FOUR days after it happened, and three days after the first pictures from the gruesome scene were taken, the massacre in Ampatuan, Maguindanao, continues to beggar description. As of press time, the number of bodies recovered from the site has reached 52, many bearing signs of sudden death.

The pictures taken by Reuters come closest—although closeness is relative—to capturing both the scale of the massacre and its sheer brutality. The vehicles the Mangudadatu party and their protective shield of lawyers and journalists had used on their journey to the provincial election office in Shariff Aguak town are seen clustered together in a partly grassy area, as though someone had decided it was the perfect place to park for a picnic. But the doors are ajar, and on the ground, just outside the vans and the SUVs, in the clear sunlight, lie the bloodied bodies of several victims. They look like they never stood a chance.

As it has become traumatically clear in the last few days, they never did.

From the start, the decision of the Mangudadatus to contest the governorship of Maguindanao in next year’s elections never sat well with their relatives, the powerful Ampatuans who have ruled the province since 2001. According to the Mangudadatus themselves, many armed Ampatuan supporters were seen moving into the area a week before the massacre—that is, before the start of the period for filing certificates of candidacy. Requests from Buluan Vice Mayor Esmael Mangudadatu for both the police and the Army to escort the party that would file his certificate of candidacy for governor were declined. Journalists from Maguindanao found the expedition too risky, and as a result the vice mayor had to depend on journalists from the cities of General Santos and Koronadal in South Cotabato and Tacurong in Sultan Kudarat. And, as Inquirer correspondent Aquiles Zonio has written, in a memorable account of how he and two other journalists narrowly escaped their colleagues’ grim fate because of a detour, motorcycle-riding men were shadowing the five-vehicle convoy and asking questions.

The Mangudadatu women, including Esmael’s wife and two of his sisters, lawyers Connie Brizuela and Cynthia Oquendo-Ayon, five drivers and, by Zonio’s count, a total of 34 journalists never stood a chance. They had motored right into a murderous trap.

The pictures offer confirmation; that is why it was important to publish them, in their gory detail. They shock us into realization: The men who did the killing, and the men who ordered it, could only have been either beasts or gods. The utter mercilessness of the mass murder, the gross shamelessness of it, is the mark of an unreasoning animal or a conscienceless being—an untouchable, a warlord or his son or his supporter perhaps, who can break human laws because he is a law unto himself.

The unbelievable scale of the atrocity is part of the horror we all feel: the worst outbreak of electoral violence in the country in memory; the worst loss of life in the history of journalism, ever. No wonder many otherwise reasonable people are starting to wonder whether the country under President Macapagal-Arroyo has irrevocably slid down to failed-state status.

But the defenselessness of the victims forms part of the terrible picture too: Unarmed women were sent instead of elected officials with their own retinue of security guards to file one single certificate of candidacy precisely to avoid stirring trouble or adding to the political tension. Only a maddened beast or an untouchable could have killed unarmed women, lawyers and journalists in broad daylight, unmindful of the consequences. Only a bloodthirsty animal or a political god could have seen no difference between killing one person and killing 52.

Not least, the vacuum of reason in the Ampatuan massacre (we should name it after the location of the mass killings) also explains the horror we all feel. Lawyers and journalists can serve as protection only if the hostile party accepts an appeal to reason and moderation; unarmed women can serve as protection only if the hostile party respects the teachings of culture or the great religious traditions. That the victims of the Ampatuan massacre were trying to do the reasonable thing, and still ended up dead, is chilling.