Blood, timber and plantations: the violence of enclosing lives and livelihoods in the Philippines

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the relationship between authoritarian populism and extractivism by examining the violence against ‘environmental defenders’ in the Philippines. Since 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte’s populist mandates have facilitated violence against opponents of the regime’s agendas. We examine the relationship between violence and ‘extractive enclosures’ on Mindanao and Palawan – two resource-rich islands with contrasting histories of commodity booms and land struggles. We show how the routine assassinations of environmental defenders is entangled with expanding extractivism. We argue that Duterte’s counterinsurgency tactics have intensified violence against opponents of palm oil and mining just as ‘protective enclosures’ are rezoned to facilitate extractivism.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural activism
• social movements
• extractive development
• agrarian livelihoods
• the Philippines

Acknowledgements

We dedicate this paper to the local and indigenous activists throughout the Philippines who continue their struggle to defend lands and environment for their people and country. More power to you. This research was supported by various NGOs and indigenous peoples in Palawan and through our ARC DP220101503.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hukbalahap is an abbreviation for Hukbo ng Bayan laban sa Hapon or the People’s Anti-Japanese Army in reference to the anti-Japanese resistance movement during the Second World War.

2 Led by the PKP, the Hukbalahap was formed by the peasant movements, KPMP, the National Association of Peasants in the Philippines and AMT, the General Workers’ Union (Hoeksema 1956; Larkin 1993).

3 As a liberal land reform scheme with some powers to expropriate private lands, CARP remains largely a voluntary scheme that has been evaded by the landed elite and has done little to reallocate enclosed lands to landless tenant farmers or otherwise (Borras Jr and Franco 2005).

4 Located at the shores of lake Lanao, western Mindanao, the siege at Marawi City (the ‘Marawi siege’) involved heavy military engagement of 500 armed militants belonging to the Abu Sayyaf, Maute Group and foreign fighters pledging allegiance to Islamic State (Hall and Delina 2019).

5 The term ‘Moro’ was used by Spanish colonizers to refer to local Muslim populations who had resisted subjugation by colonial forces – a pejorative term drawn from the Spaniard’s exonym for Muslims of North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and parts of the Mediterranean in the 15th Century (McKenna 1996; Paredes 2013). In Mindanao, Filipino Muslims have reappropriated the term as a social and political category that forms the basis of struggles for an independent homeland. In 2019, this struggle culminated into the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) as a result of negotiations between the Philippine state and the MILF (Hall and Delina 2019; see Castillo 2014 for the historical developments of the BARMM).

In 1970, the MNLF formed as an armed separatist insurgency group with the aim of establishing self-rule for Philippine Muslims in partial response to the Marcos administration’s sustained political and economic aggression toward Muslims on Mindanao (McKenna 1996, see main text). Lead by Nur Misuari, the MNLF worked to develop local ethnonationalist appeal to establish a Moro Nation, or Bangsamoro, a single independent state for the Muslim peoples of the Philippines. Originally called the ‘New MNL’, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front formed as a splinter group from the MNLF in the late 1970s, early 1980s (∼1984), with the aim of pursuing ‘purer’ Islamic goals in line with its pursuit for Moro independence (MMO 2019).

6 Supreme Court Associate Justice Marvic Leonen defined red-baiting as: ‘the act of labelling, branding, naming and accusing individuals and/ or organizations of being left-leaning, subversives, communists or terrorists (used as) a strategy … by State agents, particularly law enforcement agencies and the military, against those perceived to be "threats" or "enemies of the State".’ (see: https://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-sheet-why-red-tagging-dangerous).

7 PPVOMI is 60% Singaporean and 40% Filipino-owned and AGPI is 75% Filipino and 25% Malaysian owned (Larsen, Dimaano, and Pido 2014). The Malaysian parent company is Agusan Plantations Inc.

8 See, for example, https://vimeo.com/11491685

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number DP220101503].

Notes on contributors

Wolfram H. Dressler

Wolfram Dressler is an Associate Professor at the School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Australia. His research spans critical agrarian studies and the political ecology of conservation and development in insular and mainland Southeast Asia.

Will Smith

Will Smith is an Associate Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University. He is an environmental anthropologist and human geography whose research interests include human-forest interfaces, the social dimensions of agricultural production, and the politics of indigenous knowledge in both Australia and upland Southeast Asia.