The first day of the election season began with a bang in Maguindanao last Monday, when upwards of 100 heavily-armed men waylaid and massacred a convoy carrying 21 people ferrying supporters of a candidate for governor in that godforsaken province. Those murdered included several women and a dozen or so journalists who went along precisely to prevent such an attack from taking place.

But this is the heart of Warlord Country in strife-torn Mindanao, where it would be a fatal mistake to underestimate the violent tendencies of the local political bosses, or the extreme measures they would take to cling to power. And if it took a massacre to send a message to a political foe who dared challenge those wielding power, then the order would be given and there would be no shortage of goons to carry it out.

The audacity of the Ampatuan killings takes your breath away. To find anything similar in nearly a century of democratic elections in this country, you’d have to go back almost four decades, when a young warlord-in-waiting named Vincent “Bingbong” Crisologo, the son of the local governor and the congressman, supervised the torching of the villages of Ora Este and Ora Centro in Bantay, Ilocos Sur in 1970.

Crisologo was convicted for that heinous crime, but he found God in jail and won a seat in Congress upon his release, serving a constituency in Quezon City to this very day. Proof, as if any more is needed, that politics in this country has screwed everything up, turning white into deepest black and black into the most brilliant white.

Even the sensational bombing of Plaza Miranda shortly after the Ilocos arson can’t hold a candle to the carnage in Maguindanao, for sheer lack of respect for human life. The explosions in Manila were intended to kill off candidates of the Liberal Party during a political rally, after all, instead of mere civilian partisans and journalists like those who perished in Ampatuan.

Last Monday’s massacre becomes even more breathtaking in its cold-blooded execution when one considers that the women and the journalists had been brought along precisely to act as human shields. Muslim law supposedly forbids unwarranted attacks on womenfolk and no political boss in his right mind would dare touch a rival’s supporters with reporters’ cameras and tape recorders rolling.

But the Ampatuan clan that wields absolute political power in Maguindanao showed that it didn’t have any problems with killing off those who support anyone who would challenge it. Why would the Ampatuans fear anyone if they had the local military and police in their pockets and an army of armed civilian militiamen besides?

And how, the Ampatuans probably thought, could anyone outside of Maguindanao punish them for the dastardly deed when they had always been courted by politicians on the national level for bringing in the local vote before? Who would dare call them into account when they are feared even in Manila for their lack of any hesitation to use any means to stay in power, including killing off the opposition?

And here we were thinking that we had advanced far enough as a democracy that we could already employ automated vote machines and use Internet social networking Web sites to get the vote. Then the Maguindanao massacre happens, and we realize that political bossism and warlord-influenced elections never really left.

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The biggest challenge left for the Arroyo administration is making sure that the transfer of power next year takes place without violence thwarting the people’s will anywhere in the country. It cannot stand idly by while the Ampatuans in power everywhere demonstrate that they are above the law, regardless of the political contributions they have made in the past or will make in the future.

Unless those who perpetrated this serious blow to the entire political system are made to pay for their crime and those who are plotting revenge in kind are prevented from doing so, the Arroyo administration cannot say that it seeks a peaceful transfer of power. And if the police and the military want to prove that powerful political warlords are not above the law, they will haul in those responsible for the Ampatuan killings and make them pay for the acts of wanton violence.

Anything less would be a virtual admission by the national government that it is helpless against people who wield both political power and the guns to perpetuate it. And if that’s the case, we might as well divide the country into fiefdoms where warlords with the most firepower reign supreme over anyone in their localities, and are unafraid of anyone outside them who seek to impose laws that should apply to the entire country.

Make no mistake: Because government exists only with the consent of the governed, failure to adequately and quickly address the Maguindanao situation will inevitably result in a breakdown of the central authority. Government has no choice but to prove that what happened in Ampatuan is an isolated incident involving a warlord made mad by political power, if it wants to avoid the breakdown of the entire nation into self-governed mini-states that make their own rules upon the dictates of the families who rule them.

For the politicians seeking national office and who think nothing of making deals with the devils who rule their localities, just so they can win the local vote, let the Maguindanao massacre serve as a lesson, as well. Let them publicly denounce warlordism and privately refuse to abet the violence and oppression in boss-influenced localities, even if doing so costs them valuable votes.

Any votes that the warlords deliver are soaked in blood, like those that regularly come in those shutouts from Maguindanao and other oppressed areas where violent warlords command people to give up their sacred democratic right, if they want to keep on living in the hard-scrabble places where they rule undisputedly. Such votes may make the difference between winning and losing a national election, but they aren’t worth the lives lost to gather them.

But it will be a safe bet that while our national politicians will condemn what took place in Maguindanao, they will not stop seeking the votes of the local political bosses through “alliances,” offering continued protection and favorable treatment from the central government that bossism regularly ignores. That’s how warlords are encouraged in their belief that, instead of being punished for their illegal acts, they will actually be allowed to go their merry way as long as they deliver the votes.

That’s why those people who lost loved ones in the massacre in Maguindanao can’t really be blamed for planning to retaliate in kind against the local bosses and their own families. But allowing that to happen would just speed up the national breakdown, and send us all spiraling into anarchy and lawlessness.

As Vice President Emmanuel Pelaez was supposed to have said to a military officer, after he himself nearly lost his life in a politically-motivated attack, “What is happening to our country, general?” What, indeed?