Local Politics

Political rifts take different forms at the local level. Buguias municipality is unofficially divided into two rival parts: the north, centered on Abatan and Lo-o, and the south, focused on Buguias

Central and, to a lesser extent, Natubleng. The northern district, home of the largest farms and businesses, is more powerful. Buguias Village, despite its several wealthy families, is now a depressed barangay relative to its northern neighbors.

The Buguias people complain that the northerners dominate municipal politics. They accuse mayors from Lo-o and Abatan of refusing to support road projects in the south, instead shunting the available funds northward. National political rivalries are also implicated here; in 1984 and 1985, Buguias's barangay captain was staunchly oppositionist (i.e., anti-Marcos), whereas all the municipal officials supported the dictator and his KBL party. This, according to some, prompted an even greater pinch on the southward flow of municipal funds. Many Buguias residents also remain indignant over the transfer of the municipal seat from their village to Abatan.

But the rivalry between the north and the south is still generally friendly. A series of informal compromises includes an agreement to the effect that northern mayors should be paired with southern vice-mayors, and vice versa. Less easily realized is the corollary notion that mayors should come alternately from the north and the south.

The mayor, more than any other municipal office holder, must intercede between his constituents and state institutions, and it is crucial to have a mayor who will be sympathetic to one's own village's needs. To serve effectively, he must cultivate personal relations with powerful individuals in the provincial and even national governments. For the people of Buguias, Stafin Olsim has long fulfilled this role, first as a private citizen, and after 1988 as the mayor of Buguias municipality. A continual stream of supplicants has long passed through his Trinidad home. Such assistance is invaluable at both the personal and the community levels; as one woman living in a remote Benguet village told me: "Our problem here is that we have no one like Stafin Olsim who can help us with the government."

Pagans comprise the majority of the municipality's population, and virtually every mayor has been of that persuasion. Since most persons agree that a Christian cannot hope for this position, religion plays little role in municipal elections. Indeed, in 1989, following the election of a strongly traditionalist mayor from Buguias

proper, Paganism was virtually institutionalized when the Buguias Town Fiesta included within its celebrations a pedit of "13." At the lower barangay level, however, religious politics may be significant. Some barangays are divided evenly between the two faiths, and campaign rhetoric often has a religious flavor. But other issues may be overriding. Candidates' personalities and positions on specific issues, as well as the rivalries between different hamlets within a single barangay, strongly influence local elections.

Class plays a major yet ambiguous role in local politics. A mayoral candidate must be wealthy. Campaigns themselves are expensive, and, once elected, a mayor must play host at a continual series of negotiations and rituals. Only a wealthy man would command the prestige necessary to consider standing for office in the first place. Yet prosperity alone will hardly ensure political success. An unpopular baknang, one who stints on feasts or who gives no quarter to debtors, cannot expect popular support.

In Buguias, class divisions also reflect an inchoate philosophical divide. Two vague camps have recently emerged. The first, identified with the Pagan traditionalists, supports the prerogatives of wealth—if validated through feast performance; the second, composed of both Pagans and Christians, argues for the rights of poorer persons. But both camps wield similar rhetoric, centering on the necessity of redistribution and accepting class divisions so long as the elite act in the spirit of noblesse oblige. The "traditionalists," however, restrict redistribution to ritual occasions while their rivals call for a more generalized practice.

The intellectual leader of the latter camp is an expert on Pagan ritual and is the village's foremost negotiator. He frequently advises politicians (both Pagan and Christian) and pedit aspirants on protocol, and he conciliates individuals embroiled in intrafamilial religious disputes. When counseling the rich, he reminds them of their obligations to the community (on both sacred and secular occasions) and of their responsibilities to forgive, on occasion, their debtors. Adhering to the tradition of Buguias "spiritual empiricism," he holds as exemplars a certain baknang couple who he says has been scrupulously honest in all business dealings, has offered minimal-interest loans to needy persons, and has celebrated every ritual occasion unstintingly—and who has prospered tremendously in the process.