Camarines town council bet who refused to pay rebels slain

LEGAZPI CITY , Philippines  – A candidate for town councilor was gunned down by suspected communist rebels for reportedly refusing to pay permit-to-campaign fee in Pasacao, Camarines Sur Thursday, a report reaching Camp General Simeon Ola here said.

Senior Superintendent Eliciar Bron, Bicol police spokesman, said the victim, Ponciano Numeron, 50, director of the Camarines Sur Electric Cooperative who was running for councilor of Pasacao town, was restoring a busted light outside his residence in Barangay San Antonio when a lone attacker shot him several times with a caliber .45 pistol, killing him on the spot.

Bron said they were still verifying reports that Numeron, a retired police officer, had received several death threats from the insurgents when he refused to pay the permit-to-campaign fee.

Last Feb. 22, over a hundred color-coded permit-to-campaign cards, with fees ranging from P20,000 to P1 million, were recovered from a slain rebel following an encounter with government troops in Barangay Maysoram, Caramoran, Catanduanes.

Also recovered was a list of candidates in the May polls who had allegedly secured permit-to-campaign cards from the rebels.

Meanwhile, National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales has expressed alarm over what appeared to be daily election-related killings, which could be the biggest threat to the orderly conduct of the country’s first-ever nationwide automated polls.

Gonzales said he has been conducting dialogues with politicians in poll hot spots and telling them that the Armed Forces would strongly intervene if they would be using armed goons to have their way in the polls.

“What is unfortunate and sad is we are continually monitoring the escalation of killings; that’s what we are closely looking at now,” he said.

“Since we have automated polls now, maybe some politicians running in the elections think that it would be hard to cheat now so it’s easier to kill their opponents,” he added.

Gonzales sought to dispel the notion that automated elections would reduce violence in the polls. He pointed out that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) earlier had forged a cooperative agreement with the Armed Forces and the Philippine National Police (PNP).

He said the authorities are closely looking at “the traffic of hired goons.”

“We have reports that goons are being hired by politicians but we cannot arrest them yet because they (hired guns) are not yet in position but we know there are now negotiations. We’re just waiting for them to be in position in provinces where the politicians who hired them are located, this is toward the elections, then we will move,” he said.

Albay Gov. Joey Salceda earlier had cited PNP statistics showing that from January 2009 to January 2010, there had been 368 politics-related killings in Masbate. – With Celso Amo and Paolo Romero