In this Episode Nicole Becomes an Anti-mining Crusader

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It didn't take long for me to be whisked away into the mountains... well, at least into other mountains. I spent my first weekend in the Cordillera in the province of Abra participating in a paralegal training.

The NGO I have been placed with in the Cordillera is called the Cordillera Human Rights Alliance, it is the human rights monitor in the area. Along with documenting human rights abuses in the region, the staff also train community leaders to document abuses and community members to recognize abuse when it happens. These training sessions are tagged as paralegal training, in particular to give them more legitimacy with the local government units and any state security forces that might be in the area.

Being in Abra was gorgeous. Traveling to Abra was a hilarious, and by hilarious I mean mildly harrowing and a wonderful lesson in developing world travel. It started with a 5 hour over night bus ride from Baguio City to Benguet, the capital of Abra. The bus companies name was Jackrabbit, which I suppose is intended to indicate just how quickly they will get you to your destination. The road between in Baguio and Benguet is just as narrow and full of sharp turns as the road into Baguio. I am starting to realize that this is the only kind of road that is impossible to have any other kind of road in the Cordillera. We boarded the bus at 11pm and I immediately closed my eyes to sleep. Although sleeping on a Jackrabbit bus is a motion sickness sufferers nightmare. As the bus speed up inclines and whipped around corners I felt like we where turning and moving in directions that where not humanly, or busly, possible. I must have succeeded in going to sleep though, because I was woken abruptly around 2 am when we swerved to avoid hitting a jeepney. Driving laws are entirely ignored in the Philippine, so apparently the driver did not realize that passing another bus on a winding mountain road in the dark was illegal and dangerous. Luckily we only had a couple hours of our trip left once we got ourselves back onto the right side of the road, because I had a hard time sleeping again after i started thinking about the lack of ambulances in this remote region of the country. We arrived in Benguet around 4am, and had the bus drop up near the office of an affiliated NGO. Getting inside we dropped out bags and went almost immediately to sleep.

In the morning we got up early and the NGO's staff made us breakfast. Most NGOs offices are in converted houses or apartments, and almost all of the NGOs I have encountered have at least one staff member who lives in the office to act as security. There is enough danger of progressive NGOs being raided by state security forces to warrant this set up. After eating we headed to the town square to catch a mountain jeep to Baay Licuan, the municipality where we would be working.

A mountain jeep is a dusty but sturdy looking beaten up jeepney. These jeeps can sit 20 somewhat comfortably, but because they usually only do their routes once of twice a day they usually hold 25 in the jeep and 10 on the “top load” instead. To ride “top load” means that after the driver has strapped some of the luggage and packages to the rack of the jeep you sit on top of the stuff. I have no intentions of ever riding top load since I would burn to a crisp, and with my balance probably then also fall off. The jeep to Baay Licuan only travels once everyday and because of the unpredictable roads is typically late. We waited an hour and a half for the jeep that was suppose to arrive at 9am. Inside the jeep to Baay Licuan we all had our own bags between our knees, bundles of vegetables and cases of coke for the rural sari-sari stores in the aisle between us and a live chicken or two strapped down at our feet. We started out at a steady pace, but one we hit the dirt portion of the 4 hour drive me frequently had to stop to gear up in order to move up the steepest hills, and from time to time had to pile out so the driver could fix a broken bot or a flat tire. The driver's assistant climbed all over the jeep as it moved, swinging from the back door where he was station, along the side bars or the top load, to the passenger side door to talk to the driver. Though from he sometimes obstructed the view from my window directly the gorgeous panorama we where driving through was visible from every window in the swaying vehicle. The road from Banquet to Baay Licuan is long and tedious I am told, if you are not a Canadian girl seeing the sun crisped dry season mountain terrain for the first time.

Arriving in Baay Licuan I realized that it is not just the drive in that is beautiful, but the country side in general. A friend commented recently that being in the Philippines is making me a wonderful photographer. I can take absolutely no credit for the gorgeous pictures though. in every new place I go in the Cordillera I find myself standing in the middle of a breath taking bowl of mountains. The way they cozy into each other, the way they lovingly overlap, the palms at their base and the pines that round out their sharp edges - all of it is fodder for my camera. All I have to do is hold the camera still when I press the button and I end up with phenomenal pictures of this spectacular terrain. After arriving in Baay Licaun I was given a chance to experience this terrain in a really personal way, since we still had to hike 30 minutes to the community where we would be performing the training.

The CHRA planned to do paralegal training in Baay Licuan for a very specific reason. In the municipality of Baay Licuan, in Abra province a Canadian mining company has been approved to strip mine for gold.

In 1995 the Philippine government passed the Mining Act of 1995, which gives foreign mining companies approved to mine 100% ownership of the land that they have been alloted. This included ownership of the resources under the earth, the earth, the water and even the air. A mining company is not required to talk to the residence of the area if they decide to evict them, dig up their farming areas or divert or pollute their water source. The company is also not required to pay taxes on either the land or the profit they make from extracting its resources. The only criteria for these companies is that they have a Filipino mining partner and in the case of indigenous communities that they have free, prior and informed consent from the communities to mine. These 2 policies are applied very differently in reality. Foreign mining companies pair with a Filipino front company, paying a big salary to their partner citizen, and funneling all of the profits out of the country. To get community consent they pay enough community leaders for their signatures to say they have consent without ever actually holding a meeting, and if that doesn't work they get the military to talk to the community members for them. The whole system results in foreign mining companies holding all of the cards and the community members experiencing large numbers of human rights abuses. The communities inside the municipality of Baay Licuan are trying to organize against the Olympus Mining Company, so the CHRA decided to train them to recognize the human rights abuses they are about to be subject to.

Hiking into the community it was overwhelming to know that the whole area, the rice fields, the horse pastures, the stream that runs through boulders that are too big to have been produced by anything other then mountains, are about to become an open pit mine. Getting into the community and meeting the people my emotional connection to the situation was solidified. It is not just that this area is beautiful that makes the mining wrong, but that it is inhabited and being used. The walls encasing the vegetable terraces that are still planted every year are hundreds of years old. The people still cherish their family caribou, and ride the kind of horses their ancestors domesticated. They raise their children here, teach them to swim in the stream, and send them to college in Benguet with the money they make selling their vegetables and rice. The adults go to mass, and their kids play endless basketball in the community court, and they are happy. Those are the things that are going to be lost when these communities are evicted and mining starts.

The dedication and connection these people have with their communities and land was evident by the number of people who came to the paralegal training. They sat for two days through sweltering heat to learn about their human rights, young men, mothers with infants, baranguy officials and old men in farming cloths.The reason to fight Olympus's attempt to strip mine this area is in the faces of every person who come to our training.

Though the kids stared at me like usual in Baay Licuan, because it was an indigenous community they where more shy to come over and speak to me. Sainv been warned that this would be the case I brought out my secret weapon to make them less scared of me during the first lunch break - little Canadian flag pins. Pining one on each child's collar a community member explained to them that I came from a country called Canada and that this was that country's flag. The kids had a vague idea of what Canada was, but I soon realized that the adults in the community where all too familiar. They had been talking and thinking about Canada consistently since the Olympus bid was approved. They had even met one white man from Olympus, a man who had come in to tell them how good the mine would be for their community. In fact, when we first arrived they assumed I was from Olympus. These community members know better then to think that the mine will help them. They have heard about what happens when mines come in and people loose their land, get pressured into low paying, dangerous jobs and get sick. They where having a hard time understanding why a company from Canada could not mine in Canada, why it had to come in and ruin their community.

But what could I say to these people? How could I explain to them the sad reality of the situation? That Canadian mining companies move into third world counties because they have mined all of our resources, or because they can not do the kind of cheap and easy mining they do in third world countries in Canada. They come in to make profits, lots of profits, with low overhead. They come in because they are racist enough, or greedy enough to not care how they are hurting the people or the land. And that most Canadians don't care enough or are too apathetic to stop them. What Canadian mining companies are doing in the Philippines, and all over the developing world, is wrong. What Olympus is about to do to Baay Licuan is wrong. And I realized, watching the kids admire their new Canadian flag pins, that I am the only person from Canada who is really paying attention to what is about to happen to them and their families. It is up to me to find out where these companies are from, who their MPs are, talk to human rights NGOs in their ridings, and to exert the small amount of power I have. If I don't do something to help these people then the pins I handed out to the kids will not be the solidarity gift I had planned, but propaganda for Olympus.

Visiting Baay Licuan I was radicalized to the mining issue. If Canadian businessmen can sit in Toronto and Montreal and work out a plan to crush community opposition using Philippines military force, then how can I not sit in my office in Baguio City and work out a plan to help the people save themselves, their communities and their gorgeous land. I have accidentally become a anti-mining crusader, and I have accidentally become an ambassador to the Cordillera for all Canadians who care about doing what is right, but I am willing to take on the challenge. If I can help these people even the smallest amount because of my citizenship then I believe I will have made my country proud, unlike Olympus, and all the other Canadian mining companies in this country. Today Olympus, today Abra - tomorrow we tackle the world.

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Comments

[abie!]

hi there nicole! enjoyed reading your blog--insights and all. indeed, you are now part of the cordillera indigenous peoples' struggle for right to self determination and an ancestral lands :) abie (here in the other room at the CPA office ;)