More squatters after SC voids CALTs

LETTERS FROM THE AGNO

March L. Fianza

BAGUIO CITY -- An influx of more land speculators and squatters is expected after the Supreme Court voided in September some 36 ancestral land titles in Baguio. In other words, the decision says “one man’s loss is another man’s gain”.

With this, it also satisfies the whims of their client – the city, so that those in city hall who are involved in clearing Townsite Sales Applications (TSAs) are overjoyed. Happy days are here again. Advance Merry Christmas.

The other effect of the SC decision is the uncertainty of having future issuances of CALTs in the city, because it seems the colonization by the Americans of Ibaloy lands in Baguio is being sustained by none other than the highest court in the land, and the Ibaloys of Baguio continue to be marginalized.

After reading a copy of the SC decision, it crossed my mind that the justices of the SC second division that rendered judgement by voiding the CALTs were far from considering the intent of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997, one of which is to return the lands that were unceremoniously grabbed from them.

The discussions of the justices in that division were mostly pegged on Sec. 78 of the IPRA. The decision signed by then acting Chief Justice and now retired Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio kept on stressing that Section 78 grants the city charter control over lands within Baguio’s townsite reservation.

It further states that the NCIP has “no legal authority to issue CALTs or CADTs in the city”, short of saying that there are no ancestral lands in Baguio, when the truth remains that all of Baguio is Ibaloy ancestral domain even prior to the arrival of foreign colonizers.

The SC ruling does not appear to me as a carefully-studied output because it only stresses one side that gives the impression that it was not written by a justice of the SC but by anybody.

As an ordinary Ibaloy or Igorot who continuously feels hated and marginalized because of this recent development, I can say that the decision is deficient as it lacked to consider the history that was the foundation of the IPRA.   

Baguio is where the “native title”, also known as the Cariño Doctrine, was first recognized in the country. This was ordered by the US Supreme Court on February 23, 1909 when it recognized the rights of Mateo Cariño, an Ibaloy whose land was grabbed and converted to a military reservation by the Americans.

The Cariño Doctrine has become the basis for inclusion of a provision in the 1987 Constitution which recognized IP rights and was the foundation for the IPRA. But the SC sees it differently.   

Instead, it interprets Section 78 to mean that CALTs and CADTs may be issued by NCIP if the ancestral land was recognized by the American colonial government.

This adds insult to injury. It suggests that the Americans that only came later to colonize the area are even more authorized to administer lands that were already privately occupied by the Ibaloys.

With due respects to our SC justices, I am looking for that part of Section 78 that says that Baguio is not covered by the IPRA but cannot find it. It does not even say that there are no ancestral lands within the city area.

And so, if Baguio is not excluded from the coverage of IPRA, then it is deemed included, the intent of which is to have lands and natural resources be subject to legitimate ancestral land and domain claims by IPs.

Several historical accounts tell us that when the Americans came a few years earlier before the 1909 city charter, the Ibaloys were shoved move away from the center to the outskirts to give way to development of the newly declared city.

This was narrated in an article about an interview with Eugene Pucay Sr. (1901-1992), who was appointed by then President Magsaysay as IP representative to the city council of Baguio in the mid-50s.

A true-blue Baguio boy, Mr. Pucay said in that interview that the early Ibaloys were “pushed” around. He narrated that they moved out from where Sunshine Grocery now stands along Abanao Street, the spot where he was born, to Guisad Valley.

Guisad Valley became their permanent residential place. After they left Abanao, an American took over and put up a business establishment called the Benguet Store. That is plain and simple land grabbing.

Quoting the Americans, Mr. Pucay said the Ibaloys were ordered to move out from the center of the city because “you have many animals and you are making the road dirty. Get out of here and we will give you a place further away. That’s where you will live.”

If that was the way they ordered the Ibaloys around, it appears as if the colonizers had more entitlement or ownership over the lands in Baguio than the first settlers. Maybe Justice Carpio and the second division did not know this.  

After the Ibaloys got out from Abanao in 1911, the Americans surveyed the lands in the outskirts where the displaced Igorots were relocated. The lands that were vacated were then sold to the public to acquire money for construction and development of facilities for the city government.  

That is how Casa Vallejo came into the picture. It is the same reason how the properties along Leonard Wood Road fronting Teachers Camp were acquired by the wealthy businessmen from outside Baguio.

Other sources of historical accounts said that aside from the garden patches at Upper Session road, the Ibaloy siblings Pinaoan and Piraso had a house where the former Empire Cinema stood along Abanao road, but the Americans drove them back to Lucban Valley. Likewise, the Carantes family moved from Session road to Lucban.

In that interview, Mr. Pucay said: “The Americans did not buy the territory, but the Philippine government occupied the Baguio area and made it into a reservation. Until now the City Hall is a squatter. The City of Baguio has no land of its own. It is a reservation composed of 49 sq. kilometers.”  

In the SC decision, it nullified the CALT granted to the heirs of Lauro Carantes, over a 5-hectare property inside the Forbes Park reserve citing environmental isues. In contrast, the city kept on harping about forest protection but did not stop the illegal entry of squatters at Gibraltar within Forbes Park.

In fact, representatives of the city even made petitions in Congress to make the squatter area a barangay and segregate it from the Forbes Park. As I have said in the past, squatters can vote, trees cannot.