Dam Nation: A Bloody History of Struggle Against Dams

The construction of dams has always been opposed because of their destructive effects on whole communities. Several anti-dam leaders have been killed as a result. The recent devastation by the dams of Luzon proved that they were right all along.

MANILA - Macli-ing Dulag is a prominent name in the history of environmental and indigenous peoples' rights struggles in the Philippines. He is widely remembered by environmental and indigenous activists for his leadership in the anti-Chico Dam campaign of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The Chico Dam "would have inundated vast tracts of land in the provinces of Kalinga and Apayao," wrote Miriam Azurin in an article for Ibon Features in 2002.

A leader of the Kalinga tribe of the Cordilleras, Dulag figured prominently in the anti-Chico Dam campaign, forging bodongs (peace pacts) between warring tribes in order to unify them against the World Bank-funded "development" project. Several times, the Marcos government tried to bribe him in exchange for giving up the struggle.

Dulag would lose his life for this. On April 24, 1980, Army soldiers opened fire on his hut; he died on the spot from 10 bullet wounds in the chest and pelvis. In killing him the military hoped to silence opposition to the Chico Dam project.

But Dulag's death only served to "ignite a prairie fire." The news of his murder increased projection of the issue, thereby broadening opposition to the Chico Dam which even reached international levels. The wide opposition to the project forced the Marcos government to abandon it.

Unlike Dulag, Nicanor "Ka Kano" delos Santos - a leader of the Dumagats in Tanay, Rizal - did not lose his life in the thick of an anti-dam struggle. His first foray into activism, however, was as one of the protesters against the Kaliwa-Kanan Dam (or Laiban Dam) project in 1983. The dam's area covers seven villages in Tanay that are home to the Remontado and Dumagat tribes.

At the height of the campaign against the Kaliwa-Kanan Dam project, Delos Santos was elected as secretary-general of the Makabayang Samahan ng Katutubong Dumagat (Maskada) and vice-president of the Bigkis at lakas ng mga Katutubo sa Timog Katagalugan (Balatik). He would be instrumental in the founding of the Kalipunan ng mga Katutubong Mamamayan ng Pilipinas (Kamp).

He was shot dead in December 2001 by Army soldiers while bringing food to fellow participants in what was going to be a caravan for the upcoming commemoration of International Human Rights Day in Antipolo City.

The construction of the San Roque Multipurpose Project, which started in 1998, deprived the farmers of San Nicolas, Pangasinan of the Agno River's overflow, which they had been taking advantage of for irrigation. Funded by the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and owned by the San Roque Power Corporation, the project required the construction site to be dried up and the river to be diverted. Aside from these, irrigation canals dried up as diggings deepened the river bed.

Jose Doton, who was then already a veteran activist, led the farmers of San Nicolas and other Pangasinan towns in opposing the San Roque Multipurpose Project, explaining that it would eventually inundate all the rice lands along the Agno River.

The construction of what is now known as the San Roque Dam was completed in 2003. Doton fell prey to an extrajudicial killing on May 16 three years later - still in the thick of the campaign against the San Roque Dam, leading a group that was calling on the San Roque Power Corporation to compensate small-scale miners and others displaced by the project.

The recent floods that inundated Northern and Central Luzon - brought by typhoon Pepeng (international name: Parma) but made worse by the release of water from five dams - have proven that Dulag, Delos Santos, and Doton were right all along in opposing the construction of large dams in their respective areas.

The San Roque Dam and the Laiban Dam are just two of the large dams in the Philippines at present. Others include the Magat Dam in Cagayan, the La Mesa Dam in Quezon City, the Angat and Ipo Dams in Bulacan, the Pantabangan Dam in Nueva Ecija, the Matuno Dam in Ifugao, the Binga and Ambuclao Dams in Benguet, the Caliraya Dam in Laguna, the Bayungan Dam in Bohol, the Manangga Dam in Cebu, the Pan-ay River Dam in Panay, and Pulangi V in Bukidnon.

The international outrage sparked by Dulag's murder forced the World Bank and the Marcos regime to abandon not only the Chico Dam, but other large-dam projects in the Cordilleras and elsewhere in the Philippines. However, amid the energy crisis of the early 1990s, then-President Fidel V. Ramos revived the large-dam projects mothballed during the Marcos presidency.

Majority of these large-dam projects are initiated by foreign corporations and their local partners in cooperation with various government agencies. Most of these are funded by the JBIC, as well as the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

According to the International Commission on Large Dams, a large dam is one with a height of 15 meters or more from the foundations, or one with a height of 5-15 meters from the base but holding more than 3 million cubic meters of water.

The 1980s and 1990s saw the frenzied implementation of large-dam projects in countries like Brazil, Chile, China, Guatemala, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand.

These projects, however, were met with intense mass protests. These protest actions inspired the formation of anti-dam groups like the International Rivers Network (IRN).

The snowballing of anti-dam protests led the World Bank and the World Conservation Union (IUCN) to form the World Commission on Dams in May 1998. The WCD's tasks were to study the effects of large dams as development projects and analyze alternative means of developing energy resources; and to set standards and guidelines for planning, designing, assessing, constructing, operating, monitoring, and decommissioning dams.

The WCD studied a number of major dam projects in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.

The WCD found, among other things, that large dams had destructive effects on the environment that are difficult to reverse; and that for the most part, these did not succeed in delivering their promised benefits such as providing for energy needs.

The government has always argued that large dams have to be constructed to provide for the country's energy needs.

In so arguing, the government disregards the environmental and social costs of building and maintaining large dams. It also ignores other sources of energy, and there are several.

There are biomass-powered systems, which use organic materials like animal manure and coconut husks. There are also the micro-hydropower systems, or small systems using energy from moving water, which are characterized by the use of turbines or waterwheels to convert the energy of moving water into mechanical energy, and are especially appropriate for areas with numerous and large rivers. Solar-powered systems, which use photovoltaic cells, and wind-powered systems are also possible sources of energy.

The government has ignored these options and instead chose to build and maintain large dams, claiming that these would bring "development".

But the country's experience with large dams is best summed up in these passages from the People's Declarations Against Large Dams, issued in March 25, 2001 by the various organizations that participated in the National Workshop on Dams held in Baguio City:

"During the second half of the past century, we have seen the government development plan on energy projects arbitrarily use our river systems. Dams were built across the nation to facilitate development but defined only from the perspective of the foreign investors, dam builders, international funding agencies, and the government. Up to now, the Philippine government has been subservient to dictates of foreign monopoly capitalists of liberalization, deregulation and privatization.

"For this, the Filipino masses especially the peasants and the indigenous peoples were damned to pay a dear price.

"Thousands of Filipino families have been physically and economically displaced. Homes and properties have been destroyed and uncompensated. Communities have lost their heritage and their cultural identity. Harassment, militarization and human rights violation have become a common experience for communities directly affected by government development projects. Ecosystems have been destroyed.

"From the laying of the dam cornerstones to the turning of the dam turbines, profits flowed into the pockets of foreign energy corporations and their local partners, international funding agencies and the multi-lateral bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the flow of silt into the productive fields and the destruction of ecosystems, painful experiences of relocation and resettlement, testimonies of broken government promises on compensation, the non-delivery of social services to communities made survival more difficult for the already marginalized sectors of society. The needs of the people were drowned by the greed for profit." (Bulatlat.com)