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By Inday Espina-Varona
Conclusion
B’laan and Maguindanao claimants to the
923-hectare Nicasio Alcantara ranch in Barangay Apopong, General
Santos City, based their petitions on a long, bloody history of
dispossession.
The claim, as the Supreme Court noted, has not
been refuted by Alcantara. It is supported by historical records,
including photographs of carnage and mass destruction of
indigenous people’s properties.
Nicasio continues to fight a legal battle he has
so far lost, this time asking the Court of Appeals to overrule
former Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Heherson
Alvarez’s cancellation of his Forest Land Grazing Lease Agreement.
Meanwhile, eyes are trained on the outcome of an administrative
review by the environment department that presents another long
drawn-out installment to an already chaotic situation.
Alvarez has contested Environment Secretary
Elisea Gozun’s order to suspend his memorandum, which she premised
on findings of irregularities and procedural defects. He insists the
15-day waiting period cited by Gozun and Alcantara applies only to
decisions, not to writs of execution. The writs, he says, can be
carried out within 24 hours.
The influx of armed squatters laying claim to a
land awarded to lumad folk has heightened tension in the city, where
the Alcantaras control 12 percent of the land.
Alvarez, now presidential adviser to overseas
Filipino communities, notes that the Alcantara family has more than
7,269 hectares of grazing and timber land in General Santos. The
family also owns 2,000 hectares of titled land in Alabel, Sarangani,
according to Alvarez, who says this violates a constitutional
provision limiting landownership to 500 hectares.
“The concentration of thousands of hectares of
land in the hands of a few is fueling tension and violence in
Mindanao,” Alvarez points out.
Although that may not have much bearing on the
legal merits of the case, Alvarez’s observation is not off the
mark. Historians and political scientists have long pointed out that
the concentration of much land remains a paramount cause of conflict
in Mindanao, which has to contend with both a Muslim separatist
rebellion and a communist insurgency.
Roots of unrest
Professor Thomas McKenna, author of Muslim
Rulers and Rebels: Everyday Politics and Armed Separatism in the
Southern Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998), notes that until the 1950s, Muslims formed the majority
population of almost every region in Southern Philippines.
Large-scale migration of Christian settlers from
Luzon and the Visayas started in 1946, shortly after the Philippines
became independent. This influx was largely to defuse agrarian
tensions in the Christian-dominated areas of the country.
The American occupiers, however, also tried to
fiddle with demographics trying to defeat rebellious Muslims who had
defied Spanish colonizers for centuries. To some extent, the
Americans succeeded in dividing the Moro people and blunting the
threat of rebellion.
Although the mass of settlers in Mindanao were
poor folk, many of them former members of the communist Hukbalahap
movement, they were supervised by scions of elite clans. These would
later form the core of Mindanao’s small but powerful circle of
landowners, who continue to wield power on the island until today.
McKenna notes that Christian migration resulted
in massive dislocation and glaring disparities. The government
helped Christian settlers, but it systematically withdrew aid for
Muslims and other indigenous peoples.
More than neglect, however, what fueled unrest
in Mindanao was fraud and force that saw thousands of families
driven from lands they had occupied for centuries.
In the Alcantara case involving the 923-hectare
Barangay Apopong lease, for example, the intervenor Nasser Pendatun,
a datu who is also a police major, traces his family’s stay on the
land to the days when Islam first reached Mindanao.
Pendatun and the winning claimant, B’laan
Rolando Paglangan, both narrate heart-rending tales of flight by
their peoples.
Alcantara’s overseer, Julian Montemayor, takes
exception to lumad claims and the decision of the Commission on the
Settlement of Land Problems that virtually paints the clan as
warlords and landgrabbers.
He told The Manila Times: “Those pasturelands
had different owners when the Alcantaras’ father [Conrado] bought
the lands. They would sell it to anyone. There was so much land and
very few people. Would you blame Alcantara for buying rights to
these properties?”
“What law prohibits that? There was no problem
with the environment department, which said it was OK. Had it said
no, then the Alcantaras would not have gone ahead.”
The family, Montemayor notes, contributed to the
growth of the cattle industry and to employment.
In the beginning, the Alcantaras employed only
50 people. Today the family estate has 200 regular employees and 250
contractual staffers.
When Montemayor joined the company, it had 6,000
head of cattle. At its height, the operation had 10,000 head but had
to grapple with the El Niño weather disturbance. Two El Niño
periods, one in 1982 and another in 1992, left 600 cows dead.
Montemayor also questioned Alvarez’s
recommendation that the land be made available for lumad
agricultured activities. The Alcantaras’ pasturelands, he points
out, are among the driest in the country.
Alvarez insists the lumad who once lived on the
land would be able to make a go of viable projects, but is vague on
the specifics of land use.
General Santos City officials told The Times
that the Alcantaras had sought to control the development of a
planned township, now in limbo owing to the Supreme Court’s order.
While the Alcantaras had questioned the city’s
efforts to claim the estate covered by FLGLA 542, Montemayor
admitted that Alvarez’s cancellation order dampened attempts at
rapprochement.
The Alcantaras went back to incumbent Mayor
Pedro Acharon Jr. and asked him to take a more active role in
resolving the dispute. Should events favor the Alcantaras,
Montemayor said, they would return to the township plan and waive
their rights to the estate.
That jibes with Alvarez’s claim that Gozun’s
move to talk with the city government – not party to the legal
dispute resolved by the SupremeCourt–intends to muddle the issue.
The Alcantaras, Alvarez adds, already have a subdivision plan.
Councilor Zoilo Abing, however, says the city
government has stressed it would take care of the new township’s
housing component, ostensibly to provide homes for 13,000 urban
poor. But the Alcantaras, he admitted, were invited to develop the
township’s commercial district.
And where would that leave the poor lumad?
Ties to power
Despite reforms aimed at ensuring justice for
displaced indigenous communities, conflict continues to hound lumad
and Muslim homelands. And the Alcantara clan has been right in the
middle of that conflict.
The case under review by the environment
department is disturbing, because Gozun and President Arroyo have
laid themselves wide open to charges of coddling a political ally.
Nicasio’s brother, Tomas Alcantara, was a
former trade secretary. Nicasio, who is also president of Petron
Corp., which is partly government-owned, is part of the
President’s group of informal economic advisers. Tomas is the
brother-in-law of Paul Dominguez, former Mindanao presidential
adviser. Paul’s brother, Carlos, was Gozun’s boss at the
Department of Agriculture. Gozun’s husband used to work for Alsons,
the Alcantara holding firm, and retired with a multimillion package,
higher, Alvarez aides claim, than what Alson’s former president
received.
The clan also had clout during the Aquino and
Ramos administrations. Ramos even praised the Alcantara operations
shortly before his environment chief, Victor Ramos, extended the
land lease to 2014.
Like many other elite families, the Alcantara
clan, practices the carrot-and- stick strategy to sustain control of
their vast landholdings. The Alcantaras are generous
benefactors of the Philippine Business for Social Progress, which
runs livelihood and poverty alleviation programs in Southern
Philippines.
As former chief executive officer of the Fort
Bonifacio Development Corp., Ricardo Pascua, proudly told the
US-based Asian Society, Mindanao is a fairly recent focus for the
Philippine Business for Social Progress.
In his talk before the group, chaired by former
ambassador to the Philippines Nicholas Platt, Pascua said the focus
“came about largely due to the personal interests of a couple of
senior ex-government and business people.”
He mentioned two persons “intimately
interested in contributing something to the resolution of the
conflict in Mindanao.” The first one was Paul Dominguez, whom he
described as “the presidential adviser for Mindanao in the
Ramos’s administration, who has married into a business family.”
The Asia Source report of that meeting found the
Alcantaras interesting enough to stress their “extensive cement,
power and timber interests in Mindanao. The other person Pascua
cited was Luis Lorenzo III of La Panday Holdings Inc., who now owns
the Del Monte plantation and cannery operation in Mindanao. Lorenzo
is now secretary of agriculture.
Different paradigms
Pascua, who was also then a trustee of PBSP,
told the Asian Society that the two men were concerned that
“conflicts are happening in their business backyard,” and had
pushed for a greater focus in Mindanao.
Ironically, Pascua’s response to questions at
the forum dealt with Mindanao’s land problem, in a way that sheds
light on the current-day Apopong lumad-Alcantara land dispute. This
is what Pascua said:
“It seems like there’s a big difference in
the paradigm among the lumad and the Muslim tribes and the
Christians on the nature of landownership. Our laws which are
patterned after yours, perhaps based on the Roman concept that if
you own land and title to the land, you own it from town all the way
up to the sky. Well, like the American Indians perhaps the concept
of landownership among the tribes is different. You are steward of
the land if you are head man of the tribe, but your
responsibility is to make sure that every one of your tribe gets to
benefit from the produce of the land, and you do not have the right
to alienate the land yourself, to be given to the next generation to
whom you owe a debt of honor, to transfer the land at least at the
same state or better state than you found it. Well, these are two
different paradigms, but the government in Manila has a Roman
paradigm, so somebody comes in and says, this land is mine, and they
get a title. The tribe says ‘What are you talking about, this is
yours? This has been with me for thousands of years–you try to
come and take it.’”
Pascua put great hope on the Indigenous
People’s Reform Act, but acknowledged that everybody was taking
time to understand the different paradigms.
“We still have some ways to go,” he
acknowledged. The turmoil in General Santos City affirms his
statements.
Davao turmoil
Under the new laws that cover landownership, the
environment department plays a key role in ensuring both the
dispensation of justice to indigenous peoples and the preservation
of natural resources.
Often, as in the use of legal systems in the
past to facilitate the taking of Moro and lumad homelands,
Mindanao’s elite have exploited the new laws to maintain their
hold on politics and the economy.
Besides their role in driving off indigenous
people from their lands in General Santos City (see “Slaves do not
own land”), the Alcantaras have also been involved in massive
militarization in Talaingod, Davao del Norte.
There, the plywood firm C. Alcantara & Sons
took over thousands of hectares of ancestral lands claimed by lumad,
converting these into tree plantations under an Integrated Forest
Management Agreement (IFMA). Alsons’ involvement began in 1969,
when Gaudencio Manalac, debt-strapped relinquished his logging
operations.
The timber license agreement lapsed in 1989 and
Alsons applied for an IFMA and was initially granted a
19,000-hectare concession.
For this, Alsons got a P350-million loan from
the Asian Development Bank. It soon expanded its lease to 29,000
hectares.
The company, which has a standing
application for 45,000 hectares, virtually the size of the entire
town, was allotted 5,000 hectares as a relocation site. But the Ata-Manobo
in the area, known as an exceptionally fierce tribe, resisted its
encroachment on their lands.
That land struggle led to militarization of the
area and the evacuation of hundreds of lumad families in 1994. Then
the lumad decided to fight back, declaring a pangayaw, or war of
vengeance, many of them joining the New People’s Army.
Old schemes, new ways?
The IFMA concept purportedly aims to protect the
Philippines’ fast dwindling primary forest cover, which had shrunk
to 10,000 sq km by 1988 from 100,000 sq km in the 1950s.
The “industrial tree development” plan in
the 1990s set aside 500,000 hectares of “open and forest lands”
to private foreign and local companies–in Cagayan Valley, the
Cordilleras, Northern Mindanao and Caraga–allegedly to stop the
country’s dependence on imported timber.
The problem is, locals, especially impoverished
lumad and Moro upland communities, were blamed for the destruction
of forests, though experts concede the environmental degradation
they did pales beside the damage wreaked by big illegal loggers and
unscrupulous holders of timber licenses.
The military almost always arrived first in
affected communities, to protect investors. Although pacification
initially works, displaced people usually return to reclaim their
land, prompting a crackdown by authorities.
In Talaingod, Davao del Norte, the resulting
unrest led to the deaths of two Bayan Muna officials, including a
tribal leader.
TheSalugpunhan, the council of lumad elders, led
by the fierce Datu Gibang, issued a warning: “We will use
indigenous means, weapons and methods to defend ourselves. They
should not blame us if they are caught in our traps or injured by
our hidden weapons.”
Conflicts over IFMAs also broke out in Bukidnon,
and last year the Pasaka Regional Lumad Confedation warned of the
establishment of Oplan Alsa Lumad, the indigenous version of the
government-supervised Civilian Armed Forces Geographic Unit.
Lumad army
Alamara is a lumad term that roughly translates
as “extensive and massive tribal war.” It is a rehash of the
Alsa Masa in the late 1980s and it organizes in villages to
“provide the lumad with a natural shield against New People’s
Army intrusion/atrocities and prevent them from being recruited by
the NPA.”
Unfortunately, lumad themselves are the main
victims of the new policy.
The Bulatlat writer Carlos Conde describes the
Alamara patrols as armed with sharp bolos (machete), and M-14, M-16
and other high-caliber rifles from the Army.
“The members use a certain lana [oil potion]
sold at P150 in Kapalong, Davao del Norte, in the belief that it
will give them invincible powers from enemy bullets,” Conde
writes. In Bukidnon, members possess amulets called habak having the
same faith in invincibility.
“They carry a certificate from the military
sold at P30 each,” Conde adds. Although they are promised salaries
of P1,800 to P3,000 to as high as P7,000, as well as the
military’s P70-million socioeconomic projects, they get only P600
a month. The Indigenous People’s Apostolate in Malabog reported
that while the men now rely on “quick money” from their Alamara
work, women in Alamara communities now bear the burden of
farming.”
The lumad have found themselves trapped between
the military and the NPA, with both groups promising to give back
the lumad lands and increase the indigenous folk’s power over
their fates. In the words of an Army psy-war manuscript, “to be
king of their lands,” though reality shows them as little more
than manual laborers of security forces for rich timber operators.
Unwittingly, the military may have caused some
of the grief faced by the large estate owners. Some tribal
chieftains (datus) have apparently recruited Alamara members “by
claiming that it aims to defend ancestral lands through the
application for Certificate of Ancestral Domain Titles and by
entering into an alliance with the military for protection.”
Alsons’ man
The Alamara scheme stems from a plan hatched by
former Talaingod lumad mayor Jose Libayao, who was killed by the NPA
on September 5, 2001. As in the case of General Santos, Libayao
showed how rifts among indigenous folk jeopardize their claims to
their land. The mayor was not a native of Talaingod, but was a
Manobo from Paquibato and a former company guard for Alsons.
But Libayao called himself a supreme datu of a
“lumad province,” which ostensibly sprawled across the Arakan
Valley in North Cotabato, Senuda in Bukidnon, Talaingod in Davao del
Norte, and the districts of Malabog, Paquibato and Marilog in Davao
City. The areas cover other logging and mining projects of Alsons,
as well as expansion plans.
Libayao’s version of a tribal war, aided by
government troops, led to cattle rustling, the razing of homes and
the murders of at least three people. Military officials condemned
some of these acts but most of the perpetrators remain at large. The
human-rights group Karapatan in Southern Mindanao recorded 87 cases
of lumad victimized from January to December 5, 2002.
The military boasts Alamara has 100,000 members.
Their units are supervised by Army field officers. Lumad leaders of
the Alamara are owners or applicants for claims on vast tracts of
lands, reaching as high as 32,000 hectares in the case of the Ata-Dibabawon
tribe leader Ruben Labawan.
“From the list Alamara leaders appear to be
aspiring landlords, being applicants if not actual holders of
various Certificates of Ancestral Domain Claims or Certificates of
Ancestral Land Titles, where communal landownership becomes their
personal ownership,” a Pasaka report points out.
For now, General Santos City residents are
thankful the land dispute there has not erupted in conflict. But
with the presence of numerous armed groups among both lumad and
Christian aspirants to the land, a delay in the resolution of the
case could lead to renewed bloodshed.
The last few years in Mindanao show that despite
new laws and reforms, in the wild lands still considered frontiers,
a vast divide on the paradigms of landownership continues to rock
lumad homelands.
Gozun
clarifies charges against DENR;
Lopez says, ‘B’laan scooped up earth and cried’
Environment Secretary Elisea Gozun said on
Thursday that the claimant Tomas Alcantara was not present at the
December 11 Malacañang meeting that led to the ouster of the
then-environment chief, Heherson Alvarez.
Gozun, in an interview with The Manila Times,
said only she and Alvarez, President Arroyo and Executive Secretary
Alberto Romulo were present at the meeting.
Meanwhile, Capt. Val Lopez, Alvarez’s security
chief, denied he coerced Pendatun into signing complaints against
Gozun and officials of the National Commission on Indigenous
Peoples, saying he was very much junior to the Muslim datu and
police officer, who holds the rank of major (superintendent).
“I am not a lawyer. How could I ask him to
sign those documents?” Lopez said, adding that Pendatun’s claim
may have been prodded by “his newfound friendship with Gozun.”
Lopez insisted his role in ensuring the
installation of lumad claimants to the General Santos Alcantara
estate was prodded by a desire to see indigenous people get their
due.
Lopez, a Philippine Military Academy graduate
(1994), said the sight of B’laan claiming their land was worth all
the aggravation that followed.
“You should have seen them. They knelt on the
ground. They scooped up the earth. Then they cried. Finally, they
were back from the land that had been taken away from them.”
Proper process
Gozun, the incumbent environment secretary, said
she and Alvarez had been suddenly summoned to the palace. “I did
not even know what we were going to talk about.”
She and Alvarez were equally stunned when the
President asked her to immediately take over his post.
Gozun said she had not discussed the General
Santos City land dispute with President Arroyo before taking over
the department, and that she followed procedures before issuing the
hold order on an Alvarez memorandum canceling the Alcantara clan’s
land lease agreement.
Alvarez issued the directive a year after the
Supreme Court upheld a recommendation by the Commission on the
Settlement of Land Problems to cancel Forest Land Grazing Lease
Agreement 542, covering the 923-hectare Alcantara ranch in Barangay
Apopong.
Gozun said it was on December 19, a week before
her takeover that she received a letter from General Santos City
Mayor Pedro Acharon Jr. seeking a probe into the influx of squatters
and nonclaimants the FLGLA 542 area, and an adjoining Alcantara
estate covered by FLGLA 552.
The next day she also received a letter from the
city council, which had passed a resolution setting aside 41.6
hectares for an urban-poor housing project. The council said part of
the allotted land also lay within the Alcantara ranch.
Gozun immediately formed an investigative team,
which submitted its findings on January 9.
“After that, I consulted first with the
National Commission on Indigenous Peoples [NCIP] and the city before
issuing the order.”
Gozun said the order for a perimeter survey was
issued last Monday. Claimants have also submitted their genealogical
surveys to the NCIP. The survey is needed not only to determine
which portion of the land goes to claimants but also to check if the
land the city council wants for its urban- poor relocation site is
within or outside the Alcantara estate.
Gozun also said her husband retired not from
Alsons but from Passar, under Carlos “Sonny” Dominguez.
Dominguez is the brother of Paul, the
brother-in-law of Tom Alcantara, brother of Nicasio, who owns the
General Santos City estate. Sonny Dominguez was Gozun’s boss at
the Department of Agriculture.
Defiant guards
Lopez was dragged into the land dispute because
he allegedly handed Alvarez’s cancellation order to the community
environment officer, Andrew Patricio.
The Times tried to contact Lopez through
Alvarez’s office but he replied only yesterday. Alvarez had
pointed out that he had sent Lopez to coordinate with Army
authorities to ensure an orderly, peaceful installation.
Lopez said on Thursday that Alcantara’s
guards were denying access to claimants, even in the presence of
local Environment department officials.
He had to go to Mayor Pedro Acharon Jr. and link
him up with Alvarez to get the needed security.
Even so, Lopez said, in the adjoining Caguay
estate–also upheld as lumad land by the Supreme Court–there was
brief tension when Alcantara guards and Army troops and policemen
trained high-powered guns at each other, before the estate men gave
in to authorities.
There were no shortcuts to the installation,
Lopez stressed, noting it had come a year after the Supreme
Court’s decision.
“My boss did nothing wrong,” Lopez said.
“I am glad he was so eager for justice to be given the B’laan.”
“That is what the rebellion is all about, land
disputes,” Lopez pointed out. “The B’laan told me,
‘pagganito ang ginagawa ng gobyerno, magrerebelde kami’ [If this
is what the government is doing, we will rebel].”
“They challenged me, ‘You, sir, is there
nothing you can do to help us?’”
“Being a young, idealistic soldier, I helped
them by coordinating with authorities."
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