elections, that teachers were forced by armed men to fill out election documents in favor of administration candidates.

“Despite the hardships and the risks, our teachers trooped to the polling places and did their job well,” Education Secretary Jesli Lapus said. “This shows both professionalism and patriotism at its finest. We should all be proud of them.”

Some have elevated Banaag and her colleagues to the status of heroes.

Conrado de Quiros, a popular columnist, wrote that while soldiers “only defend this country’s body, teachers protect this country’s soul.”

“We tacitly acknowledge the overweening importance of teachers when we make them poll watchers,” he wrote. “We say that there is no other group or class or species in this country we can trust to have the loftiness of spirit and purity of heart to keep elections clean.”