DOCUMENT: CORDSIEG.TXT [Ed. Note: This article is reproduced with permission from the "Multinational Monitor", Vol XIII, No. 9, September 1992] INDIGENOUS VOICES T H E C O R D I L L E R A U N D E R S I E G E An Interview with Victoria Tauli Corpuz Victoria Tauli Corpuz works with the Cordillera Women's Education and Resource Center on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. The Center works to empower indigenous women in the face of militarization, development, aggression and ethnocide. Corpuz also works with the Cordillera People's Alliance, a coalition of approximately 120 indigenous people's organizations. MULTINATIONAL MONITOR: Why was the Cordillera People's Alliance formed? VICTORIA TAULI CORPUZ: The Cordillera People's Alliance came together and formed into an alliance in 1984. Prior to that, there had been a series of struggles with the Cordillera peoples over the dam issue and mining and logging concessions in the region. These are very localized struggles, but eventually they became more integrated. As a result, an indigenous people's movement for self- determination started developing. The many emerging organizations decided to come together so that they could have more impact on the government. The Cordillera area is largely forest. These are areas where people have been living for ages. Communities have residential areas with rice fields, and then they have the forest, which is communally owned by the tribe. Those are their hunting grounds, those are where their sacred trees are, those are the areas where the water comes from. These forests are very much protected by the people. They know the forest is where their life comes from, where their water comes from, where the fertility of the soil comes from and where their wood and wild food comes from. So it's a very integral part of the daily life of the people. MM: What were some of those early struggles? CORPUZ: The Chico dam project, which was funded by the World Bank, was one. It involved the construction of dams along the Chico River, which runs within the Cordillera region. These dams would have displaced about 300 families in one particular community, and several villages would have been eroded and flattened. Of course, the people resisted; they resisted the whole project. [The builders] didn't get to the first step. They were able to do the survey; in one area they were able to set up some foundations in the river; but the people fought against all these things. It took such a long time before anything could be done that the World Bank decided to cancel the whole project in the mid-1970s. The project had become a big embarrassment for the World Bank. The early reports said that no people were going to be affected by the dams. That was entirely wrong, many people were living just beside the river, because that is where the rice fields and the burial grounds are. It is their ancestral land. So the people were willing to die for it. They armed themselves. They are warrior societies and engage in tribal wars with each other, but this time they united among themselves and really put up a united position against the whole project. The government sent in a lot of military men, but the people persisted in their opposition. After two to three years, they decided to cancel the whole project. Now they want to revive the project. But the opposition has already been forged. The fight against the Chico dam was really something which strengthened the people's will to unite themselves. They saw that with unity they were able to stop a project which had been designed and promoted by a big multilateral bank. In fact, there was one article that said that it was the first time that pre-industrial, "uncivilized," as they always say, peoples were able to stop a World Bank project. Immediately after that, President Marcos gave a big logging concession -- something like 200,000 hectares of pine forest -- to one of his cronies, a corporation which makes cellophane and related products. The project was opposed by the people of Abra, one of the Cordillera provinces. The company was able to set up a mill and begin logging on some mountains, but because of the consistent opposition, the whole project stopped. So these two particular projects were stopped by the people's opposition. These successes spurred the development of a lot of organizations among the people. By 1984, members of these organizations decided to form themselves into a federation -- the Cordillera People's Alliance. MM: What are the main concerns of indigenous people in the Cordillera today? CORPUZ: The main concerns are still basically the same. Our region has been always considered a resource base area by the government. It has rich natural resources, a lot of gold, a lot of minerals, intricate river systems which can be a source of hydro-power and tropical rain forests and pine forests. Ever since the colonial period, governments have been trying to exploit these natural resources. Right now, we have problems with open-pit mining operations. The biggest and oldest mining company in the Philippines, the Benguet Corporation, has been operating in our region since 1905. Suddenly Benguet decided that it is not going to do underground tunneling anymore but will convert its operations into open-pit mining. This is devastating the whole area. Mountains are being bulldozed. So now the people in those villages which are affected are opposing the whole project. They have been setting up barricades to stop the operations of the open-pit mines. There is a stalemate now because the company decided to stop doing the open-pit mining in the areas where the people are setting up physical barricades. But I think they are really bent on pushing through with their plans. And then CRA, the Australian affiliate of the British Rio Tinto Zinc, wants to expand its operations. The net impact is again that the people who have been doing small- scale mining in those areas will be displaced and their rice fields also will be destroyed. The more complicated problem which is affecting the whole region is the militarization that is coming along with the mining and logging operations. Right now the region is targeted as one of the areas for comprehensive counter- insurgency operations. We have a lot of areas right now which are being subjected to aerial bombings and strafings. We suspect that one reason that the military is doing this is so that logging will be facilitated. A lot of logging operations have been stopped because of the opposition of the people. I think that, because the Philippines has a big foreign debt, the government is doing everything it can to facilitate the entry of multinational corporations, so that their investments can help earn foreign exchange for us to pay our debt. In fact this was confirmed when we had a dialogue with the military men who are operating in the area. One of the generals who was heading operations, General Manlongat, said "It's true, one of our roles is to insure that the economic activities of these companies will be able to be pushed through. If we don't militarize the area, then the companies cannot pursue their economic activities." Those are the kinds of issues that we are confronted with right now. And it's also one reason why we want to become part of bigger alliances internationally. They will provide us with the opportunity to project the issue internationally. MM: Can you describe the Benguet situation and explain how the company's operations are affecting people in the Cordillera? CORPUZ: Benguet's open-pit mining operations have already displaced some people from their communities. Small-scale miners' tunnels are covered and they're not allowed to proceed with their own mining activities. Several rice fields have already been covered. What is worse is that the water sources have disappeared -- several of the springs are now gone. So people will have to buy water all the way from the city at very expensive prices. The other effect is the pollution. The open-pit mining operations are causing tremendous erosion. Recently Benguet's mill released some of its waste and caused toxic poisoning among the people. The people that live around the area started vomiting and experiencing watery eyes and headaches. Later on it was confirmed that these problems were caused when the mill spilled its wastes. MM: Who owns the land Benguet and the other companies are mining? CORPUZ: That's a big issue. Legally, at least underground, the land is owned by the mines. They have patented claims to the land which were facilitated by a law called the Mining Act. The act says that the mines can be owned by mining corporations and that they have rights underground -- it doesn't really say that they have rights above ground, however. But the people are already being displaced from their communities. In effect, there's nothing that's going to be left for them because of the open-pit mining operations. It's very difficult for the people to win legal battles because the law is really siding with the mining corporations. Even the government's environmental impact study gave the companies clearance for their operations. The people cannot win when they depend on the legal framework, relying on the law or environmental assessments. So they have to resort to para-legal activities like barricading and doing mass actions, mass campaigns. These are the only things left. MM: How has the government responded to these types of activities? CORPUZ: They deployed a military detachment to the community and arrested the leaders of the opposition. There is still a court case going on right now. That's the response of the government. And they are also saying that as far as the government is concerned, operations of the companies are legal. But the people are continuing their efforts to resist, hoping that they will be able to at least delay the full operations of the mines. MM: Are the organizations fighting the mining companies independent or part of the rebel New People's Army (NPA)? CORPUZ: They are independent community organizations. These are organizations of small-scale miners, women's organizations, community-based organizations and youth organizations. Some of them were just created because of this struggle, and others existed before the fight All of these organizations were created by the people themselves to be able to effectively address their issues in the community. The NPA is not in the particular place where the mines are. But in the other areas, in the mountains, of course they are there. There are also a lot of people's organizations which were set up even before the NPA was there. Whether they come together because of a particular issue is incidental. Because the opposition to mining and logging operations was there even before the NPA was there. Much of the opposition was led by women who were not really organized. But because they were the ones who were doing the farming, they were the ones who were really taking care of the land. They felt that these threats to their role as food producers were very serious. So on their own initiative they opposed these particular projects. MM: Could you discuss the government's military operations further? CORPUZ: The military deployed several battalion formations into the region in October 1990. The reason was that the Cordillera is a rebel-infested area, so they put in all these military men. Presently, we have something like 20,000 military men, operating within the whole region. It used to be just company-sized operations; now they have brigade-size deployments carrying out not just ground operations but comprehensive air and ground military operations. There are Tora-tora planes and helicopter gun-ships hovering around the communities they would like to evacuate, and they're dropping rocket bombs into the communities. MM: Do you believe the rebel presence is the real reason for the military deployment? CORPUZ: Well, there really are rebels, but not that many and they are not all over the place. We think that the government is really using the rebels' presence as a pretext to insure that their programs for "development" of the region will be able to be pushed through. That's what happened with Marag Valley, one of the valleys in the region which is very rich with tropical rainforests. The people have prevented logging in this area for years. They have always protested whenever the logging concessions would come in. They would burn bulldozers. Large- scale military operations in the Cordillera first started in the Marag Valley. But at the same time, I think the government would really like to pursue [the plans they have for the region] because of the need for additional income, and using the military is one way of doing it. Of course the government would like to stop the insurgency in the region. Right now we have an energy crisis in the whole country, and the government is planning to build hydroelectric dams, outside of the Chico Dam, that were previously stopped. We have the Abulog-Gened Dam which is funded by the Asian Development Bank, and various other dam projects plotted for the whole region. This is the time that the government will try to pursue all of these projects. MM: What is the military doing to the people? CORPUZ: In several communities they are forcing them to leave their communities, using the theory of removing the water from the fish. They think the NPA is being coddled by these people, so they have to remove the communities so the NPA will become hungry. However, these people have been living there for ages, and you cannot just kick them out, so the military is also imposing economic blockades and food blockades. Food which the people would bring into the communities is being stopped at the check points. They ask, "How many members are in your family?" Then they try to measure the amount of food that you can bring in, which will feed your family for a week. So after one week, you have to hike several kilometers again to get what is left from the military detachment. The military operations have been going on for more than a year. They are creating a lot of problems for the people. They cannot harvest their rice fields anymore. Many of them are scared to go out because of the mortar shellings. Several of the people have been hit by stray bullets. They are also given a curfew, and so the food production has really gone down. The people are also not allowed to perform the rituals that they have been performing for years. That's why we think that the military operations are ethnocidal -- the very activities of the people which are important for their continuance as distinct peoples are being destroyed. We have rituals before we plant rice. After we harvest rice, we have several rituals to ask blessings and also to appease the spirits of our ancestors. But with the military operations going on, we cannot do these things. Everything has been disrupted. MM: What happens to the people who are forcibly moved? CORPUZ: The worst thing is when they ask you to evacuate. Some people have been evacuated already. They are brought into hamlets where they virtually cannot do anything; they are just relying on the relief that the relief legions bring in. Life in the hamlets is very constrained and controlled. Several times we have undertaken fact-finding missions to gather data about what's happening to the people, and even then we are not allowed to go into the hamlets. So the hamlets are really creating hell for the people in them. MM: Aren't things better than they were under the Marcos dictatorship? CORPUZ: For us, it really got worse under Aquino, because this is the first time we've been subjected to military operations of such an extent. It's much worse now. I don't know what's happened with a government that's supposed to be democratic. In the end, it is catering to all interests besides those of the people. MULTINATIONAL MONITOR -- the monthly newsmagazine that tracks the activities of multinational corporations. 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