The beautiful land being threatened by the Laiban Dam project.
Thursday, January 14
Stuart Ryan, CUPE 4600 staff:
On January 13 and 14 our delegation split into two for exposure tours far away from Manila, both in time but also in the lives of the Filipino people we were to meet. One delegation visited the indigenous people in the villages of Tanay municipality in the province of Rizal, far up in the Sierra Madre mountains.
After a long trip up winding highways some 4,000 feet above Manila, we spent the last hour of the trip navigating one of the most difficult dirt roads I have ever seen. At the end we had to get out of the van to walk into the tiny village of Sitio Manggahan in Barangay Laiban where 130 families live.
The road literally ended in at the church in the village. Just down the slope was the meeting of two rivers, called the Left and the Right rivers, at the border of the provinces of Rizal and Quezon. The river beds surrounded by lush mountains was a beautiful setting.
The views were spectacular, as you can see from the pictures.
What looks idyllic is not. Down the path from the church rests a huge tunnel from a previous attempt to build a dam in the region. International pressure has stopped the Marcos dictatorship, but the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo administration is considering the approval of a US$ 1 billion dollar project to build the Laiban dam, which will flood the 8 barangays of Rizal and Quezon and bury the lands of the Dumagats, the indigenous people in the region.
The Laiban dam project will be built by the San Miguel Corporation, which is one of the largest corporations in the country. The owners belong to the Cojuangco family, a powerful clan that also owns the Hacienda Luisita, a huge sugar plantation where the army and police killed seven strikers in 2004. (We were there two days ago.) Everyone drinks San Miguel beer.
Why are they building the dam? To provide an alternate source of water for Metro Manila by 2015. A private company, financed by Japanese capital, will sell the water to the two private companies who distribute water to its 12 million citizens at a profit. How is the public interest met in all this? Privatization of water is also an issue for CUPE in Canada, as multinationals are trying to get into the pubic water supply system.
Community members, who have spent their lives on this land, are in danger of losing their homes. Their ancestors are buried on this land. The San Miguel Corporation has never consulted the community about the dam project or the prospect of their forced relocation.
We met with leaders of Sitio Manggahan and neighbouring Sitio Magata in General Nakar, Quezon who are most worried about their future. The first question they asked is where are they going to be moved to. Will we be able to provide for our people? To date San Miguel Corporation has not talked to the indigenous people; they sent a feasibility study group last year but did not talk to the village leaders.
Our hosts took us around the village. They make a living by making charcoal from the abundant trees in the forest and from subsistence farming. Apparently some 70% of the Filipino people are peasants eking out a living from what they can.
In our tour of Sitio Magata in the neighbouring Quezon province (we crossed a suspension bridge by foot to get there), we were shown an alternative school that used to be run by the United Church of Christ in the Philippines. It was closed by the Philippine military because it was teaching a more progressive curriculum than what is provided in the elementary school across the bridge. The military says it must be a school of the New People’s Army, a peasant guerilla army in the adjoining mountains.
We found out that some 28 pastors, many from the United Church, have been killed in the last seven years, as part of the counter-insurgency strategy of the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo government. Anyone who is preceived to be a supporter of workers, peasants or in this case, the indigenous people, are considered to be part of a front of the Communist Party and the New People’s Army, and are targeted for killings, disappearances or other forms of harassment.
This region is a priority area for the counter-insurgency. During our trip we were stopped three times by militias, who had our driver open the van to look for weapons.
Our hosts, including one of the elected officials of Barangay Laiban, provided us with both dinner and breakfast. The official put us up in his house. While the only source of energy, a common generator, shut down at 8 p.m., we were well greeted with the utmost hospitality. Our host asked about the conditions of the First Nations people in Canada.
Our guides told us of a grassroots alliance, involving the Southern Tagalog regional chapter of Karapatan (whom we met a week ago), that was organizing against the potential building of the dam. You can follow it as a link from Karapatan’s web site www.karapatan.org.
A rainstorm on Wednesday night cut short our visit because the walk on the road to an adjoining village was not possible. But our determination to support the indigenous people grew as we left to return to Manila.
