Mayor’s slay reopens Diwalwal mine chaos

Mt. Diwata, as its name connotes, is a fairy tale. Located in Moncayo, Compostela Valley, it is perhaps the only place in the country where the bitterest of enemies converge not to fight but to find their place in the sun. For three decades folks seeking passports from poverty have trekked there to try their luck at gold. Soldiers stoop beside Moro separatists, policemen beside communist rebels, scraping at tunnel walls for the glittering ore that could change their lives forever.

But Diwata has another name, Diwalwal, coined by settlers to mean there’s not always a happy ending. It describes the dry tongue of one who hikes up the slopes for the first time in search of a new life. Or slides down a ravine the nth season in hope of discovering a nugget. Or, if misfortune strikes, one does come upon the precious metal but is no sooner struck in the back with a pick ax by thieving companions. Everyone in Diwalwal knows that gold can be the lighted wick of one’s life.

Last weekend’s slaying of Mocayo Mayor Joel Brillantes could have something to do with that greed for gold. As majority owner of JB Mining Management Corp., one of the three biggest diggers in Diwalwal, Brillantes had made many enemies in the rush. Anyone of them could have hired the gunman who was himself shot dead by Brillantes’s bodyguards.

Although himself a tunnel operator, Brillantes had ordered all of Diwalwal’s tunnels closed last year for pollution. Environment authorities found out that chemicals used to detach gold from ore had so poisoned the waterways that crops were failing in the valley below. The closure angered other operators and half a million diggers and miners who suspected that Brillantes wanted to corner the business. Reynaldo Española, JBMMC vice president, said the mayor had been receiving many death threats "due to his pro-environment stand."

Compostela Governor Jose Caballero countered, though, that "there are too many possible angles, let us not muddle them." Authorities have been prodding the two other main tunnelers, Blucor and Helica, to merge with JBMMC and employ as many independent panners as they can. A conservation plan needed to be put in place. The gold rush had gone on unregulated for so long that the mountainsides were eroding fast and hundreds were dying in collapsing tunnels. Dozen others had perished in pitched battles when adjoining tunnel walls of the main operators cracked open into each other. The merger was about to take off when Brillantes closed all the tunnels.

The police are also looking into possible communist participation. The New People’s Army is said to derive "revolutionary taxes" from big and small miners alike. The take supposedly reaches tens of millions of pesos per month. Diwalwal is believed to hold 125,000 metric tons of gold, worth $14 billion or P728 billion, in two major veins each seven kilometers long, one kilometer deep and 3.5 meters wide. Alongside the veins run silver deposits estimated at 1.875 million metric tons, worth $4.5 billion or P234 billion. Three Manila mining firms with legal rights to explore Diwalwal have barely scratched surface. Much less the big and small local tunnelers, and the countless diggers and panners. But the NPA is said to extort 10-30 percent of the daily haul from the locals, plus more from the masiao, an illegal numbers game. The closure of tunnel works deprived the insurgents of the multimillion-peso take.

And there’s also the explosives angle. A group of high-ranking PNP officers is known to control the supply of dynamite with which operators blast new tunnelways. The business so enriches them that they can’t wait forever for the tunnels to reopen.

Brillantes’s slaying will reopen the chaos that had turned Diwata’s fairyland into Diwalwal’s fiery lawlessness. The mayor had somehow slowed down frenzied mining to a point where government could come in to set the rules. Authorities have just begun to monitor the sale of toxic and explosive materials that are the miners’ usual trade tools. Education and health workers came in only months ago to look into the conditions of miners’ wives and children. Legislation pends in Congress for an orderly extraction of ore by the three legal mine concessionaires, and unlicensed but long-present tunnelers, panners and diggers.

The task of bringing law into the gold rush is only beginning. And it now hinges on getting the masterminds of Brillantes’s assassination.

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Expect Taiwanese cement dumpers to decry the reimposition of a P20.60-tariff per imported bag. Trade and Industry Secretary Mar Roxas slapped the tariff, effective up to December 2004, after the Court of Appeals upheld his authority to put up safeguards against unfair trade.

Nobody but the dumpers benefitted from foreign cement. At the height of the import surge in 2001, they were shipping in stocks for as low as P54 per bag, but selling to consumers at P137-P150 – the same price or slightly lower than local brands. Manufacturers reeled from the cement flooding. Two factories shut down. Most others had to lay off workers or put them on voluntary work-and-pay cuts to survive the onslaught. One of every five cement workers lost their jobs. By November 2001, when local supply dwindled, the dumpers began retailing their imported stocks at P5 more per bag.

A recent JP Morgan report ranked Philippine cement as among the cheapest in the world. It said in the February 2003 release of the JP Morgan "Construction and Building Materials Sector" that the Philippines is 69th among 73 cement-producing countries surveyed for pricing. Local stocks now sell for P112 per bag, lower than the heyday of dumpers and despite the resumed P20.60-tariff. At that rate, Philippine cement is now the cheapest in Southeast Asia.

It goes to show that authorities do need to shield local industries from too speedy opening of trade. Dumpers invoke free trade. But what we need is fair trade.

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