TACLOBAN, the Philippines — A mile offshore from this typhoon-wrecked city lies a postcard-perfect tropical islet fringed with golden sand beaches and topped with a mansion and swimming pool: the private island of one of this country’s most powerful families, the Romualdez clan of the former first lady, Imelda Marcos.
Facing the island are the devastated remains of what used to be the city’s most densely populated squatter settlement, a flattened jumble of broken boards and twisted sheets of corrugated steel on land also owned by the family. An estimated 1,000 people in this settlement alone drowned a month ago when Typhoon Haiyan sent a tsunami-like storm surge rushing across the peninsula, obliterating the spindly homes in its path.
Now the Romualdez family, which has dominated city politics for decades, is locked in a battle with the squatters, trying to block rebuilding on the site.
The family says it is for the squatters’ good; the area was so exposed that even the evacuation center, in a school, was overwhelmed. Waves and wind slammed cars and other debris repeatedly into bodies that were trapped against the school’s walls, a local official said, sending sprays of blood onto terrified parents and children seeking shelter there. Even some in the federal government, stacked with rivals of the Romualdez family, say such vulnerable land should be abandoned.
The squatters doubt the family’s sincerity, and the ability of the government to help them build lives in a safer place. They contend that the clan sees the storm’s devastation as a way to finally clear the land, which some in the family have wanted to do for years.
The immediate payoff: The national government is considering buying the land to extend the runway of Tacloban’s airport for international flights — a move that could not only benefit family members financially, but also embellish their political fortunes by making their hometown a bigger, more important city.
“They should provide jobs and a place to live to help us recover,” said one of the squatters, Rowena Versoza, who lost 15 family members to the storm and has almost single-handedly rebuilt her hut. “No one talks to us about that.”
Land disputes at this settlement and similar shantytowns up and down the coast are among the many reasons the recovery effort here is faltering. The typhoon destroyed or severely damaged the homes of four million people — more than twice as many as those left homeless by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. Virtually no new permanent houses are being built yet, as the local and national government wrangle about which areas are too vulnerable to storm surges to be rebuilt.
But the standoff over the roughly six-acre strip of land owned by the Romualdez family is particularly fraught, emblematic of troubles that have plagued the Philippines for decades: an unequal distribution of property that keeps many mired in poverty, together with a degree of lawlessness and political expediency that allows the poor to settle on land that is not legally theirs. An estimated one-third of Tacloban’s residents are squatting on other people’s land.
The landowning aristocracy includes not only Mrs. Marcos’s clan — Romualdez was her maiden name — but also the family of the president, Benigno S. Aquino III, which has begun to parcel out rural land to more than 6,000 tenant farmers under a court order.
Hanging in the balance here in Tacloban is the fate of up to 175,000 people who lived in crowded, rat-infested shantytowns with no sewage systems before the storm. The national and local governments say they will build temporary wood homes inland, and Mrs. Marcos, who now lives on the main island of Luzon, has offered her estate on the southern outskirts of Tacloban for some of those shelters.
That is not enough to calm the squatters. Many are fishermen who do not want to move inland, and practically all distrust that enough new government housing will be built in an impoverished country with a history of graft.
So far, the squatters on the Romualdez land appear to be winning. They trampled a recently erected barbed wire fence around the area and are building new shanties from the scraps that the typhoon left behind. But they worry that with so many members of the Romualdez clan in government — among them, Mayor Alfred Romualdez and his cousin who represents the city in Congress — their victory will be short-lived.
The Romualdez family has owned the shoreline property for generations, since before Gen. Douglas MacArthur chose the southern outskirts of Tacloban in 1944 for the American invasion that began the liberation of the Philippines from Japanese rule.
The American military quickly built an airport and other facilities that helped transform what had been a college town and provincial capital into the fast-growing economic hub of the east-central Philippines.
The largess of Mrs. Marcos and her husband, Ferdinand, during his two decades as the country’s autocratic leader also enriched the city and won Mrs. Marcos and her family a loyal following here.
Facing much bigger political challenges during the chaotic last days of Marcos rule in the 1980s, the Romualdez family did little as squatters began moving in large numbers onto the sandy grasslands at the end of Tacloban’s airport runway.
As the city continued to boom — reaching 235,000 permanent residents before the typhoon, plus a similar number of students, migrant workers and other temporary residents — the family chose not to risk a confrontation by trying to evict anyone. Like those in other parts of the country where large numbers of former farmers and fishermen have poured into cities, vote-conscious politicians and the police have been reluctant to push out squatters, who register in large numbers to vote.
Congressman Martin Romualdez, who has played a leading role in the family’s discussions over the years about what to do with the site, said forcing people out would not have been “politically correct,” nor necessary, given the family’s many holdings in real estate and mining.
The family did, however, enhance one of its other properties in the city; in 2003, when the mayor was the current mayor’s father, the city government set aside a 100-acre marine sanctuary off the island that bans fishermen from its spectacular coral reefs.
“When we go near it, we get shot at,” said David Yano, a fisherman who said he had lived in the squatter settlement for 35 years and is rebuilding there.
The latest battle began when Armando Romualdez — a 76-year-old uncle of the mayor and congressman, and a younger brother of Mrs. Marcos — showed up at the settlement three weeks after the typhoon and demanded that residents leave, nearly a dozen residents said. They said he told them he wanted to sell the land for the airport expansion.
When Jerry Yaokasin, the deputy mayor and a political independent, was told several hours later about the visit, he shoved his chair back, let out a plaintive “aieee,” and rushed out to speak with aides. He later explained that while he was upset by Armando Romualdez’s visit, he personally believed the squatter settlement should be relocated because of the danger.
Mayor Romualdez said in a subsequent interview that his uncle had only voiced concern for the safety of those rebuilding there during his visit. “He lost a friend who died in the area and he does not want it to happen again, and he feels guilty,” the mayor said. Armando Romualdez, who lives in a ranching town on another Philippine island, did not answer numerous calls or text messages seeking comment.
Buildable land without squatters in the immediate vicinity sold for $500,000 to $1 million an acre before the typhoon. But the mayor also noted that the value of the land was most likely diminished by the storm.
In any case, he said, his uncle had been mistaken in telling longtime residents that they had to leave by next month. The mayor promised that residents would not be evicted until they had homes elsewhere.
Then the barbed wire went up.
Tecson Lim, the city administrator, said he had encouraged property owners throughout the city to put the fences up to prevent the reappearance of squalid settlements he described as posing a health risk. The mayor and his cousin, the congressman, each said they did not know who had put up the fence, but Mr. Yaokasin, the deputy mayor, said the neighborhood’s elected leaders determined it had been erected by the uncle’s representatives.
For now, residents of the settlement say, their government is simply making their lives harder. In the tortured logic of the country’s unending land disputes, the city is refusing to deliver food there, forcing traumatized residents to walk 20 minutes for sustenance. Otherwise, the mayor says, new squatters will come, replacing those swept out to sea.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/14/world/asia/land-disputes-slow-recovery-in-philippines.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print