ACCOMPANIED by Igorot dancers, about a hundred Cordillera students and upland professionals who used to be students, marched along downtown Baguio to declare they are reclaiming a Baguio lot that used to host Igorot dormitories from squatters.
EV ESPIRITU / INQUIRER NORTHERN LUZON
BAGUIO CITY—A group of students and their supporters on Saturday declared their intent to take back from squatters a downtown Baguio property intended exclusively for Cordillera students’ housing in 1960.
About 100 students, garbed in G-strings and the colors of various Cordillera tribes, stopped weekend traffic when they marched on Session Road led by a reconstituted Bibak Students Dormitories Inc.
Bibak is the acronym of the students’ home provinces—Benguet, Ifugao, Bontoc (the capital town of Mt. Province), Apayao and Kalinga, the subprovinces of the original Mountain Provinces.
“Bibak” for a time was a rallying cry for activists seeking an Igorot region during martial law.
Their symbolic home was the Bibak Dormitories on Harrison Road here.
“The government segregated the Bibak lot to serve Igorot students, who had to leave their villages to enroll in Baguio universities [in the 1960s and 1970s],” said Sonny Bugnosen, spokesperson of an interim Bibak council composed of Cordillera lawyers, musicians and businessmen.
He said the Bibak Student Dormitories Inc. used to run the student housing facilities. It regrouped in order to reclaim the 5,000-square-meter lot that was segregated by the government for student dormitories, which has since been occupied by a colony of squatters.
Unity
Since the creation of the Cordillera Administrative Region in 1987, Bibak (or the expanded Bimaak, to include Abra and to replace Bontoc with Mt. Province) became a term for upland unity, and was the name used by local and
international Cordillera organizations.
Some of the people who revived the Bibak Students Dormitories Inc. are Bibak chapter members living abroad.
Bugnosen said many of them were surprised on their return to the summer capital that the dormitory site had been occupied by illegal settlers.
Early this year, the city government had advised the settlers to leave, citing a 2013 resolution of the Cordillera Regional Development Council that required the property back for Cordillera student housing.
The Presidential Commission for the Urban Poor (PCUP) intervened.
But in an April 2015 letter to PCUP Chair Hernani Panganiban, City Administrator Carlos Canilao said the Baguio government would pursue demolition proceedings against the settlers, some of whom were migrants from Bulacan, Pangasinan and Mt. Province.
Canilao informed PCUP that the settlers have been profiting from the lot when they put up food stalls, variety stores, boarding houses and offices.
The Bibak lot also hosts a government building, which served as the session hall of the defunct Cordillera Regional Assembly (CRA), the legislative arm of an interim Cordillera government that was designed to prepare the region for autonomy in 1987.
In 1994, the Baguio City council investigated the CRA’s takeover of the Bibak lot.
The CRA stopped using the facility when Congress gave the legislative body and two other government agencies P1 budgets in 2000.
The hall has since served as the office of the village council of Barangay Harrison-Carantes-Claudio.
In 2011, the council urged President Aquino to grant the city government proprietary rights over the Bibak lot.
Bugnosen, however, said the Bibak Students Dormitories Inc. also intend to acquire land rights over the lot.
Rafael Wasan, a member of the interim council, said the city council in the 1960s had segregated the property for Bibak, “so we will simply pursue [the rights granted by segregation] so we can acquire the title over the lot.” Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon