One — Murder Most Foul

FAR ABOVE MANILA in the northwest corner of Luzon is a dry, impoverished region called the Ilocos, a dusty yellow land with crumbling red brick churches. It bears more resemblance to Sicily or Sardinia than to visions of Pacific paradise. The small provinces called Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur are shielded from the rest of Luzon by a ridge of blue mountains inhabited by isolated hill tribes. Here life has never been easy. Survival was an act of desperation. The brown, weatherbeaten faces of the Ilocanos show grim self-reliance. According to tradition, they were forced out of Borneo long ago and settled here because these inhospitable valleys were only lightly inhabited. Nobody else wanted them. Adapting to the harsh landscape, the Ilocanos became more resourceful, more cunning, more clannish, and more vengeful than any other ethnic group in the archipelago.

The first European to arrive was a young Spanish nobleman, the conquistador Juan de Salcedo. In 1571, at the age of twenty-two, he sailed up from the original Spanish colony on Cebu to establish the new settlement of Manila, and then explored the coast of northern Luzon, founding many of the principal towns that remain today. He was appointed lieutenant-governor of the Ilocos, but died suddenly of fever at the age of twenty-seven.

The Spaniards had mixed opinions of the scantily clad Ilocanos. Some found them “more barbarous than the Tagalogs” to the south, while others considered them “a quiet and peaceful people, [who] dislike war, and are humble and well-disposed.” It was the twofold nature of Ilocanos to be very agreeable up to a point and then, when their sense of honor was disturbed, violent to a degree unusual even for the Malay archipelago, where the word amokoriginates. Pistols and rifles are common as toothpicks, and men boast of being crack shots, or black belts in karate. Boys carry butterfly knives, the Filipino switchblade, flicking them open and closed with a wrist motion similar to twirling karate nunchuks. In more recent years, family and political grudges have been settled by burning down whole villages with flamethrowers.

Under Spanish rule, the Ilocanos grew cigar tobacco and rice, garlic and onions, and other vegetables; they harvested fish, salt, coconut, wove their own cloth, and smuggled goods the short distance from Hong Kong and Taiwan, only three days’ sail.

Spaniards from sun-baked Grenada in particular felt at home here, and built most of the churches and haciendas. These friars were all Augustinians. They hired Chinese masons, who mixed sugarcane juice with coral limestone to produce bricks for the churches. Today there are primary schools in every town; literacy is high at 70 percent, but so is unemployment. There are only two roads out through the mountains, and a few bridges, which made it easy for local warlords to enforce control, to wage feuds and vendettas like the dons and capos of Sicily. It is an intensely parochial place.

Ilocano women are small, fine-boned, and pretty, but a hard life and family jealousies quickly take their toll. Ilocano men, although reactionary politically and thrifty by nature, spend like Beau Brummell on clothes and jewelry (for themselves) and like to prance and strut. Because they are so poor, appearances mean a lot, especially in towns like Laoag, Sarrat, and Batac where people without money like to pretend that they have. In the absence of plumbing, villagers still wash their clothes, brush teeth, bathe, and defecate in the same muddy streams. There are several unattractive new towns with lights, toilets, TV, and paved streets, built by President Marcos as a birthday present to himself. One is a village called Ferdinand, in a new community called Marcos.

The provincial capital of Ilocos Norte is Laoag, a stunted town which never grew into a city. It is built around a central market, and in addition to churches has a few very modest Chinese and Ilocano restaurants, general stores, silversmiths, soap and candle makers, a town hall, a courthouse, and a jail. In the streets, besides ubiquitous Filipino jeepneys, some of them survivors of World War II, the favorite transportation for adults is the creaking, horse-drawn banca, or sway-backed Detroit dinosaurs with tail fins and musical horns playing the first bar of the Colonel Bogey March. Since cars are beyond the reach of most young Ilocanos, motorcycle gangs are everywhere, roaring through town like cowboys on payday.

Small, varicolored chickens patrol the country lanes, but there are few dogs to be seen, for good reason. On feast days they are eaten.

Here in the Ilocos, absolute loyalty to the family and the clan means resenting everybody else. Ilocanos make a fetish of traits that differentiate them from other Filipinos.

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