Conclusion
They saw themselves as part of an exclusive class. Among their perks was the power to choose who among them was appointed town mayor. And their anointed one showed his gratitude by rewarding these people with favors for getting him the job.
No, this is not a scene describing corruption in towns in the country after a recent local election.
Actually, this scene dated back to the time when the country was under the Spanish colonial administration from early 17th century until the late 19th century.
The ‘principalia’
For more than 200 years, this privileged class, known as the principalia, were the only people the Spanish colonial administration allowed to hold any sort of local administrative position in the towns and villages.
The principalia were descendants of the original village leaders who agreed to cooperate with the newly arrived Spanish conquistadors in the mid-16th century.
By the 17th century, the descendants of these tribal leaders were firmly entrenched in the lowest rungs of the Spanish colonial administration. Prominent among these descendants were the village leaders or cabeza de barangays.
This group, usually composed of a dozen men, were known as the principales. They choose among themselves who will be the town mayor, or gobernadorcillo.
The gobernadorcillo was the only one allowed to deal directly with the Spanish colonial administrators and officials, while the cabezas de barangay enjoyed generally cordial relations with the Spanish clergy.
Thus, in a town of 1,000 natives, political power concentrated in the hands of just 12 men, chief among them was the gobernadorcillo. The principales kept their fellow natives in line. While doing so, they enjoyed the patronage of their Spanish bosses.
The general native population had no say in how things were to be run.
Reform and revolution
By the 19th century, such a state of affairs was no longer acceptable. The rise of liberalism in Europe finally made its way to the Philippines.
The Propaganda Movement was born. This movement sought reforms. Unfortunately, their movement failed. And with the failure of this movement, a revolt of the masses arose.
The principales became involved in the revolt. Unfortunately, some among them only sought to protect and enhance their status.
Ballot padding
When the time came to form a new government, members of the principales class took control of the proceedings of the Tejeros Convention. They sought to protect the traditional colonial practice of consolidating political power within their class. They refused to accept a nonmember of the principalia class as a peer. In their eyes, only a peer was qualified to hold political power.
In what was possibly the first case of ballot padding, the integrity of the proceedings of the Tejeros Convention was compromised. There were more ballots than delegates. And when the ballots were counted, a principales was named president. He was Emilio Aguinaldo, a former gobernadorcillo. His chief rival, Andres Bonifacio, was elected secretary of the Interior.
One of Bonifacio’s avowed goal for the revolution was to do away with as much of the Spanish colonial practices as possible. The principales saw the Revolution as a chance to increase their prestige and authority by replacing the Spaniards with people from their class.
Bonifacio wanted to have the name “Filipinas” replaced, because it is in honor of a Spanish monarch. The principales, who felt threatened by Bonifacio’s changes, disagreed.
A coup and sham trial
Things came to a head.
Since Bonifacio was not a principales, a delegate of the convention questioned Bonifacio’s qualification to hold any post in the new government. Insulted, Bonifacio invoked his authority as head of the revolution to declare the
proceedings void.
Aguinaldo’s supporters began circulating rumors that Bonifacio was actually a Spanish collaborator and a thief. Acting upon these rumors, Aguinaldo had Bonifacio arrested and tried as a traitor of the revolution. Bonifacio was found guilty and executed.
Several months after Bonifacio’s execution, Aguinaldo agreed to a truce with Spanish colonial authorities. In exchange for ending the revolt, the Spanish colonial government agreed to pay Aguinaldo and members of his Cabinet, as well as instituting reforms.
Aguinaldo, along with his immediate circle, went into exile, while the remaining principales in the towns restored their status before the revolution. The archipelago remained a Spanish colony.
The Spaniards did attempt to institute administrative reforms. However, the only people among the natives who had the educational and administrative background to implement these reforms were still the principales. Thus, the principales maintained their hold on power despite Spanish reforms.
Enter the Americans
The outbreak of the war between the United States and the Spanish Crown brought in a new dimension.
Aguinaldo sided with the Americans against Spain.
He declared the Philippines an independent state on June 12, 1898. In doing so, he tried to insinuate himself with the US officials by adding in his declaration of independence that the country was under the protection of the US government.
The people in Washington, D.C., however, had other plans. They negotiated directly with representatives of the Spanish Crown and the Spaniards ceded the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico to the Americans.
Instead of finding himself as the new country’s head honcho who can deal with the newly arrived Americans, just as what he used to do with the Spaniards, Aguinaldo found himself in the middle of another war.
While some in his Cabinet actively sought to continue fighting a war with the US, many of Aguinaldo’s allies thought differently. They sought to end the fighting based on amicable terms, the same formula that they used with Spain.
Bitter infighting occurred within the Aguinaldo administration. In the end, Aguinaldo’s loyalists had those people who disagreed with them removed quietly. Those who refused to do so were murdered.
As a reward for keeping him in power, Aguinaldo protected his loyalists. Unfortunately for Aguinaldo, these “loyalists” continued to undermine the war against the Americans.
In the end, Aguinaldo, whom the Americans captured, executed an oath of allegiance to the US on April 19, 1901. The other Filipino leaders who refused to swear allegiance to the US were exiled to Guam.
Official hostilities ended in 1902, when US President Theodore Roosevelt offered a general amnesty to Filipinos. Those who refused to lay down their arms were branded as bandits.
The ‘principalia’ under the US
In order to assert administrative control over the archipelago, Americans tapped people who had previous administrative experience into positions of local authority.
John Ray Ramos, a heritage-conservation advocate and historian, said under the first rules on suffrage at the beginning of American rule, only men who were at least 23 years old, owned real property worth at least $250, paid an annual tax of at least $15 annually, had held a municipal position under Spain and could read or write in either Spanish or English were eligible to vote.
That meant that only people qualified to vote and run for municipal elections were the members of the principalia class.
According to Jennifer Conroy Franco in her book Elections and Democratization in the Philippines, these early restrictions resulted in an extremely small electorate under during the first municipal elections under the US rule in 1902.
“By one account, in 390 municipalites with a total population of 2,695,801, there were a total of 49,523 persons who had qualified as electors, or 18.37 electors, to 1,000 inhabitants,” Franco wrote.
This was a situation tailor-made for the perpetuation of the principalia class.
Coupled with the then existing rules on suffrage, the principales easily maintained their hold on power. They were the town’s large landowners, the only people who can afford to pay such an annual tax, the only people who held administrative posts under Spain, aside from being able to speak English and Spanish fluently.
Put simply, an average of only 18 people in a town of 1,000 could vote for mayor. This was little changed from the previous practice of 12 people deciding who among them can become gobernadorcillo during the Spanish colonial period.
When the US allowed Filipinos to assume provincial posts, those elected to municipal posts were the ones to choose who among them would be provincial governor. This expanded the power of the principalia from the towns to the provincial level. The Americans inadvertently allowed the principalia’s patronage politics to expand.
And when the Americans opened the National Assembly for Filipino voters in 1907, the rules on suffrage haven’t changed.
“Only 104,996 Filipinos, or 1.15 percent, of the total population was qualified to vote in the 1907 elections,” Franco wrote in her book. A check with the records of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines confirmed Franco’s account.
Because of the situation, the campaigning for a municipal office was a simple matter. In 1902, to win as mayor in a town with a population of 1,000, a candidate only has to get 10 out of 18 votes.
By 1907, a person who wants to win the post of governor only has to win the nod of a majority of town mayors in a province. For example, if that province has 25 towns, the candidate only has to get the nod of 13 mayors to be governor.
It was network that encouraged the development of political alliances, even between rival factions.
The principalia was a class that survived the downfall of the Spanish colonial administration, thrived during the revolution and adapted well to the American occupation of the Philippines.
US officials in the Philippines later sought to expand the number of voters in the country.
The rules on suffrage were changed by the time of the Jones Act, otherwise known as the Philippine Autonomy Act of 1916.
Ramos explained that the change consisted merely of allowing Filipinos who can read and write any of the dialects fluently aside from English and Spanish to vote. The same other restrictions on landownership and taxes remained.
“This changed brought the number of voters in the colony to a mere 9 percent of the entire population,” Franco wrote in her book.
Records showed that by 1916, the Philippines had a population of 9,542,000. The statistic Franco cited meant that the country had a little over 850,000 people who were qualified to vote. Despite the expansion, it kept the right to vote largely within the landed class.
That meant that most of the political campaigning was done by ward leaders. These ward leaders had the responsibility of convincing the voters who lived in the ward leaders’ area to vote for a particular candidate. It was a simple matter for the ward leaders to tell the relatively few dozens of voters to gather in the town plaza and tell them who to vote for. At the plaza, favors were asked and promises made.
The practice of candidates barnstorming in the towns was unknown. “With the promulgation of the 1935 Commonwealth Constitution, the property restrictions were dropped, but literacy and gender requirements were retained,” Franco added.
Ramos said the country’s voting population expanded in 1936, when Filipino women won a plebiscite granting them the right to vote.
Due to the literacy requirement, only a mere 11 percent of the population at that time were qualified to vote, even after women were granted the right to vote.
According to Franco, the restrictiveness in voting qualifications came from the principalia class, who had gained their posts in previous elections. This gave rise to what was described in Franco’s book as an “electoral style of dexterous manipulation.”
Franco cited the memoirs of former US Vice Governor in the Philippines Joseph Ralston Hayden.
“From 1903, a very large proportion of citizens, who possessed the electoral qualifications, actually registered,” Hayden wrote. “Not only is the franchise highly esteemed, but in the early days, a man’s vote possessed a distinct material value in many districts. Furthermore, in many provinces, the rival political factions saw to it that every possible voter qualified and, in many instances, forced onto the register additional persons who were not legally entitled to vote. An especially common method was to secure the registration of a voter under the property qualification by grossly overestimating the value of his possessions.”
“On the other hand, some persons who were legally entitled to be registered were kept off the books by partisan officials,” Hayden added.
This was a principalia practice of preventing people from outside their class from voting or running for office. Franco claimed that US colonial officials in the Philippines did not take a serious effort to enforce the formal rules governing political competition.
“Such practices quickly became a standard feature of elections in the Philippines,” Franco wrote.
“The carefully orchestrated introduction of national political institutions was clearly intended to ensure that national political power would belong exclusively to members of the elite, who as the main beneficiaries of US colonial policies, were also expected to be the most reliable guarantors of US interest in the Philippines,” Franco wrote. “In creating the national political arena, US colonial officials had consciously built upon existing rival networks of competing factions of the elite that had dominated municipal politics since the 19th century.”
And it was the principalia class that had been dominating municipal politics since the Spanish colonial era, Ramos said.
“In effect, this created a controlled environment for members of the native land-based elite to build and expand the political resources and develop the political skills needed to compete electorally and gain access to the national political arena in the future,” Franco wrote. “The most politically ambitious members of the Filipino elite used the opportunity to establish and extend rival elite alliances and patronage networks, to gain experience in managing government affairs, and to win the confidence of top US colonial officials.”
Even after the introduction of the popular vote after World War II, the practices of the principalia class, especially that of political patronage, still endures to this day.
One rarely hears the word principales nowadays because they are now more popularly identified as “political dynasty.”