DENR chief clears task force head despite rendezvous with illegal loggers

Environment Secretary Ramon Paje. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines – Environment Secretary Ramon Paje has cleared the chief of the anti-illegal logging task force of any irregularity and called the latter’s meeting with suspected illegal loggers in Mindanao a simple “error of judgment.”

It was Paje himself who disclosed that retired Major General Renato Miranda was confronted by the late Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo after learning that the head of the task force met with some wood producers sometime in July or August this year.

“Why are you drinking with the enemy?” Robredo supposedly told Miranda in jest when they discussed the matter.

But Paje said Miranda explained that he only met with the wood producers in a restaurant to get “full information” from them.

“Sabi ko, general, baka kako error of judgment (I told them, general it might be an error of judgment)” he told a budget hearing in the Senate on Tuesday.

“I think it was a judgment made by the person on the ground. He (Miranda) was on the ground. But in our part we committed no irregularity,” Paje said, responding to Senator Loren Legarda’s queries.

Paje also doubts that Miranda might have conspired with illegal loggers, citing the task force’s seizure of 13 million board feet of illegal logging since the creation of the group.

“The way I saw it, if you confiscated 13 million board feet, you deprived illegal loggers 13 million,” he said. He added  how you can one be an accomplice with that track record.

In the same hearing, the secretary said that after President Aquino signed Executive Order 23 calling for a total logging ban across the country, the number of illegal logging hotspots “from Apayao to Cotabato” dropped from 197 to 28.

Paje lamented, however, that the Caraga region in Mindanao remains the top producer of illegal logs due to complicity between loggers and indigenous peoples, who claim the forests as theirs.

An earlier INQUIRER report charged Miranda of involvement in the protection of illegal loggers and financiers in Caraga region.

The allegation is contained in a confidential report given to the late Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo.

The late secretary’s special assistant Isosceles Otero said he received a “disturbing report” that Miranda has instructed a certain Colonel Ga to collect protection money from “key players of the illegal logging trade.”

Miranda has since denied Otero’s report, saying Ga had even caused damage (“nakapanakit”) to operations of illegal loggers given his background as a retired Marine officer. With a report from Cathy Yamsuan, Philippine Daily Inquirer