Beheaded in balding forest

Let petty offenders go unpunished and they graduate to bigger crimes. That’s how pickpockets eventually turn into bank robbers, or street pushers into drug lords. For years, past Quezon City mayors had allowed sidewalk vending on the Manggahan stretch of Commonwealth Avenue. After a decade, they built shanties on the sidewalk and moved onto three of the five lanes of the highway. With help from corrupt cops, they tapped onto electric connections of traffic lights and brightened up their stalls. Four attempts in the late ’90s to evict them from the road led to the death of five policemen who were securing demolition teams. Defiant vendors had boldly shot them in broad daylight.

That same neglect is happening at the La Mesa Dam watershed, one of Metro Manila’s two remaining forests. The watershed is all of 3,000 hectares stretching from Quezon City to Caloocan and Montalban in Rizal. It houses the two filtration plants of the Manila Waterworks and Sewerage System in one small corner near Fairview. Beside the plants is the lake that takes water from the Angat and Ipo dams in Bulacan. And around the lake is a balding forest.

Time was when the old National Water and Sewer Administration strictly guarded La Mesa Dam from intruders. It built a 10-foot high fence around the vast forest. Soldiers patrolled the perimeter against potential sabotage. When Nawasa was transformed into the MWSS, security began to loosen up. The soldiers were replaced with a few civilian guards. Soon, squatters broke in from an unguarded gate near the busted swimming pools where students used to go on field trips in the ’60s. The guards just looked the other way.

Things got worse when MWSS gave the filtration plants to private concessionaires in 1997. Claiming to have no budget for it, the MWSS pulled out its guards. The concession agreement required the private firms to secure only the filtration plants and the two main gates in Fairview and Novaliches. Nobody was left to patrol the forest. The squatting went on unabated. A retired police general took over a portion of the forest, cut down decades-old trees, and put up a poultry and hog farm just a few hectares from the plants. Other squatters followed suit with smaller coops and sties. Emboldened by such audacity, a lot owner in Fairview built a house using the dam’s perimeter fence as his rear wall. From the quiet of his kitchen, he punched a hole through the fence and cleared an area in the forest for a fighting cock and dog-breeding farm.

If this could happen in a portion of the dam close to the gates and urban centers, what more with the area in Rizal? That’s where ruffians slip in to cut down narra, yakal and ipil trees for illegal trade with sawmills. They’ve grown in number and boldness, and built houses right inside the dam perimeter. Residents in Fairview would hear chainsaws whirring from dusk to dawn, complain to authorities, and sometimes get action. The deforestation goes on to this day.

In the late ’90s the ABS-CBN Bantay Kalikasan Foundation volunteered to replant 1,200 hectares of the denuded forest. With donations from the Lopez business clan and other companies and individuals, the foundation bought seedlings, set up a tree nursery and began to plant one difficult hectare after another. It hired its own environment officers who double as unarmed forest guards. It’s an act of heroism for the officers to drive away woodcutter gangs everytime they hear them.

Last week, five drunken men barged into the foundation staff house while caretaker Bobby Glee and his wife were lunching. Two of the men shot him pointblank. Glee drew the bolo he uses to clear the nursery of brush, and wounded one of his attackers. They shot him again in the back. When Glee fell to the floor, one of the men grabbed the bolo and hacked his neck till the head was severed.

Police are still establishing the motive for the killing. Those men could only be squatters in the forest, most likely illegal tree cutters. They had gone unpunished for years. They have graduated from petty crime to cold-blood murder.

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Another bunch of environment wreckers must be made to face the music. For years, the government has been planning emission tests on all vehicles to reduce air pollution. Transport groups have always resisted. The 1999 passage of the Clean Air Act now makes the tests mandatory, however. Starting this month, all vehicles up for registration must pass the test or else be rejected. Jeepney, bus and truck owners and drivers are again protesting, claiming they are not yet ready for it and asking for still another postponement to January.

That’s how Manggahan’s illegal street vendors were able to stay for more than a decade – by asking the authorities for postponement upon postponement of eviction. They claimed they were not ready to move into the Commonwealth market that had been vacant for five long years, and pay rent instead of grease money to the cops. Quezon City’s new mayor Sonny Belmonte put his foot down and herded them to the market.

Those transport groups have had enough time to prepare for the emission tests. Postponing implementation would only embolden them to ask for another reprieve. Seventy-five percent of city pollution comes from vehicles, especially those with diesel engines.

The US Environment Protection Agency has reported, after a decade-long study, that diesel fumes cause lung cancer and other respiratory ills. At the very least, prolonged exposure to diesel particulates leads to skin rashes. The EPA report zeroed in on diesel engines built before the mid-’90s. Most of the jeepney, bus and truck engines in the Philippines are of such vintage, and belch out the blackest, most noxious smoke.

The government should also test farm machines, two-thirds of which run on diesel motors.

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Still another group of nature destroyers are dynamite fishermen. They abound in Batangas, Zambales, Pangasinan, Quezon and Aurora. Barangay officials are supposed to identify and report them to the police. But not in those provinces, where some of the officials and policemen are themselves the dynamiters.

Blast fishing destroys coral reefs where fish spawn, eat and grow. Unchecked, it would dwindle the catch and push fish prices up.

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Simeon V. Marcelo, the new Ombudsman, is an ex-seminarian. Will that placid religious past scare the hell out of grafters? Probably not, but his law experience could.

Marcelo came to public eye in December 2000 as one of two private prosecutors tapped by congressmen for Joseph Estrada’s impeachment trial. He was at the time litigation division head of the Carpio Villaraza Cruz law firm, which he joined in 1982. President Gloria Arroyo took note of his diligent homework and skillful examination of witnesses, and named him Solicitor General in February 2001. As government’s chief trial lawyer, he went on to indict Estrada for plunder and argue government cases in the Supreme Court.

The Ombudsman job would be for seven years. It requires not only courage and stamina to fight corruption, but also deep understanding of the ever improving ways by which unscrupulous officials steal from the public coffers. Marcelo’s experience in litigating bank fraud and corporate disputes, in election law and arbitration could serve him in good stead.

Marcelo placed fifth in the 1979 bar exams. As college scholar, he was among the top ten graduates of the U.P. law class of that year. His pre-law studies in philosophy landed him in the dean’s list at the Ateneo in 1974. Before that, he was first honor in 1971 at the San Jose Seminary, and high school valedictorian at Maria Assumpta Seminary in 1970.

Marcelo was chairman of the Integrated Bar’s national committee on legal aid from 1997 to 1999. He had served as professorial lecturer in 1974 at Nueva Ecija Doctors Colleges, and as associate at the ACCRA law office from 1980 to 1982.

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Catch Sapol ni Jarius Bondoc, Saturdays, 8 a.m., on DWIZ (882-AM).

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