Accused of Murder, Kidnaping, Torture : Philippine ‘Warlord’ Favored in Voting

CABARROGUIS, Philippines —  Orlando Dulay was relaxing at his poolside cabana, playing with his pet rabbits, chatting with some small-time political bosses and military friends who had dropped in. He smiled as he discussed the charges of murder, kidnaping and torture pending against him.

Two days earlier, last Tuesday, the Supreme Court in Manila had ordered that Dulay be arrested immediately for “heinous” crimes against the people. But there he was, gregarious and articulate, the 52-year-old former governor, legislator, military commander and, as some say, “undisputed warlord” of Quirino province, beside his swimming pool with his friends.

Among the friends was Lt. Col. Jose Dalupines, the provincial military commander and the man who would be responsible for arresting Dulay. The colonel sat next to Dulay, sipping coffee and listening to his former commander’s war stories, tales that have made Dulay legendary as an anti-Communist fighter. He had no plans to arrest Dulay that day, the colonel said.

“When the order comes from Manila, I will arrest him,” Dalupines said. “It may take a week before that Supreme Court order reaches this place. Maybe not for 10 days, maybe not even then. The mails are not so good here in the Philippines.”

Indeed, Dulay’s arrest order may not arrive until after the May 11 election to establish a national legislature for the first time since President Corazon Aquino took power 14 months ago with the overthrow of Ferdinand E. Marcos’ authoritarian government.

Friday, the day after the scene at the poolside, several Manila newspapers reported that Dalupines had reported to his headquarters that he had rearrested Dulay. But at noon the day of his supposed arrest, Dulay had still been smiling by his poolside as the colonel prepared to leave.

Although he faces three charges of murder related to the carnage that occurred in this northern province at the time of last year’s presidential election, Dulay is himself a candidate. Moreover, the word in the barrios is that he may win. After all, he still controls the province.

Dulay is something of a symbol of the political system that kept Marcos in power for 20 years, a system largely unchanged despite Marcos’ ouster. And he is just one among scores of Marcos-era politicians, some of them facing criminal charges ranging from graft to murder, who are nevertheless expected to win seats in the new Congress by using the traditional warlord politics of muscle, money and favors.

May Not Win Majority

Political analysts predict that Aquino’s handpicked Senate candidates, helped by the president’s personal popularity, will win at least 18 of the 24 seats in the Senate. But Aquino’s top campaign strategists concede that she may fail to win a majority in the more powerful House of Representatives.

Paul Aquino, the president’s brother-in-law and campaign director for People Power, her political party, predicted in a recent interview that right-wing opposition candidates are almost sure to win at least 70 of the 200 House seats.

The potential opposition victors include dozens of former Marcos officials. Besides Dulay, there is Jose Aspiras, a former minister of tourism and one of the men charged with engineering the 1983 assassination of Aquino’s husband, Benigno S. Aquino Jr. Another is Ismael Mathay Jr., the former vice governor of Manila who was regarded as a protege of Marcos’ wife, Imelda.

Further threatening Aquino’s support in the lower house, which has the power under Aquino’s new constitution to impeach the president and dissolve the Senate, are lingering doubts that all of the 122 candidates whom the president has endorsed will support her after the election. Eleven of these were members of Marcos’ party.

These doubts are based partly on Aquino’s failure to endorse a full slate of candidates in all 200 congressional races. In addition, pro-Aquino candidates are running against each other in many districts, where they will split the pro-administration vote and benefit the opposition.

Marcos Political Machine

Far more important, according to Paul Aquino and other analysts, is the Aquino administration’s failure to dismantle the Marcos political machine, a network of feudal warlords and political bosses such as Dulay, and to instill a new political order in the country.

Campaign director Aquino said the president’s expressed hope for a clean new electoral system will show itself in less than 20% of the congressional races, but “hopefully, within the next five years, all the other places will be infected by it.”

In desolate Quirino, people say, five years will hardly make a dent in a system that seems almost as old as the barren Sierra Madre range that surrounds the province.

Dulay has been at the heart of that system for the last 16 years, first as a military commander fresh from three years of psychological warfare campaigns with the U.S. Green Berets in Vietnam and later as a governor and national assemblyman who proudly distributed 5,000 pesos ($250) at election time to every village chief in the province to help get out the vote.

Discounts Charges

Many of the chiefs, known as barangay captains, sat beside Dulay’s pool as he discussed the campaign and what he called the insignificance of the charges against him. Asked how the killing of three men could be considered insignificant, Dulay, who hints broadly at having ties to the CIA, said:

“Look at Uncle Sam. When you dropped that bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, millions of people were killed and injured. That was genocide, no? But who cares? You won the war. You were heroes. So what is two lives, or three lives? Why make a hell out of it. What matters is I, too, will win.”

Government prosecutors charge that Dulay and members of his private army kidnaped the two provincial leaders of Aquino’s presidential campaign last year, along with the son of one of them, two nights after the election.

A witness has testified in court that Dulay thrust the three men into his Jeep and sped off toward his house in the provincial capital of Cabarroguis the night before they were killed. There, according to another witness, Dulay was overheard torturing the three men, all of whom were screaming for mercy.

Several days later, the bodies of the two Aquino supporters were found hanging upside down from a bridge just beyond the provincial border. The son’s body was found in a nearby sewage canal.

3 Girls Also Killed

The killings, according to Ernesto Salunat, a local lawyer who is helping the government as a “private prosecutor,” were meant as a message to anyone opposed to Dulay and Marcos. The message was underscored, Salunat said, by the subsequent killings of three daughters of opposition leaders in the only village where Aquino won in Quirino province last year. The victims were found with “I Love Marcos” bumper stickers pasted across their mutilated bodies.

Dulay has not been charged in the killings of the three girls.

At the time of the killings last year, a Roman Catholic priest in the province told an interviewer that Dulay “rules Quirino by fear, and all the killing is meant to keep the fear going here.”

“It’s a feudal system,” the priest said. “If you control life and death itself, you control the people’s minds.”

Not long after the killings, the Marcos government was driven out by a coup, backed by the Roman Catholic Church and millions of Aquino’s followers, and Marcos fled with his family and closest friends to the United States.

Escaped From Camp

Three weeks later, Dulay was arrested and charged with three counts of murder and kidnaping. But he escaped from the military camp where he was being held and disappeared without a trace, until his arrest about a year later near Princeton, N.J.

Dulay returned to the Philippines on March 18. Details of his flight and his year in the United States have not been revealed. But in two lengthy interviews with The Times last week Dulay strongly implied that, for the most part, it was made possible by the CIA.

Asked how he managed to escape from his prison cell at military police headquarters in Manila last year, Dulay declined to comment “for security reasons.” But then he said: “You Americans did it. I’ve been in Vietnam, I’ve been to the States before, as a student (he graduated from the officers training school at Ft. Lee, Va.), and I have won the confidence and trust of some Americans in those places.”

At one point, Dulay referred to Eugene Hasenfus, an American air cargo handler captured in Nicaragua last year after a rebel supply plane was shot down, as “my good friend,” and added, “We were together in Vietnam.”

Dulay said that during his year in the United States he met several times with “my friends” at the Pentagon.

“I wasn’t putting down Cory Aquino,” he said. “I was just telling them about communism in the Philippines and what should be done about it.”

Accompanied by Americans

When he returned to the Philippines in March, Dulay said, he was accompanied on the journey by two American officials, one from the State Department and another from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. They “were afraid I might get assassinated,” he said.

Dulay was asked whether potential assassins might include Communist guerrillas, a group that he has been fighting for the last two decades. He replied:

“That’s one possibility, and maybe some guys who feel that I have become a threat to their political careers.”

Dulay’s return has, indeed, tipped the political scales in his congressional district, which he has controlled since Marcos assigned him to the area as military commander in 1973. Nine candidates are vying for the province’s single seat in the House, and Dulay says his most formidable enemies are candidates who were leading in the race before he came home.

Most of the candidates have been talking publicly about the murder charges against Dulay and his alleged record of inciting fear in the province.

Confident of Winning

Dulay insists that the charges will not hurt his chances, saying: “I have not done anything wrong. I did not commit a crime. It’s political persecution, that’s all.”

Clearly, politics is involved.

Private prosecutor Salunat is one of Dulay’s opponents in the campaign. Still, even if the arrest order arrives before election day, Dulay insists that it will not help Salunat.

“You could gag me,” Dulay said. “You could put me in a box. I won’t even campaign, and he will lose. He won’t even get 200 votes.”

His toughest competitor, Dulay said, is a wealthy local sawmill operator, Junie Evangelista Cua, who has been spending lavishly on his campaign, money that Dulay and others assert that he made by “raping” the province through massive deforestation. Cua says he has been endorsed by President Aquino.

“No,” Dulay said, “not much has changed in the politics of this country. It’s the same, practically.”

After the elections, he said, “I will support President Aquino and her programs, win or lose. The way I see it, you must have your own kingdom, and this is mine. And I have returned to it for this election because the voice of the people is the voice of God.”