THE PHILIPPINES: Mambo, Mambo

Even though election day is three months away, Filipinos (who model their campaigning on what they imagine U.S. electioneering to be) were going at it hot & heavy last week. President Elpidio Quirino was handicapped by being in the U.S. to recover from an operation on his ulcers, and by the fact that Eisenhower had so far not invited him to Denver. Carlos Romulo was handicapped by the fact that his campaign had not caught on, and that he felt it necessary to issue daily statements that he would not pull out because of “my sacred duty to thousands.” That left most of the excitement to Ramon Magsaysay, the Huk fighter.

One day last week, after giving a speech on economics (not his strongest subject) to the Manila Junior Chamber of Commerce, Magsaysay hurried home, changed his grey business suit for slacks and an aloha shirt, and set out in an air-conditioned Cadillac for the barrios.

In a driving rain, Magsaysay was whisked through bamboo forests into Pampanga province, the last region of the islands where the Huks are still strong. A limousine with six bodyguards led the way; a jeepload of Manila police guarded the rear. Peasants, alerted that Magsaysay (pronounced wag-sigh-sigh) was coming, waved and grinned from beneath their huge dripping salakots (hats). As the convoy sloshed into Manalin, a public address system blared the catchy Magsaysay Mambo: “Mambo, Mambo, Magsaysay,/ Our democracy will die,/ If there is no Magsaysay.”

Hundreds of enthusiastic peasants, many of them barefooted, waited on an outdoor basketball court for him to appear. Dripping wet, Magsaysay borrowed a comb from a toothy young man whom he introduced as “Commander Big Boy, one of the Huks who surrendered to me.”

The Shaved Heads. The meeting began with a pair of comedians with shaved heads who did a scathing song & dance satire of Romulo. Sample: “Are you the author of I Saw Bataan Fall?” “Yes, sir.” “Where were you when Bataan fell?” “I was hiding in a tunnel.” The tunnel was Corregidor, the book’s title was a little wrong, and the accusation was unfair, but it went over fine. Then the shaved heads took up a report that Romulo had plagiarized from Adlai Stevenson. “Why didn’t you steal a speech from Eisenhower?” “Because I am going to lose too.”

Romulo was left to the comedians; the record of Quirino’s Liberal Party was left to Magsaysay himself. Speaking mostly in Tagalog dialect, heaving with emotion, Magsaysay told of the 1951 murder of Politician Moises Padilla, “whose only crime was to make speeches against the administration.” He told how Padilla’s legs were broken, his eyes gouged out, and his tongue pierced, before he was killed by five bullets in the back. “I carried his body in my arms,” shouted Magsaysay. “It was not the body of Padilla I carried, but the body of the humble people of my country.”

Then Magsaysay went unabashedly to work building himself up as a homespun hero and as a great friend of America. Said 45-year-old Magsaysay:

“I have been attacked as too young for office. Quirino didn’t ask my age when he asked me to clean up Huks . . . They have attacked me because I was once a mechanic and truck driver. That’s not an insult to me but an insult to 19 million humble Filipinos.”

Rice & Coke. With cries of Mabuhay (long live) in his ears, earnest, honest Magsaysay climbed back into his car and drove on. It was pitch dark. At several villages, the candidate and his bodyguards plodded with flashlights through inky darkness in the rain to shake hands with people. At Guagua, Magsaysay dined on chicken and rice, washed down by Coca-Cola, and told a crowd that “by coming like this among the humble people of the country, I am revolutionizing political campaigning in the Philippines . . . My policy can be summed up in one word, ‘action.’ It’s my obsession to serve you.”

As his limousine headed back towards Manila, with a guard pointing a cocked carbine through the window into the rainy night, Magsaysay nervously cracked his knuckles, and predicted that he would get 60% of the votes if the election were free. He accused Quirino of hoping to stay in office by fraud and intimidation. If the election is stolen, said Magsaysay, “the Philippines will become a banana republic at the mercy of the Communists.”