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MOUNT DIWATA, Davao: Fortune favors the brave in this gold rush
region of the southern Philippines, but the poison that goes with
the new wealth spares no one.
Drawing thousands of dreamers and desperadoes
into its honeycomb of tunnels for a generation, the logged-out
mountain 120 kilometers north of Davao City has yielded some 2.7
million ounces of the precious metal, according to official
estimates.
Franco Tito, a former hired gun who is the
senior elected official in this village named after a woodland
fairy, awards honor students with gold medals and packs a
.45-calibre gun, a stark reminder of the region’s violent past.
He worries about the stream that bisects the
community of some 40,000 people—it is choked with plastic, garbage
and the milky-colored detritus of the area’s preferred antiquated
mining process.
The tailings—residue from the process of
separating the gold from the ore—run into the Naboc stream and
eventually poison the Agusan, one of the country’s largest river
basins.
“There were four major problems when I arrived
here—law and order, legality, taxation and siltation. I have
solved the first three, and now I want to solve the fourth,” he
told Agence France-Presse.
Liquid mercury, a highly regulated substance, is
openly sold here for P1,200 (about $30) a kilogram in stores that
also stock food.
Shabby huts made of plywood and sheets of
corrugated tin cling precariously to cliff sides. Dirt bikes ply the
muddy roads. The main causes of death are landslides and tunnel
cave-ins.
The miners are still paid in ore, not cash.
After school, children pound the ore into dust.
Many residents suffer the effects of mercury
poisoning, as the heavy metal is used to separate the gold from the
ore and contaminates food and water.
“You need a kilo of mercury to process 270
kilos of ore,” said Guillermo Carmona, who was kicked out of the
Philippine Army after he was found to be moonlighting here.
He sports a tattoo of his old infantry unit
along with a thick gold chain and pendant, visible reward from his
backyard mill, a series of huge metal centrifugal drums that are
spun by motor to separate the gold from the crushed rock.
“We have a siltation problem at the Naboc
River,” said Arturo Uy, governor of Compostela Valley Province.
“A few years ago there was a plan to put up a tailings dam, but I
do not know what happened to the funding.”
A UN-funded study in 1999 found methyl mercury
contamination of nearly three times over the safe ceiling for rice,
mussels and fish harvested from the Naboc or farms irrigated by its
water.
The Institute for Forensic Medicine at
Germany’s Ludwig-Maximilians University also found high levels of
mercury contamination in the area.
Fortune hunters flooded in after September 1983,
when a Mandaya tribal elder first panned the yellow metal on the
Naboc River. They promptly bastardized the hamlet’s name to “diwalwal,”
slang that refers to exhaustion after hard work boring holes through
rock on the mountainside.
Tito, who still moves around with armed
bodyguards, does not dispute rumors that he has killed at least 40
men, saying: “We were all illegals, so none of the killings were
reported to the authorities.”
There were few winners in the land grab that
followed the discovery of gold here, and most of them are now firmly
entrenched in local politics.
“In the old days this was the wild-wild
west,” Tito said, recounting his transformation from army misfit,
neighborhood tough, bodyguard and mineshaft guard, to a key
stakeholder, thwarting three assassination attempts along the way.
“All sorts of undesirables were drawn
here—discharged soldiers and police, hoods, holdup men,
kidnappers, rapists, ex-convicts, fugitives, people who welshed on
their debts,” he said.
The national government was largely absent in
the early days, and it was cut out of the spoils since by law
small-scale miners need only pay income tax.
Instead miners forked out a “revolutionary
tax,” essentially extortion money extracted by the self-styled New
People’s Army to fund its deadly decades-old Maoist insurgency.
Last month, the guerrillas attacked a mill near
here, killing two bodyguards of the Monkayo town Mayor Manuel
Brillantes.
In 2002 President Gloria Arroyo declared Mount
Diwata and surrounding areas a mineral reservation, laying out plans
to bid out the property to mining companies, which would employ
modern methods and safeguard the environment.
But after paying for their right to be here with
blood, the locals are indignant.
“We don’t want Diwalwal to remain like
this,” Governor Uy said. “But we will oppose its turnover to a
foreign-owned company.”
Tito said, “Convert this into a highly
mechanized, large-scale operation and that would be throwing
thousands of people out of work.”
-- AFP
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