Indigenous People Have Sacred and Legal Rights

Some years ago a group of young people undergoing jungle survival training in the mountains of Zambales province were invited by the Aeta, a community of aboriginal indigenous people, to pitch their tents near their village and join a harvest celebration. The next morning the happy campers woke to discover a ring of smiling Aeta men. They had stood guard the whole night, enduring mosquitoes, snakes and pests to protect them from the bandits that infested the nearby hills. They live a simple life close to nature, extremely generous, kind, friendly and non-violent and easily bullied and exploited.

There are an estimated 15 million indigenous people throughout the Philippines and they are being invaded by another kind of bandit - the mining companies and their armed goons backed by crooked and corrupt politicians and officials.

The ancestral lands of these Filipinos are sacred and protected under the Indigenous Peoples’ Republic Act of 1997, which provides the legal framework for indigenous peoples’ self-determination. Ever since the political elite were able to pressure the Supreme Court in December 2004 to declare the 1995 Mining Act (Republic Act 7942) constitutional the ancestral lands, the remaining rain forests rivers and bays were immediately threatened by the foreign mining companies. In recent years, huge mining disasters have destroyed huge areas of rice fields, fishing grounds and wiped out villages and mango and coconut farms. The Rapu-Rapu mining disaster being only one of them.

The soaring prices of minerals make these lands and their mineral contents more valuable than ever before and the voices of protest are drowned by the roar of bulldozers and excavators biting into the mountains and hills in a feeding frenzy of open pit mining. According to Horacio C. Ramos, director of Bureau of Mines and Geosciences, mineral based exports last year reached US$22 Billion.

The Church has been outspoken about the plunder of the natural resources by foreign mining companies in cahoots with the local elite to the detriment of the vast majority of Filipinos. The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines said in a pastoral statement that the “adverse social impacts” would have a devastating impact on the lives of the people more than the earnings to the economy. “We reaffirm our stand for the repeal of the Mining Act of 1995,” the bishops had said. “We believe that the Mining Act destroys life. The right to life of people is inseparable from their right to sources of food and livelihood. Furthermore, mining threatens people’s health and environmental safety through the wanton dumping of waste and tailings in rivers and seas,” the CBCP declared.

The indigenous people are most affected. Since the end of WWII they have pushed further in to the mountains as the logging companies invaded and logged out the rain forests in a few decades of insatiable and unstoppable greed. Now only 19% of the original forest cover remains, and that is now endangered by the mining companies backed by the ruling family dynasties who control both the Congress and the bureaucracy and the vast wealth of the Philippines. Some social scientists and economists estimate that about 2% of the population, those at the peak of the population pyramid, own 70%of the wealth.

140 Leaders of a large Mindanao indigenous group known as the “Lumad” met in Davao City a few weeks ago to voice out their dire circumstances of their people and tell the world that they are facing greater hunger, poverty and marginalization than ever before. The government has only issued 71 Certificate of Ancestral Domain Titles, (CADTs) and only 8 are for Mindanao.

The “Lumads” fear that the Government is holding back the certificates and instead has issued 240 mining permits to foreign mining companies and 60 of these,”tenement” agreements are within the ancestral lands of the indigenous people. The Davao meeting of the “Lumad” leaders was assisted by the Irish Center for Human Rights, represented by Cathal Boyle. He said that there was evidence of racial discrimination by the Government against these indigenous people. It is clear that irresponsible mining exploits and destroys the environment and brings little benefit to the people. This has got to change.