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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS