Clampdown: UP goes after land grabbers

The Supreme Court made it plain enough when—for the nth time in September 2004—it upheld with finality the ownership of the University of the Philippines over its campus in Diliman, Quezon City. “We strongly admonish courts and unscrupulous lawyers to stop entertaining spurious cases seeking further to assail UP’s title,” it warned.

“These cases open the dissolute avenues of graft to unscrupulous land-grabbers who prey like vultures upon the campus of UP. By such actions, they wittingly or unwittingly aid the hucksters who want to earn a quick buck by misleading the gullible to buy the Philippine counterpart of the proverbial London Bridge.”

If there is a hint of exasperation in the way the decision was worded, it must be because the Court is tired of repeating itself over the same issue for almost fifty years now. It first declared that UP is the rightful owner of the Diliman campus on October 31, 1959. Since then, it has decided eight more similar cases with the same verdict.

Even the Land Registration Authority (LRA) has set the record straight. In a report issued by its Verification Committee in August 1984, the LRA traced the origin of UP’s Transfer Certificate Title (TCT) No. 9462 which covers the University’s Diliman campus to the TCT No. 36048 of the Commonwealth of the Philippines. Apparently, the Philippine Government executed a deed of sale in favor of UP on March 1, 1949 relative to TCT No. 36048. Thus, TCT No. 36048 was cancelled in lieu of TCT No. 9462 issued in the name of UP.

Going by these judicial declarations, UP should not have a problem with chasing away illegal settlers.
Yet this is not the case. In the past decades, UP has been busy keeping land grabbers at bay. It’s almost funny how all these claimants come out of the woodwork, their bogus papers matched only by their absurd claims.

But this is exactly what alarms UP. Where are these fake documents coming from? How do the claimants get hold of them? Armed with fake titles, they are able to get their day in court no matter if their claims run from the incredulous to the hilarious. Some of these claimants even manage to elevate their arguments to the Court of Appeals, and quite a few to the Supreme Court itself.
Is there an invisible hand that orchestrates these relentless and seemingly organized land-grabbing attacks against the UP property?

Unholy crusade
Only this October, for example, UP won a favorable decision from the Quezon City Regional Trial Court against St. Mary’s Crusade to Alleviate Poverty of Brethren Foundation Inc., which seeks the reconstitution of a parcel of land in Quezon City with an area of 4,304,623 square meters. The claim apparently encompasses the 493-hectare Diliman property.

St. Mary’s Crusade claims that the land area in question is covered by Original Certificate Title (OCT) No. 1609 which is owned by one Marcelino Tiburcio. On November 26, 1985, Tiburcio supposedly executed a Deed of Transfer and Conveyance of OCT No. 1609 in favor of St. Mary Village Association, Inc. It is based on this alleged Deed of Transfer and Conveyance that St. Mary’s Crusade is now laying claim over the property.

Interestingly, in 1989, an entity named St. Mary Village Association, Inc. filed a petition seeking the annulment of UP’s titles to its Diliman property based on an alleged Spanish grant issued on March 25, 1877 in favor of one Eladio Tiburcio. The trial court dismissed the petition on January 31, 1990.
The people behind St. Mary’s Crusade admit that they do not have the original certificate but they do have a technical description of the property in question, duly certified as correct by the National Archives of the Philippines and a certification issued by the Land Management Bureau of Manila. How did they get past these government agencies? But what the Office of the Vice President for Legal Affairs finds most curious is that these claimants refuse to identify in their petition all the persons that they claim would benefit from the property. Who exactly are these people?

A check on the background of the people behind St. Mary’s Crusade reveals that they are all residents of the Diliman campus, presently living in the housing area allotted by UP for its qualified personnel under its housing program. All but one of the petitioners had been former UP employees who had availed of and qualified for housing privileges. These employees subsequently resigned or retired from active service but refused to leave their respective housing units. They are, in short, illegal tenants, and therefore subject to eviction.

Monomania of lands
And then there’s the perplexing case of Prince Julian Morden Tallano. Here is a man who claims to be a descendant of King Luisong Tagean whose sons supposedly included Rajah Soliman and Lapu-Lapu. (This alleged filial relationship between Soliman and Lapu-Lapu—two prominent figures in the country’s history—has apparently escaped the attention of historians for it is not mentioned in textbooks.) And by virtue of his lineage, Tallano is now asserting ownership over several land titles. OCT No. T-01-4, for example, covers the whole archipelago and its four regions: Luzon, Visayas, Palawan-Zamboanga embracing Kalayaan and Sabah, and Mindanao. TCT No. T-408, on the other hand, covers 1.253 billion square meters of Metro Manila.

What is even more baffling is that despite the patent absurdities of such claims, the Court of First Instance (CFI) of Pasay City allegedly promulgated on November 4, 1975 an Order for Reconstitution of TCT No. T-408 and OCT No. T-01-4 , among other titles, in favor of Gregorio Madrigal Acopiado, Tallano’s supposed great great grandfather. As in the case of St. Mary’s Crusade, the original copy of the said decision was reportedly lost or, more specifically, destroyed in a fire that gutted the Pasay City Hall on January 18, 1992. Tallano’s group, however, claims they have a true copy of the decision certified by the Office of the Solicitor General.

In 2005, Tallano and a certain Anacleto Madrigal Acopiado filed with the Regional Trial Court Branch 220 of Quezon City a petition for the enforcement of the CFI-Pasay City’s 1975 decision. Acopiado insisted that by virtue of said judgment, UP’s TCT over its Diliman campus is null and void. Thus, UP should reconvey ownership over its Diliman property to the Acopiados.

Convinced that the alleged CFI judgment was secured through fraud, the UP System Office of Legal Affairs sought the assistance of the Office of the Solicitor General and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to determine the true identity of the claimants. In a report dated June 10, 2005, the NBI declared that Julian Morden Tallano is not a prince but an impostor who, many times in the past, had assumed different identities and provided different addresses with the evident aim of defrauding other people. Tallano, who turned out to be a native of Nueva Ecija, was also found to be the subject of several warrants of arrest for estafa, falsification of documents, and swindling, among many others.

The identity of Anacleto Madrigal Acopiado, meanwhile, could only be established by an altered death certificate issued by the Local Civil Registrar of Taguig, Manila on November 28, 1994. Moreover, the NBI could not find any document to prove that Don Gregorio Madrigal Acopiado exists or ever existed.

Cracking the whip
There are countless other spurious claims over the ownership of the UP Diliman campus currently docketed in trial courts. And, as long as equally spurious documents are readily available from the black market, many more are expected to come out.

This is the reason UP is going beyond asserting its ownership over its property. UP is now determined to go after these organized land-grabbing factions who are growing ever more brazen.

Zero is more

Ten years ago, when globalization was more of a trendy buzzword than a policy framework redrawing political relations and tearing down national borders, economist Joshua Cooper Ramo warned that “the idea that we are moving toward a single global culture is both wrong and dangerous. Economic strength and social mobility will unlock a new, more complex balance of power as even simple ideas about how we live our lives come into question.”1 Free trade, for instance, would press environmentalism against consumerism. The more we consume, the more waste we have to dispose of.

But now that globalization has become a standard against which the competence and efficiency of government policies and decisions are measured, how far do we put our environment on the line in exchange for our economic well-being?

Waste Disposal Methods
Environmentalists do not find any trade-off acceptable. “Our environment is just as essential to our existence as our economy, culture, or politics,” points out Voltaire Alferez, executive director of Earth Day Network Philippines Inc. “So why pursue our global agenda at the expense of our environmental resources?”

Alferez, also a third year law student at the University of the Philippines, explains that a trade-off is not necessary because there are various sustainable methods that have been developed over the years to manage the excesses of human consumption. Governments, he said, only need to have the political will to adopt and implement these methods.

The most common and oldest disposal method is landfill, where waste materials are dumped in a treatment site and covered with layers of soil to decompose. The problem with landfill, however, is that decomposing waste produces leachate fluids which permeate the underlying and surrounding geological strata, polluting potable groundwater. Moreover, as waste decomposes, methane is released in considerable quantities. Methane is a strong greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, but it can also be processed to generate electricity.

Incineration is another waste treatment technique that involves the combustion of organic materials and substances, reducing the volume of the original waste materials by 95 to 96 percent. Like landfill, burning waste materials releases potentially hazardous pollutants such as carbon dioxide, dioxins, and toxic ash. On the plus side, waste incineration also releases large amounts of energy which can be used to generate electricity.

A less common but more sustainable method of waste disposal, according to Zero Waste Alliance, is anaerobic digestion. This process takes place in an oxygen-free chamber to allow bacteria to thrive and break down the molecules of waste materials which will then form gaseous by-products and small quantities of solid residue. Anaerobic sewage plants produce significant quantities of methane. Liquid and solid organic fertilizers are also formed and can be sold to cover operating costs.

Perhaps the most popular among the waste disposal methods is recycling, which online environmental network Earth 911 defines as “taking a product or material at the end of its useful life and turning it into a usable raw material to make another product.” Not everything, however, can be recycled. In a computer unit, for example, not all of the spare parts can be sorted, cleaned, and re-processed into new products for manufacturing. And there is no guarantee that those that are successfully manufactured, will function as fully as one would expect of a newly processed product. In the end, critics say, recycling wastes more resource than it saves.

Zero Waste Management
Given the limitations of waste disposal methods, a new philosophy on saving the environment from the excesses of a global economy has emerged. Called Zero Waste Management (ZWM), it extends the principles of recycling to form a circular system where as much of the original material as possible is reused. Discarded materials are not seen as garbage in need of disposal but as valuable resources in need of new application.

Chemist Paul Palmer, who was the first to use the term in the mid-1970s, says that zero waste depends on the redesigning of industrial, commercial, and consumer goods. While recycling contents itself with attempting to deal with goods after they have become waste materials, zero waste does not accept garbage. Palmer collected, for example, all of the solvent (a mixture of xylene and butyl acetate) produced in the process of manufacturing electronic products, put them in small cans, and sold them as a lacquer/thinner.

Dr. Metodio Palaypay, pioneer of waste management in the country and member of the National Solid Waste Management Commission, says ZWM demands that “nothing be burned or disposed of. Everything must be given back to the factory or to Mother Earth.”

A former professor of the UP College of Medicine and resident at the UP Diliman Health Services, Dr. Palaypay says that ZWM boils down to SSS—Start Sorting at Source Technique. “It’s as simple as providing separate containers for the organic, inorganic, and toxic wastes in every household, school, barangay, or any establishment,” he explains. “If all the garbage were segregated it would be easy to collect and find [new use] for them.” Organic waste can be used as feed for hog, fermentable fruit peelings, fertilizer. The inorganic, meanwhile, can be transformed into fine arts crafts, sold as factory returnables, and used as functional post-material such as road-crack filling.

ZWM, according to Dr. Palaypay, is essentially embodied in Republic Act No. 9003 or the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act. RA 9003 sets guidelines and targets for solid waste avoidance and volume reduction through source reduction and waste minimization measures, including composting, recycling, re-use, recovery, and green charcoal process before collection, treatment, and disposal in appropriate and environmentally sound solid waste management facilities. It mandates local government units (LGUs) to set up an ecology center in every barangay and segregation of wastes. Moreover, it specifically prohibits open burning and open dumpsites.

“RA 9003 was signed into law by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on January 26, 2001,” points out Dr. Palaypay. “It’s 2008 now and I can count with my fingers the number of LGUs that have complied with the requirements of the law.”

Zero Basura Olympics
To fast-track the implementation of RA 9003, the Department of Environmental and Natural Resources (DENR), the National Solid Waste Management Commission (NSWMC), and the Earth Day Network Philippines Inc. teamed up with various environmentalist groups and non-government organizations to launch the “Zero Basura Olympics: A Race to Conquer Garbage in 300 Days” last June 20. The idea, according to Environment Secretary Lito Atienza, Jr. during the launch, is to encourage everyone to experience the benefits of the 3Rs—reduce, recycle, reuse wastes simply by managing their garbage and converting them into something useful for their immediate environs.

By “everyone,” he means the inclusion of public and private establishments in the Olympics other than LGUs. “We are aiming for a garbage-free landscape,” Atienza explains. “That is why we invited subdivisions, schools, universities, stores, markets, hospitals, parishes, factories, and industries to join this event for best practices in waste management.”

The environmentalist groups who are working with the DENR and NSWMC are currently doing the rounds to conduct seminars on ZWM. Last August 28, for instance, the Zero Waste Recycling Movement of the Philippines sponsored a lecture at the UP Integrated School. According to Prof. Armando Basug, aside from waste segregation in the offices and classrooms, the UPIS also operates an organic farm to support the school’s zero waste management program.

Participants will be evaluated by a panel of experienced, credible, and highly respected environmentalists, based on their compliance with the components of RA 9003—education, institutionalization, engineering, enforcement, and economics or program sustainability. Establishments which garner 3,000 points will be conferred the rank of Garbology Grand Master, meaning it has achieved the zero garbage goal. Other ranks include Garbology Master (2,500 points), Garbology Expert (2,000), and Garbologist (1,500). The lesser the garbage, the higher the score.

After 300 days—or on August 31, 2009, National Heroes Day—merit certificates will be handed out to those who collected the most number of points. Winners will be proclaimed “National Living Heroes of the Environment.”

For LGUs who fail to comply, the Olympics legal panel headed by Atty. Antonio Oposa, faculty member of the UP College of Law, reminds them that RA 9003 comes with a penalty clause. Local government officials and government agency officers responsible for the non-compliance may not only be ousted but also banned from holding any office, elective or appointive, in the government.

If all goes well, the Zero Basura Olympics will be held every two years, or as Palaypay says, until zero waste becomes a national habit, a national way of life.

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1 Joshua Cooper Ramo. “The Shape of the Future” in Time. May 14, 1998.