Blood and money in the sand: The tragic story
of the Atis of Boracay
JUST like any paradise beach that lures tired bodies and souls to soak in its waters and bask in its sands, there is a narrative that is conveniently hidden behind the poster-perfect scenery of Boracay.
And it is one that is written in the narrative of blood and money.
In
February 22, 2013, a 26-year-old Ati youth leader named Dexter Condez was
brutally murdered, shot six times by an unknown assailant as he was walking
with two female companions after attending a meeting. Condez was the spokesman
of the Boracay Ati Tribal Organization (BATO). As such, he was at the forefront
of the Ati struggle to assert their ancestral rights over their land. The
National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP), as supported by
anthropological studies, has established that the entire Boracay Island is the
ancestral domain of the Atis in that they were its earliest settlers. In fact,
the island’s name is in their language.
But like
the fate of many indigenous peoples, the Atis were displaced and forced to
retreat into the forested areas of the island when tourism investors began to
descend on Boracay in the 1970s. But before that, local peoples from the Panay
mainland began occupying parts of the island and later were able to secure land
titles over what used to be legally considered as common property, and
historically should have been considered as Ati ancestral lands.
A
competing narrative is used by these local migrants to negate the ancestral
domain claims of the Atis. They argue that the latter are also from the Panay
mainland and only go to the island to forage during certain seasons. However,
this is a weak argument since it only affirms the characteristic nature of Atis
as nomadic tribes, and it even strengthens their claims not only on Boracay but
even on those other areas mentioned. After all, the festival that has become a
symbolic representation of the culture of Panay is named after the Atis, and
historical accounts validate the claim that they were the very first people
encountered by the Spanish colonizers there.
But the
Atis were not even fighting for the entire island anymore, more so the entire
Panay mainland, but only for a piece of land, some 2.1 hectares, which was
awarded to them by the Philippine government in 2011 and for which a
Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT) was issued. However, this was
contested by local migrants who claimed that they hold land titles over the
area covered by the CADT issued by the government.
Until
today, the murder of Condez has yet to be finally resolved even as a suspect, a
security guard working for a major hotel in the island, was arrested in 2014.
Still to be clearly established is the motive behind the murder. Friends of
Condez, including the nuns who were helping the Atis, said that he had no
personal enemies, and that the only issue in which he was involved was the land
dispute over the CADT.
As of
today, the Atis remaining in the island, now estimated to be around just 20
families, have yet to occupy the land awarded to them. They are now confined in
an enclosed complex called the Ati Village, which is in fact a former dumpsite.
Fenced-in, isolated from the entire island, but still linked to it as a tourist
attraction, the original settlers were symbolically dumped there. While some
can consider the fact that the Atis are now living in more convenient houses,
and no longer foraging, hunting and gathering like they used to, as evidence of
development, others see this as a pathetic image of how the original settlers
of the island have been reduced to, becoming an enclosed and controlled
spectacle, disoriented and uprooted from their culture.
Now, their
ancestral lands from where the Atis have been alienated, with its white sand
beaches and pristine waters, and which developed in leaps and bounds to become
a prime tourist attraction, have literally turned into a dumpsite for
uncontrolled and unregulated development. A rough estimate reveals that more
than half of the island’s establishments are not connected to the island’s
sewerage system, even as they do not have their own to show. A significant
number of these establishments are unregulated, and operate under the radar, if
not with the tacit consent of the local government which has continued to issue
building permits even in the absence of environmental clearances from the
Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). Environment Secretary
Roy Cimatu, during an onsite inspection visit, was reported to have been
shocked at the scale and magnitude of environmental violations in the island.
The lure
of tourism profits is just too much to resist, that even beaches and forests
were encroached into by developers, even as human waste was dumped into the
waters of Boracay, undermining the very resources that the island was
capitalizing on. Ecological Marxists call this the second fundamental
contradiction of capitalism, where the pursuit of profit leads capitalists to
destroy the very physical base of their production.
In the
process, it is not only Condez who suffered physical death. The blood that was
spilled in the sands of Boracay on that fateful evening of February 22, 2013 is
but a physical reminder of the many other deaths that attended this so-called
development. The death of culture and the silencing of indigenous rights is
revealed when the original settlers are now confined, contrary to their very
nature, in a village that used to be a dumpsite. Their ancestral land is now
home to an alien culture that fed on cash but has produced garbage.
But there
is another side to this tragic story unfolding in what otherwise would have
been paradise. In cleaning up the mess, the underbelly of the Boracay economy,
the small-time establishments run by locals, and the migrant labor force that
dominate even the bigger hotels and resorts, may suffer the same fate as that
of the Atis that were displaced by the very economy within which they now exist
and benefit from. (Next: The fate of the local economy and small-scale tourism
industry, and the local migrant labor force)
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