Palace drawing up memo to solve ancestral land mess

BAGUIO CITY—Cabinet officials, led by Environment Secretary Ramon Paje, are drawing up a memorandum on how to address ancestral land titles that are interfering with projects and claiming land being used by government agencies, a top official of the Natural Resources Development Corp. (NRDC) said here.

Felix Mariñas Jr., NRDC president, said the government is also looking into reports that companies have bought titled indigenous peoples (IP) lands in Baguio City, where disputes drew Malacañang’s attention to complications in ancestral land ownership.

The National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP), an agency under the Office of the President, has been tasked by Republic Act No. 8371 (Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997 or Ipra) with issuing certificates of ancestral land title (CALT) to mark land belonging to indigenous peoples.

Many agencies have gone to court over CALT that encroached on watersheds, government reservations, parks and even the presidential Mansion since 2008, but it was a writ of possession granted in November 2013 to the heirs of Cosen Piraso, daughter of Ibaloi patriarch Piraso, which worried Malacañang, Mariñas said.

The writ allows the Piraso clan to take over the government-owned Casa Vallejo, Baguio’s oldest hotel. The NRDC, the corporate arm of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), oversees Casa Vallejo.

On Tuesday, NCIP commissioners, sitting en banc, suspended all actions pertaining to the writ of possession.

Last week, an NCIP adjudicator turned down a separate petition filed by another Ibaloi family to stop a government project within the Mansion reservation.

The Abanag family, descendants of Baguio Ibaloi matriarch Menchi, was granted the CALT that includes a portion of the Mansion and the Wright Park. The family had asked the NCIP to stop the People’s Television Network from building its regional office at the reservation.

Mariñas said the NCIP ruling allows Malacañang to address what has become an embarrassing situation for the government through the proposed joint memorandum.

Disputes on CALT that could only be resolved in court would be set aside to avoid disrupting government programs for 2014, according to a suggestion being integrated into the proposed document, Mariñas said.

For example, the Office of the Solicitor General had challenged the legitimacy of some Baguio CALT in the Supreme Court, among them the titles owned by the Piraso and Menchi clans, city records showed.

Mariñas said the proposed memorandum will respect the importance of Ipra, since “Secretary Paje does not want to send the wrong signals.”

“This government respects IP rights and the Ipra, and we need to express that not all ancestral land claimants have problems with the government,” he said.

Most importantly, Mariñas said, the memorandum would require the agencies to share information. He said the writ of possession over Casa Vallejo caught the DENR off guard after the agency and the NRDC were excluded from the CALT process.

Mariñas said information is also vital because one of the CALT covering Vallejo had been transferred to a Parañaque City-based company, owned jointly by Filipinos and a Japanese.

Lawyer Melchor Rabanes, Baguio legal officer, said the city government has been investigating similar reports about corporations and nongovernment organizations acquiring ancestral land titles in contested property, like Forbes Park and Baguio Dairy Farm.

Ipra allows CALT holders to transfer their property only to family members or members of the same tribe. Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon