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Understanding the Irisan land problem

BAGUIO CITY (Aug. 23) — Their Spanish colonial period counterparts trooped to a place called Pugad-lawin and tore their respective “cedulas” (residence certificates) today more than 100 years ago to signal the natives’ defiance to the Spanish crown and declared their independence, but the city’s urban poor now gathered at the city hall here and sought redress for their plight having built their homes on lots they wished they could call their own.

The throng is composed of residents in several migrant communities in Irisan, which are now subject to overlapping land claims and alleged land scam. Some residents of the Irisan Cypress Point Village are preparing to file a class suit against the Asia Pine Hills subdivision developer Peter Santos.

They said the filing of the case would help people recover what they have paid to persons claiming control over the 3.6-hectare property which used to be home to 42 urban landless families.

In 2003 and 2004 the city demolished most of the houses upon the insistence of the developer who has been favored, the residents say, by highly placed politicians in the city. Asia Pines now control 11 hectares of the 18 hectare ancestral land claims of an Ibaloy clan.

The estate is now subjected to the Community Mortgage Program (CMP).

Ibaloy claimants over the Irisan Lime Kiln

In the committee hearing called by Councilors Faustino Olowan and Edilberto Tenefrancia at the session hall, a woman showed a map of a very vast property she referred to as the 9.2-hectare ancestral land claims of Mike and Elsie Kiwas. She explained to the committee hearing that certain portions of the land claims had been allocated for various community needs as school site, day care center site, health center, a relocation site for the city’s disabled persons, etc.

She said, the Kiwas heirs were willing to share the property to the landless occupants had they approached the matriarch and did not form an organization to go against her, instead, a group whose members claimed to be descendants of retired Benguet Corporation (BC) employees thinks they should be entitled to the property which their ancestors developed while they were still employees of the lime mines in the area.

However, a Kiwas heir countered that what their fathers enjoyed as employees of BC before could not be passed on to them.

Government (in)action

Several government agencies were in the hearing to testify what their respective offices were doing or not doing in the area. However, there is still a cast doubt on their respective responses to the people’s inquiry.

For instance, although Dir. Victor Carantes of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) enticed the contending parties to consult with his personnel for clarification of land acquisition procedures, he dismayed the poor residents when he said that applications have to undergo hearings, which, the residents say, would take a long time to be decided on by the courts.

Clarita Rasay, community relations officer of the National Housing Authority in the Cordillera, likewise explained in a nutshell the objectives and nature of the CMP saying the land acquisition program aims to provide assistance to actual occupants and for poor families to own property, the threat of monthly amortization for 25 years seemed to scare the poor. Likewise, the maximum P80,000 in loans to the poor was not so interesting. She also said that the NHA does not have any existing project at the lime kiln site.

Dir. Vicky Torres of the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB) said she understood the plight of the poor who have been clamoring for a decent community life. She laments that the government funding for the poor goes to people who do not belong to the informal settlers.

“Napupunta ang pera ng gobyerno sa mga di karapat-dapat,” (Government money goes to people who are not qualified) Torres said. She did not elaborate on how the city’s urban poor could avail of the services of the HLURB so that the y would benefit from such a government endeavor. Instead, she almost succeeded in discouraging Irisan residents toimprove their home lots when she revealed that carst development would soon create sinkholes that might cause the houses to subside.

A barangay official who claims he was born in Irisan said the limestone on which most Irisan homes were built upon, are actually large rocks that serve as pillars. Unless developers blast against these rocks, he said, these would continue to hold the community intact. Nevertheless, he did not discount the possibility that there might be underground streams because he had tried throwing stones into these “sinkholes” when he was young.

Titles over public land

One resident who caught the attention of the City Council Committee on Lands was Cris Fontanilla, a young man from Purok 21 in upper Irisan barangay who said his family settled in that place a long time ago. While they were improving their lot no one came to claim that the land was his or hers. Eventually, a claimant came and his family negotiated with him.

Later he was informed that there was uncertainty with regards to the titles being held by the claimants. His research revealed that the property is a part of an unclassified forest land, and therefore, is not alienable and disposable.

Another resident told the city councilors facilitating the hearing that there are people who have been collecting money from the poor, who desperately wanted to get a lot on which to build a decent house.

Vote-rich melting pot of cultures

Barangay Irisan, according to a paper presented by Irisan People’s Action against Demolition and for Good Governance (IPADeGG), a loose coalition of people’s organizations, the barangay is one of the largest in terms of land area and population. It is originally peopled by the Ibaloys and is now home to around 6,000 more households of informal settlers from the six Cordillera provinces and the neighboring La Union and Pangasinan towns. A substantial number come from the Central Luzon and Tagalog regions, as well.

Irisan’s land problem is so complicated, IPADeGG admits, that it has been a key issue on which other related issues arise. Overlapping claims, serious land speculation and an alleged processing and sale scam involving large parcel of lands in the public domain are among the more serious ones.

Corporate interest feeds on government neglect

While there are obvious ancestral land claimants to most parts of Irisan, commercial subdivisions pose a greater threat to the present land occupants. Notwithstanding, the alleged 211 land titles may yet surface for most settlers. Corporate interests on land and its resources come in the form of real state developers who are the biggest land speculators now.

Although there are no government housing projects yet, the CMP has already been perceived as a ploy to institutionalize land-grabbing and titling of public lands in the area.

A case n point is the Cypress Point Village where several shanties had been demolished in 2003 to give way to the Asia Pine Hills Subdivision, In July, a CMP has been awarded for the place by the country’s Vice-president Noli de Castro.

The community is still in a limbo on how the CMP would be implemented, yet a lot of people have been speculating about its ill-effects.

The nature of Irisan’s land problem necessitated that the city council creates a Task Force Irisan as IPADeGG suggested to the council. But parallel efforts from the council and the office of the city mayor, could not solve the problems, says Councilor Tenefrancia, who along with Councilor Olowan facilitated the committee hearing.

Several landless urban poor are moving heaven and earth to have a decent shelter in the city. In the meantime, government agencies involved in the environment, housing and land use are in a quandary on how to solve the Irisan land problems.

Like their counterparts during the 1896 Philippine revolution against foreign domination, the city’s urban poor not only in Irisan, are waging a war against poverty, hunger and a decent life even in the most dangerous parts of this geologically impaired city in the sky. # Lyn V. Ramo far NORDIS

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