Ghosts of Martial Law Haunt BARMM's First Parliamentary Elections - MindanawOnline

Ghosts of Martial Law Haunt BARMM's First Parliamentary Elections

After four postponements, the Bangsamoro's September 14 vote drew a record 84% turnout—but a layered record compiled by international observers, church-based watchdogs, and grassroots volunteer-monitors documented killing, vote-buying, pre-shaded ballots, and an electorate largely unprepared for its own new institutions

On September 21, as the Philippines marked the anniversary of the 1972 declaration of Martial Law, observers in Mindanao found themselves confronting more than memory. For the Moro region, the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was an era of militarization, displacement, and atrocity endured across Moro, Indigenous, and Christian communities alike. And one week after the first-ever Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) Regional Parliamentary Elections—held on September 14, 2026 after being pushed back at least four times, in May 2022, May 2025, October 2025, and March 2026—critics argue that the very ghosts of that era have returned to haunt the sacred promise of Bangsamoro self-determination.

The Dreamed Assignment

In Katski Flores' film EDJOP, we are reminded that Mindanao was the dreamed assignment of Edgar Jopson—the legendary student activist turned revolutionary hero. To Edjop, Mindanao was not an abstract battleground; it was a region bombarded, heavily militarized, and devastated by rampant human rights violations under the Marcos regime, where authentic, courageous revolutionary leadership was needed most. He chose to go where the suffering was deepest to stand alongside its people.

Decades after Edjop laid down his life in Davao, those who watched the BARMM elections unfold have been struck by a deeply painful realization: the very ghosts he fought so hard to banish have returned. The weight of history is precisely what separates this election from ordinary Philippine contests. BARMM's parliamentary system was not a routine administrative grant from Manila; it was secured through generations of armed struggle, peace negotiation, and sacrifice—through revolutionaries like Edjop who saw in Mindanao the frontlines of true liberation. An election that dishonors the free exercise of the people's will does not merely compromise a contest; in the eyes of its critics, it desecrates the covenant that the Bangsamoro would finally govern themselves, free from external coercion and internal tyranny.

An Election Unlike Any Other—Repeatedly Delayed, Poorly Understood

The repeated postponements stretched what was designed as a three-year transition into roughly seven, testing voter patience at every turn.

Those delays carried a quieter cost: voter education never caught up. An Institute for Autonomy and Governance (IAG) survey of 2,688 likely BARMM voters, conducted in early 2025, found that 47.3 percent admitted they were completely unaware of how the region's voting process works—an improvement over the group's 2024 survey, in which 58.4 percent had no knowledge of the system at all (Rappler). Some 2,393,202 registered voters were eligible to elect 80 members of Parliament—40 through regional political parties, 32 through single-member districts, and eight sectoral seats (GMA News, Inquirer). Critics argue this information vacuum left an already vulnerable electorate easy prey for manipulation.

Dynasties in Parliamentary Clothing—and a Fragmented Verdict

Entrenched political families, long dominant over local government units, extended their reach into the regional halls of power through district races, party alignments, and attempts to capture sectoral seats. The final results confirmed that no single party can govern alone: the Bangsamoro Federalist Party (BFP), led by interim Chief Minister Abdulraof Macacua, topped the party-list race with 678,328 votes (roughly 35.5 percent) for 16 seats; the United Bangsamoro Justice Party (UBJP)—the political arm of the MILF—took 613,663 votes for 15 seats; the BARMM Grand Coalition won 391,266 votes for eight seats; and the Raayat Democratic Party earned one (Daily Tribune, Manila Bulletin, DZRH). Macacua himself described coalition-building as "an unavoidable situation" to reach the 41-seat majority (Rappler).

And as proclamations of winning district representatives proceeded, grassroots monitors documented the visible imprint of provincial and local political clans on the incoming Parliament—kinship and patronage networks linking municipal halls to regional party slates. Power-sharing between dynasties, critics argue, risks degenerating into a cartel formalizing elite control behind a parliamentary façade. The International Republican Institute, which observed alongside 108 international monitors from 16 organizations including ANFREL and NDI, concluded that while Comelec had "administered a complex election under difficult conditions," political violence, clan dynamics, and armed actors "remain serious concerns" (IRI, OPAPRU).

Beyond BARMM: A Republic of Clans

But the ghosts of Martial Law do not confine themselves to the Bangsamoro. Beyond BARMM, they keep haunting Philippine society, for elite and dynastic dominance pervades the nation's very fabric—and the dynastic capture glimpsed in the region's first parliament is not a deviation from the national norm but its continuation.

The freshest numbers, drawn from the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism's accounting of the May 2025 midterm elections, tell the story. Even after twelve dynasties lost gubernatorial races—victims of voter backlash, scandals, and factional infighting—71 of the 82 winning governors, or 87 percent, remain members of political families (PCIJ, May 2025). In Congress, PCIJ found that members of political clans occupy 80 percent of district seats in the House, with over half of them seeking reelection in 2025 (PCIJ, CMFR). The dynastic invasion has even colonized the mechanism created after EDSA to empower the marginalized: 36 of the 54 party-list groups in the current 19th Congress—two-thirds—include at least one nominee from a political family (PCIJ). Locally, 113 of the country's 149 cities are ruled by dynasties, and one in every three city councils is now filled with the mayors' own kin (PCIJ). The largest families have only grown more bloated: 18 dynasties were classified as "obese" heading into the 2025 polls—each fielding at least five members for various positions—while in Ilocos Sur, seventeen relatives of Luis "Chavit" Singson's clan ran in local races, and Camille Villar, daughter of the country's richest man, became the fourth member of her family elected to the Senate since 2001 after a campaign featuring a reported 3.5 billion pesos in advertising (PCIJ).

To be fair, the 2025 midterms also revealed cracks in the wall: the Villars lost a congressional seat in Las Piñas, while entrenched clans in Catanduanes, Albay, and parts of Mindanao were unseated, some for the first time in decades—proof, analysts note, that change is possible where credible challengers and voter dissatisfaction align, though such flips remain exceptions rather than transformation (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung). The longer arc still bends toward consolidation: researchers Mendoza, Jaminola, and Yap have traced the evolution of dynasties from "fat" to "obese," and earlier analyses found 70 percent of Congress dynastic as far back as the 15th Congress, with dynastic jurisdictions correlating with lower incomes, lower human development, and deeper poverty (PIDS, CMFR). Political scientist Dean Dulay's research adds the damning corollary: dynastic mayors spend more without delivering higher growth or lower poverty (PCIJ).

Most damning is what this persistence says about the post-Marcos settlement. The 1987 Constitution that emerged from EDSA commands in Article II, Section 26 that the State "shall guarantee equal access to opportunities for public service, and prohibit political dynasties as may be defined by law." Nearly four decades later, no enabling law has ever been passed—blocked by a Congress dominated by the very families the provision was written to restrain—and at least two petitions are now pending before the Supreme Court seeking to compel Congress to enact the dynasty ban (PCIJ, Inquirer). People Power toppled the dictator in 1986 and raised hopes that oligarchic dominance would be broken; it was not to be. The clans that survived the dictatorship—Marcos foremost among them—recovered their thrones, and the republic's formal restoration of democracy was layered over an unchanged architecture of privilege.

The relevance to BARMM is not analogical but literal. PCIJ's mapping of Mindanao reads like a roster of the region's parliament: the Adiongs of Lanao del Sur, the Mangudadatus of Maguindanao, the Dimaporos of Lanao del Norte, the Hatamans and Salimans of Basilan, the Tans of Sulu—the same surnames now extending from provincial capitols into the Bangsamoro Parliament (PCIJ). What the region's grassroots monitors documented during the proclamations was thus the frontier advance of a national phenomenon, not a local invention. The Bangsamoro, in other words, has inherited the republic's oldest disease just as it finally won its own body politic—and the cure deferred nationally for forty years cannot be presumed to arrive regionally on its own.

Statistics as Veneer

Echoes of the February 1986 Snap Election—when courageous computer technicians and poll watchers walked out in defiance of systemic fraud, igniting the nation's conscience at EDSA—haunt the present. That act proved that high official figures mean nothing when the process behind them is corrupt. Comelec reported a record turnout of 84.34 percent, with 2,018,478 of 2,393,202 registered voters casting ballots (Daily Tribune, BusinessMirror)—yet critics see the same weaponization of statistics, a slick veneer over what grassroots monitoring complicates: IM4PEACE volunteer-monitors reported low turnouts in some polling centers and collected testimonies from voters who stayed away out of fear of escalating violence. A high regional aggregate can conceal pockets where fear emptied the queues.

The Monitor's Record: A Day in Three Situation Reports

IM4PEACE volunteer-monitors issued rolling situation reports documenting conditions the official narrative passed over. Their 10:00 a.m. report captured the opening hours: election-eve violence leaving three dead and 15 injured near polling centers in Cotabato City; voting suspended after shootings; voter suppression and intimidation; missing names, absent secrecy folders, slow machines, and pre-marked ballots; and harassment of accredited monitors. The 5:00 p.m. report catalogued a deteriorating afternoon: stone-throwing, beatings, and partisan intrusion in Cotabato City polling centers that forced police to suspend voting; an armed encounter in Shariff Saydona Mustapha, Maguindanao del Sur, that wounded an elderly civilian; a grenade explosion inside a Cotabato City polling center; a shooting in Upi, Maguindanao; widespread vote-buying in Sultan Mastura and Pualas; ballot fraud including multiple voting and voters turned away with "no more ballots" claims; counting machine malfunctions and overheating in Sultan Kudarat precincts; volunteers pulled out of unsafe areas; and barangay LGU partisanship in Cotabato. The overnight and day-after report documented that the closing of polls brought no relief: two more bodies—bearing stab wounds—found floating in the riverside of Bagua 2, Cotabato City on September 15; an armed, masked group roaming the city aboard a dump truck and motorcycles; power outages and slow transmission of election returns that delayed independent monitors' retrieval of the ERs; and the growing visibility of political-family links between LGUs and the incoming Parliament.

These findings substantially align with the formally accredited watchdogs: PPCRV volunteers caught vote-buying on video in Barira, Maguindanao del Norte (Manila Times); LENTE logged ballot secrecy violations, unauthorized assistance, and firearms inside voting centers (Rappler); Namfrel reported pre-shaded ballots at Central Pilot School; and in Maluso, Basilan, the fraud moved from allegation to institutional record.

The Ballots of Maluso

Nowhere was the contamination of the process more demonstrably documented than in Maluso, a coastal town of Basilan—and tellingly, one of only two areas, with Cotabato City, that Comelec placed under its direct control as voting began. The poll body itself confirmed that ballots in several precincts in Maluso had been pre-shaded ahead of the September 14 vote—marks placed on the ballot before the voter ever held it (Rappler, Inquirer). Comelec responded by ordering the printing and delivery of replacement ballots for the affected precincts and pledged to file criminal charges against the perpetrators, though Chairman Garcia was careful to confine the admission to "unfortunate incidents" within an otherwise "generally peaceful" exercise (DZRH, BusinessWorld). The discovery drew alarm from no less than Basilan Vice Governor Hadjiman "Jim" Hataman-Salliman, who publicly described the pre-shading in his province (Tribune, BusinessWorld). Its consequences cascaded through election day: the Philippine National Police acknowledged that several polling centers in Basilan had not yet opened because of the alleged ballot irregularities, disenfranchising and delaying voters through no fault of their own (GMA News). Independent watchdogs framed the episode within a wider pattern—Namfrel and LENTE raised alarms over pre-shaded ballots, vote-buying, voter coercion, and armed people at voting centers across the region, asking pointedly whether voters in BARMM had actually been able to cast their ballots freely and in secrecy (Rappler).

The significance of Maluso lies in what it settles. Vote-buying and intimidation leave disputed traces—he said, she said, video or no video. Pre-shaded ballots discovered before counting begins are a different order of fraud, one acknowledged by the administering body itself and referred for prosecution. For critics of the official "peaceful and successful election" narrative, Maluso is the incident that cannot be waved away—a verified breach at the heart of the first parliamentary election of the peace process.

Former Comrades in Arms

Perhaps nothing captured the election's bitter irony more than the scene around Cotabato City's polling centers. On election morning, a shooting broke out inside Central Pilot Elementary School along Sinsuat Avenue, wounding four people, including a police officer (Inquirer, Rappler). Two men identified with a political party later died at Cotabato Regional and Medical Center, where all the wounded had been taken (Philstar). Among the dead, according to accounts given by UBJP supporters who identified themselves in media interviews, was one of their own—cut down in the city's regional capital while contesting what the Bangsamoro's own charter had promised would be a peaceful transfer of power.

The presence of those supporters was itself a marker of how far the political settlement has frayed. Witnesses described groups of men massing in Cotabato City from different areas outside the city—some reportedly from outside BARMM altogether—whose arrival, in the assessment of grassroots monitors, was less a provocation than a counter-move: the reaction of a party facing what observers describe as the well-muscled, well-resourced machinery of incumbents contesting every seat of power in the region. BARMM police had separately acknowledged receiving information that masked men were attempting to enter the city as polls closed (Rappler).

The tragedy is compounded by who these men are to each other. The UBJP is the political party of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front—the movement that signed the 2014 peace agreement from which this very parliament descends. Its principal rival, the BFP, is led by interim Chief Minister Macacua, himself a figure of the same revolutionary struggle. The men exchanging gunfire outside polling places in Cotabato were, many of them, former comrades in arms—veterans of a shared fight for self-determination now divided by party machinery, resources, and the spoils of the very autonomy they bled together to win.

What Official Bodies Recorded

The human cost. The pre-midnight shooting near Datu Usman Mampen Elementary School in Barangay Bagua 2 killed three men—Caril Abdul Lumidsog, his brother Bain, and 88-year-old Edar Kasan Andog—companions of Barangay Bagua 2 chairman Fahad Singh who had gone to check reports of gunmen near the campus; 15 others were wounded (Philstar, Inquirer). Cotabato City police identified the confrontation as a dispute between supporters of the UBJP and BFP camps jostling for queue position ahead of voting (GMA News). Two hours before the shooting, an explosion in Purok Amirol, Mother Barangay Kalanganan, killed Zainodin Sapal Macabuat (Philstar). On election day, four people including a policeman were wounded inside Central Pilot Elementary School, two fatally (Inquirer, Philstar). Shots were also fired near a mosque in Rosary Heights 10 from a vehicle passing UBJP supporters, and in Basilan a businessman who is the son-in-law of a candidate was shot in Lamitan (Rappler, Manila Times). On September 15, grassroots monitors reported the discovery of two bodies bearing stab wounds floating in the Bagua 2 riverside. By CCAA's fuller accounting, the cycle recorded 143 deaths and 34 injuries (BusinessMirror).

Board of Election Inspectors Withdrew. At least 839 teachers across BARMM withdrew from electoral board duties citing fears of hostilities, while 137 to 139 Cotabato City teachers were excused or absent from final machine testing, forcing police to serve as electoral boards (Philstar, BusinessWorld). Rido feuds during the campaign period had already displaced some 2,000 residents, per CCAA (Inquirer).

Democracy under duress. Comelec placed Cotabato City and Maluso under its direct control amid over 20,000 deployed security personnel. But the Commission on Human Rights reported observers encountering difficulty accessing polling places, armed presence, and ballot interference, with some Lanao del Sur voters staying home out of fear across a province where 21 towns sat in the red security category. The CHR stressed that "every voter must be able to exercise the right to vote free from fear, intimidation, coercion, and retaliation" (CHR, Inquirer).

No Relief After the Polls

The day-after IM4PEACE findings—the stabbed bodies retrieved from the Bagua 2 riverside, armed groups roaming the regional capital, delays in monitors' access to election returns—foreshadowed a restive aftermath. The CCAA cited the resurgence of a rido between two MILF commanders in Nabalawag, Special Geographic Area, just two days after the election, and on September 19 troops fought an encounter with remnants of two  armed groups in Tugunan, SGA, killing seven, with forces bracing for retaliation (BusinessMirror, Philstar). Independent conflict monitors had recorded 229 conflict incidents and 85 deaths in BARMM between the start of candidate filing in May and end-July, including the August 15 strafing of Macacua's convoy (Eurasia Review).

Notes of Light in the Dark

Yet honesty requires recording what worked, for these may matter more to the future of the Bangsamoro than the failures.

The mass base that held. Whatever the intimidation and bloodshed, the strong will and commitment of the MILF-rooted UBJP's mass base was unmistakable. Facing opponents flush with state resources, the party of the former revolutionary movement mobilized its communities and delivered—capturing 15 party-list seats and six sectoral seats, dominating Lanao del Sur districts, and securing representation across the region's provinces (Daily Tribune, Manila Bulletin). MILF chair Ahod Balawag Ebrahim himself, after voting, expressed openness to negotiating with other parties toward a coalition (Al Jazeera). That a movement built through decades of underground organizing could translate its base into parliamentary seats through the ballot rather than the bullet—after four postponements, amid gunfire—is itself a measure of the peace process enduring its most severe stress test.

Consensus democracy among the Non-Moro Indigenous Peoples. While much of the region's politics was marred by fraud and force, the Non-Moro Indigenous Peoples' two seats in the Bangsamoro Parliament were filled not through the fray of competitive voting but through a distinctly indigenous consensus process. Through a tribal assembly convened ahead of the election, NMIP communities selected Leticio Datuwata of the Lambangian Tribe and Jo Genna Jover of the Teduray Tribe as their representatives—the culmination of the traditionally marginalized peoples of the uplands exercising self-determination through deliberation, customary governance, and collective accord rather than muscle or money (Daily Tribune, Manila Bulletin). What makes the achievement more remarkable, indigenous advocates note, is that the process was not spared the turbulence surrounding it: it withstood political pressures, disruptions, and deliberate attempts to discredit it, yet the tribal assemblies held their course and their consensus held. For the Lumad, whose lands and lives have too often been the collateral of other people's wars, the process demonstrated that consensual, community-centered democracy is not merely compatible with Bangsamoro autonomy—it is one of its living traditions, and its resilience under pressure may be the region's most instructive democratic lesson. Critics of the mainstream contest point to it as proof that the region's voters deserved a process of at least equal integrity.

Never Give Up, Not Giving Up

The most dangerous response, advocates warn, is cynical resignation—the lie that "this is just how elections are." Precisely because electoral flaws and dynastic dominance are so prevalent nationally—in a republic where 87 percent of governors and four in five House district representatives are dynasts, and where two-thirds of party-list groups have been infiltrated by political families—the Bangsamoro cannot afford to normalize them regionally; the historic mandate of this autonomy arrangement cannot be surrendered as a playing card for traditional politicians, nor treated as the exclusive domain of revolutionary fronts or elites carving up coalitions. LENTE has demanded tighter safeguards against voter interference, greater transparency, and stronger Comelec independence (Manila Times); the CHR has pressed for transparent investigations, chain-of-custody reviews, and post-election audits (CHR, Inquirer). The demands converge on a common principle: true political authority does not belong to those who wield the loudest guns or the deepest pockets—it belongs solely to the people.

That defense begins with understanding, and with the new Parliament serving a special transition term from October 30, 2026 to June 30, 2031, the window for sustained, non-partisan voter education is already open. The burden rests on the tri-people of the region—Moro, Lumad, and Christian—alongside civil society and the volunteer-monitors whose situation reports, aggregated with those of PPCRV, Namfrel, LENTE, and the international delegations, now constitute the day's true historical record. And the burden extends beyond the region: a nation that left its constitutional prohibition on political dynasties unimplemented for four decades—now awaiting Supreme Court petitions to force the issue—cannot be surprised when dynasties colonize its newest parliament. If the UBJP's organized base could hold and deliver under fire, and if the Non-Moro Indigenous Peoples could carry their voice into Parliament through a consensus process that survived every attempt to break and discredit it, then the raw material for a genuine Bangsamoro democracy plainly exists—and for the ghost of Martial Law to be finally exorcised, that material must be defended everywhere, in Mindanao and in Manila alike.

Until every resident of the Bangsamoro can cast a vote that is free, safe, informed, and unclouded by fear—and until former comrades can contest power by ballot alone—the region's long journey toward genuine self-determination remains unfinished. A vote cast out of fear or secured through fraud—whether bought in Sultan Mastura, coerced in Cotabato, or pre-shaded in Maluso—is an insult to the sacrifices of those who laid down their lives for Bangsamoro autonomy, and to revolutionaries like Edjop, who chose to stand where the suffering was deepest.

The Ghosts at the Gate

History, it is said, repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. In the Bangsamoro, it has returned as something crueler: as a mirror. Fifty-four years after Ferdinand Marcos Sr. signed Proclamation 1081, the ghosts of Martial Law gathered at the polling precincts of the region his regime bombed and militarized—and found them hauntingly familiar.

The first ghost is violence. Under the dictatorship, Mindanao was bombarded, militarized, and scarred by rampant human rights violations—the very conditions that drew Edgar Jopson to lay down his life in Davao. In September 2026, the region's first parliamentary elections recorded shootings outside and inside polling centers, a grenade explosion at a precinct, an elderly civilian wounded in an armed encounter, bodies recovered from a riverside with stab wounds, and—by the fullest independent accounting—143 deaths across the cycle. Security forces guarded the machines while, in the words of the Commission on Human Rights, voters were left to brave fear, intimidation, coercion, and retaliation. The names of the dead have changed; the bullet bidding to command the ballot has not.

The second ghost is fraud wearing the mask of legitimacy. The pre-shaded ballots of Maluso—confirmed by Comelec itself, referred for prosecution, and echoed in the monitors' tallies of vote-buying, multiple voting, and coerced abstention—are the direct heir of the February 1986 Snap Election, when technicians walked out of a fraudulent count and high official figures were exposed as veneer. Then, as now, a record turnout of over 84 percent was brandished as proof of success; then, as now, the arithmetic of participation concealed the arithmetic of disenfranchisement—an electorate, nearly half of whom did not understand the very system it was voting in, intimidated in pockets no aggregate could see.

The third ghost is dynastic capture. The Marcos restoration taught the nation that EDSA toppled a family but spared a system: 87 percent of governors, four in five House district representatives, and two-thirds of party-list groups now belong to political families, in open defiance of a constitutional prohibition left unenforced for four decades. Into the Bangsamoro Parliament—carved from generations of struggle precisely to escape external coercion and internal tyranny—have marched the same surnames that rule the provinces: the Adiongs, Mangudadatus, Hatamans, and their kin, converting a covenant of self-determination into a coalition of clans. The revolution's heirs, once comrades in arms, exchanged fire outside the very schools where the autonomy they bled for was being voted on.

And the fourth ghost—the oldest—is impunity. The dismissal of atrocity as "isolated incidents" within a "generally peaceful" exercise; the postponements that stretched a three-year transition into seven; the 839 teachers who chose their survival over democracy's frontlines; the rido and reprisals that outlasted the counting—all normalized by the seductive lie that "this is just how elections are." Martial Law's most durable weapon was never the decree; it was the resignation it bred.

Yet ghosts, the Bangsamoro has shown, are not immortal. The same election offered its own counter-spell. The UBJP's mass base—organized through decades of underground struggle—held and delivered under fire, proving the ballot can inherit the bullet's discipline. The Non-Moro Indigenous Peoples seated their two representatives through tribal assembly and consensus, a process that survived every pressure, disruption, and attempt to discredit it, proving deliberation can outrank muscle and money. Where the peace process was honored, it worked.

The lesson of September 14, 2026, is therefore not despair but duty. The autonomy for which millions suffered, and for which revolutionaries like Edjop and other tri-people martyrs chose to stand where the suffering was deepest, will not defend itself. It must be owned, nurtured, and fiercely protected by its own people—Moro, Lumad, and Christian—demanding accountability for every death, every pre-shaded ballot, every coerced vote, and every dynastic bargain made in their name.

Again, until every resident of the Bangsamoro (or in the country) can cast a vote that is free, safe, informed, and unclouded by fear, the ghosts remain at the gate. But so do the people who have buried them before—and history records that, in the end, it was never the ghosts who won.

.. with the help of Lumo...