Jose, a 35-year-old Filipino, is looking forward to brisk business ahead of presidential elections next May.
But he is not in the market to provide campaign placards or even the food candidates are fond of handing out to the poor to attract votes.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Politicians are among a steady stream of clients for the revolvers and machine pistols Jose produces in the backyard of his home in Danao City on the central Philippine island of Cebu.
"Usually we sell a lot when an election is coming and on our part we are very happy," Jose told Reuters in his stuffy one-man workshop devoted to churning out the crude, illegal but highly effective weapons.
With as many as one in 80 Filipinos owning a firearm, and gun licences regarded as optional, shootings over trivial incidents such as traffic altercations are commonplace.
After several shootings sparked by My Way, the Frank Sinatra favorite has become a song to avoid at karaoke bars.
But it is during the Philippines' bitterly fought elections that gun violence traditionally surges as rival clans with long histories of enmity battle for dominance and to settle scores.
Jose is one of an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 people in Danao who work in the gun trade -- as many as one in 10 of the population -- giving it the dubious distinction of being the gun capital of one of the world's most trigger-happy countries.
Many of the 6,500 people murdered every year meet their end from the barrel of a gun turned out by makeshift factories such as that of Jose.
"We are just doing this for our livelihood, for the money," he said. "If we could feed our families with other jobs we would do it."
Since World War II, when traders in the area supplied Filipino guerrillas with weapons to fight the occupying Japanese, Danao has armed everyone from political barons and security guards to Muslim rebels.
Most of the gunmakers, who work secretly in backyards, or in the surrounding sugarcane fields and rolling hills, are well known to the police, but they typically turn a blind eye in a city where there are few jobs and high unemployment.
"I guess some of them just pity these guys because they have no other work and they feel they may go into some other really illegal things, like maybe joining the subversives," said Ramon Durano III, mayor of Danao City, referring to Communist rebels active there and in troubled Mindanao province to the south.
Critics say the police and the military allow the trade to flourish because they profit from it themselves.
There are certainly profits to be made. Jose sells machine pistols for up to US$215, with small calibre .38 revolvers going for a bargain US$27 -- still equivalent to a few weeks' wages for many.
By contrast, the city's 50 legal gun makers work in a cooperative and have to split the proceeds from sales of just 10 to 15 firearms a week.
Police estimate there are 800,000 registered guns in the country and at least another 400,000 illegal ones.
Many of the Danao weapons end up in Mindanao, the main base of several Muslim rebel groups fighting the government.
Japanese "yakuza" gangsters and Taiwanese criminals are said to have been customers, smuggling the weapons home on fishing boats.
About 100 people died in election-related violence in limited national polls in 2001, 31 of them either incumbent officials or candidates.
Ramon Durano, father of the mayor of Danao, who established his family's iron control over the city, was an archetypal provincial warlord complete with a large private army.
"Politics in Cebu is a battle of survival in a very physical sense ... you simply cannot allow yourself to be shot by gangsters," he wrote in his autobiography.
The heavy-handed tactics used to secure votes in the Philippines have become less blatant in recent years but the highly charged atmosphere ahead of next May's election has again stirred the specter of bloodshed.
Opposition politicians have warned of a government-rigged poll, while members of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's camp have described the candidacy of actor Fernando Poe as a desperate bid by the opposition to grab power.
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
China’s military news agency yesterday warned that Japanese militarism is infiltrating society through series such as Pokemon and Detective Conan, after recent controversies involving events at sensitive sites. In recent days, anime conventions throughout China have reportedly banned participants from dressing as characters from Pokemon or Detective Conan and prohibited sales of related products. China Military Online yesterday posted an article titled “Their schemes — beware the infiltration of Japanese militarism in culture and sports.” The article referenced recent controversies around the popular anime series Pokemon, Detective Conan and My Hero Academia, saying that “the evil influence of Japanese militarism lives on in
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
RSS