The Fugitive of Talaingod

TALAINGOD, Davao del Norte — Datu Guibang Apoga, the chieftain of the Ata-Manobo tribe in the hinterlands of Talaingod, has been in hiding for a decade now.

In the lowlands of Mindanao, his face is prominently displayed on posters in bus terminals and police stations as one of the most wanted persons in Southern Mindanao. In the uplands, he is being hunted down by government-backed tribal vigilantes.

Man on the Run. Datu Guibang Apoga, shown here in an interview with Davao Today in the mountains of Talaingod in 2006, promises to keep fighting for his dispossessed people. (davaotoday.com photo)

In 1997, a warrant of arrest was issued against Datu Guibang and 25 other leaders of his tribe who had fought, using their spears and arrows, the armed goons of C. Alcantara and Sons (Alsons), a logging company and manufacturer of Ecowood plywood whose expansion encroached into the tribal lands of the Ata Manobos. Ironically, it was also the year when the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA), which purported to protect the rights of indigenous peoples, was signed into law by then President Fidel Ramos.

How the Ata-Manobo datu has come into hiding is a long story that began with the encroachment of big companies into the tribe’s ancestral lands. As the tribe urged other Mindanao tribes to withdraw their certificates of ancestral domain titles (CADT) and scrap the IPRA, the struggle of this fugitive datu and other Mindanao tribes is not about to end soon.

The First Encroachment

In 1991, Alsons encroached into the Ata Manobo territories when it initiated tree planting activities in Talaingod after the government approved its Integrated Forest Management Agreement (IFMA). Through IFMA, logging companies like Alsons, whose Timber License Agreement (TLA) had expired, were able to convert their logging concessions into commercial timber plantations.

Owned by the powerful Alcantara family whose members include top officials in the Ramos and Arroyo regimes, Alsons was working out, in the early ’90s, an application to increase the coverage of its operations from 19,000 to 45,000 hectares — an area that practically covers the entire Talaingod. At around this time, Paul Dominguez, a member of the Alcantara business and political dynastry, was the presidential assistant for Mindanao.

(To learn more about Alsons’ business practices, read this special report in The Manila Times in 2003.)

Talaingod had just been turned into a town, with former Alsons security guard, Jose Libayao, lording over it as mayor. Libayao was an Ata Manobo. He was not from Talaingod but from Mapula, in Paquibato District, Davao City. He signed the agreement that put the entire Talaingod area under Alson’s IFMA. The plan also included relocating Ata-Manobo communities into a 5,000 hectare relocation site.

Datu Guibang and his fellow tribal leaders fiercely opposed the proposal. The datus agreed to unite in defense of their land.