Mangyan Heritage Center

MANILA -- Complaints about mining are sure to turn off President Macapagal-Arroyo these days.

Not wanting to be cornered on issues against mining in the country, President Macapagal-Arroyo immediately diverted a recent dialogue with leaders of indigenous communities to other issues.

According to leaders of the Catholic Church who were present during the talk, the President was visibly uncomfortable when a Palace dialogue led by a Roman Catholic bishop supposedly solely on indigenous people's concerns became a litany of complaints over government-promoted mining operations across the country, last Wednesday.

Laoag Bishop Sergio Utleg herded a group of around 20 tribe leaders to present to Ms Arroyo the official position of a Church-sponsored regional assembly for the indigenous people's month.
But someone apparently forgot to tell them never to mention that word: mining.

"Sumama ang mukha (Her face turned sour)," Fr. Edu Gariguez, director of the Mangyan Mission in Oriental Mindoro, recalled when he opened discussions on the mining problem.

"We're here today because we fear that our rights as indigenous peoples would be put in danger because of the proliferation of large-scale mining," he remembered telling Ms Arroyo in Filipino.

Gariguez said at least eight tribe leaders would have delivered concrete accounts on the negative impact of mining in their respective areas.
But Ms Arroyo purportedly stopped them on their tracks when she moved to another topic and told them to raise the matter to Environment Secretary Lito Atienza.

"In fairness to her," the priest said, "she probably didn't want to talk about the matter because she didn't have the data."

As promised, Atienza showed up on Thursday at the continuation of the indigenous peoples' assembly at the San Carlos Seminary in Makati, an event sponsored by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines Episcopal Commission on Indigenous Peoples.

To the participants' dismay, Atienza supposedly echoed the Arroyo administration's pro-mining policy, insisting that "mining is the way to development."

The government's hard stance on mining somehow soured an otherwise promising dialogue that also saw Ms Arroyo promising to distribute certificate of ancestral domain titles for the Tadyawan tribe in Oriental Mindoro and Aetas in Zambales.

Terence Osorio, national coordinator of the Alyansa Tigil Mina (Alliance for A Stop to Mining), said Ms Arroyo promised to go to Mindoro to personally distribute the certificates.

Gariguez welcomed the distribution of certificates, the culmination of more than four years of application process. But he pointed to the irony of the government recognizing ancestral lands while promoting mining as well.
"She gives out lands, but she also allows the proliferation of so many mining operations," he said in Filipino, noting that more than 90 mining applications were currently filed at the Mines and Geosciences Bureau for Mindoro province.

In the official Indigenous People's assembly statement, a copy of which was given to Ms Arroyo, participants urged the government to repeal the Mining Act of 1995 consistent with the CBCP position in its pastoral statement two years ago.

Gariguez and other leaders also wanted the government to "respect mining moratorium and logging bans declared by local government units" and "compel just compensation and rehabilitation on the destruction that mining has caused to our lives and properties."

"Deplorably, the government's development paradigm, markedly demonstrated in its pursuit of projects that militate against a sustainable, authentic human development, have left a great number of us economically deprived, socially excluded, politically disenfranchised and culturally marginalized," they complained.