Sherwin de Vera, a vocal critic of destructive development projects, said he was not surprised when he was told by family and friends that a group of suspicious-looking men were looking for him on the University of Northern Philippines (UNP) campus in Vigan City, Ilocos Sur, last week.
The suspicious-looking men went to the UNP, inquiring with the campus security guards regarding his visit to the UNP on July 18 and 19. De Vera was a student leader during his college days some years back at the UNP.
A political activist, de Vera is currently an environmental advocate, and a very vocal one at that, opposing large-scale mining and massive land-conversion of forests and agricultural areas into agro-forestry plantations in Ilocos Sur.
He said he sensed he was being tailed for days while wandering in Vigan City a couple of days ago. And he was no longer surprised.
“I knew they were military intelligence. They have been tailing me,” he told the BusinessMirror in a telephone interview last Sunday.
Military target?
It was not his first rodeo, so to speak. “In 2005 I had to hide, along with my family, because the threat was very real,” he said.
The reason: “Because of my environmental advocacy. Because I am an activist,” de Vera added.
De Vera is currently the regional coordinator of “Defend Ilocos,” an environmental group based in Ilocos Sur. It is a vocal critic of large-scale and illegal mining operations in the Ilocos Region.
The group has been critical of the government’s inaction against magnetite sand or black sand mining in rivers and coastal areas in the region. Lately the group has been starting to create noise against the encroachment of a plantation being pushed by a town mayor in Ilocos.
The plantation—which is cultivating eucalyptus trees covering 600 hectares of forest—threatens not only the rich biodiversity of Ilocos Sur but also the livelihood of upland farmers, who stand to be affected once the invasive alien species and monocropping system impacts on the environment, de Vera said.
De Vera added the farmers have been afraid to oppose the project. But with the group’s advocacy, the farmers have started to understand and speak against it.
Being Defend Ilocos’s acting spokesman, de Vera, the soft-spoken and light-mannered leader, is also currently the face of the group, bravely speaking out against destructive development projects.
As expected, like other militant groups, Defend Ilocos has also been very vocal against “militarization” of rural communities in the region. He said being an activist doesn’t make one a member of the communist New People’s Army (NPA).
In the Philippines, activists and environmental advocates claim to be targets of threats, harassments, intimidation, or worse, extrajudicial killings—because they are suspected as sympathizers, if not members, of the Maoist, revolutionary NPA.
The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) has time and again denied the allegations linking the military to the killings, dismissing the charges as communist propaganda.
Risky business
With or without martial law, even before the Duterte administration, environmental advocacy in the Philippines in a very risky business. Especially when one is against “business interests,” activist and environmental advocate Clemente Bautista said.
In an interview, Bautista, national coordinator of Kalikasan-People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan-PNE), said he was once the subject of harassment because of his environmental advocacy.
He was tailed by “suspicious-looking men” believed to be military intelligence operating in Metro Manila. Bautista believes that he was being targeted for the same reason de Vera was being “tailed” by military intelligence—his environmental advocacy.
“It was because of my environmental advocacy during the Aquino administration. We suspect that my organization’s work or campaign against large-scale mining and exposé of other destructive programs of the government [was the reason],” he said.
According to Bautista, it was during the preparation of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in the Philippines when suspicious-looking men started to tail him, because of the “noise” they were creating.
“We [conducted] different activities. We launched [a series] of protests in the venue [during] preparation activities, highlighted different issues like dirty coal plants and big mines,” he said.
He added his group also spearheaded rallies in front of offices of mining companies in Metro Manila, particularly Australian and Canadian mining companies that were part of the Apec meeting.
Bautista said environmental advocates in the Philippines are “endangered species,” too, like journalists and political and social activists.
Deadly place
According to Kalikasan-PNE, with at least 28 land and environmental defenders killed in 2016, the Philippines remains one of the deadliest countries in the world—and the deadliest in Asia—for environmental and land defenders.
Citing the report, entitled “Defenders of the Earth”, released early this month by Global Witness, a London-based international non-governmental organization (NGO), Leon Dulce, campaign coordinator of Kalikasan-PNE, said the Philippines has been the deadliest place for environmental advocates for four years in a row and the trend is expected to worsen by 2017 “with no fundamental change in the country’s environmental policies on one hand and increasingly fascist police and military campaigns of President Rodrigo Duterte, on the other.”
Dulce said in just the first half of 2017 that Kalikasan-PNE, one of the partner-organizations of Global Witness that helped generate documented reports of human-rights abuses committed against environmental advocates, monitored at least 10 more cases of environment-related killings.
Global trend
Killings of environmental advocates is not unique to the Philippines.
The report declared 2016 as the deadliest year for environment and land defenders, with least 200 people killed across the globe, more than twice the number of journalists, which reached 79.
Bautista said at least four people, from the number, were murdered every week last year alone.
The trend is both increasing, up from 185 in 2015, and spreading, with murders reported in 24 countries compared to 16 in 2015.
Mining-related
According to the report, mining was the bloodiest trade, with at least 33 murders linked to the sector.
The killings linked to logging, on the other hand, also increased from 15 to 23 in one year, while 23 killings were connected to agribusiness projects. Almost 40 percent of those murdered were indigenous people, with the police and military as the primary suspects in at least 43 murders.
The Philippines has been among those with the highest number of killings since 2013, when Global Witness first launched the international report.
The international NGO has recorded a total of 144 cases of killings in the country since 2002.
According to Bautista, initially under the Duterte administration, environmental advocates had high hopes with the appointment of Regina Paz L. Lopez as secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).
He lamented that Lopez was dropped like a hot potato by Duterte. “There was lack of support on the part of Duterte,” he said.
Bautista said there were promising reforms during Lopez’s short-lived term in the DENR.
He said the mining audit would have a strong impact on the subsequent order to suspend and close erring mines. The suspension and closure orders, he added, was never implemented.
Bautista alleged that under new environment secretary, a former chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the reversal of Lopez’s supposed reforms, human-rights and environmental crimes worsened as evidenced by the killings cited in the report.
Worst under Duterte’s term
Comparing the killings during the post-Marcos era administrations, the killings of environmental advocates were worst under the Duterte administration, Bautista claimed. The group, however, started monitoring killings involving environmental and land defenders only under the Arroyo administration.
Killings under the nine-year Arroyo administration were at a rate of four persons per year. Under Aquino’s six-year term, there were 11 reported killings. Under Duterte, he said Kalikasan-PNE recorded 19 during his 13-month rule.
Kalikasan-PNE noted that the worsening impunity against environmental defenders under the current administration were rooted in the fundamentally unchanged economic policies, especially on extractive and destructive projects, enforced during counterinsurgency operations.
“Mining-related killings accounted for 47 percent of the cases we monitored during the first year of the Duterte administration. Suspected state armed forces were accused of being involved in 41 percent of these cases and 65 percent were perpetrated on Mindanao, where plunder and militarization were most widespread,” Dulce was quoted in a statement released by Kalikasan-PNE as saying.
Among those hardest hit by the increasing militarization are the indigenous Lumad people of Mindanao, the group said.
“A striking case was the murder of Jimmy Saypan, a Lumad peasant leader from the Compostela Valley who was killed on October 10, 2016, by suspected military elements,” the report said.
Saypan was among the leaders of the Compostela Farmers Association, which led barricades and protests against the Agusan Petroleum and Minerals Corp., a company affiliated with San Miguel Corp.
According to Global Witness campaigner Ben Leather, “States are breaking their own laws and failing their citizens in the worst possible way. Brave activists are being murdered, attacked and criminalized by the very people who are supposed to protect them. Governments, companies and investors have a duty to guarantee that communities are consulted about the projects that affect them, that activists are protected from violence and that perpetrators are brought to justice.”
Dulce said, “The Duterte administration must be held accountable for the worsening climate of impunity against Filipino environmental defenders. Military, paramilitary and police forces should immediately be pulled out of rural communities to stem the militarization, and a full-blown investigation into the country’s security and counterinsurgency programs should be launched.”
According to Kalikasan-PNE, Duterte’s continuing diatribes against mining oligarchs and other environmental plunderers should lead to the investigation of corporate interests that have benefited from militarization.
“If we do not hold the big mines and other extractive and destructive projects accountable over human-rights atrocities, we will only perpetuate their business-as-usual operations,” the group said.
Environmental groups have been demanding for justice for their fallen comrades since alleged extrajudicial killings targeting environmental advocates have started. They said justice remains an elusive dream, and environmental advocates are now becoming an endangered species.
Image credits: Defend Ilocos