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Eight reasons why the Cordillerans should junk GMA!

1. GMA is killing our vegetable producers.

The trade policies of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo have opened the country’s domestic market for agriculture to a flood of cheap foreign produce. Not satisfied with just implementing the law on agricultural tariff reduction that resulted from Philippine concurrence in the 1994 treaty which created the World Trade Organization, GMA has been negotiating bilateral agreements that will allow the surplus carrots, potatoes, and other vegetables of China and Korea – and, reportedly, also Australia – to enter the Philippines absolutely toll-free. GMA does not care about what this will do to the 45,000 vegetable-producing households in the Cordillera who are already reeling from the effects of tariff reduction on their capacity to compete against importers for shares of the market. Unlike their counterparts in many countries, they have no crop or market insurances to fall back on. If they lose what remains of their market shares, they will be unable to survive.

2. GMA is killing local agriculture.

Unlike their counterparts in China, Korea, Australia, and other countries, such as the US, Philippine agricultural producers have no recourse to subsidies from the state. This, and not cost-inefficient production, is the primary reason why our agricultural producers in the Cordillera cannot sell their goods at prices that are competitive with those of imports. GMA once promised “safety nets” that would help at least the vegetable growers among them survive the impact of global free trade in agricultural goods. But few of the measures promised by GMA have thus far materialized; and these did not include subsidies, anyway.

Even more committed to the principles of global free trade than its proponents among state leaders in the US and other advanced capitalist nations, GMA has been reducing Philippine government support for agriculture. From a measly 4.2% during GMA’s first year in office, expenditures on agriculture have fallen to 2.9% of total government spending. State agricultural institutions and agencies have thus had to fend for themselves. In the Cordillera, this has translated into smaller budgets for the maintenance and improvement of public agricultural facilities, and greater reliance on partnership with private corporations for the dissemination of new developments in agricultural technology. As a result, our agricultural producers have become more vulnerable to the efforts of transnational corporations to entice them into adopting the use of crop breeds and chemicals that will give them high yields, but at the cost of their incurring high-interest debts with input suppliers, degrading their land and their water sources, and endangering the viability of indigenous and locally adapted food crops on their own farms as well as those in the wider surroundings.

GMA does not care about the fate of agriculture in the Cordillera or any place else in the Philippines because she has had other plans in store for the land..

3. GMA is selling our peoples’ ancestral lands to big capitalist mining companies.

The main subject of GMA’s negotiations with China, Korea, and Australia is the interest these nations’ capitalists have expressed in Philippine metallic mineral resources. The revitalization of large mining in the country, mainly by transnational corporations, is top on GMA’s list of economic development targets.

Among GMA’s priorities are nine mineral exploration and mine development projects in the Cordillera – all located beneath, atop, or upstream of land that our communities utilize for agricultural and small-scale mineral production; all thus requiring the displacement of our communities from economic resources and pursuits vital to their survival.

4. GMA is helping the big capitalist mining companies to circumvent laws aimed at protecting the national patrimony, our local communities, and the environment.

GMA has purposedly sought out and utilized means of bulldozing, boring through, or at least getting around the legal obstacles to wide-ranging, large-scale capitalist exploitation of the country’s mineral resources. The biggest such obstacle was a 2004 Supreme Court decision to declare unconstitutional those provisions of the Mining Act of 1995 which allowed foreign capitalists full control of mineral lands and mining operations, in violation of the patrimony provisions of the 1987 Constitution. GMA’s maneuvers resulted in the Supreme Court’s reversal of its original ruling less than a year after this was made. Other obstacles remained, though: provisions in environmental law, the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act, the Local Government Code, and the Mining Act itself which, in effect, stated that large mining projects required the consent of affected communities and local governments. GMA has, however, devised cunning means of dealing with these legal obstacles administratively. With these means at their disposal, GMA’s minions in various government agencies are now able to process quite speedily the 114 applications that have been filed for exploring and mining 1.2 million hectares – that is to say, 66% of the total land area – of the Cordillera!

5. GMA has no regard for the right of indigenous communities to decide on the fate of their own resources, their own environment, their own lives.

GMA already showed her knack for finding ways around inexpedient laws early in her Presidency. Between January 2001, when GMA assumed the Presidency, and July 2002, when the construction of the San Roque dam was completed, our indigenous communities in Itogon challenged the legitimacy of the dam project by citing its failure to comply with the IPRA’s provisions on Free and Prior Informed Consent. First, GMA dealt with the challenge by simply having the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples repeatedly fail to convene on the case en banc. Then when the challenge came to the attention of the San Roque project’s financiers in the Japanese government, GMA had the NCIP dismiss it on the technicality that the contract for the project had already been signed eighteen days before the IPRA was signed into law in October 1997.

As to the more substantive issues that our Itogon communities raised in connection with the dam, GMA was mum. Her representatives, though, argued on her behalf that the ancestral land rights of a few indigenous communities, and the livelihood and wellbeing of a few thousand indigenous peasant households in the Cordillera, were peanuts compared to the 345 megawatts of electricity and the irrigation for 80,000 hectares of land that the San Roque dam project could contribute to the national economy.

6. GMA is violating the rights and sacrificing the wellbeing of our workers to the interests of big capitalists, such as those in mining.

Economic expediency has been GMA’s excuse for many of her policy decisions and much of her legislative advocacy. But her primary concern is obviously not the alleviation of the dire economic situation that the Filipino masses are in; rather it is the creation of economic conditions conducive to the interests of the elite in Philippine society. Only when she was already embroiled in her current political crisis did she begin to advocate a legislated minimum wage increase for Filipino workers who had been demanding their right to decent wages long before she assumed the Presidency. Prior to her crisis, GMA played deaf to labor demands. And even now, her government continues to display a bias for capitalist interests when intervening in labor disputes.

Under GMA, government intervention in labor disputes has many times taken the form of violent repressive action. Worst on record was last year’s massacre of striking Hacienda Luisita workers by the Philippine National Police. The same police measures as were witnessed at Hacienda Luisita are now being used on our striking workers in the Lepanto mines: the transformation of the mining compound and its surroundings into a virtual garrison, dotted with heavily manned outposts; the violent dispersal of picketlines – at least 15 instances to date, since the strike began in June; black propaganda geared at associating the local workers’ union with the revolutionary New People’s Army, in order to justify the thick presence and military stance of the PNP. It will not be surprising if the PNP were to follow these measures with the gunning down of workers, their families, and their supporters at the picketlines, as happened in Hacienda Luisita.

The right to strike is a basic liberty of the working class. But GMA obviously has no respect for this.

7. GMA has no regard for basic civil liberties. She is a militarist.

In general, GMA has displayed a propensity for disregarding the basic civil liberties of the people. She has time and again ordered or approved and commended acts of military violence geared at repressing civil unrest. Worst on the overall record of her government’s human rights violations has been the assasination of numerous activists among the indigenous Mangyan and migrant settlers of Mindoro, another resource-rich target of transnational capitalist expansion in mining.

In our own resource-rich Cordillera, the Armed Forces under GMA has deployed at least 14 companies of regular troops and 13 companies of the militarized PNP – the majority of them in Kalinga and Abra, which are now the primary targets of transnational mining.

8. GMA has no qualms about harboring hoodlooms, like those in the so-called CPLA, and involving them, as well as simple armed auxiliary recruits, in conflicts that can spark or fan the flames of tribal war.

At least two of the 14 companies of military regulars in the Cordillera are Separate Rifle Companies comprised of CPLA “integrees” – i.e., Cordillera People’s Liberation Army personnel whose integration in the AFP has been authorized and formalized by GMA herself. Under GMA, Civilian Armed Auxiliaries in the Cordillera have grown to nearly 47 platoons, the majority of them drafted from the tribal communities of Abra, the Mountain Province, and Kalinga.

GMA is obviously unconcerned about the long list of criminal activities that the CPLA has been involved in. To her, the CPLA is just one more weapon to wield against NPA revolutionaries, as are the Civilian Armed Auxiliaries. Neither is she concerned over the possibility that in pitting the CPLA and the Civilian Armed Auxiliaries against local units of the NPA, she may be sparking or fanning the flames of tribal war among the indigenous population in at least half the Cordillera.

The fact is that GMA cares nothing about indigenous peoples, peasants, and workers in the Cordillera or anywhere in the Philippines. Her policies have consistently shown her to be sorely lacking in compassion and uninterested in the issue of social justice. She is anti-poor, anti-people.

We should participate in the nationwide movement to oust GMA from the Presidency. But even GMA’s ouster would not deliver us from our hardships as indigenous people and as Filipinos because our problems are rooted more deeply than GMA. We must actively struggle for a total transformation of the system that underpins the workings of our society.

Advance the cause of national democracy!

Fight for the self-determination of indigenous peoples! # Cordillera Peoples’ Alliance for the Defense of Ancestral Domain and for Self-Determination, 23 August 2005

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