Every Filipino should be worried sick about the possibility of losing her home. It doesn’t matter if she holds legal title to the land. Just ask Imelda Palanca and her siblings.
Sometime in the 1920s, their grandfather, Pedro Palanca, cleared two tracts of land in Palawan, planted these with coconut trees, and built his home there. His children remained on the tracts after he died. In 1977 they obtained official title to the land. But 22 years later the government took the Palanca siblings to court, claiming that it owned the tracts. The Supreme Court agreed with the government, which declared the Palancas squatters on state-owned land, liable to be evicted anytime with not even a peso as payment.
The case of the Palancas is not exceptional. It is a recent extension of a perverse general rule under which one in every three Filipinos is officially a squatter on public land. That’s 25 million citizens whom the government can evict any day it fancies, without having to pay a peso.
Take Boracay Island, for example. Its white-sand beaches and crystalline waters made it a tourist attraction only in the 1970s, but long before that (“since time immemorial,” courts have found) it was home to many generations of Boracaynons. In 2008, however, the Supreme Court ruled that because nearly half of the 1,000-hectare island was public land, many of its 12,000 residents were squatters whom the government may evict at any time.
The high court’s reasoning gives the government a claim to about 60 percent of the archipelago’s total land area. It also recycles the imperial logic of the country’s former colonizers. Here’s how that goes: Every Filipino was turned into a squatter on Spanish land the moment Ferdinand Magellan planted a wooden cross on the island of Limasawa on Easter Sunday of 1521. From then on, the only way anyone could own land in the Philippines was by getting the proper certificate of title from Spain or its successor states. The Philippine Constitution retained this royal idea, known as the
Regalian doctrine, even after the 1986 People Power Revolution. Only agricultural lands may be privately owned—and the President has the sole power to classify land as agricultural. Then President Gloria Arroyo exercised this power while the Boracay case was pending, by classifying about 60 percent of the island as agricultural land. Under another law, those living on the tracts classified as agricultural can be recognized as landowners if they can prove longtime occupation of the tracts by them and their forebears since before Philippine independence. But those living on the other half are squatters.
That can’t be right, can it? We’re an independent republic, not some Spanish or American colony, as we were long ago. Shouldn’t we, the Filipino people, be entitled to our ancestral homes now that the country belongs to us? What about the revolution? Isn’t that what we, the sovereign Filipino people, succeeded in bringing about a generation ago? And what about the Constitution? Did Boracaynons—or anyone else, for that matter—think they were signing their own eviction notices when they ratified it in 1987?
These land grabs should have raised all of these important questions, and stirred the Filipino people to rise in protest. When each of those decisions came out, however, none of the usually outspoken pundits raised an eyebrow, let alone their voice. It can’t be because Palawan and Boracay are far from the capital, where most of these pundits reside.
Just last year, the Supreme Court relied on the same reasoning to declare that an occupant of a lot in Taguig City was a squatter on public land—even though he proved that his family had been living there since before World War II. That decision was meekly accepted, too. No one in our country seems to think there’s anything wrong with this sort of legalized land-grabbing.
In a republic like the Philippines, it is the duty of the citizenry to rise up and demand that grossly unfair laws and decisions be changed. This was exactly how the Filipino people responded to the exposé of large-scale corruption involving the pork barrel or Priority Development Assistance Fund. The pork barrel was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1994, and its allocation continued uninterrupted until last year, after it was reported that ghost projects and fake organizations were used to defraud the Philippine government of roughly P10 billion, with lawmakers receiving huge kickbacks in the process.
The pork barrel system was quickly condemned by bloggers, opinion writers, and politicians nationwide. President Aquino declared his intent to abolish the PDAF and withheld the release of funds under it. Even the Senate and the House of Representatives declared their support for moves to replace the PDAF with a more
accountable system. Last November, merely four months after the scam was exposed, the Supreme Court overturned its longstanding precedent and declared the PDAF unconstitutional.
The scandal stirred a republican rowdiness among Filipinos. Yet when it comes to land rights, Filipinos are meek and basically mute, acting as if their government were still under the thumb of a monarch who is both the sovereign and the owner of any land he wants. The very name of the principle used to justify the government’s land-grab scheme expresses that autocratic principle: the Regal-ian doctrine. That sounds like what it is, something we all, citizens in a republic, should rise up against and demand to be changed.
Bryan Dennis G. Tiojanco is a graduate student of Yale Law School. He is also a lecturer at the University of the Philippines College of Law, where he graduated cum laude.